Thank you Scott and James for a very nice piece. Even a precisionist monster such as myself finds little to quibble with. To me, the heart of the matter is that Jesus did not die to establish a system. If someone replaces one system with another, then it can only be because they find fault with the original system. But there is no fault with the Mosaic system, the fault is with us. So, the system was not replaced with another system but completed. When the system(the Law) was given the right input(Christ) it produced the correct output(Justification of the Human Race once and for all). There is no divine replacement because from the divine side the work is recognised as finished. And we now find ourselves with no system, nothing between ourselves and God. Or at least nothing from His side. Because even as Christians we find the thought of nothing between us and God terrifying, even the incarnate compassionate Christ, we constantly look to put something in the middle, some intercessor, some mediator, some middle term. We insist on negotiating with and bringing various merits and satisfactions to someone who wants to give us the whole thing for free. We'd be funny if we weren't so sad.
Thank you Scott and James for a very nice piece. Even a precisionist monster such as myself finds little to quibble with. To me, the heart of the matter is that Jesus did not die to establish a system. If someone replaces one system with another, then it can only be because they find fault with the original system. But there is no fault with the Mosaic system, the fault is with us. So, the system was not replaced with another system but completed. When the system(the Law) was given the right input(Christ) it produced the correct output(Justification of the Human Race once and for all). There is no divine replacement because from the divine side the work is recognised as finished. And we now find ourselves with no system, nothing between ourselves and God. Or at least nothing from His side. Because even as Christians we find the thought of nothing between us and God terrifying, even the incarnate compassionate Christ, we constantly look to put something in the middle, some intercessor, some mediator, some middle term. We insist on negotiating with and bringing various merits and satisfactions to someone who wants to give us the whole thing for free. We'd be funny if we weren't so sad.