Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > Delivered from the Elements of the World: Atonement, Justification, Mission > Status Update

"Jesus died and rose again to condemn flesh and to open the flow of the Spirit to the nations, to justify human beings by the Spirit who raised him from the dead, In delivering Israel and then the nations from flesh, he delivered them from the elements of the ancient socioreligious cosmos. By his death and resurrection, he became a new kind of human being, a pneumatikos man, and by the gift of his Spirit he enables those who receive him to live the life of the Spirit while still in the flesh. By dying and rising to justify us from the flesh and from the elements, Jesus made possible the formation of "the one," the unified, harmonious humanity that Yahweh promised to Abraham. This is the social gospel of Jesus. At the heart of this good news is the good news that Jesus has formed, is forming and will ultimately form a new human race."

"There must be a church if there is to be social transformation, if the damage of flesh is going to be overcome. The church is, in fact, the first form of transformed human society. This is why the God-man must die and rise: if society is to be saved, there must be a church; if there is going to be a church, there must be a Messiah dead and risen. If the world is to be saved, atonement must become a social fact."

"It is hardly surprising that the Galatians were tempted to slip back into that older, simpler, childlike world. Any pious Gentile knew that their own health, and the health of their people, depended on maintaining good relations with the gods, and that required pure sacrifices. For Jews, being under the elements and being under Torah were one and the same. Without Torah-observance, the world would spin out of control. Maintaining the binary boundaries of holy and profane, clean and unclean, offering regular sacrifice to satisfy the Creator Yahweh—all this was necessary to hold the world together. Doing Torah constituted the physics of social life. For Jews, the distinction of Jew/Gentile, circumcision/uncircumcision is the fundamental groundwork of reality. Anyone who tampered with Torah was threatening all order, casting the world back into chaos."

"Paul's answer to that challenge is straightforward: the Spirit is the new fundamental element of social life, and he is a God of order, not confusion. The Spirit is the quintessence of a new world. By the Spirit, human beings can share in the deliverdict that the Father enacted in the Son's death and resurrection. By the Spirit, humans are delivered from death and the fear of death. The Spirit forms the "one" out of the binary fragments of stoicheicized humanity."

"The Spirit forms the one, but he forms the one through water. As in Romans 6, so in Galatians 3: baptism is the key point of transition from the world of flesh to the world of Spirit, from stoicheic immaturity to full sonship. Those who are baptized into Christ are clothed with Christ (Gal 3:27). Wearing this common priestly clothing, they are all "one," no matter what their fleshly, social or stoicheic status."

"By the Spirit, baptism forms the church as the society of the atonement. It does not instantly change the hierarchies of the surrounding society. By forming the church, it plants within the cities of this world a new form of the city; the church stages an eschatological form of social life before the nations and before the principalities and powers. Baptism announces that fleshly society is not the only form of human society, announces not merely the possibility but the reality of a communion that is constituted by the Spirit. Each baptism is a little Pentecost; and given the way Paul has set up his argument, that means each baptism is also an echo of the justifying event of the cross. Gentiles are justified—that is, delivered from flesh, sin and death; pronounced righteous before God by sharing Jesus' resurrection—when they receive the Spirit. That fulfills the Abrahamic promise to justify the Gentiles by the faith of Jesus, The Spirit gives them a share in the resurrection power of Christ, and the Spirit's invasion of their lives is a "justifying" act. If baptism is the rite by which one receives the promised Spirit, then it is equally the act by which the Spirit reenacts the deliverdict of the resurrection in the experience of an individual. Baptism is the rite of justification."

"The Supper effects what it signifies: It signifies communion with God in Christ by the Spirit because that is what it is; it signifies fellowship among all people in Christ because that is what happens (or ought to) at every celebration; it signifies remission of sins, and grants remission, because it is Goďs hospitable welcome of sinners; it signifies fellowship in holy things because it gives holy things to holy people. Once we see what the Supper signifies, we can see the truth in this: Jesus died and rose again so that we could celebrate the Lord's Supper together. That is simply to say: Jesus died and rose again to enact the kingdom, the feast of all humanity before the face of God, the aim of the entire ceremonial system of the Torah."

"The fruits of the Spirit are the fruits needed to make society Edenic. Flesh has its own stoicheic ranking, but those who are in the Spirit "keep in ranks" with the Spirit. Paul deliberately echoes the language of stoicheia when he talks about the Spirit's leadership of the church. As we saw in chapter two above, the noun form comes from a verb that means "to arrange in ranks" or "to classify in contrasting pairs." Troops are stoicheicized when they are mustered, and bricks form a stoicheic pattern when built into a wall. This is the verb Paul uses when he speaks of "keeping in step with the Spirit"; it could be translated, "If we live by the Spirit, with the Spirit also keep in ranks" (Ei zõmen pneumati, pneumati kai stoichõmen, Gal 5:25). Stoicheic order involves a ranking and arrangement of things, and the Spirit too is a source of order, not of chaos. Stoicheic order involves the erection of binary oppositions, and though the Spirit breaks through those binary structures, the Spirit establishes an absolute "binary" opposition to life according to the flesh."

"Weak flesh compensates for weakness by displays of strength; fearful flesh deflects fear by acts of bravado, by exhibitions of the libido dominandi. Flesh becomes rebellious flesh when it rebels against creatureliness and seeks to be as God. Flesh is only sinful flesh, we can say, because it refuses to accept its own fleshliness. The Spirit permits flesh to be what it is: flesh, and in that sense those who are ek tou pneumatos (of the Spirit) are more fleshly than those who walk kata sarka (according to flesh). In the Spirit, people who are in flesh can boast of their weakness, their afflictions, their wounds, because those who are in the Spirit know that their power is not from flesh but from God. Mimicking the faith of Abraham, those who walk by the Spirit look to the God who raises the dead and speaks of things that are not as though they were."

"The church fulfills and advances the justice of God by keeping in the ranks of the Spirit. The church is the people delivered from slavery to flesh; the church is the poststoicheic communion, the socioreligious entity that operates by matured forms of purity and holiness, that performs genuine sacrifices. The Spirit is at war with flesh, outside and within the church, and it is the duty of the church's members and leaders to stay in the ranks of the Spirit as he carries out that warfare and not abandon the Spirit to join forces with the flesh. The church's first mission is to be the church, to embody the justice of God in her own life together in the Spirit."

"The church's mission is not merely to maintain herself an outpost exhibiting heavenly justice and the life of the Spirit; the church is not a dim desk lamp in the midst of the howling darkness. The church claims to be heir of the promises to Abraham, and the promise that Abraham believed and was reckoned righteous was that "all nations shall be blessed in you" (Gal 3:8). Isaiah's promises indicate that the light of God's justice will shine like dawn through Zion to illumine the nations. Zion will become not a hill or a minor mountain, but the chief of the mountains, prominent enough to draw the attention of the nations, who stream there because Zion is the place where military technology can be put to agricultural uses (Is 2:2-4)."

"In a world where the curses of Eden and Babel have been institutionalized in stoicheia, right in the face of the stoicheia the church forms a community with post-stoicheic patterns of holiness and purity, of sacrifice and priesthood, of temple and sacred space. That is what leads to the clash between Jesus and the Jewish leaders, between the apostles and the Jews and eventually between the Christians and the Romans. In each case the church is a standing challenge and rebuke to an existing socioreligious system. In each case the leaders of that system consider the church a dangerous intrusion, a pollution, a confusing and defiling mixture of classes, sexes, nationalities. Christians are incestuous for the love between brothers and sisters; their cannibalistic feasts are abominations; their refusal to serve the gods puts everyone in danger."

"The church carries out its mission first by simply being the poststoicheic community it is, by proclaiming the gospel of Jesus that invites all listeners to be justified from sin in the waters of baptism, by staying in the ranks of the Spirit. By virtue of the simple fact of setting up a sacred space—the church itself—different from the sacred space of the existing order, the church poses a challenge to preexisting socioreligious arrangements. By insisting on purity regulations different from those of the surrounding society the church rebukes the surrounding society. Even if tolerated, it might create a bipolarity in a monolithic system of sacredness; or, in a polytheistic setting, it establishes a monotheistic sacred community that lays an exclusive claim to holiness, and so disrupts the existing system from another direction. Just by being present as the setting of the poststoicheic purity, holiness and sacrifice of the Spirit, the church leaves its mark. It cannot help but meddle, cannot leave well enough alone. And often its effects, for those who want to protect the status quo, are far more than merely meddlesome. Often the effect will be to topple the great from their high places and raise the poor from the dust heap to sit with princes."

"Societies, like individuals, have dabbled with Galatianism. Churches have reverted to stoicheic patterns of worship and sociality, reintroducing veils and barriers and divisions that Jesus and the Spirit had torn down. Entire civilizations have become Christian and then retreated, forming an odd post-Christian, post-poststoicheic socioreligious entity. We are living in just such a civilization: one that was once Christian but has returned to the obsolete life under the elements of the world."

"There is the Christian order of the church that exists (not always faithfully) in the Christian era. And beyond the church there are socioreligious groups that more or less completely remain under the elements, groups that straddle the border of the Christian era and groups that have entered the Christian era, spent the night or a millennium, settled in and gotten comfortable, and then decided to move on out the other side."