3.1. The Work of Christ
3.1. The Work of Christ
We need not belabor this point. The single, central reality of the New Testament is that “God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36); and that changes everything. On the one hand, he “fulfills” all manner of hopes and expectations, thus functioning as both continuity and discontinuity with the old: he is the “seed” of Abraham, inheritor of the promises to Abraham, through whom both Jew and Gentile alike are now “heirs according to promise” (Gal 3:16, 29); he is the great high priest, whose singular sacrifice of himself eliminates all other priests and offerings, through whom we all now have direct access to the Father (Hebrews); he is the rejected stone now become the chief corner-stone by whom we have become living stones in God’s new “spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:4-8).
On the other hand, the death and resurrection of Christ bring an end to the old and begin the new. His death ratified a new covenant, so that the people of God are newly constituted — based on faith in Christ and including Gentile as well as Jew.104 His resurrection set the future in motion in such a way that this newly constituted people are “raised with him” and enter an entirely new mode of existence — so much so that a radically new understanding of that existence also emerged.
This is obviously the focus of New Testament theology, and the primary reason for discontinuity with the former people of God (in the sense that they must now come through Christ in order to belong). But such focus does not in itself account for the people of God sensing themselves to be a newly constituted people as well.105 This can only be accounted for on the basis of the eschatological framework of their self-understanding and the role of the Spirit within that understanding.