As often in Paul, this results in multiple ironies. The purpose of Israel – and of Torah as its charter – was to set forward the larger purposes of God the Creator. But insofar as Torah (or those who might be using it to this end) was now threatening to prevent those larger purposes from being fulfilled, it must be abolished – not in the sense of leaving God’s people with no moral compass, but in the sense of inviting them, as people who were once idolaters but are so no more, into a larger multi-ethnic reality no longer defined by the restrictions (circumcision, food laws, Sabbaths) that in
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