Atonement and the New Perspective Quotes

“Israel’s participation in the divine covenant in Torah was a daily reality—every aspect of the life of the community was being lived out in accordance with what God had said. It was not primarily a matter of belief but one of praxis. To do the works of the law was the faithful response to a covenant that Israel understood actually to exist. Living “in Torah” was not a likening to something, it was the substance of something—an “enacted reality”: So long as theologians conceive their task as primarily elucidating biblical “ideas,” they will continue to miss the fundamental significance of covenant in the biblical tradition. Covenant is not an “idea” to be embraced in the mind, and therefore religious community cannot be defined with respect to “orthodox” appraisals of that idea. Covenant is an “enacted reality” that is either manifested in the concrete choices individuals make, or not.918”
― Stephen Burnhope, Atonement and the New Perspective: The God of Israel, Covenant, and the Cross

“Reformed covenant theology seems to build its case on three main premises. Firstly, that the old covenant was revoked because Israel so thoroughly violated it (a punitive supersessionism). Secondly, the old covenant was in any event only ever temporary. Thirdly, the efficacy of the old covenant was not actually as Israel took it to be, at face value; rather than dealing with Israel’s transgression (as its practitioners would quite reasonably have supposed at the time) it was instead to remind her of her transgressions and point her to Christ to come.”
― Stephen Burnhope, Atonement and the New Perspective: The God of Israel, Covenant, and the Cross

“Judaism as we know it today is largely the product of “the winners” after 70 CE—or perhaps one should say, the survivors—namely the Pharisees,576 and in fact, of one stream within Pharisaism, that of Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai.577”
― Stephen Burnhope, Atonement and the New Perspective: The God of Israel, Covenant, and the Cross

“It is precisely as one of the diverse streams recognizing themselves as Judaism, says Neusner, that we must classify “Christianity”—“The earliest Christians were Jews, who saw their religion, Judaism, as normative and authoritative.”564”
― Stephen Burnhope, Atonement and the New Perspective: The God of Israel, Covenant, and the Cross

“Katherine Sonderegger questions whether it is right for Christianity to refashion its claims to finality and universality as the price of achieving Soulen’s aims of repudiating supersessionism in all its forms and affirming the Pauline claim that “God has not abandoned his people.” She argues that “a stronger case for such radical reshaping should be made,”542 and asks whether there is not a degree of anachronism here. We should not overlook, I believe, a form of supersessionism that Judaism and Christianity both share: as systems of thought and practice they supersede their biblical origins. Judaism has a complex relation to its biblical past, as does Christianity. Christianity can no more address Judaism, a system of Torah and Talmud, through discussion of biblical Israel, than can Judaism address Christianity, a system of Church and doctrine, through discussion of the Apostles.543”
― Stephen Burnhope, Atonement and the New Perspective: The God of Israel, Covenant, and the Cross

“The church’s standard canonical narrative, however, embodies structural supersessionism in the way that it construes (or, “structures”) this narrative unity. In the foreground, says Soulen, are the perceived key events of creation, fall, Christ’s incarnation, the inauguration of the church, and final consummation—what he calls the “four key episodes.” What is noticeable here, though, is that God’s engagement with the human story is being told in cosmic, universal terms: the Hebrew scriptures are almost completely omitted, save for Genesis 1–3. The God of Israel’s history with the Israel of God recedes into the background of the story and “God’s history with Israel plays a role that is ultimately indecisive for shaping the canonical narrative’s overarching plot.”523 Soulen notes that this omission is reflected in virtually every historic confession of Christian faith from the creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople to the Augsburg Confession and beyond.524”
― Stephen Burnhope, Atonement and the New Perspective: The God of Israel, Covenant, and the Cross

“Segal is probably right in suggesting that “scholarly reticence to ascribe spiritual experience to Paul may be rooted in theological embarrassment with the nonrational aspects of the human soul.”513 Paul is also a mystic, in Segal’s view, so it is a combination of Paul’s conversion experience and his mystical ascension that forms the basis of his theology.514 Paul’s “conversion” is not to be explained in intellectual categories alone, as the exchange of one set of religious facts and information for another: “Paul is not converted by Jesus’ teachings, but rather by an experience, a revelation of Christ, which radically reorients his life.”515”
― Stephen Burnhope, Atonement and the New Perspective: The God of Israel, Covenant, and the Cross

“Israel had been called to be the covenant people of the creator God, to be the light that would lighten the dark world, the people through whom God would undo the sin of Adam and its effects. But Israel had become sinful, and as a result had gone into exile, away from her own land. Although she had returned geographically from her exile, the real exile condition was not yet finished. The promises had not yet been fulfilled. The Temple had not yet been rebuilt. The Messiah had not yet come.336”
― Stephen Burnhope, Atonement and the New Perspective: The God of Israel, Covenant, and the Cross