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"By identifying YHWH as both the creator of the cosmos and the redeemer of Israel they safeguarded all their three basic doctrines: monotheism, election and eschatology. One God, one people of God, one future for Israel and the whole world. And Paul has now written a poem in exactly this vein; but the central character is not YHWH, but Jesus. Or rather, as I think we must say, the central character is YHWH now recognized in the human face of Jesus....Paul has gone beyond Jewish speculation, but he is not speculating. He is drawing conclusions from the death and resurrection of the Messiah...there is no tension, for him, between Jesus being the totally human Messiah, the representative of Israel, and the one who is sent as it were from God's side, to do and be what only God can do and be. Paul, in short, seems to have held what generations of exegetes have imagined to be an impossibility; a thoroughly incarnational theology, grounded in a thoroughly Jewish worldv iew."
--N. T. Wright on 1 Corinthians 8:1-6, Phillipians 2:5-11 and Colossians 1:15-20
a great paragraph of thought, for a number of reasons. The very last thought expressed, is a good example. One simply cannot understand the Christ without understanding Israel.
jd
