The endangered and reaffirmed promises of God: a fruitful framework for biblical theology

The third option is both the most compelling and the most in line with both the origins of christology and subsequent Christian tradition, but also the most difficult to formulate in a way that addresses the concerns highlighted above. That is the claim that, in Christ, Gentiles have full access to the God of Israel:

   If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according
   to the promise [Gal 3:29].

   So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth were without
   Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the
   covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now
   in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the
   blood of Christ.... So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you
   are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God [Eph
   2: 11-20].

   You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people,
   in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of
   darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you
   are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have
   received mercy [1 Pet 2:9-10].

The claim of full inclusion in the people of God belongs, in other words, to the core of the proclamation of Christ that the God of the covenant with the people Israel has acted in Jesus Christ on behalf of the world. And, as Paul (and others) were so adamant to show, this was God's plan from the beginning:

   For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on
   behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises
   given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God
   for his mercy [Rom 15:8-9].

When it comes right down to it, this is really the only view that can make any sense at all for Christians. It recognizes that the first believers turned to their Scriptures, as Dahl points out, in response to, and to make sense out of their experience of what God had done in Christ, an experience that was as undeniable as it was potentially unsettling. It was the gospel that emerged as a result of this interpretive process that the Gentiles received as well, promising precisely full access to the God of Israel in Christ (of course there was tremendous controversy over what else the Gentiles had to do). In other words, Christians have the "right" to read the First Testament as their own Scriptures because they have been adopted into the family of Abraham and Sarah. There was an event that set in motion this new perspective, an event Christians cannot but see as revelation.

Everything turns, though, on how Christians understand and formulate this claim, whether the inclusion of the Gentiles involves the replacement of the physical descendants of Abraham and Sarah (as the church soon all too readily concluded), or merely the long hoped-for expansion of God's embrace beyond Israel. If it is the latter, as it must be, it becomes clear that the Gentile church is saying, finally, not that it is "laying claim" to Israel's Scriptures, but that the God revealed in Israel's Scriptures has laid claim to the Gentiles in Christ, and they can no more deny this than deny the very air they breathe.