In hist-crit terms, I think your challenge is spot on, specifically in terms of Christ’s Jewishness. I guess my problem is when we get into ecclesiology and think Israel has nothing to teach us. That may not be what you or Mark was saying, though.

And “Before Abraham was I Am” certainly implies chronology. As does Paul’s whole thing about “the Rock was Christ.”

I think Mark’s comment above really gets what I’m going for here.

I just don’t think you can make this move Scripturally. Christ fulfills the law. He is the embodiment of Israel as Israel was called to be – “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” He comes to save this people. Your move is to focus on his singularity at the cost of his proper theopolitical context, which was the quite singular nature of Yahweh’s calling of Israel. Why should Jesus be divorced from that? Indeed, I think this robs the OT theopolitical narrative of Israel of its singularity and uniqueness.

And why stop there? Doesn’t the Incarnation make him intelligible to humanity in certain ways? Does that rob the singularity of its power? Conversely, doesn’t the context of that incarnation have some sort of significance?

One can recognize Yahweh’s singular work with Israel – which Jesus fulfills as only Yahweh could (Yahweh being the center of gravity throughout) – without being supersessionist.

The more I’ve read Jesus as dependent upon a Jewish context, the less relevant the OT has become in my thinking.

Kinda like reading the Silmarillion (the mythical back-story to the Lord of the Rings). Once I got the necessary gist to understand the Trilogy, it wasn’t important to go back and really engage the deeper mythology of the Lord of the Rings.

In the same way, the OT has been like a cultural decoder ring for understanding Jesus. However, if I take what you say to heart, I can really embrace the OT as flowing from Christ himself. This does away with my own secret and unconfessed replacement theologies as the Hebrew Scriptures become part of the story of Christ himself–not just some prequel.

In other words, Jesus’s apocalyptic singularity is such that it resists being rendered intelligible by reference to anything else, including Israel. This is not to deny the connections, biblical and historical between Jesus and Israel. Only to put the center of gravity where it belongs.

Also, I see your point below, but I still prefer the language of retroactivity, on the basis of the Pauline point that Jesus is before all things and in him all things hold together. I don’t think that this is supersessionist in the same way at all. Rather it renders the history of Israel in the same light that it renders the history of the church, namely as part of humanity’s being opened up to the “more” of God through the mission of the Spirit.

Finally, I think prophecy and fulfillment need to be rethought as it bears on this issue. Clearly the Old Testament is not a straightforward “prediction” of Jesus in any simple sense. I don’t think seeing them as retroactive effects of Jesus’s singularity does violence to the nature of Israel’s exilic hope. Rather it just points to where the coherence of that hope is to be found, namely in Christ’s irruptive coming, which at once defines and constitutes the very nature of that hope.

I also am not entirely comfortable with the language of retroactive and preverberation. How is this less supersessionist? Israel is included in this account rather than merely instrumentalized, but it still takes on a relative and secondary significance to the event of Christ. Also, what do we make of the fact that it seems as though the biblical account of history itself thinks primarily in terms of prophecy and fulfillment?