Jewish and Gentile. These practices and boundaries are stoicheia because they are arranged in ranks; they are stoicheia because they constitute the basics of religious and social life. They are very appropriately called “elements of the world,” and it is these that Paul says have now lost their force. Paul, I said, is a sociologist, transposing terms from Greek thought into a social, covenantal key. He does so with physis and with our key phrase, ta stoicheia tou kosmou, which he translates