by revealing our past. We do not regard the written deposits of the OT as “someone else’s mail,” to allude to the evocative title of Paul van Buren’s fundamentally wrongheaded article.39 They are ours. And therefore we are not finally dependent upon a historical reconstruction of that history before we can truly inhabit it. At the heart of this sense of self-identification with Israel’s history lies the historical Jesus. We belong, because he belongs. The God whom he teaches us to call “Father” is
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