Volf and Fictive Family

I've been working my way through Miroslav Volf's Exclusion and Embrace. In light of my recent Household of God series, I found the passage below interesting. Here Volf is describing how Paul dealt with reconciling God's universality as Lord of all with his culturally particular revelation to the Jews.

As he worked it out in Galatians 3:1-4:11, Paul’s solution to the problem that touched the very core of his religious belief contains three simple, yet nonetheless momentous interrelated moves (which I have extrapolated from N. T. Wright’s analysis in The Climax of the Covenant). First, in the name of the one God Paul relativizes the Torah: Torah, which is unable to produce a single united human family demanded by the belief in the one God, cannot “be the final and permanent expression of the will of the One God” (Wright 1992, 170) Though still important, Torah is not necessary for membership in the covenant. Second, for the sake of equality Paul discards genealogy: the promise “had to be by faith, so that it could be according to grace: otherwise there would be some who would inherit not by grace but as of right, by race” (168). Third, for the sake of all the families of the earth Paul embraces Christ: the crucified and resurrected Christ is the “seed” of Abraham in whom “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female” (Galatians 3:28). In Christ all the families of the earth are blessed on equal terms by being brought into “the promised single family of Abraham” (166).

Paul’s solution to the tension between universality and particularity is ingenious. Its logic is simple: the oneness of God requires God’s universality; God’s universality entails human equality; human equality implies equal access by all to the blessings of the one God; equal access is incompatible with ascription of religious significance to genealogy; Christ, the seed of Abraham, is both the fulfillment of the genealogical promise of Abraham and the end of genealogical privileged locus of access to God; faith in Christ replaces birth into a people. As a consequence, all peoples can have access to the one God of Abraham and Sarah on equal terms, none by right and all by grace. Put abstractly, the religious irrelevance of genealogical ties and the necessity of faith in the “seed of Abraham” are correlates of the belief in the one God of all the families of the earth, who called Abraham to depart. (44-45)

I'd say that faith in Christ is a rebirth into one family. As I noted in my Household of God series, Paul's persistent use of fictive family language was intended to reinforce these theological truths.