Q. On the issue of appealing to Torah ironically to get the Gentile converts not to submit to the Torah involving the Mosaic covenant I have often told my students that there is a difference between using the OT as Scripture which still speaks throughout to God’s people, and using it to talk about participation in a particular covenant, namely the Mosaic one. While Paul’s audience is not obligated to keep, observe, the Mosaic covenant they are required to learn from it as Scripture, since it remains God’s Word. Would this be congenial to the point you are making?
A. Well yes, but one needs (as you see) a nuanced view of how scripture works. This is why I developed the five-act model which I expound in various places, especially in my book Scripture and the Authority of God. There is a problem about all post-Reformation thinking here in that having replaced the Pope with the Bible people have often tended simply to see ‘the Bible’ as a fixed commodity of ‘inspired text’ – without any of the differentiated and esp narrative quality which the Bible itself actually explains (think e.g. of how Hebrews carefully shows the ways in which Israel’s scriptures point beyond themselves to a new reality).
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