A Thought about Reconciliation and Exchange of Malfunctioning Flesh for God

 “As also if anyone is within Christ, they are a fresh creation; the ancient things passed by, look, they have become fresh and new; yet the all things from the God who was exchanging us for Himself through Christ and giving to us the service of the exchange, like that God was with Christ exchanging the world for Himself, not accounting to them their missteps and the message of the exchange having been placed within us. On behalf of Christ then we act as elder statesmen like God pleading through us;  we are bound on Christ’s behalf, be exchanged to God. Because He made the One not knowing malfunction to be malfunction, so that we we would become God’s state of being observant to do the right thing by means of Him.”

-St. Paul, 1st century

“Because the impotence of the Torah with which it was weak through the biology, God having sent His own Son with the likeness of malfunctioning biology and about that malfunction judged against the malfunction within the biology, so that the right action of the Torah would be fulfilled within us who don’t walk down the line of the biology but down the line of the Spirit.”

-St. Paul, 1st century

The word KATAΛΛACCΩ in the original Greek of 2 Corinthians 5 is traditionally translated here as “reconcile,” except this isn’t its core meaning. The word actually means “to exchange or change” usually in reference to money. That is, it means to say turn drachmai into denarii, or dollars into euros. By extension of this it means changing an enemy into a friend, and thus to reconcile, but its core meaning is to exchange one thing for another. In the context of Paul’s writings and thought processes revealed within them, I believe the better translation here is not reconciliation, but exchange. Just as Christ was exchanged into the likeness of malfunctioning flesh so that malfunctioning flesh could be exchanged into the core nature of God. It is not that Christ was “made to be sin for us” in a penal substitutionary atonement (as the King James Version declares), it is that God the Son took on the likeness of malfunctioning biology so that our malfunctioning biology could be exchanged for and take on God the Son.

     For the record, this is another instance where, most likely, the Reformer translators went with the Latin translation meaning rather than the Greek meaning, because the word used in the Vulgate is "reconcilio," and meaning first and foremost, "to reconcile."