My immediate response to your comment, Andrew, which I have really enjoyed reading, is this: you assume that there are two exclusive alternatives - a “narrative or historical or eschatological context” (as interpreted by yourself), and “universal theological propositions”.

But there is another narrative context which is not as reduced as the one you are proposing, whose framework goes beyond the immediate 1st century situation of Israel, and is provided by the OT writings themselves - as interpreted from the perspective of the NT writings.

Within this broader narrative context, Israel was always part of a bigger purpose in God’s plans to deal with the crisis of Genesis 1-3 which frames the entire narrative. Echoes of the crisis and restoration movements are heard particularly in the linguistic motifs in the story of Noah, Abraham, and the entry of Israel into the promised land.

The broader context makes sense of much of the way the OT is written (in contrast with how identical material is handled in the Koran, for instance), where the failings and shortcomings of God’s people are a constant theme, and provide a constantly reverberating echo of the formative crisis of Genesis. Romans acquires its meaning within this broader context - to which Paul is constantly alluding. Even the catalogue of sins in Romans 1:18-32 is not exhausted by relating it to contemporary Jews and Gentiles. As Don Richardson has pointed out, it is also an anthropological history of religion: a declension which is descriptive of religious practice worldwide.

The echoes of Maccabees which you have pointed out, in Romans 3:25 especially, need careful attention, because Paul (and other NT authors) constantly take OT symbols, words, practices, beliefs, and flesh them out with new meaning in the light of the advent of Christ. We cannot assume that an earlier meaning of a word provides exclusive access to the precise definition of its NT counterpart.

There is a historical/narrative reading of the OT & NT writings which we need to return to with greater rigour. It is the reading in which God remains faithful to his covenant, as expressed in incremental repetitions from Genesis to Malachi, a covenant whose purpose was to fulfil God’s plans for creation whilst dealing with the Genesis catastrophe and its painful consequences as described in the slowly unfolding history of the OT.

In this retelling of the narrative, Israel plays a prominent part, and especially 1st century Israel. But the advent of the perfect Israelite, Jesus, who was and did everything that Israel was meant to be and do, and became much that Israel could never be, bursts the bounds of a purely localised historical and national fulfilment. This is the narrative reading which now needs to sit alongside the mutually exclusive alternatives which you provide, and I suggest it is a better reading than either of them.

There always was a universal meaning to the advent of Christ, if by universal we mean significant for the entire creation, and not simply for the history of Israel in the 1st century. This significance was not developed as a mythological adornment by the church in hindsight as the real history faded from view, but can be traced back to the years immediately following the resurrection of Jesus, and long before, if we are to take much of Isaiah seriously. The unwillingness of Israel as a whole to accept the terms of this interpretation of her history led directly to the national catastrophe of the Jewish war, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in AD 70.

It is within this narrative context which I have sketched out that the purpose of the death (and resurrection) of Jesus needs to be understood. In this context, I question whether Don Carson can validly take a narrow reformed interpretation of ‘the atonement’ and make it a test of orthodoxy, and I think he undermines his case by doing so.