A "non-zero-sum dynamic" and Decoding God's Changing Moods, from Robert Wright.
This got me thinking... If we can find the "non-zero-sum" in our dealings with our opponents/nemeses, we will be better positioned as Christians to obey God's command to: Love - to love God, our neighbors, our enemies. We show no wisdom when we allow anti-love (from a Christ-centered perspective) to overwhelm our thinking and feeling.
I don't necessarily agree with everything Wright is postulating - where he ends up within the context of his theorizing - but gleaning ideas from his writing and trying to examine how we live our lives as Christians can bring us to a more Christ-centered life.
Happily, after the exile, life got more non-zero-sum. The Babylonians who had conquered Israel were in turn conquered by the Persians, who returned the exiles to their homeland. Israel was no longer in a bad neighborhood. Nearby nations were now fellow members of the Persian Empire and so no longer threats. And, predictably, books of the Bible typically dated as postexilic, such as Ruth and Jonah, strike a warm tone toward peoples—Moabites and Assyrians—that in pre-exilic times had been vilified.A more inclusive view is also found in a biblical author (or authors) thought by many scholars to be writing shortly after the exile—the priestly source. The priestly source, or P, uses internationally communal language and writes not just of God’s covenant with Israel but of an “everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”
A zero-sum, isolationist worldview had moved Israel from polytheism to belligerent monotheism, but now, as Israel’s environment grew less threatening, belligerence was turning out not to be an intrinsic part of monotheism. Between second Isaiah’s angry exilic exclamations and P’s more congenial voice, Israel had segued from an exclusive to an inclusive monotheism.
