Solly is right: ‘When YHWH said to Israel ‘I am your redeemer’ this is not a past tense statement.’ The relationship is live and ongoing (for God is faithful) and Israel is not Israel apart from God’s faithfulness. Israel is always re-supplied with her identity by God. Here is how I introduced the subject:
The doctrine of the election of Israel, and thus of the Jewish people, returned to the centre of dogmatics in the twentieth century, in large part due to Karl Barth. He insisted that God is faithful, and worthy of trust, to the extent that he keeps his promise to this people. Barth’s recovery of typology, in the form of pairs of election-rejection, man-woman and Jew-Gentile, made possible the recovery of the whole Old Testament for christology. But Barth contrasted the pairs of types he identified in the Old Testament, one of which stands for election, the other for rejection. What will prevent these becoming static, and creating two opposing sorts of people? Only the Spirit, God himself, can make one people out of two. So Jesus Christ is the rejected and the elected man. But the power of Jesus Christ is an abstraction if it is not bound to the act of a particular community. Barth avoids an abstraction from Christ, Eugene Rogers believes, but he abstracts from the Spirit (‘Supplementing Barth on Jews and Gender’ Modern Theology 14, 1998). Though God has a particular relationship with Israel, Barth cannot say what that is, because he does not show that God’s relationship to the Jewish people is ongoing. The ‘Old Testament in abstracto’ for Barth, is the ‘passing’ form of the human being. Then the people of Israel, the Jewish people, is just a shadow that gives way to the coming community, a different community. Rogers argues that Barth has allowed us to believe that the people of Israel are no longer led by the Spirit of God; the Synagogue is what human beings need to be saved from. Barth has re-established the centrality of the election of the people of Israel, while also seeming to suggest that Israel is replaced by the Christian community. Robert Jenson offers a solution to the problem . He proposes that to Barth’s phrase ‘Jesus Christ is the electing God’, we add that ‘the Holy Spirit is the electing God’. Rogers agrees that we must supplement each of Barth’s contrasted types with the Spirit as their third term. It is not individuals that correspond to types, but community, this specific community, that is elect. We should then identify God not by focusing on Jesus Christ as individual, but on Jesus and the community the Holy Spirit gives to him. By doing so we refuse to abstract from God’s concrete self-determination to be for Israel.
Much of this is paraphrase of Eugene Rogers. But it is Robert Jenson who has been leading the way here, but when he talks about Israel jenson is talking about God and the future of all humankind, not picking winners in the Middle East conflict. We talk about Israel in order to talk faithfully about Christ and his witnesses, the patriarchs, prophets and people. The people of Christ are first (and by the generosity of God) the people of Israel, and second (by the truly surprising generosity of God) all the others, the rest of us, the gentiles. When we talk about Christ we must do so from the resurrection, Christ vindicated and glorified, so Christ with his people added to him – the whole Christ. Christ is many and one: we do not make him many, he makes us many. Christ is not first an individual to whom the subsequent arrival of his people represents company he didnt have before: rather he is communion intrinsically, and in him (his communion) we become distinct and particular persons, a great company of us, made plural by him. To put it at it strongest – Christ is the Church before the Church is, and Christ is the people of Israel before the people of Israel are. I try to link all this to the New perspective on Paul later in this chapter. Meanwhile, Christ is risen, while we are not yet risen, but can only look forward to the completion of his resurrection, by which we will be joined to him.
Solly’s phrase for all this eschatology is: God’s work in Christ is the great reverse engineering of the Cosmos.
