On Whether the Church is the New Israel
[Originally posted on my Rabbisaul blog April 22 2006]
Nothing original for the blog, so here’s a bit of a piece I wrote in response to an English Baptist on a discussion forum. The overall topic was whether the Church is the new Israel, and whether old Israel was the Church. The gentleman I am responding to is focusing upon the issue of the Church not being the physical seed, which is all Israel was.
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Both above and later, you’re assuming that the issue is physical vs spiritual. That is a subtle but fundamental misreading of Paul. The issue is flesh vs Spirit, which is very different, having to do with the contrast between two ages, not a contrast between two metaphysical principles.
The New Testament has absolutely no qualms about extending spiritual promises to the children of believers. Children are raised and nurtured in the Lord, not into the Lord; Peter bears witness to the new covenant gift of the Spirit at Pentecost by upholding the ancient principle that the promise is to his hearers’ children – a statement that makes sense only within the context of the ancient promises, characterized by the classic covenantal principle, “I will be God to you and to your children after you.” If Peter is not reinforcing that, he has zero reason to say such a thing; and if he believes what you do, he has every reason not to.
The hermeneutic I’m hearing from you is, at its basis, afflicted with at least a touch of dualism, because it assumes that man’s problem has to do with physicality. Everything is made to denigrate physical descent.
The Bible’s analysis of the situation is quite different.
Man’s problem is a fallenness that pervades man in every aspect of his being (not just the physical). And corresponding to that, redemption is not a sacrifice of the physical for the sake of the “spiritual” – far from it, the foundational Christian confession is the redemption of the body. If redemption cannot occur from the womb, then your system is tainted with an unbiblical dualism, and also makes redemption weaker than the fall. (In order to make up for this, generally a new doctrine called the age of accountability is created ex nihilo to save infants and young children. So one unbiblical error is “corrected” by creating another.)
When Jesus says of the littles ones that of such is the kingdom of heaven (Mt 19.13-14), He is speaking of children that have been brought to Him, and the term generally refers to infants and toddlers. Let me ask you this: Were they “of faith” or not? If not, then how can the kingdom of heaven – which is all about faith (cf Rom 14.17) – belong to such as them as its paradigmatic members?
Now, personally, I’m a bit ambivalent about saying that the Church = Israel. I think there are senses in which that is true, and senses in which it is not true. I would rather say that the Church belongs to the one company of the people of God that He began to gather from the beginning, and that the old covenant patriarchs are “our fathers” (1 Cor 10).
Strictly speaking, however, the Church was founded upon the apostles and prophets (Eph 2.20), and a building cannot be erected before its foundation is laid. This takes us back to what I mentioned at the beginning – the contrast between two ages that is fundamental to the whole structure of Paul’s thought. (Not to mention other NT books, not least John.)
The time before Christ produced real believers, but it is nonetheless the age of flesh (and outside of Christ, this is still the case). The new covenant is marked by the gift of the Spirit, and thus inaugurates a new aeon. Pentecost is thus the birth of the Church, although I would also insist that it is fundamentally wrong-headed to ignore the long gestation period that spanned over so many preceding centuries, and act as if this new work God does in the Church is (at best) tangentially related to what has gone before. Otherwise, it is nonsense to call Jesus “Christ,” meaning Messiah – nothing could be more intimately related with Israel’s whole purpose, identity and hope.
The point is that what we have at issue here is not whether the new covenant is spiritual, even in comparison to the old. Paul posits a spirituality for the new covenant that he does not grant to the old. But that emphatically does not mean that he sees no continuity, and precisely on the level of what I call relational typology.
First Corinthians 10 is a prime example of this, and of course Paul uses the tupos language explicitly in that passage twice. He speaks of the judgment of the Israelites in the wilderness and places the Corinthians (and even himself, in context; see 9.27) within that same typology. The wilderness episodes function as a warning to the Corinthians precisely because the covenantal structure is similar enough that there can be covenantal inclusion and participation in Christ, and yet have a fallout of apostasy and judgment.
In summary, it’s not so much that the Church is Israel (although again, there are senses in which that is true, and Paul says as much in Gal 6.16) as that the Church is Israel’s destiny, its goal, just as Christ is the telos of Torah (Rom 10.4). The Church is the one people of God for the new age of the Spirit, the people which God had in the works through the one long story of salvation that He began long before.