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There is much to be said for making this move. The church is, after all, in an important sense "the new Israel." I have been especially taken with the imagery employed in the First Epistle of Peter. The apostle is writing to a group of Christians that obviously includes Gentiles, but he begins his letter with Old Testament terminology, greeting his readers as the "exiles of the Dispersion" (1 Pet. 1:1, NRSV). Especially significant is the way, in the second chapter, he takes a series of images of Old Testament Israel and applies them to the New Testament church: "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people." He then adds a quotation from one of the prophets: "Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people" (1 Pet. 2:9-10, NRSV). These verses helped clarify my own thinking about the nature of Christian community.

At the Bible conference where I worked in my teenage years, I heard a fundamentalist preacher argue that Satan always promises unity, and that in our own day the devil was actively promoting "one world race, one world church, and one world government." This meant, he insisted, that all true Bible-believing Christians must oppose the racial desegregation movement, the World Council of Churches, and the United Nations.

I remember feeling at the time that this view, even though it tied a lot of issues together in a neat package, was nonetheless a troubling one. I had no strong views about ecumenism or international relations, but I had been a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and Jackie Robinson was my hero: I was thrilled by his courage as he overcame prejudice in desegregating major-league baseball, and I had a hard time thinking of him as a tool of Satan.

I gradually came to reject the whole picture set forth by that preacher. But I was never completely clear about how unbiblical his viewpoint was until I realized the implications of 1 Peter 2:9-10. God is putting together a new kind of "race," a new kind of "priesthood," and a new kind of "nation." Jesus is in the business of actively promoting a unity that he does not want us to define ourselves along artificial lines of what the sinful world sees as ethnic-racial or denominational or national identities. Through the blood of Jesus Christ we have been made into a new kind of people, in which "there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28). Here the idea of the church as a new kind of Israel is a compelling image.

This way of viewing things has been constructive for my understanding of the nature of the church—and indeed of the basis for Christian social ethics. But I realize now that I have often put the underlying theological point in too unqualified a manner.

Once I gave a speech, for example, on the topic "Where Is Israel Today?" I wanted my audience to understand where we will find that group of people in contemporary life who are the present-day intended beneficiaries of the promises God made to Israel in Old Testament times. Then I explained what I took to be two mistaken answers Christians often give to my question. The first answer I gave was that the contemporary beneficiary of those promises is, simply, flesh-and-blood Israel—the present-day Jewish people. This, I explained, is the viewpoint of dispensational theology. To illustrate the point, I quoted Lewis Sperry Chafer's statement that we must never confuse "God's consistent and eternal earthly purposes—which is the substance of Judaism—and his consistent and eternal heavenly purpose, which is the substance of Christianity." On this view, God's ancient promises to the Jewish people are still in effect. The Lord wants them to be a flourishing nation, and he has brought them back to their original homeland where, in fulfillment of prophecy, they will someday acknowledge Jesus as the true Messiah of Israel.

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March 5 2001, Vol. 45, No. 4