VII - CONCLUDING SUMMARY

Summary

In the analytical section we constantly found a Jewish ‘problem’ lying behind particular transpositions, take-overs, and tendencies to supplant the old Israel by a new or true Israel. Attack from Judaism was the original and continuing cause of the phenomena discussed in the foregoing chapters. It centred upon the Jewish wing of the young Church—precisely the segment where one finds the earliest groping towards a satisfactory formulation of the relationship between the Church and Israel. The problem was raised in a very different form by the Gentile side of the Church, for Gentile Christians did not stand in an ambivalent relationship to Israel. They could be admitted to Israel but had no specific claim upon the attributes of Israel; these they could only assume by incorporation into the People of God. There came later a period when the Church had separated from Judaism and Gentile Christianity felt that, on sufficient theological grounds, it could make the transposition on its own; but in the formative period it was Jewish mission and Jewish reaction which created the difficulties resulting in the take-overs. It is important to note that it was the failure of Jewish mission which gave rise to the only sustained treatment of the problem of the Church/Israel relationship in Romans 9–11.

The most searching difficulties, after Jesus had come and revealed himself as Son of Man and Messiah, were posed by the twin questions of the status of unbelieving pious Jews and of Jews who had followed Jesus in the new Way of salvation.