The essential nature of the church as both the circumcised and uncircumcised

Last updated on: March 29, 2015 at 9:35 pm by Joel Willitts

The essential nature of the church as both the circumcised and uncircumcised 2015-03-29T21:35:06-04:00 Joel Willitts

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One of my many “novel” interpretations of the letter of Galatians as I work on the text for my commentary is to take Paul’s statement about the “truth of the Gospel” (2:5; 2:14) to name the essential nature of the church as comprised of both circumcised and uncircumcised. In both cases where the phrase is found, Paul is concerned to protect this fundamental element of the gospel.

I came across this gem from Karl Barth’s Dogmatics in Outline that eloquently makes the same point (p. 81):

Israel really is the presentation of God’s free grace. So God becomes visible in relation to man, in the event in which Jesus Christ reaches the goal, in His resurrection from the dead. Here man appears surrounded by the light of the glory of God. That is grace, that is God’s turning to man. And this becomes visible in the man out of Israel. In the train of this event–and once more grace is here positively visible–we arrive at the astounding extension of the covenant with Abraham, far beyond those who are of his blood: “Go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature!” That is grace–from narrowness into spaciousness. Yet precisely because salvation is of the Jews, the Jewish nation is not only judged but also given grace. This reprieve of Israel, in the form of its election and calling holds good unalterably, is to this day visible in the Church, which is in fact essentially a Church composed of Jews and heathen. In Romans 9–11 Paul lays the greatest stress on the fact that there is not a Church of the Jews and a Church of the heathen, but that the Church is the one community of those who come to faith out of Israel, together with those who are called out of the heathen to the Church. It is essential to the Christian Church to be both . . . The existence of Jewish Christians is the visible guarantee of the unity of the one people of God, which on its one side is called Israel and on its other the Church.

There are so many interesting points in this paragraph. What an important claim about the necessity of having Jewish Christians in the church (last sentence). In the context where he has referred to the Third Reich’s anti-semitism, Barth is talking about a modern conception of race and I suspect he would have included any racially Jewish person in the category of Jewish Christian whether they were ethnically Jewish or not–by “ethnically Jewish”, I mean to name Messianic Jews in distinction from assimilated Jews. I take race and ethnicity to be related but different concepts. The former is genealogy, the latter is social.

Another point in the context, the status of unbelieving Israel, is also very interesting:

Alongside the Church there is still the Synagogue, existing upon the denial of Jesus Christ and on a powerless continuation of Israelite history, which entered upon fullness long ago. But we have to remember that if it is God’s will–and the Apostle Paul stood in puzzlement before this question–that this separated Israel still exists, we can only see the Synagogue as the shadow-picture of the Church, which accompanies it through the centuries, and, whether the Jews are aware of it or not, actually and really participates in the witness of God’s revelation in the world. The good vine is not dried up. For that God planted it and what God has done to it and given to it, is the decisive thing; and it is made manifest in Jesus Christ, the man out of Israel.

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