‘Holy People’ – Some Protestant Views

                                                                  Simon Schoon

1. Introduction

1.1 The ‘True Holy People’
‘Israel’,  ‘People of God’  and  ‘Holy People’: these are titles the church has thought right to assume for itself, at an early point in its history. In the place of Israel, the Church viewed itself as elected, called and sanctified by God. So Christian theologians conducted a fierce polemical debate with Jewish scholars on the questions, ‘Who is the true people?’ and ‘Whose is the inheritance?’ In other words: who could claim the title of honour ‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’ (Exod 19:5)? Quite often the struggle was not decided by words but by brute force. The Church claimed the exclusive right to the title ‘Holy People’. It held that the original Israel had forfeited this right, on account of its unbelief in the promised and now revealed Saviour Jesus Christ. The Christian aversion toward the Jewish People has its strongest expression in the long-upheld substitution theory: as the new People of God, the Church has taken over, definitively, the place of the old Israel as the ‘Holy People’.
            The Reformers in the 16th  century left the substitution theology unchanged. The ‘Holy People’ was re-defined as the church of the Reformation. They emphasized the holiness of those church members who by faith alone were destined to share in the holiness of Jesus Christ. The Church of the Reformation projected itself retrospectively onto the Old Testament, as far back as the Garden of Eden.[1] The history of the People Israel in the Old Testament age was annexed ecclesiologically.
In the centuries-long struggle where the ‘pure church’ was to be found, much attention had been given to the four notae ecclesiae, the ‘notes’ of the ‘true church’: its unity, its holiness, its catholicity and its apostolicity. The Reformation reduced the four notae of the Church to only two. These were the pure preaching of the Word and the proper administration of the two sacraments, Baptism and Holy Supper, while some parts of Calvinism added a third nota, namely the right application of Church discipline. Little if any thought was given to the connection of the Church to God’s ancient people Israel, let alone that this connection could be seen as a nota ecclesiae. There was not a single theological acknowledgement of the continuing history of the living Jewish People after the coming of Christ. Only in modern times has this debate on the ‘true people’ reached the level of a real dialogue, though not yet in all parts of the world, and not in every part of pluralist Protestant Christianity.
In the context of the Jewish-Christian dialogue it has been proposed more than once that churches of every background and denomination should be ready to drop their self-definition of ‘the Church as God’s (Holy) People’, so as to create a new climate in the Jewish-Christian relationship. Considering the enormous diversity of churches and opinions in Christianity, this is probably unattainable and unrealistic in practice. During the Second Vatican Council (1964-1968), the Roman Catholic Church re-discovered the Church as ‘the People of God on the way’ and favoured this title as a proper correction of the existing sacramental and clerical vision of the Church.[2] Also in the theology of the World Council of Churches, founded in 1948, to which the majority of Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Churches belong, the identification of the Church with ‘God’s People’ has become a popular way of speaking.[3] One must wonder, though, whether a renewal of the relationship between Christians and Jews demands such a radical step as giving up the title ‘Holy People’. Jewish partners in dialogue do not ask for such ‘sacrifices’ and make no such demands on the self-definition of Christians, provided this poses no implicit threat to their own self-understanding and existence. From this viewpoint, the theological challenge for Christians is not so much whether to renounce the term ‘People of God’ for the Church, as to use this term in such a manner that no anti-Jewish responses will result from it.

1.2 Outline
This contribution is developed as follows. After this Introduction (1) we will first  look into the controversial issue whether and how the New Testament – as a continuation of the Old Testament - allows Christians to speak of the Church as ‘God’s People’ and as ‘Holy People’ (2). Next, several Protestant – mainly Calvinist or Reformed - thinkers from the past and the present, will be called as witnesses (3 and  4). In the past Protestants maintained – as many still do -  that the Church is the ‘only true People of God’ and that the Church has replaced the People of Israel as the ‘Holy People’ for good. In more recent decades, since the impact of the Shoah, other terminology has come into use about Jews and Judaism in Church and theology (5). This change of emphasis will be illustrated with a selection of quotations from many official church documents which address the subject (6). The new development has triggered a crisis, because it challenges what Christians have always taken for granted, namely the claim of the church to be ‘the only true and holy People of God’. Finally, some conclusions will be drawn for Protestant theology (7). 

 2. Old and New Testament

Throughout history, the Church has declared itself to be the only ‘Holy People of God’. It took until the second half of the 20th century, after the Shoah, before the Church would honour the Jewish People with the biblical title ‘People of God’. Such a long anti-Jewish history leads to the inevitable question: Is the replacement  theology of the Church a direct consequence of texts in the New Testament itself and therefore, in the Protestant view, an essential part of the Christian creed? Precisely because Protestant Christians, through their Sola Scriptura principle, frequently call upon Bible texts, this question must be dealt with first. After mentioning briefly some basic texts from the Old Testament, [4] we will investigate some central New Testament texts, in the most probable chronological order.

2.1  Old Testament
It is evident that the title ‘God’s People’ is derived from the Book of Israel which the Church calls the ‘Old Testament’. It is disputed what should be called die Mitte (‘the central theme’) of the Old Testament, but many look for it in the formulas ‘God and his People Israel’ and ‘the People Israel and its God’.[5] The so-called ‘covenant formula’ reads: ‘I will be your God and you will be my people’ (cf. Exod 6:2-8; Lev 26:12; Jer 31:33b). The basis of the covenant is God’s election of Israel as his people (cf. Deut 7:6; 14:2), but Israel can never by its election boast of being better or greater than all other nations (Deut 7:7). According to the Song of Deborah, Israel is ‘the People of JHWH’ (Judg 5:11,13). The fierce criticism of the prophets towards their people never meant that the covenant of God with his people would be definitely broken, but was a passionate and existential appeal to walk in ways that are appropriate for the People of God.[6] According to Isa 19:25, the promise to be God’s people does not belong exclusively to Israel, because in the future the blessing of God will include many nations, even the enemies of Israel: ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage.’

2.2 The Apostle Paul
Paul, the writer of the oldest New Testament texts, nowhere calls the Church ‘the People of God’. He refers to the Church only as láos (‘people’, ‘nation’) in quotations from the Septuagint. Only indirectly, in Rom 9:25-26 by way of a quote from Hos 1:10 and 2:22, is the community of Jews and Gentiles described as ‘the People of God’. But the rhetorical question about the People Israel, which opens Rom 11: ‘I ask then, has God rejected his people?’, is emphatically and explicitly answered by the apostle himself: ‘By no means .... God has not rejected his people, whom he foreknew’.  Because Israel remains God's People, Paul can emphasize: ‘...as regards the election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers’ (Rom 11:28). 
On the one hand, Paul did not use the expression ‘People of God’ as an self-evident title for the Church. On the other hand, he could metaphorically attribute the honorary titles of the People Israel in the Old Testament to the Church, when he speaks of the Christian community as ‘Chosen’, ‘Beloved’ and ‘Holy’. Although he does write about ‘Israel after the flesh’ in 1 Cor 10:18 (kata sarka), he avoids the obvious parallel and calls the Church nowhere ‘Israel after the Spirit’ (kata pneuma). Paul speaks of the relationship of the new community of the Church to Israel as the Ancient People of God in terms of a ‘mystery’ (mystèrion), which in his apocalyptic vision will swiftly be revealed, actually at the moment that ‘all Israel will be saved’ (Rom 11:26).[7]

2.3  The letter to the Ephesians
It was a remarkable development that in the course of the first century the new Jesus community came to consist largely of Gentiles. The New Testament does not conceal the tensions that existed between ‘Judaeo-Christians’ and Gentile Christians. Paul warned the latter, in the church of Rome, not to feel superior and to remember the fact that they had come from ‘outside’: ‘It is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you’ (Rom 11:18). The disciple of Paul who probably wrote the letter to the Ephesians (meant as a letter to several Christian communities) cannot hide his amazement at ‘the mystery’, that the Gentiles have now become ‘fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel’ (Eph 3:6).  Clearly, the writer no longer wrestles with the question of the destiny of the Jewish People, on which Paul spent so much ink in his letter to the church in Rome. He is no longer concerned with the larger, not-Jesus-believing part of Israel, but with the unity of the new community of Jews and Gentiles that has come into being.[8]  
This Pauline disciple is nevertheless still in awe of the mystery that Gentiles who ‘at that time were separated from Christ, from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise,  having no hope and without God in the world’, have now from far-off ‘been brought near in the blood of Christ’ (Eph 2: 12-13). In this letter, the Gentile Christians are firmly reminded of their former status. Their earlier position as pagans was not that of  Gentile proselytes in the Jewish community, but was still further removed; they were entirely outside the Jewish people and the synagogue, excluded from the politeia (both ‘citizenship’ and ‘religious commonwealth’) of Israel (Eph 2:12). They formed no part of ‘God’s People’ and were beyond the Covenant of God with Israel. They were therefore regarded as people without hope, as ‘atheists’ (atheoi), that is to say, they lived outside the realm of the God of Israel.  Through the cross of Christ peace has now been established between Jews and Gentiles, hostility is abolished, and people may now be drawn from all the nations to share also in the privileges of Israel as God’s People.[9]

2.4   The Gospel of Matthew
Little is said about ‘the Church’ in the four gospels, and whenever the Church is referred to there, as in the response of Jesus to the confession of  Peter:  ‘I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’ (Mat 16:18),  these words have generally been considered as the outcome of the theology of the early Christian Church.[10] The expression ‘my Church’ in Mat 16:18 is undoubtedly to be understood from a later viewpoint, in the second half of the first century, when Christian communities existed beside synagogues. With these words, the evangelist intended to make known that through Jesus a special ecclesia was to be built; a text that would later have an especially great influence in the Roman Catholic tradition, specifically in the founding of the papacy in Rome.
Mat 21:43 must be cited in this context. After the parable of the wicked tenants (Mat 21:33-46),  the evangelist puts the following words in the mouth of  Jesus: ‘Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation (ethnos) producing the fruits of it’. This text is explained by Church Fathers, Reformers, and exegetes as an allusion to the rejection of Israel as God’s People. Only a few, such as Calvin, interpret the text as a warning to the Church and its leaders, that election is never self-evident and that the Church does not have  election as its property.[11] Various Jewish authors hold the view that this text is anti-Jewish and consider it a later addition. So David Flusser: ‘The rejection of the Jews and the transfer of the divine election to the Gentiles belong to the ideology of Matthew, who most probably was a Gentile-Christian, and the earliest witness of Gentile-Christian anti-Judaism’.[12] Pinchas Lapide is of the opinion that the aggressive wording of verse 43 can scarcely be attributed to Jesus himself, and therefore should be viewed as a creation of Matthew or as a gloss by a later editor.[13] However, inserted or not, as a part of the canonical text of the Gospel of Matthew this verse has played an important role in the anti-Jewish tradition of Church and theology. The question still remains whether it is as certain as the Church would like to believe that the Church is the ‘people’ identified in the text, bringing forth the fruits of the Kingdom.
The New Testament scholar Wim Weren has gone a different route as with regard to  this Bible section. According to him, in the text of Matthew not a single proof can be found as evidence that the ‘people’ mentioned there means any other people than the People of Israel. The parable of Jesus in his opinion is a form of prophetic proclamation within the People of Israel. He comes to this remarkable conclusion through an intertextual analysis of Is 5:1-7 and Mat 21:33-46.[14] In connection with the song of the vineyard in Is 5, Jesus, it is supposed, told a juridical parable, fully intending to shock his listeners into recognizing themselves in it. Just as King David pronounced his own judgment on himself, when the prophet Nathan told the parable of the young ewe (2 Sam 12:1-14), so Jesus’ listeners  pronounced judgment on themselves with their reaction to his question: ‘When, therefore, the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants? They said to him: He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and let the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons’ (Mat 21:40-41) In the story of the vineyard in Is 5 as much as in the parable of Mat 21, one can see a contrast between the authorities and the ordinary people. In the Old Testament, and in the Targum and Midrash on the text of Is 5, the dread prophetic warning never means that Israel will cease to be God’s People. But the text does contain an outright ethical call. Jesus’ words to the leaders are to be understood in the line of this prophetic tradition. He calls them, fervently, to realize their great responsibility. In the parable, two kinds of reactions within the one People Israel are opposed to each other: the attitude of the authorities is opposed to the attitude of the common people, as expressed most vividly in the same chapter by the faith of harlots and publicans (Mat 21:32). The latter are upheld as ‘the people that brings forth the fruits of the vineyard’. According to Weren, the parable cannot be explained as a confirmation of substitution theology. It is, anyway, exegetically clear, that by ethnos (‘people’) in Mat 21:43 the Church is not meant.[15] It is at the same time certain that such a parable would be completely wrenched from its original meaning if it were turned around into an ideological weapon and used against the Jewish people as a whole.

2.5  1 Peter 2:9

The locus classicus for the ‘Church-as-God’s-people’ theology is undoubtedly 1 Pet 2:9.[16]   In this oft-quoted text, the Church is crowned with the Old Testament titles of Israel from Exod 19:5-6:  ‘You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people’. In 1 Pet 2:10, with an allusion to Hos 2:23, the author identifies the Church with God’s People. 1 Peter is difficult to date precisely, and could be placed anywhere between 70-100 C.E., written by an unknown writer who stood more or less in the Pauline tradition.[17] Old Testament material plays a very important structural role in 1 Peter.[18] This role is theological: The writer re-reads and re-interprets the authoritative text of the Old Testament from a new perspective, in light of what he regards as the definitive revelation of God in Jesus Christ. The text of 1 Pet 2:9-10 is regarded by commentators as the pivot of 1 Peter. In the preceding verses 2:6-8 the ‘stone’, quoted and ‘lifted’ from Ps 118:22, is christologically applied in a totally new context: ‘Come to him, to that living stone, rejected by men but in God’s regard chosen and precious’, and those who believe in Jesus Christ are called themselves ‘living stones … built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood’. The mentioning of the holy priesthood in this verse is already an allusion to Exod 19:6 and leads in 1 Pet 2:9-10 to the more explicit quotation of Exod 19:5-6, in which the titles of Israel seem to be clearly transferred to the Church.[19]
The conclusion of the biblical theologian Wells is: ‘All the terms and associations of Israel’s election, which were initially attributed to Christ, are now applied to the body of believers in their relationship to Christ. So we find expressed here the themes of holiness – the special status, the special character, the special purpose – focused upon the people of God in Christ’.[20] The emphasis of the author of 1 Peter, however, is not in the first place ecclesiological; he has a much more ethical and missionary purpose. He wants in his letter to encourage Christians, in their situation of estrangement as ‘aliens and exiles’, to live up to the high standard of their election and calling: ‘that you may declare the wonderful deeds of Him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light’ (1 Pet 2:10). In this way, the New Testament canon established a new context for reinterpreting the themes of holiness and peoplehood.[21]

The conclusion from this review of a number of texts is that upholding the Church as ‘People of God’ may not be seen merely as a later development, and therefore as a negative outgrowth of the substitution doctrine, but can refer back to various texts of the New Testament. It has been demonstrated that it is also possible to find different emphases in the New Testament and to put forward different nuances. Though in the New Testament the honorary titles for Israel are only seldom entirely transferred to the Church, this happened on a large scale in church history. That this was also the case in Protestantism will be shown below with a number of classical examples.

 3. Some classical views in Reformed Protestantism

Three examples of classical Reformed Protestantism are chosen here to delineate the main line of thought on the theme of  ‘Holy People’. First we make reference to the well-known Reformer of Geneva, John Calvin, after whom the Calvinist part of Protestantism is named. Secondly, we will mention the Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper, whose name is connected with neo-Calvinism. Thirdly,  we cite the most important Protestant theologian of the 20th century, Karl Barth.

3.1 John Calvin
For Calvin (1509-1564) the Church is chosen by God before the foundation of the world. The holiness of the Church derives from Christ and is effected and preserved in the practical life of the Church by the proclamation of the Word, the administration of the sacraments, and the enforcement of Church discipline.[22] To prove the holiness of the Church, Calvin often refers to 1 Cor 1:30, where Paul writes that the believers are sanctified by Jesus Christ: ‘He is the source of your life, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification, and redemption’. On the one hand, he dissociates himself from the Roman Catholics, whom he accuses of setting up an ideal of the holiness of the Church in it self, apart from Christ. On the other hand, he turns himself against the Anabaptists, who according to him want to establish a Church without any sin and error, in the tradition of the Donatists and Cathars. Because the holy Church cannot be ‘to the dishonor of God … a conspiracy of wicked and abandoned men’, he regards Church discipline as one of the notae ecclesiae that serves ’like a bridle to restrain and tame those who rage against the doctrine of Christ’.[23]
Calvin’s struggle for a ‘holy Church’ and his doctrine of Church discipline must be seen in the context of his time, in which he tried to establish a kind of theocracy in Geneva and saw the Roman Catholic Church as a revelation of the Antichrist. Often the Jews are mentioned and used in the Institutes of Calvin to illustrate the terrible failures of the Catholics, whom he refers to as the ‘Romanists’. The Jews of the Old Testament serve as a ‘model of disobedience’ to expose the sins of the ‘Romanists’ of his time: ‘The Romanists, therefore, today make no other pretension than what the Jews once apparently claimed when they were reproved for blindness, ungodliness, and idolatry by the Lord’s prophets’.[24] However, unlike Luther, Calvin was not so harsh in his criticism toward Jews, because he had not much contact with them and they were no serious threat to his reformation in Geneva. There was also a major doctrinal reason: he was convinced of the unity of the Old and New Testament. He emphasized the one covenant, and believed in the continuing use of the law by Christians.[25]
Although Calvin could openly speak about the Church as ‘the (holy) People of God’, a Church which existed for him already in the time of the Old Testament, yet he preferred the term ‘covenant’ to the name ‘holy Church’. His Institutes are built up around this central concept. For him the unity of the one covenant was a very important conviction, a covenant which had started in Old Testament times, and was widened and fulfilled by Jesus Christ. The same salvation which was revealed in its fullness in the New Testament, was already the salvation of the Old Testament, but there it was only present in ‘shadows’. The Law of the Old Testament is fulfilled, not finished, in the New Testament, and serves not only as a means to discover sins, but is primarily meant to show believers the way to live according to God’s will in thankfulness.
Calvin mentioned the historical dispensations of the one covenant, which relate in his view to God’s pedagogical motives in his revelation to Israel and the Church. The essence or substance of the covenant remains the same in the different dispensations, namely the person of Christ.[26] There is not much room in his christological thinking for a dynamic history of the covenant of Israel during the time of the Old Testament and there is no room at all for an active continuation of the covenantal history of Israel after Christ. Except for some remarks in his exegesis of Rom 11 he does not speak about the future of Israel and the Jews. Yet his emphasis on the one and only covenant and his extensive attention to the Old Testament has given later Calvinist tradition many points of contact to elaborate on the theological significance of the Jewish People.[27]

3.2 Abraham Kuyper
It is a leap in history, jumping from Calvin of Geneva in the 16th century to the neo-Calvinism of Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) in the Netherlands of the 19th and 20th centuries. Kuyper was an influential theologian and statesman. He succeeded in mobilizing a following, primarily of the less well-to-do petit bourgeoisie, and gave them their own church, their own university, and their own political party. He was of great significance for the emancipation of a large part of the Protestant population in the Netherlands. It followed naturally from his battle-cry ‘In isolation lies our power’, that he made them a tightly disciplined movement with its own particular organizations, wielding power and influence on all fields of the political and social spectrum. In this struggle, he notably saw the Jews as his rivals. In 1907 Kuyper wrote on  ‘the Jewish problem’ after a journey through many countries around the Mediterranean. On the one hand he was fascinated by the sheer endurance and intellectual strength of the Jews; on the other hand he wrote of their ‘love of money’ and eagerness for political and social domination. The Dutch people could deal with  that Jewish danger in his opinion, but that was not the case in poor countries like Romania and Russia. Therefore it was a good thing that there was inequality in civil rights for Jews in those countries.[28] The conceptions of Kuyper were congenial with the thoughts of the anti-Semitic Berlin court-chaplain Adolf Stöcker.
Kuyper was adamantly opposed to  the philosemitic and millennialist current within those Reformed Churches in the Netherlands which had been founded by him, and succeeded by his personal prestige in pushing through his views on Jews and Judaism during the Synod of his Church in Middelburg (1896). In his opinion a constant struggle was to be waged by Christians against Jews, because they rejected Jesus and resisted in this way the breakthrough of God’s kingdom in the world. In the documents of the Synod of 1896 the terms ‘Israel’ and ‘Jewish People’ were avoided; only ‘the Jews’ as individuals were mentioned. The choice of the name ‘Jews’ instead of ‘Israel’ had a clear ideological background that was resolutely propounded by Kuyper. His approach towards Jews was solely missionary and is characterized as ‘a crusade against the Jews’.[29] In his view they were violators of God’s covenant, who should be called on to join the Church. Because he regarded the Church as the only ‘true People of God’, there could be no place for the Jews as a people, as an ethnic group. The first aim of the Mission to the Jews was, in the eyes of Kuyper, the fight against Judaism as a false religion. The second aim was ‘to win the Jews for Christ’. His views should be seen in the context of his efforts for the emancipation of the Reformed part of the population. In this struggle he saw the Jews as dangerous adversaries. His conviction was, however, also coloured by anti-Jewish conceptions, which were expressed in several of his publications and exerted considerable influence in the Reformed Churches.[30]  Only after the Second World War did this ‘crusading attitude’ toward the Jews totally disappear from Reformed Protestant thinking.

3.3 Karl Barth
Many Protestants regard the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) as the ‘church-father’ of the 20th century. He wrote extensively on the Jewish People in his Church Dogmatics. As a Reformed theologian - in line with the Reformer Calvin – he took his starting point in the concept of the one covenant. He regarded this covenant, which God had begun with the people Israel, as the basis of God’s plan to reach the whole world. By the universalisation of this covenant through the event of Jesus Christ, the Church became the real partner of the original covenant. The fulfilment of the covenant in Christ was already meant as its deepest intention during the period of the Old Testament. It is Barth’s conviction that the covenant of God with Israel had never been abrogated, though it was undoubtedly fulfilled and confirmed in Jesus Christ. This christological fulfilment is regarded as the anticipation of the coming Kingdom of God.
Yet, in the theology of Barth many remnants of the anti-Jewish ‘teaching of contempt’ of the Christian Church can be found. On the one hand, he introduced a much more dynamic concept of covenant than was common in Christian theology at that time and emphasized strongly the significance of ‘biblical Israel’ as a people of God. On the other hand, he could not - by the very christological concentration of his theological project - give genuine room to the living continuation of the covenant-history of the Jewish People after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the year 70.[31] He regarded Israel as the ‘natural context of Jesus Christ’.[32] So he recognized theologically the concrete ‘Israel after the flesh’, but only in the light of Jesus Christ. He spoke about Israel and the Church as the two figures of the one Community of God in the world, but because of the rejection of Jesus by the synagogue Israel is called by Barth ‘the witness of God’s wrath’ and ‘the mirror of God’s judgment’. In contrast, the Church is described as ‘the witness of God’s grace’.[33] After the crucifixion of Christ the history of Israel should not have been continued in Barth’s opinion, and when it was, it can only be seen by him as ‘unfruitful’, ‘ghostly’ and ‘lacking the true prophecy’.[34] At the consummation of history, the synagogue will find its fulfilment when it will be integrated into the Church.
When Barth speaks about the Church as ‘people of God’, he speaks about the present; when he calls Israel the ‘people of God’, he speaks about the past. For him the Church is ‘holy’ because God has set it apart, decisively, from the surrounding world as a being with its own distinct origin, nature, law, and direction. The holiness of the Church is the reflection of its ‘Head’ Jesus Christ. According to Barth, Christians cannot believe in the Church as they believe in God, because the creed says credo ecclesiam and not credo in ecclesiam.[35]  As long as the Christian community lives in the world, its invisibility is hidden by its visibility. The Church is guilty of failure and error, but it rests on the power of Christ’s promise and cannot therefore perish. In the final volume of his Church Dogmatics he deals with ‘The People of God in the World’ and compares the present position of the Church as the ‘people of God’ with the experiences of Israel as the ‘people of God’ in the time of the Old Testament.[36]  Unlike his friend and pupil the Dutch theologian Miskotte he did not show any interest in living Judaism and rarely engaged in a real dialogue with Jewish thinkers. 
           

[1] See for example in Calvinist tradition Question and Answer 54 of the Catechism of Heidelberg: ‘What do you believe concerning the ‘Holy Catholic Church’? That the Son of God, out of the whole human race, from the beginning to the end of the world, gathers, defends, and preserves for Himself,  by his Spirit and Word, in the unity of the true faith,  a Church chosen to everlasting life; and that I am, and  forever shall remain, a living member thereof.’