The Abraham Principle
Why is that? Why is there this unending fixation on Israel in the Old Testament? Is this the inferiority complex of a little nation that had to fear for its existence all the time and therefore almost of necessity developed a theological megalomania? Most certainly not. If we read the Old Testament from beginning to end—from Abraham to Daniel, so to speak—then looking back, considering the whole of it and at the same time incorporating the great revolutions in world history, we could say:4 The God of the Bible, like all revolutionaries, desires a complete overturning, the radical alteration of the whole of the world’s society. For in this the revolutionaries are right: what is at stake is the whole world, and the change must be radical, simply because the misery of the world cries to heaven and because it begins deep within the human heart. But how can God change society at its roots without taking away its freedom and its humanity?
It can only be that God “starts out small,” beginning at a single place in the world. There must be a place—visible, comprehensible, subject to examination—where liberation and healing begin, that is, where the world can become what it is meant to be according to God’s plan. Starting from this place, then, the new thing can spread abroad. But it most certainly cannot happen through indoctrination or violence. Human beings must have the opportunity to view the new thing and test it. Then if they want to they can allow themselves to be drawn into the history of salvation and the story of peace that God is bringing into being. Only in this way can the freedom of the individual and of the nations be preserved. What drives one toward the new thing cannot be compulsion, not even moral pressure, but only the fascination of a world transformed.
So God has to start small, with a small nation. More precisely, God cannot even begin with a nation. God must start with an individual, because only the individual is the point where God can build on change undertaken freely.
That is precisely what the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis tell about. The first pages of the Bible had told of the creation of the world, the development of the story of humankind, and—in a few hints—the growth of human civilization and culture. But along with all that the Bible also spoke immediately of disobedience to God and thus of the growth of destructive rivalries and brutal violence.
But then Genesis 12 starts over with something new. It suddenly ceases to look at humanity as a whole and begins to talk about an individuaclass="underline" Abraham. God begins to transform the world by starting anew, at a particular place in the world, with a single individuaclass="underline"
Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen 12:1-3)
So God makes a new beginning with an individual. However, he will not remain a lone individual. He will become a great nation. That is unavoidable, since an individual could not show what God wants: a new society. So the individual has to be there at the beginning, but in the end the result must be a new society because redemption, salvation, peace, blessing always have also—and indeed, primarily—a social dimension. At the very end of the Bible we will find the image of the “holy city,” the “new Jerusalem” (Rev 21)—and the city, the polis, was in antiquity the proper image of society.
Nevertheless, the indispensable role of the individual remains integral to the people God wants to create. The people of God can never be a pure collectivity, never simply a mass; it must always also be “Abraham,” that is, a people in which every individual is constantly called by God to perform her or his duty. We may call the whole thing the “Abraham principle.”
For the Sake of the Nations
From all this we can already see that the people God chooses and creates cannot rest within itself. It is not self-enclosed, existing for its own sake. It is chosen out of the mass of the nations for the sake of those nations. Abraham was, after all, dragged out of his family and his homeland so that he could be a blessing for many others. In the people that came from him was to be made visible and tangible what God wants for the whole world: nonviolence, freedom, peace, salvation.
Because God desires the salvation of the world, that salvation has to be tangibly present in the experimental field of a small nation, precisely so that the other nations can see that there really can be justice and peace in the world, so they can see that justice and peace are not utopia, not “nowhere,” and so they can freely take on this new social order. Of course that puts a shocking burden on this nation: the burden of election. Because if the people of God does not do justice to its task, if instead of peace in its midst there is conflict, instead of nonviolence it works violence, instead of showing forth salvation it spreads disaster, it cannot be a blessing for the nations. Then it falls short of the meaning of its existence; then it will not only be a laughingstock for the nations but will do great harm.
A Basic Biblical Constant
That, or something like it, is the description one must give of the meaning of Israel’s election, looking back especially at the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis but also at any number of other key biblical texts such as Exodus 19:5-6 or Isaiah 2:1-5. At any rate, this election and its function for the world form a basic constant in the Old Testament. According to the Old Testament, salvation and the reign of God cannot otherwise exist in the world.
But then the question arises: is this basic constant of the Old Testament abandoned in the New Testament? Is it no longer valid there? Has it given way to a vague and placeless universalism? Anyone who says or even hints at such a thing will have to prove it. He or she will have to prove that for Jesus, Israel was indeed no longer the sign of blessing (or of judgment) for all nations but that he had separated himself internally from Israel and preached an absolute salvation, that is, one divorced from Israel—with “people in general” as the immediate audience for his message.
It would then have to be proved explicitly and in detail that Jesus only appeared in Israel because that was his place of origin, because he was naturally shaped in some way, like every human being, by the history of his people, but that otherwise he had set himself apart from Israel’s history of election. And yet there is not the faintest evidence of such a thing. It simply cannot be produced. Precisely where Jesus (like John the Baptizer before him) calls into question the participation of Israel, or part of Israel, in ultimate and definitive salvation (cf. Matt 8:11-12) he presumes Israel’s salvation-historical function. But above all there is an overabundance of texts to show that Jesus did not abandon the fundamental constant we have described. I will speak of those texts at length in the following chapters. Most important of these is the choice of the Twelve—a demonstrative sign-action showing that Jesus cared about the twelve tribes of Israel. The Twelve are a visible sign and, of course, also an “instrument” of his will to gather all Israel. And why? for the sake of Israel? No, for the sake of the world!
The principle behind this is pointedly formulated in James’s speech in Acts 15, aided by a mixed quotation based on Amos 9:11-12: