The Israel of God: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

This book tries to crack many nuts in a few pages, but it has several issues. To be sure I agree with most of its conclusions and arguments, but I do think it needs to be redone.

First, the less important stuff: it is badly typeset. The type used seem to vibrate optically, making for much a tiring

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and even irritating reading experience. So from the start I cannot claim to be impartial in my evaluation.

A much more irritating issue is some quite out of line quotes from Israeli personages and mentions of Israeli history, trying to prove Israel is not anything special. Taken all out of context and without any effort at evaluation, they seem more like a piece of antisemitic propaganda; coming early in the book, they predispose people sympathetic to Israel (as I count myself to be) to discount claims by the author. Also, they are irrelevant to the author’s argument, so they end up opening the whole book under suspicion instead of strengthening its argument.

The main thesis is that the Christian church is the Israel of God, and thus the current State of Israel has no special place in God’s kingdom. As such, it sounds like a book for recovering Judaizers or Dispensationalists, but its tone and approach will probably alienate all but the already convinced. I have nothing against its main thrust, which I believe to be true from the general tenor of Scripture; personally, I have little use for its text-proofing approach, while I do indeed appreciate some of its translation insights.

There are a few non-sequiturs, specially in the concluding propositions; in general, I think that while the main thesis is indeed true, the author tries to wring more from Scripture than can be exegetically sound and logically tenable. While I am in general theologically aligned with the author (and Jean-Marc Berthoud, for instance), in this issue I am more sympathetic with Jacques Ellul (which I consider mainly a heretic, but a very interesting one) than with them.

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