Aristotle or Abraham?

The twentieth century has been one of crisis for the Church, which has been challenged both by the end of the ideal of Christendom and also by the horrors of the Holocaust. Responding to this ecclesiastical problem, Scott Bader-Saye contends that a renewed understanding of Israel might provide resources to envision a faithful post-Christendom church. Unlike theologians such as John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas, who have pointed to the Greek polis as a model for renewing ecclesiology, the author suggests that it is not to Aristotle but to Abraham that the Church should look in order to articulate and incarnate a faithful alternative to the voluntarism and violence of modernity. By recovering a doctrine of election that is both non-supersessionist and fully trinitarian, Christians may discover their political calling to embody a way of life that will bring renewed meaning to the Church and to Christians participation in the world. Two seismic events mark the twentieth century as one of crisis for the Church. The first is the demise of the ideal of Christendom, which held that the Church has been and should be the spiritual sponsor of Western Civilization. The second is the Holocaust, the horrors of which have prompted both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches to repudiate the teachings and attitudes undergirding their dark history of Jewish persecution. The cumulative effect of these two events is that Christians have been called rethink their own doctrines and practices, especially with regard to the Churchs prior conviction that it had replaced Israel in Gods plan.In his pathbreaking new work, Church and Israel after Christendom, Scott Bader-Saye contends that a renewed understanding of Israel might provide resources to envision a faithful post-Christendom church. Unlike theologians such as John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas, who have pointed to the Greek polis as a model for renewing ecclesiology, the author suggests that it is not to Aristotle but to Abraham that the Church should look in order to articulate and incarnate a faithful alternative to the voluntarism and violence of moderni The doctrine of election is the linchpin linking a renewed understanding of Israel with a renewed vision of the post-Christendom church. By recovering a doctrine of election that is both non-supersessionist and fully trinitarian, Christians may recover their political calling to embody a way of life that will bring renewed meaning to the Church and to Christians participation in the world.