Israel the prototype

God’s work in and with Israel is the pattern and prototype for His work in and with all nations. How far can we press the analogy?

Babel unified the nations but they were dispersed. Yahweh chose Abram to launch a counter-Babel movement, and over the next half-millennium slowly, achingly slowly, established Israel as a nation in a land. Israel herself was soon broken in two, and eventually shattered into pieces and scattered to the four winds, the empires of late antiquity. In those empires, Jews rose to high positions of great prominence.

Rome was a new Babel, unifying the peoples of the Mediterranean. Within that empire, Jesus the seed of Abraham was born to launch the climax of God’s counter-Babel movement. The church born in exile took form within Rome, and eventually Rome was ruled by kings who professed Jesus as King. The formation of a “world empire” was preparation for the Christianization of that world.

Rome broke up too.

And so eventually did Israel of the church, first dividing into Protestant and Catholic and now splintering into a thousand sects scattered not just around the Mediterranean but literally to the furthest reaches of the globe. The church entered the “times of the Gentiles.”

The US currently holds supremacy among the “Gentiles,” and the global reach of American culture dwarfs anything that Rome achieved. If the pattern holds, we might expect the great modern “empire” to be prepared for a Christianization like that of Rome.

Or, perhaps, as in the ancient world, we should expect a succession of four world powers. Spain (?), Britain, America, . . . ? China?

If we can push these analogies, we can perhaps get some sense of the chronological rhythm of Christian history. It took two and a half millennia, more or less, for God to nurture the seed of Abraham until we arrived at an openly “Abrahamic” empire, a (more or less) redeemed “Babel,” from the call of Abraham from a collapsing empire to a Mediterranean world at least professedly Christian. Perhaps it will take a similar arc of history to move from Jesus the Seed of Abraham, born within an empire, to a professedly Christian empire of wider-than-Mediterranean scope.

Self-criticism: This schematization is Euro-centric, Occidental. What happens to these speculations when we figure in the Eastern churches of which Philip Jenkins has recently written? Or even if we include Byzantium? Plus, are we even supposed to find correspondences with this level of detail between biblical history and church history? Still, the analogies are arresting and worthy of speculation.