New Israel

After quoting extensively from Isaac Watts’s nationalistic renditions of the Psalms (Psalm 47 is made to say “The British islands are the Lord’s, / There Abraham’s God is known”), Willie James Jennings ( The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race ) writes that “Britain is mapped onto the biblical journey of Israel. Israel’s history disappears, and the British nation appears as the real history of God with God’s people. There is no continuity between Israel’s history and that of other nations. All that remains is a kind of parallelism between Israel and Britain. It would be a vast mistake to lose sight of the soteriological effect Watts is properly building on in his vernacular operation. The articulation of a relationship between the God of Israel and that of other peoples is precisely the desired telos of the Christian gospel. However, Watts offers no material connection between the desired telos and the people of Israel.”