Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 160:638 (Apr 2003)
Article: A Race Apart? Jews, Gentiles, Christians
Author: David F. Wright

BSac 160:638 (Apr 03) p. 131

A Race Apart?
Jews, Gentiles, Christiansa

David F. Wright

Seldom do Christians, even in Baptist churches, think of themselves as a baptismal community, that is, as a community whose Christian identity finds definitive focus in the experience of baptism and what leads up to it and follows from it. By what kinds of terms, then, would Christians classify themselves as a social or corporate reality? The word “community” has been used by some. Most Christians would disown categories such as “club,” “society” or “association,” which are colorless and inadequate. “Fellowship” might have some supporters, as would “family.” And then there are more activist terms like “movement” or even “army.” Very few would propose “people” as in “Christian people,” and hardly any would think of Christians as a “race.” In a letter addressed to “the exiles of the Dispersion” in northern Asia Minor Peter told his readers, “You are a chosen race [γένος], a royal priesthood, a holy nation [ἔθνος], a people [λάος] for God’s own possession” (1 Pet. 2:9). Each of these four designations is pregnant with suggestiveness of its own, but they all express the important early Christian conviction that Christians in any one place or region belonged to a people, the people of God, which constituted a new corporate presence. This self-consciousness became a significant feature of the remarkable confidence of the Christians in the first three centuries. This article pursues this dimension of the making of the early Christians.

If one holds that Constantine’s conversion and then patronage of the church had at least something to do with his perception of the strength or potential of Christianity in the empire (which seems a reasonable position to hold), this strength cannot have

BSac 160:638 (Apr 03) p. 132

been a matter of statistics alone—total numbers as a percentage of the population of the empire. It must have included the cohesiveness of the empirewide church as a whole, with a unifying framework of mutual recognition and leadership that gave reality to its sense of being a single and distinctive people, with a unique divine destiny.

Including Gentiles

The first conflict that the Jesus movement encountered in clarifying its identity was in breaking out of the swaddling clothes of its matrix in Judaism, which was in essence an ethnic religion. The outcome of those first-generation controversies over the inclusion of Gentiles still retains a critically important place in Christian ...