ABSTRACT
The Presbyterian Church put forth in 1987 a powerful and theologically challenging statement on Christians and Jews, affirming explicitly "that the church, elected in Jesus Christ, has been engrafted into the people of God established by the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The theologies that are now being produced in the West must take both of the shifts into account. If the church is understood as that body of people grafted into and thus carrying forward Israel's covenantal politics, then this means we can no longer read the New Testament as superseding the social concerns of the Old Testament. The doctrine has fallen on hard times in modern theological thought, for it bumps up against modern conceptions of freedom and autonomy, it calls into question explanations of the world as a closed system, and its unabashed particularity makes it troubling to the universalist aspirations of the Enlightenment.
