Q

uestion

187

Why are (or were) the Jewish people God’s

chosen people? Why not someone else? Are

Christians now God’s chosen people?

Christian Piatt

A.

One of my favorite bumper stickers reads, “You’re special—just

like everyone else.”

Sometimes we decry the egocentric nature of our current

Western culture, but the truth is that the desire to be unique, chosen, or oth-

erwise set apart has been a phenomenon of human behavior for as long as

history has been recorded.

The Jewish people are not the only ones who claim this sort of chosen

status; most religions have some way that a particular group is deemed to be

anointed as the select chosen by God. But with respect to the Christian faith,

Jews were the recipients of the Ten Commandments, which became a corner-

stone of Judeo-Christian faith, and their stories were chronicled over thou-

sands of years in both the Old and New Testaments.

It’s no real surprise that those who wrote these scriptures down also are

the ones chosen by God in the stories. The fact that men wrote the texts down

probably had a similar effect in placing males at the top of the social pyramid.

There are those today who would contend that Christians now are God’s

chosen, and are even the only ones who are granted access to heaven. Agree or

not, this mindset is consistent with the texts of the Old Testament, but with the

New Testament, Jews fi nd themselves on the outside of the circle.

Given stories like the prodigal son and the laborers who all got paid the

same wage for different work, however, there’s scriptural support for another

perspective. Sure, we may grumble that affording all of God’s creatures an

equal measure of grace simply isn’t fair, but it’s clear, time and again, that our

understanding of justice may not necessarily align with God’s grace.

Brandon Gilvin

A.

To understand “chosenness,” it’s important to realize that ancient

Israelite religion was not monotheistic. The religious culture of the

Ancient Near East presumed the existence of many gods. A quick

perusal of Genesis and several of the Psalms reveals stories that remain in our

canon and point toward a polytheistic cosmology.

According to Genesis, The God YHWH (or Elohim, in some parts of

the tradition) strikes a covenant with Abram/Abraham that his descendants