Most interesting essay on the Chosen People

By David B. Goldman aka "Spengler" over at the First Things blogsite. This is just an excerpt:

The State of Israel was founded with at least some theocratic elements—at exactly a point in history when the Catholic Church was renouncing theocracy and withdrawing from secular governance. Catholics, along with many Protestant and Orthodox Christians, view with disquiet the revival of a religiously defined political state just when religiously defined states were disappearing as a factor in Christian life. Although the theocratic elements in Israeli law are ad hoc rather than systemic, they are nonetheless integral to Israel’s character (the Right of Return for Jews, for example).

So why should Christians renounce a Christian theocracy while embracing a Jewish theocracy? The answer flows from the distinction between the People of God of the flesh and the People of God in the Spirit. The Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod has observed that, uniquely among the peoples of the world, the Jews are the People of God as a nationality, whereas Christians must be dual citizens of the People of God and their nationality of birth. For that reason alone, a Jewish state must have at least some theocratic elements, although in other respects it is subject to the same international law that applies to all states. Wyschogrod explains:

As understood by Christianity, a model of dual loyalty develops. The individual belongs both to a nation and to a religion. He is a Frenchman and a Christian or a German and a Christian. As Frenchman or German, he is a member of a national community with territorial and linguistic boundaries. But he is also a member of the supra-national church which has no national boundaries. . . . The church is a spiritual fellowship into which men bring their national identities because they possess these identities but not because such identities play a role in the church. The church thus understands itself as having universalized the national election of Israel by opening it to all men who, in entering the church, enter a spiritualized, universalized new Israel.

In one sense, Israel is beyond the “laws” of history. It is not subject to the rise and fall of all other peoples and empires, a fact which causes angry philosophers of history whose schemes Israel undermines to refer to it as a fossil not subject to historic destruction.

But at the same time, Israel does not abandon the domain of history. It refuses to exchange its historical and national messianism for a doctrine of individual salvation. Israel refuses to invent the idea of a church which forces men to live in two jurisdictions and to assume two identities: a member of a nation and a member of a church. When such a bifurcated existence is decreed for human life, European wars in which Christian fights Christian, not as Christian but as German, Frenchman or Pole, become possible. That such a church-sanctioned conflict was the rule rather than the exception in the history of Europe was not simply the result of a failure of Christianity. Once religion and nationality are separated, the historical order in which national destinies are realized is almost inevitably de-Christianized.

Through Jesus Christ, as Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger once wrote, “the pagan nations accede to the election of Israel and share in its grace.” But the election of Israel and the election of the Gentiles who answer the call to the Church of Jesus Christ take radically different forms: Jews are called as a nation, while Gentiles are called away from their nations, as individuals. By affirming that the Jews are still called as a nation, the Church affirms that no other nation is elected in the flesh.

This is a distinction of inestimable importance, for the residual paganism of Christianized nations has invariably expressed itself in the idolatrous desire to be a chosen people—to be a nation like Israel. That is the secret of so-called Christian anti-Semitism: It is not Christian at all but rather expresses pagan resentment against Israel and jealousy of its unique form of election.