sible to bring this message home
to men who were not Jews in any other way than by leaving the Jewish
Church. But to leave that Church was to declare it to be worthless, and
that could only be done by conceiving it as a malformation from its very
commencement, or assuming that it had temporarily or completely
fulfilled its mission. In either case it was necessary to put another in
its place, for, according to the Old Testament, it was unquestionable
that God had not only given revelations, but through these revelations
had founded a nation, a religious community. The result, also, to which
the conduct of the unbelieving Jews and the social union of the
disciples of Jesus required by that conduct, led, was carried home with
irresistible power: believers in Christ are the community of God, they
are the true Israel, the [Greek: ekklesia tou theou]: but the Jewish
Church persisting in its unbelief is the Synagogue of Satan. Out of this
consciousness sprang--first as a power in which one believed, but which
immediately began to be operative, though not as a commonwealth--the
christian church, a special communion of hearts on the basis of a
personal union with God, established by Christ and mediated by the
Spirit; a communion whose essential mark was to claim as its own the Old
Testament and the idea of being the people of God, to sweep aside the
Jewish conception of the Old Testament and the Jewish Church, and
thereby gain the shape and power of a community that is capable of a
mission for the world.

4. This independent Christian community could not have been formed had
not Judaism, in consequence of inner and outer developments, then
reached a point at which it must either altogether cease to grow or
burst its shell. This community is the presupposition of the history of
dogma, and the position which it took up towards the Jewish tradition
is, strictly speaking, the point of departure for all further
developments, so far as with the removal of all national and ceremonial
peculiarities it proclaimed itself to be what the Jewish Church wished
to be. We find the Christian Church about the middle of the third
century, after severe crisis, in nearly the same position to the Old
Testament and to Judaism as it was 150 or 200 years earlier.[47] It
makes the same claim to the Old Testament, and builds its faith and hope
upon its teaching. It is also, as before, strictly anti-national; above
all, anti-judaic, and sentences the Jewis