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On which I comment only that, if faith is what I've interpreted it to be-namely, the "obedient faith" of unreseved trust in God's love and unqualified loyalty toit-then it is, in its essence, submission to God as God. But if Niebuhr is right in assuming, as I judge him to be, that there are "things that should be changed" as well as "things that cannot be changed," then, clearly, to obey God, and thus to submit to God as God, cannot be singular, but only duaL To act courageously and loyally to change the things that should be changed is no less to obey God, and so to submit to God as God, than to act serenely and trustfully to accept thethings that cannot be changed.

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2. Who are God's "chosen people" today? What does that term mean in today's world?

I shall answer these two questions in reverse order. So, first, what does the term "chosen people" mean in today's world?

As I've already explained, I can answer this question here only by taking the qualifying phrase, "in today's world," to mean, "from the standpoint of an adequate Christian witness and theology today." On this assumption, and in my own best judgment as a Christian and a theologian, I should say that the term "chosen people," used normatively, rather than merely historically or descriptively, is to be understood as designating any people-which is to say, any group of human personswho, having been somehow called by God, have accepted God's call, and have therefore also been chosen by God through their own choosing. This assumes, of course, the scriptural distinction between being "called" by God and being "chosen" by God-as in the hard saying familiar to all of us from Matthew's account of Jesus' own preaching, "Many are called, but few are chosen" (22:14). Whereas the calling of human beings to obey, and thus to submit, to the gift and demand of God's pure unbounded love is, in all its modes, entirely God's work alone, God's choosing of human beings is not solely God's, because it is and must be mediated through each of their own free and responsible decisions to accept God's call. The term "God's 'chosen people,'" then, designates the people who are chosen by God, if they are, only through their own choosing.

Thus-to respond now to the first question-"God's 'chosen people' today" can only mean any and all persons today, here and now, although only such, who, having somehow accepted God's call to obedience, however it may have come to them, have thereby also been chosen by God. Of course, the only way in which God's call can be accepted, whatever the mode of its coming to any of us as an individual person, is through obedient faith-through unreserved trust in God's love and unqualified loyalty to its cause. Simply to believe certain propositions to be true, or to perform certain actions that are good, is not to have faith in the sense required to accept God's acceptance. Therefore-as Jesus' parable of the missing wedding garment, according to Matthew, makes all too clear-it is always possible even for those who earlier responded to God's call to

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fail to accept it anew when it comes to them again, and thus not to be chosen through their own choosing, or, if you prefer, through their failure to choose positively. So the "chosen people" in one sense of the term may very well not be the "chosen people" in another sense-and, from my standpoint, the only sense that really counts, Christianly and theologically.

Two final comments. First, you may have noted that I've expressly allowed for there being plural modes, or ways, of God's calling human beings. In my view, simply to be a human being at all is already to have been called by God in one mode, what I distinguish as the "original," if also only the implicit, mode of God's calling. But, then, any human being who is, in any way, religious, or has a live option to become such, is to be reckoned among the specially called, meaning by that the explicitly called-any and all who have not only received God's original though only implicit call, but also God's explicit call, as represented, more or less adequately, through some religious concepts and symbols. Finally, then, there are those whom God has called not only implicitly, and even explicitly, also, but decisively as well-this being the claim that Christians make or imply for the mode of their own calling and also for that of any and all persons who have ever had a real option of becoming a Christian. Why? Well, because, to be a Christian is to understand oneself and lead one's life decisively through Jesus, and, for Christians, Jesus is, as they confess, the Christ-by which they mean, simply, the decisive re-presentation of God's call to all human beings, and thus of the gift and demand of God's all-encompassing love of everyone.

But-to come now to my second comment-if there are at least these three distinct modes in which human beings may be and have been called by God; and if, accordingly, there are at least three main types of peoples, or groups of persons, who could, in their different ways, be said to be "chosen people," the principle still stands, that no one is chosen, whatever the mode of one's calling, or the group to which one thereby comes to belong, except through one's own choosing. And this means, as Kierkegaard liked to say, that we are chosen, if we are, always and only retail, never wholesale--not as any group, but always and only as single individuals, one at a time, each through

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her or his own free and responsible decision to accept God's calling, whatever the mode or modes through which God may call us.

3. To experience a full and right relationship with God, is it necessary to be part of a religious community? Is there a difference in answering this question as between the Old and the New Testaments?

This double question, which I've taken the liberty of rephrasing slightly to bring out what I understand to be the questioner's intention, is obviously closely related in certain ways to the one I've just responded to. So this seems to be a good place to try to answer it.

This I do summarily by saying Yes to both parts: Yes, it is necessary, in an important sense, to be part of a religious community in order to experience a full and right relationship with God. And Yes, there is an important difference as between the Old and the New Testaments in answering this question. I shall now briefly elaborate this summary answer-beginning, once again, with the second part of the question and then proceeding to the first.

In talking about the relevant difference between the Old and the New Testaments so as to answer the first part of the question, we are in particular danger of oversimplifying certain things that are more complex than we allow, thereby furthering misunderstanding rather than understanding. But fully recognizing this risk, I still think one can speak truly about an important difference between the Old and the New Testaments as they bear on answering our question. The difference, very simply, is the difference between being part of a religious community that is, in principle, at one and the same time, a national or political community -- in the case of the Old Testament understanding of Israel -- and being part of a religious community that is, in principle, distinct from all other historical communities, national or political very much included-in the case of the New Testament understanding of the church, which is sometimes spoken of there, significantly, as "the new Israel." It was just this difference, of course, that occasioned the first great controversy in the early Christian community over whether it was necessary for gentiles-which is to say, all

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members of nations other than Israel-first to become Israelites before becoming Christians, just this being the significance of circumcision.

But allowing that this difference remains, and that the church's longstanding, if not always wholly consistent, recognition of it is certainly relevant to answering our question, I would nonetheless argue that being a part of the religious community rightly identified as the Christian church is, in a sense, necessary to experiencing a full and right relationship with God. This is true, at any rate, if "God" means, as I simply assume, the One whom Christians speak of as "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Still, there is necessary, and there is necessary-and being part of a Christian church is necessary to a full and right relationship with this God only if-in a phrase of John Wesley's-there be "tilne and opportunity.tt In other words, it is necessary in a conditional sense only. Wesley drove home this distinction by appealing to the condition of the thief dying on the cross, for whom there simply was no "time and opportunity" to become a part of any religious community, including the religious community that is the visible church of Jesus Christ. But, then, was Jesus' promise to the thief vain? No, Wesley insisted; for all that was necessary in an unconditional sense was the thief's obedient faith, his obedient trust in God and loyalty to God in accepting Jesus' promise. Being part of a religious community-by constantly making use of its distinctive means of salvation through faith and then joining in continually administering these means to others through bearing witness-being part of a religious community in this sense follows necessarily frOln the obedient faith through which alone anyone is saved solely by God's grace. But the necessity in this case is always conditional only-always provided that there be "time and opportunity" -- and it is in this sense, although only in this sense -- that I answer Yes to the first part of the question, also.

4. In our society, both sacred and secular, we generally speak of life and death separately, e.g., life is one thing, death \[an\]other. Is there a more correct way to think of them in Christian theology? Is life one thing and death another?

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Although I happen to have had the opportunity to talk about this question briefly with the person who has submitted it, I must confess I'm still perplexed by it and fearful of missing its point. But, for what use it may be, I'll make three points of my own by way of response, and then leave it to the general discussion to produce a proper answer.

First, it's one thing to speak of things "separately," something else again to distinguish them. In both cases, one's point in speaking, presumably, is to deny that the things in question are simply identical, or one and the same. But it's being misled and misleading to suppose-as even the philosopher David Hume once notoriously allowed himself to do--that any things that can be distinguished can also be separated. That people in our society, sacred and secular, generally speak of life and death as distinct I, too, would take to be true. But that they thereby take them to be separate seems to me to be another, and distinct, claim for which I find no compelling evidence.

On the contrary-and this is my second point-anyone in our society who has been educated in the so-called life-sciences as they're conventionally taught, for the most part, in our schools, colleges, and universities will surely have learned that, although life and death are certainly distinct, they are also inseparable, since to live is to die, dying, and so death, too, being entirely of a piece with living. Consequently, wherever Christian witness and theology have critically appropriated the Christian tradition in the light of modern scientific understanding, including that of the life-sciences, there is a recognition, however consistently or inconsistently worked out, that death, for all of its difference from life, is insofar an integral part of it, all prescientific notions to the contrary notwithstanding. I have in mind, for example, the notion that we find in the stories of human origins in the Book of Genesis that death is not properly of a piece with, or a part of, life, but is rather utterly contrary to it, being a divine punishment arbitrarily called down upon the first human beings (and, curiously, all of their progeny as well!) because of their disobedience to God's command.

As I see it, then, if there is a more correct way to think of life and death in

Christian theology today, it is almost certainly due to theology's having allowed

itself to learn from the best scientific knowledge now available to us, instead of

being content simply to hand on the prescience of earlier human generations. In

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other words, it is to science, more than to theology, that we owe the corrections that some Christians and theologians, also, may have eventually learned to make in traditional Christian teaching on this whole subject.

Even so, my third point is that the ultimate justification for any such revisionary theological understanding as the questioner would presumably take to be "more correct" cannot be simply that it agrees with modern scientific understanding about the inseparability of life and death, or, if you will, of living and dying. No, this revisionary theological understanding is finally to be justified, if it is, only by the kind of properly religious, indeed, Christian, understanding of life and death to which Paul bears witness in at least some-although certainly not all!-of the things he has to say about them. I'm thinking not only of his powerful assurance in Rom 8:38 f. that "neither death, nor life," any more than "anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord"; I'm thinking, above all of what he says to the Romans in the fourteenth chapter of that same letter: "We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the LordI and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord of the dead and the living" (vss. 7 ff.).

5. So much is said about Christian forgiveness. I believe in a loving and forgiving God, but the extent and capacity ofGod's love is beyond human comprehension. Does God want me, a human being created in the image ofGod, to forgive those who have hUl't nze, continue to choose evil over good, and are unrepentant? Does God? What ifI won't-or can't?

On my analysis, there are two closely related questions here. I shall take them up in order, as follows.

First, Does God want me to forgive those who have hurt me, continue to choose evil over good, and are unrepentant? My response, unhesitatingly, is Yes, God does want you to forgive those who have hurt you, and so on, and God wants this precisely because you are, as you say, a human being created in God's