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makes whatever comes to be both really real and abidingly significant. In doing the first thing, God may be said to create and emancipate, or providentially order, all things; and in doing the second thing, God may be said to redeem and consummate all things. Because, in both cases, God's doing extends to all things, God is rightly said to be, in the one case, the Creator, and, in the other case, the Consummator -– all other things being, in their myriad different ways, also creators and consummators, although always only of some things, never of all.

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First, there is no more reason, logically, to ask where God is in tough times than in any other times, there being no logical connection whatever between the times of our lives, tough or otherwise, and the whereabouts of God. This is true, at any rate, if God is to be understood as we assumed at the outset, i.e., as the all-worshipful One of "the greatest and first commandment," and thus as the unsurpassable One, "than which none greater can be conceived." To worship is to trust and to be loyal -– ideally, to trust unreservedly and to be loyal unqualifiedly. But worship in this sense is authorized as a proper response only if the object of worship, of trust and loyalty, is worshipful -– ideally, all-worshipful. And this the object of worship can be only if it is unsurpassable: absolutely unsurpassable, or unsurpassable by itself as well as all others, in all the respects in which anything can be so; and relatively unsurpassable, or unsurpassable by all others, although not by itself, in all other respects. Although, for any believer in God conceived as all-worshipful and therefore unsurpassable in these senses, good times are rightly accepted as tokens or signs of God's reality and favor, they are in no way evidence, logically, of God's existence and activity and may not be taken, logically, to "prove" them. By the same token, bad times, or tough times, are in no way evidence logically of God's nonexistence or inactivity and "disprove" absolutely nothing that Christian witness and theology have any stake in affirming.

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It follows, second, then, that our possibility as human beings before God is exactly the same in tough times as in any other times. Because God remains present and active in every time, we have the same possibility in tough times as in any other times --– the possibility that I speak of, following Paul, as obedient faith, which is to say, entrusting ourselves unreservedly to God's pure, unbounded love and then living in unqualified loyalty to the cause of God's love, loving God with the whole of our being by loving all whom God always already loves, to whom God is always already loyal -– by loving our neighbors as ourselves.

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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-to it – 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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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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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.

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