Theopedia

Gentile

Gentile is the biblical term for a non-Israelite, translating the Hebrew gôy (plural goyim) in the Old Testament and the Greek ethnos in the New. Scripture sets Israel apart from “the Gentiles” as the nation God chose for himself (Exod. 19:5-6; Deut. 7:6), while also promising from the outset that “all peoples on earth” would be blessed through Israel (Gen. 12:3). That promise comes to fulfillment in the New Testament, where Jew and Gentile alike are united in Christ as “one new man” (Eph. 2:15) and the gospel goes out to “all nations” (Matt. 28:19).

Biblical Basis

Old Testament: a people set apart, for the sake of the nations

The Old Testament regularly names goyim, “nations,” as those outside Israel, even while gôy can describe Israel itself (Gen. 12:2). God set Israel apart from the surrounding nations as his “treasured possession,” a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exod. 19:5-6), a distinction the law maintained through boundary markers such as circumcision and the dietary code (Deut. 7:6). Yet the same covenant that set Israel apart also announced, at its founding, that the nations would be blessed through it: God tells Abram that “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). The prophets develop this universal horizon further. Isaiah names the LORD’s servant “a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isa. 49:6; cf. 42:6), and pictures the nations streaming to Zion’s light (Isa. 60:3).

New Testament: the wall of partition broken down

The New Testament sharpens the distinction with the Greek term ethnos, then announces its abolition in Christ. Paul tells the Ephesians that they were once “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise” (Eph. 2:12), but that Christ “has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” and “create[d] in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace” (Eph. 2:14-15). Calvin reads that “dividing wall” as the ceremonial law specifically, the system of “ablution and sacrifice, by which the Jews were consecrated to the Lord,” which had kept Jew and Gentile apart; on his reading, Paul is not describing a change to the substance of the covenant of grace, only the removal of a ceremonial barrier that had kept Gentiles at a distance from it.1 Hodge likewise reads Ephesians as devoted, in its greater doctrinal portion, to setting out “the purpose of God to bring the Gentiles into his Church, and to make them equally with the Jews partakers of the redemption of Christ.”2 Hassler adds that the “one new man” Paul describes is not simply Jew and Gentile merged, but “the new humanity comprised of both,” which justification by faith reconciles to God as a single body rather than two groups made merely tolerant of one another.3

Paul returns to the theme in Romans, describing a “mystery”: a partial hardening has come upon Israel “until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in,” and “in this way all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:25-26). Interpreters who otherwise share a broadly Reformed reading of Romans 9-11 do not agree on exactly what that “fullness” and that “salvation of all Israel” require, whether a future large-scale turning of ethnic Israel to Christ or simply the ingathering, across history, of a believing remnant alongside the Gentiles.4 Bavinck takes the latter view: Paul is not describing a separate future program for the nation, but the same pattern he has already stated elsewhere, that “gentiles are now fellow heirs and fellow citizens with the saints,” while God “will always bring to faith in Christ a part from Israel as well.”5

Historical Development

The Judaizing controversy and the Council of Jerusalem

The question of Gentile inclusion divided the apostolic church almost immediately. A party demanded that Gentile converts keep the Mosaic law, circumcision specifically, before they could be counted full members of God’s people (Acts 15:1). Bavinck traces this demand through Paul’s letters as a recurring opponent: “the Judaizers of Paul’s day demanded the keeping of the Mosaic law, specifically the law of circumcision, also by Christians from among the gentiles.”6 The apostles and elders, meeting at Jerusalem, ruled against the requirement; Peter told the council that Jewish believers themselves are saved “through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will” (Acts 15:11), meaning the Gentiles, and the council sent its decision to the Gentile churches without imposing circumcision (Acts 15:19-29). The Judaizing party did not disappear with that ruling; Bavinck notes that after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, and again in AD 135, it persisted as a sect within the church, the Nazarenes and Ebionites, who denied Christ’s deity.6

Patristic reception: Gentile believers as “the true Israel”

By the second century, Christian writers described Gentile believers, together with believing Jews, as sharing in Israel’s own identity. Bavinck cites Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho for the claim that Christians, Gentile and Jewish alike, are “the true Israel, the blessed people of God.”7

Reformation covenant theology: one covenant, one people

Calvin’s reading of Ephesians 2 (above) supplied the Reformation’s answer: since the “wall of partition” was the ceremonial law and not the covenant of grace itself, Gentile believers were never outsiders to the substance of God’s covenant with Abraham, only to its temporary, ceremonial form.1 On this reading, the New Testament’s inclusion of the Gentiles is not a new covenant replacing an old one, but the same covenant of grace revealed to Abraham, now extended to Gentile believers as well.

The rise of dispensationalism and the modern Israel-Gentile-church question

In the nineteenth century a new movement, dispensationalism, made the distinction between Israel and the church a controlling principle rather than a settled question. Martin identifies this distinction as dispensationalism’s own “sine qua non,” the point without which the system is not dispensationalism at all.8 Berkhof, writing from the Reformed side, criticized “consistent Dispensationalists” for pressing the distinction so far as to treat law and gospel as opposites keyed to different peoples: “Israel was under the law in the previous dispensation, but the Church of the present dispensation is under the gospel, and as such is free from the law.”9 That nineteenth-century formulation set the terms for the debate over Gentile inclusion that continues among evangelical interpreters today.

Confessional Witness

No confession in the Reformed family, the 1689 included, has a chapter addressing the Jew/Gentile distinction by name. The closest adjacent statement is the chapter “Of the Gospel, and of the Extent of the Grace Thereof,” which affirms that the gospel’s historical reach “unto the nations and persons to whom it is granted” has varied “according to the counsel of the will of God” rather than by any natural claim nations have on it.10 That statement was not written to settle the Jew/ Gentile question specifically; it states a broader principle, the sovereign and uneven spread of gospel revelation among the nations, of which the New Testament’s opening of the gospel to the Gentiles is one instance.

Opposing Views

Reformed covenant theology and dispensationalism agree that Gentiles are saved through faith in Christ, but disagree over what that inclusion means for Israel’s own place in God’s plan. Covenant Theology, following the Reformation reading above, holds that Gentile believers are grafted into the same olive tree as believing Israel, sharing the one covenant of grace rather than belonging to a separate arrangement. Dispensationalism holds that Israel and the church remain distinct peoples with distinct promises, so that God’s plan for the Gentile church does not exhaust or replace his promises to the nation of Israel as such. Even within a broadly Reformed reading of Romans 9-11, interpreters differ over whether “all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:26) points to some future large-scale turning of ethnic Israel to Christ or simply names the ordinary, ongoing pattern of a believing remnant gathered alongside the Gentiles across history.4

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t including Gentiles in “Israel” mean God has abandoned his promises to ethnic Israel? Bavinck’s exposition of Romans 11 answers that Paul raises this very question and rejects it directly: “God has not rejected his people” (Rom. 11:1-2). The hardening that has come upon part of Israel is partial, not total, and “there has always been a remnant chosen by grace” preserved alongside the Gentiles who are now being gathered in; God will “never, until the end of the ages,… totally reject his ancient people.”5

Doesn’t grafting Gentiles into the one covenant amount to “replacement theology,” the church simply displacing Israel and inheriting her blessings? Martin’s answer is that fulfillment runs through a person, not a group succeeding another group: “it is not that the church replaces Israel and inherits her blessings. Rather, Israel finds its fulfillment not in a community but in an individual Son of God.”11 On this reading, Jewish and Gentile believers are united because both are united to Christ, the true Israel, rather than because one community has taken over another’s position.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 2, chap. 7, 312-313. ↩ ↩2

  2. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 799-800. ↩

  3. Andrew Michael Hassler, “Justification and the Individual in Relation to the Corporate People of God,” in “Justification and the Individual in the Wake of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 216-217. ↩

  4. Philip Chase Sears, “Introduction,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 10-11. ↩ ↩2

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 24, “The Return of Christ.” ↩ ↩2

  6. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩ ↩2

  7. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality,” citing Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 116, 123, 135. ↩

  8. Oren Rhea Martin, “Conclusion,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 278. ↩

  9. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 598. ↩

  10. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 20, “Of the Gospel, and of the Extent of the Grace Thereof,” para. 3. ↩

  11. Martin, “Conclusion,” 290. ↩