1. The drama of salvation in Western theology seemingly jumps from the closing of the Gates of Heaven at the time of Adam's sin to the opening of these same Gates at the time of Jesus' death on the cross. Seemingly eighteen hundred years of God's interactions with the sons and daughters of Abraham and Sarah amounted to nothing as far as salvation was concerned. This amounts to a form of destructive silence?-by not saying anything about Israel, their significance for God is thereby obliterated.

2. It should not go unnoticed that, even in the Christian Scriptures, the drama of salvation is everywhere situated in relationship to Israel. The term "Israel" appears no less than seventy times in the Christian Scriptures. Nor should it go unnoticed that, when Paul begins to argue for the inclusion of Gentiles as Gentiles in the drama of salvation, he does not fall back on any recent saying of Jesus but rather goes deep into the story of Abraham in order to argue that God, from the very beginning, had ordained "to make him [Abraham] the father of all who believe without being circumcised . . . and likewise the father of the circumcised" (Rom 4:11). When the totality of Paul is examined, it can be discovered that "Paul does not talk about a `new, true Israel' and would never have applied the name of Israel at all to a purely gentile Christian church."

3. The early church Fathers regarded the revelations of the Hebrew Scriptures and the revelations of the Son of God as made out of the same whole piece of cloth. Justin Martyr puts the matter succinctly:

Formerly he [the Logos] appeared in the form of fire and the image of a bodiless being to Moses and the other prophets. But now in the time of your dominion, he was, as I have said, made man of a virgin (1 Apol. 63.16).

The history of salvation, therefore, spans the whole of human history. The drama begins with the Logos creating the world, then walking in the Garden with our first parents, then addressing the enmity between Cain and Able, and so forth. Thus, even before Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob enter the picture, the oikonomia of salvation was unrolling according to the divine plan. In this vision of things, the Incarnation is the tip of the iceberg and not the whole mass.

Irenaeus took the position of Justin and extended it by explaining that the work of salvation was a weighty endeavor that had to overcome difficulties on the part of humans and also difficulties on the part of the Logos. On the part of humans, they had to progressively learn the ways of God and gradually conform their lives thereto. On the part of the divine Logos, he had to familiarize himself with the ways of humans. Thus, the progressive ascent of humankind has to be met with a progressive descent of the eternal Logos. In both instances, the ascent and the descent pass through the whole history of Israel.

4. Irenaeus, consequently, had no difficulty in specifying that the "synagogue is the mother of the church" and that the Jewish tradition of mastering life under the Torah serves to make ready the time for the Spirit-filled freedom of the children of God:

The Law . . . carried out the education of the soul by means of physical and external things, leading it as if by a chain to obey the commandments, in order that man [woman] might learn to serve God. . . . This done, however, it was necessary that the chains of servitude, to which men [women] had grown accustomed, should be taken away, and that they should follow God without them. . . . And indeed both slaves and children have a like devotion and obedience toward the head of the family; but the children have a greater boldness . . . (Adv. haer. 4.13.2).

5. For Irenaeus, therefore, the drama of salvation could not be told without telling the story of Israel. Here and elsewhere, Irenaeus allows that Jews and Christians have "a like devotion and obedience" to God even while the freedom of the children represents an advance stage in spiritual evolution. Just as it is arrogant and dangerous for humans to ignore their dependence upon their primate ancestors, in like fashion it is arrogant and dangerous for Christians to ignore their dependence upon their spiritual ancestors.