Isaac reflects on his visit with the people at First Mennonite Church of San Francisco:
In San Francisco the Mennonites assemble as Christ’s body within the house of Israel. Gentiles have become children of God, wrote theologian Karl Barth in 1949, “only as those chosen with [the Jews]; as guests in their house.” For First Mennonite of San Francisco, Barth’s theology becomes flesh: The church is learning how to be a physical guest within a material house of Israel in diaspora…. The Mennonites have followed Jesus the Jew into one of Israel’s houses of worship. They show all of us that gentile Christians can’t help but be linked to the Jews because we build our lives around Jesus, who was born of a Jewish mother and circumcised on the eighth day. As Barth put it in his Church Dogmatics: “The Word did not simply become any flesh, any man humbled and suffering. It became Jewish flesh.”
For the rest of his article, follow this link to the Mennonite Weekly Review online version: With the Jews