One Citizenship, Not Two

Ephesians 2 says God made Gentile believers citizens of the Israel that already existed; he did not give them a second citizenship beside it. A system whose first essential is a permanent distinction between two peoples has to explain a passage whose subject is God removing the wall between two peoples. The target here is Ryrie's version of the distinction, two peoples kept permanently apart. Progressive dispensationalists such as Craig Blaising and Darrell Bock hold that the church shares in one people of God while Israel keeps a future of her own, so this section lands on them differently, and their quarrel with Ryrie is the one Section 4 records.¹⁰³

Romans 11's olive tree has a dispensationalist reply: a tree can have two kinds of branches grafted in. Ephesians 2:12–19 is harder to answer that way. Paul tells Gentile believers what they used to be: "without the Messiah, alienated from the citizenship of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world" (2:12). Then: "But now in Christ Jesus you who used to be far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ" (2:13). Brought near to what? To the citizenship they were alienated from. Christ is "the one who made both groups into one and who destroyed the middle wall of partition, the hostility" (2:14), in order "to create in himself one new man out of two" (2:15) and "to reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross" (2:16). The conclusion is a statement about citizenship: "So then you are no longer foreigners and noncitizens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of God's household" (2:19). Galatians says the same thing as an inheritance: "And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's descendants, heirs according to the promise" (3:29).

The usual dispensationalist reply is that the wall removed is a barrier between believing Jews and believing Gentiles inside the church, not the end of Israel's national distinction. That keeps two peoples, but the text says "one new man out of two," and the reply has to say what the two became. A second citizenship is not what Paul describes. A single one, entered by those who were outside it, is.

The fence stays where Paul put it: "A partial hardening has happened to Israel until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved" (Romans 11:25–26), and "the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable" (11:29). This section does not test whether Israel has a future. It tests whether the church and Israel are two programs, and Ephesians 2 answers that the wall between them came down at the cross.