In The People Called, Paul Hanson traces the growth of community in the Old and New Testaments and offers the biblical vision of a true, life-sustaining community as a living possibility for our time.
"What enabled one people to peer so deeply into life as to become the tutor of future ages?" Hanson asks. "For one thing, no people in world history has been more intimately acquainted with tragedy than the Jews. In biblical times, they experienced repeatedly the ravages of passions and deed, both from foreign hostility and from intracommunal conflict. Cut of a history combining tragedy and comedy and joy, nevertheless arose a profound understanding of the only source promising deliverance from that which destroys life, to that which creates and fosters and upholds life-the advent of divine grace. . . .
"Israel did not derive from its sense of a Deliverer God an attitude of moral complacency, but inferred from the experience of divine deliverance a remarkably dynamic moral universe. . . . [This] dynamic and life-enhancing notion of community found in the Bible reflects more than one people's history; in fact, . . . [it] opens up to people of all ages a dependable vision of the one who is active in all history to guide the human family to a common life of justice, compassion, and shared prosperity on a mended and peaceful earth."
The People Called is a major work, "reflective of the current state of biblical scholarship. . . . Hanson's particular focus on 'community' is a theme that invites both political realism and theological sensitivity. . . [and] permits us to see old texts in quite fresh ways. . . . Hanson shows himself once again to be sensitive, skillful, and articulate. . . . [He] has considerably advanced the current discussion in biblical theology."-Walter Brueggemann, Eden Theological Seminary