I still don’t get the ‘fascistic’ charge. We had this conversation before and I thought you understood the point that by calling the people of God a ‘new humanity’ I am not relegating the rest of the world to a position of inferiority. To quote John Doyle:

Good. If in the OT Israel is to be regarded as the "new humanity," it’s a matter of categorization, of God naming them "the people of God" and setting them apart from the other nations. Israel’s separateness is geographical (the land of Israel) and relational (the covenant between God and this people). But it’s not an ontological separation between one kind of material being and another. There’s never any indication that God chose Abraham and his descendants because of some genetic or inherent moral difference they already possessed, nor did God transform the Israelites into some other kind of being (fully human or superhuman) as a result of His choosing them to be His people. The "new creation" of a microcosm composed of God’s people isn’t a new material creation like the one Genesis 1-3 presumably describes, but rather the creation of a new relational category that marks Israelites individually and collectively as "the people" among all other people.

That’s your statement and I entirely agree with it. So what about the quotation marks?

First, to use the term ‘genocide’ at all, whether in quotation marks or not, seems to me a significant departure from the tendency of much popular theologizing either to ignore or to allegorize the conquest narratives. To raise the issue, moreover, against the backdrop of the Rwandan genocide, in which Christians slaughtered Christians, is surely provocative. 

Secondly, there are many reasons to use quotation marks other than to suggest that somehow this wasn’t really a genocide or that the Canaanites were somehow subhuman - and why shouldn’t I be the one who is offended by that sort of retort? I used quotation marks partly to highlight the controversial nature of the word and partly to avoid prejudging the theological significance of the event.

Thirdly, I’m not absolutely sure that ‘genocide’ is the right word. The Canaanites are killed not because of their race but because of i) their idolatry and ii) their wickedness. That is not to suggest that the killing was therefore morally justified - it is simply a matter of describing it accurately.

So frankly, John, I am at a loss to understand how a post that sets the conquest of Canaan against the Rwandan background and highlights a parallel with the flood story can be said to dehumanize non-Christian humanity. Israel is called as a servant people to be blessed and be a blessing to the nations of the earth - a kingdom of priests for the sake of others. The conquest of Canaan is an intrinsic part of that story. Aspects of it are highly disturbing, and I want to be able openly to ask questions about that without being labelled fascistic.

Of course, if you and others still see this unpleasant tendency in the argument that Israel is conceived from the start as a microcosm, an alternative to a corrupted humanity, then let me know, and I’ll try to do something about it. But to my way of thinking, this ‘new creation’ / microcosm terminology has much more to do with rehumanizing the church - correcting the personalistic, quasi-gnostic dualism that besets much modern theology - than with dehumanizing humanity.