In an essay on the beginning and end of Isaiah, David Carr points out a series of significant shifts. In chapter 1, Yahweh charges Israel with unnaturally rebelling against his father (1:2), and in the “communal supplication” of chapters 63-64, Israel appeals to Yahweh on the basis of His Fatherhood: “You are our Father” (63:16) and “You are our Father” (64:7).

Strikingly, though, Yahweh never takes up that appeal in His response to the supplication (contained in chapters 65-66). Instead, Yahweh gives reassurance to the righteous within Israel, and continues to show a stern face to the rebellious. “Father” never comes up in chs. 65-66. Instead, the imagery turns to motherhood. Instead of the harlot of 1:21, Zion has become a mother bringing forth her children (66:7-12). Yahweh Himself comforts like a mother: “As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you; and you shall be comforted in Jerusalem” (66:13). At the beginning of the book, Yahweh appeals as a Father; by the end, He is comforting the remnant like a mother. History is a feminization of the human race, from Adam to Bride. Isaiah suggests that the glorification of Yahweh is a divine maternalization.

Be that as it may, there is a narrowing of focus in Isaiah from Israel to the remnant of Israel, and along with that there is a shift of focus from Yahweh as Father of the whole nation to Zion as the mother of the remnant.

As Carr points out, this is consistent with the shift of emphasis regarding holiness in the course of Isaiah. Yahweh is introduced as the “Holy One of Israel” early on (1:4), and the phrase is used right up to chapter 60, which calls Jerusalem “the Zion of the Holy One of Israel” (v. 14). After that point, there are a couple of references to the Holy Spirit (63:10-11), but the language of holiness is almost exclusively transferred to the city and habitation and people of God (62:12; 63:15, 18; 64:10, 11). In chapters 65-66, “holy” is used exclusively of the “holy mountain” of Yahweh (65:11, 25; 66:20). Holiness descends from Yahweh Himself to the mountain on which He dwells, much as the focus shifts from Father Yahweh to Mother Zion.

A number of things follow from this. First, what makes the final Israel Israel is not merely the fact that they have Yahweh (or Abraham) as Father, but the fact that they also have Zion as mother. The “visible” church is the family of Father Yahweh; the “invisible” church consists of those children of Yahweh who have been born by Mother Zion. Insofar as he uses the concept at all, Isaiah gives the concept of “invisible” church a distinct ecclesial slant.

Second, though, Isaiah gives an important gloss on this Cyprianist theme: What makes the children children of Zion is the fact that they are born from Zion’s birth-pangs, out of the woes of exile. The “invisible” church is the one that emerges on the far side of the purging fire, that lives through the furnace of affliction by not forsaking and rebelling against Yahweh. Importantly, this lends a temporal coloring to the idea of an “invisible” or remnant church. The righteous remnant is there in the midst of Israel from the beginning, but the proof is in the burning. “Not all Israel are of Israel,” but that is only evident when the birthpangs have given way to a new epoch. Or, to put it in Pauline terms: The just shall live by faith.