According to the Book of Isaiah, the "remnant" is a small group of Israelites who will survive the invasion of the Assyrian army under Tiglath-Pileser III. The remnant is promised that they will one day be brought back to the Promised Land by Yahweh. Isaiah again uses the terminology during Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem. The concept of the remnant is taken up by several other prophets, including Micah, Jeremiah and Zephaniah. In Jeremiah 39–40, the "poor people, who had nothing", who remained in Judah when the rest of its population were deported to Babylon, are referred to as a "remnant". The post-exilic biblical literature consistently refers to the Jews who have returned from the Babylonian captivity as the remnant.
New Testament
New Testament verses that refer to a faithful "remnant" include and .
Church views
Church of England
The influential Anglican "remnant theology" of Martin Thornton sees the church parish as made up of three different levels of members. Thornton refers to the smallest of the groups as the Remnant, likening it to the remnant of Isaiah in the Old Testament. These are ordinary people of extraordinary devotion, more proficient than spiritually gifted, whom it is vital for the parish priest to identify and nurture through spiritual direction, for they are the dependable, beating, praying heart of the parish. They truly live their Christianity and form the core not just of the parish but of the universal "Church Militant".
The Old Testament notion of "the remnant" was one of the three images Karl Rahner used to set the parish into his larger vision of church in his 1956 essay "Theology of the Parish" and his 1961 book The Episcopate and the Primacy, co-authored with then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. What was significant for Rahner in the concept of "the remnant" was the idea that the whole – the universal Church – could be present in the part – the parish: "the Church as a whole, when it becomes "Event" in the full sense, is also necessarily a local Church, the whole Church becomes tangible in the local Church".
James Watts claims that some authors have given too much emphasis to the remnant theme, such as some scholars who "have considered it central to the NT message". According to Watts, there are fewer occurrences of the theme in the Bible than one might expect.
