Israel and the faithfulness of God: Romans 9-11
Introduction
I have a very specific agenda in this post. I want to propose a reading of Romans 11 very different from those commonly available on the market today. In particular I want to take a close look at 11:25-27 and attempt to give an answer to the difficult question of what Paul means when he says “all Israel will be saved”. I don’t want to show my cards too quickly, though, so let’s start with the broader context and build our way step by step.
What is Romans 9-11 all about? We do good to ask this question at the outset of our study in order to keep the answer at the front of our minds while wading through the details. We reject, of course, the old notion that this section is peripheral to the thrust of Paul’s argument. It is no mere addendum to an otherwise coherent systematic theology, rather it is the theological crescendo of a letter with a very pressing pastoral concern. Paul has just mounted eight chapters of the most robust and deliberative argument with the intent of placing Jew and Gentile on the same footing in the family of Abraham. This has been his logic: God’s covenant faithfulness has been now been revealed, stunningly apart from Israel’s observance of Torah, through the singular faithfulness of Israel’s representative, Jesus of Nazareth; and therefore Israel has no ethnic boast, because membership in the covenant does not stand on the grounds of national boundary-markers like circumcision, but rather on the grounds of a Spirit-empowered faithfulness responding to the faithfulness of Jesus.
So now the question confronts us: If all this is so, and God’s promises stand on the grounds of faith, through Jesus, and not on the grounds of Torah, then what do we say of Israel herself? Since the majority of the nation presently rejects this Jesus, what does this all say of the covenant God made with Abraham? Is it suspended? And if so, how does this reflect on God’s own righteousness? This is what chaps. 9-11 are all about.
Romans 9:6-11:10
Paul’s reply to this question becomes explicit, first of all, in 9:6 and 9:14. “But it is not that the word of God has taken no effect… What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? Certainly not!” Echoing the main theme of chaps. 3-4, Paul declares that God actually has remained faithful to His promise to Abraham, stunningly in spite of Israel’s widespread rejection of the gospel. But the real issue, Paul replies, is who Abraham’s “seed”, the children of promise, really are: “for they are not all Israel who are of Israel”. Now, as many have noted, standing alone it’s true that this phrase doesn’t necessarily imply that Gentiles are included in the true “Israel”; in and of itself it only insists negatively that not all Jews are included in that company. However, Paul doesn’t mean for that to be a stand-alone statement. He goes on to state positively: “But the children of the promise are counted as the seed”. The question is, Who are the ones that are counted as Abraham’s descendants? Considering the foundation he has laid already in chap. 4 and following the logic of the present passage to his own conclusion in vv. 23-33, it seems hard to deny that Paul includes Gentiles in the “children of promise”, the “seed”, and thus in the true eschatological “Israel” of v. 6.
The initial answer which Paul gives to the question concerning God’s righteousness is perhaps different than many would expect. In an argument sprawling throughout chapters 9 and 10 and built upon all he has said thus far in the letter, the apostle declares boldly that the word of God actually has taken effect (9:6-13), that there is presently a company enjoying the covenantal privileges of 9:4-5. Surprisingly (and undoubtedly just as controversial to Paul’s audience as it is to us) we find that this group is comprised largely of Gentiles, but that Israel has largely forsaken its standing in the covenant, because, as Paul says, it has not submitted to the righteousness of God unveiled in Christ (9:30-10:4, 14-21).
11:1 then begins by asking the appropriate question, now that God’s reputation has been cleared of the accusation of unrighteousness: “has God cast away his people?” Certainly, given what Paul has said in 9-10 alone, such a conclusion would be quite easy to reach. But Paul responds, just as resoundingly as he did in 9:6, with an unwavering “Certainly not!” He then goes on in 11:1-10 to point out that the present remnant of Christian Jews (of which he himself is a prime example) demonstrate well enough that God has not rejected Israel according to the flesh. Paul realizes that one could reply, however, that while the present remnant does prove that God has not rejected ethnic Israel, that fact alone does not suggest that any more would return. Has the remainder of as-of-yet-unsaved Israel stumbled beyond recovery? Paul’s response to this further inquiry makes up the rest of chapter 11.
Most Christians are at least vaguely familiar with Romans 11:11-36, but this is the point at which it is most important for us to keep our finger on the text and not short-circuit the process of exegesis by assuming we already know where Paul is going. Very different groups at opposite ends of the theological spectrum have a deep investment in their particular interpretations of this passage, so we do well to tread lightly on this ground and with an awareness of how it has been mishandled in the past. The goal of this exercise does not boil down to a pat on the back in an “ivory tower” for having figured the text out. Hearts and lives are involved here.
Romans 11:11-36 and the question of “all Israel”
There have historically been two primary interpretations of what exactly Paul’s main point is in Romans 11:11-36, finding their biggest point of disagreement in vv. 25-26. The first would say, with different variations, that Paul is speaking prophetically of a corporate salvation of the Jewish people at the end of the age. The second would say, also with variations, that he is speaking of the salvation of all God’s people, Jew and Gentile alike, and that “all Israel” in v. 26 refers to that company. Although this second position is by far the minority view in both the Church and the academic world today, it is by no means completely abandoned and recently it has even been making somewhat of a comeback through the revamped interpretations of notable scholars like N.T. Wright.
To speak personally for a moment, I have spent a good amount of time on both sides of the fence in regards to this passage, and over time I have found them both to be lacking in green. They both fall short, that is, in the most important details of uncovering the grammatical coherence and inner logic of vv. 25-26, and then in fitting that into the larger context of what Paul is getting at in the passage. But what if there was a third option? What if there was a reading that did more justice to the text than either seeing 11:26 as speaking of (a) a mass end-time conversion of the Jewish race or (b) seeing the “Israel” there as the redefined “Israel” of 9:6-8? I believe there is, and I will spend the rest of this post attempting to expound this third option.
Through reading Wright’s Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans and his chapter on Romans 9-11 in Climax of the Covenant I have been convinced about one thing: Romans 11:26 is not talking about an end-time salvation of the whole nation of Israel. If it was it would stand in direct contradiction to Paul’s real purpose in that chapter. Many think that when Paul says “how much more their fullness!” in verse 12 he is implying what they already assume he means in v. 26, i.e. an eschatological salvation of the whole Jewish race. But he continues in the very next line, connecting it to what he’s just said with the conjunction gar (“for”), that he expects “some” of his ethnic brethren to be saved through his mission to the Gentiles. There is a sober realism to v. 14, reflecting years of hard missionary experience and being flogged in synagogues. Verse 15 then continues in the same vein, connected itself to v. 14 by gar.
But it’s not only Paul’s “some” that stands in the way here. It’s also the “if” of v. 23, which suggests that Paul genuinely doesn’t know what the “full number” of ethnic Israel will look like. Combine both of these with the fact that the “fullness” of the Gentiles in v. 25 obviously doesn’t imply that “all Gentiles” will be saved, and that v. 31 assures us that the time of mercy for Israel is “now”, and I think we can safely say that neither v. 12 nor v. 15 can be taken to imply a mass salvation of ethnic Israel at or around the second coming. The text just doesn’t allow for this.
And all of this of course has bearing on v. 26 as well. Since 11:25 begins with the conjunction “for” and v. 26a continues with “and”, we should assume that they are an explanation of what has gone before and not a new and radically separate point (which is exactly what a mass end-time salvation of ethnic Israel would be). Furthermore, the wording at the start of v. 26—translated “and so” in the NKJV and NASB, and “and in this way” in the ESV—does not denote a temporal progression, but rather a logical one. Nowhere in Romans does houtos ever come close to meaning “then” or “after that”. Paul is explaining that this is how (houtos) God is saving all Israel, not that this is when he will save all Israel (i.e. after the fullness of the Gentiles comes in). Those who attempt to find support for a mass eschatological salvation of ethnic Israel from this passage would do good to look elsewhere.
The problem I’ve found with Wright’s reading, however, is that I don’t think he follows through on his own critique. He makes a big deal of how the conjunction which introduces the thought of vv. 25-26 (“for”) links that thought with what has just preceded in vv. 11- 24, but then he fails to show how his interpretation of those verses actually explains the train of thought in vv. 11-24. Sure, it stands in continuity with much of Paul’s agenda in Romans as a whole, and it is definitely preferable to the Dispensational reading, which has no support whatsoever, but Wright fails to explain what purpose a supposed polemical redefinition of “Israel” serves in relation to Paul’s main purpose in this passage.
Paul is concerned, right up until the statement in question, with developing an argument for why God is not finished with ethnic Israel: “How much more”, he says in v. 24, “will these, who are natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree.” The “for” (gar) that v. 25 begins with suggests that Paul is still developing the “how much more” argument of the preceding verse, not intruding into it from outside with a claim that Israel’s hardening and the ingathering of the Gentiles is actually the way by which God is saving all his people, a renewed “Israel” comprised largely of Gentiles. Yes, a redefined “Israel” has precedent from 9:6-8, but Paul’s argument has moved on from there. If we are committed to reading vv. 25-26 in continuity with the preceding sequence of thought—and the rules of exegesis demand that we should—then we must not be content with Wright’s reading of those verses, for it fails to do justice to the central concern and inner logic of the text itself.
And nor does it do justice to the verses that follow. If we take out vv. 25-26 we find that vv. 28-32 continue right where v. 24 left off: Ethnic Israel may have been cast away for the sake of the Gentiles, but they are still beloved for the sake of the Patriarchs and chosen for God’s purpose by his immutable grace (vv. 28-29). For in the same way that the Gentile Christians were once rebellious and yet have presently found mercy through the rebellion of the Jewish people, even so the Jews have been rebellious in order that God might now show mercy to them also (vv. 30-31). For God has committed them all to disobedience in order that he might have mercy on all (v. 32).
In line with the previous 10 chapters of Romans, Paul here envisions redemptive history playing itself out in a great circle: (1) humanity falls; (2) God chooses Israel to be his instrument of salvation through the law; (3) Israel fails, so that God sends his son, the Messiah, to save the world apart from the law; (4) God provokes Israel to jealousy by the world’s coming into Israel’s promises through Israel’s Messiah; (5) all of humanity, both Jew and Gentile, are saved by God’s grace alone. There is a special emphasis on parts (3), (4) and (5) as Paul closes off the main theological portion of the letter. We can see part (4) of this sequence most clearly throughout Romans 11:11-32, because that of course is Paul’s main concern in this passage. The problem with Wright’s view of vv. 25-26 is that he effectually erases this step from the process.
But notice in particular that there is an instrumental relationship between parts (3) and (4), where Paul sees Israel’s blindness serving a sovereign purpose both for the Gentiles and, paradoxically, for Israel herself. He claims throughout this passage that the salvation which has spread to the world as the result of Israel’s transgression is not in itself the end of the story, but rather serves a purpose of its own—that is, to “provoke them to jealousy”. Over and over again Paul sums up the previous theme concerning Israel’s call to be a “vessel of wrath” for the sake of the world: “by their trespass, salvation has come to the Gentiles” (11:11); “their trespass means riches for the world, and their failure riches for the Gentiles” (11:12); “their casting away means the reconciliation of the world” (11:15); “you have received mercy because of their disobedience” (11:30). This repeated emphasis is clearly a major theme of 11:11-32, but it is not the main one. Rather, it forms the first part of a double movement, each of these statements having a second part: “…in order to provoke them to jealousy” (11:11); “…how much more their fullness!” (11:12); “…their acceptance will be life from the dead” (11:15); “…even so they have now been disobedient, so that through the mercy shown to you they might now receive mercy” (11:31).
This pervasive double movement may give us the key to understanding the meaning of houtos in 11:26. If context counts for anything then it very likely refers to the paradoxical relationship between Israel’s fall and her restoration which has been the subject of the whole passage. Just like her representative, the Messiah, so Israel must come through the process of death and resurrection, as v. 15 says with its echoes of 4:17 and 4:25. Or, again, as the logic of vv. 30-32 runs: God has committed Israel to disobedience so that (significantly, houtos appears again in v. 31) he might ultimately have mercy on Israel.
This, then, is how I now believe 11:25-26 should be interpreted: God’s method of saving ethnic Israel is to harden them, i.e. committing them to the rebellion which they persistently chose, so as to create a period of time in which the Gentile mission could be accomplished, and, paradoxically through this mission, to provoke Israel to jealousy so that they might let go of their death-grip to Torah, relinquish their ethnic claim, and come in by the same gracious mercy which God has shown to the Gentiles, i.e. by faith. The emphasis is not on the number who will be saved, the “all” (which can only mean the same thing as the “fullness” of the previous verse and the “all” of v. 32, i.e. all who will come to God through repentance), but rather on the manner of their salvation, the “this is how” (i.e. through being cast away so that they might be saved, along with the Gentiles, by God’s grace through Christ). It seems to me that this reading has much more going for it, both contextually and gramatically, than the other two alternatives.
As I have already noted, Paul sees this whole process taking place progressively in the present, the salvation of Jews and Gentiles taking place side by side—he does not envision the salvation of “all Israel” taking place at some separate dispensation in the future, for he hopes that the current remnant of Jewish Christians will be greatly enlarged through his own ministry to the Gentiles (11:14). Just as the Gentiles can receive mercy “now” through Israel’s disobedience, so too the same offer of mercy is held out to Israel “now” (11:30-31), but only “if they do not continue in unbelief” (11:23).
But what do we make of Paul’s quotations of Isaiah in vv. 26b-27? Surely, many would argue, Paul is quoting Isaiah 59 with Christ’s Second Coming in mind, so he must therefore be thinking of a large-scale act of salvation at the end of the age throughout these verses, not the steady process of “jealousy” and consequent coming to faith that has been the theme of the chapter so far. This reading has of course been very popular, but considering both the context of Isaiah 59 and the particular way in which Paul has been reading the OT throughout Romans, I think we can safely say that he has something very different in mind here.
The first half of Isaiah 59 is about Israel’s failure to walk out their calling as God’s Servant to the world and how instead they have gone down an unjust and crooked path, turning in on themselves in ever increasing wickedness and rebellion against their God. In response to this, the second half of the chapter pictures God acting, by “his own arm”, to bring salvation for both Israel and the world, dealing with their sin finally and forever. In its own context, the verse which Paul quotes is all about Israel’s sins being forgiven, the exile being undone and the covenant being renewed by the “word” and the “Spirit” which were promised long ago. And this, we remind ourselves, is precisely what Paul says God has done through Jesus. The theme of Isaiah 59 is thus the perfect backdrop for the whole theme of Romans, the good news that God’s righteousness has been unveiled, apart from the law, through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.
The cumulative point of 11:25-27, built especially upon 2:17-3:26 and 7:5-8:30, is that God has accomplished through Jesus what Israel hoped and yet failed to accomplish through the rigorous observance of national law. Paul recognizes that the covenant could not be renewed and Israel could not be redeemed through the law but only through an initiative from God himself—or, as Isaiah says, “by his own arm”. And just like Isaiah, Paul recognizes that there had to a be casting away in order for there to be restoration. Israel had to be committed to disobedience in order that her God might have mercy on all. This is the mysterious process, according to God’s great and unsearchable wisdom, through which all Israel will be saved.
Oh, the depth of the riches of both the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! “For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has become his counselor?” Or who has first given to him and it should be repaid to him?” For of him and to him and through him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen.
The Two Shall Become One
On May 29th, 2009 I entered into a covenant with the commitment to love, serve and cherish the most beautiful, brilliant, fiery, visionary and humble woman I’ve ever known, Rebecca Louise. The Lord has blessed me more bountifully than I ever could have imagined. If you don’t know Becky you should definitely click on the link to her blog on the right-hand column and at least get to know her vicariously through her past writings.
We’ve also started a joint blog as a couple, so be sure to check that out. The wife just wrote the most personal, probing and convicting post called “The Face of Christ”. Here’s a sample:
In my own journey, I have realized the gravity of the question our Lord asked Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” and how my every choice, pursuit, and conviction rests in its hands. How I answer that question dictates how I answer every other question in life. Therefore, in my pursuit to know the true answer, I have been discouraged to find that those who are supposed to know Him most in modernity give polar opposite descriptions of Him. Oh, of course any group of people will describe an individual with an assortment of emphasized characteristics, but if the pastor says He will judge no seeker, the preacher says He’ll judge those who don’t repent, and the nun says He’ll judge all for the sanctification of their souls, someone has to be wrong. Who is Jesus? How can I know Him?
In Christ,
Matt
Pope Benedict on Luke 18:9-14
I’m getting blown away by how good the Pope’s recent book Jesus of Nazareth is. It’s surprisingly rare to find a work on Jesus that is both historically grounded and faithful to the text of the New Testament (almost laughably ironic considering the weight which the gospels carry in contrast to much of what passes under the critical radar as legitimate “history” these days). There is no polarization between the so-called “Christ of faith” and the “Jesus of history” here, just straight up Jesus Christ. Based on what I’ve read so far, I highly recommend this book.
You’ll probably be seeing more than a couple good quotes pasted up here over the next few days. Here’s a starter to wet your appetite:
The Pharisee can boast considerable virtues; he tells God only about himself, and he thinks he is praising God in praising himself. the tax collector knows he has sinned, he knows he cannot boast before God, and he prays in full awareness of his debt to grace. Does this mean, then, that the Pharisee represents ethics and the tax collector represents grace without ethics or even in opposition to ethics? The real point is not the question “ethics–yes or no?” but that there are two ways of relating to God and to oneself. The Pharisee does not really look at God at all, but only at himself; he does not really need God, because he does everything right by himself. He has no real relation to God, who is ultimately superfluous–what he does himself is enough. Man makes himself righteous. The tax collector, by contrast, sees himself in the light of God. He has looked toward God, and in the process his eyes have been opened to see himself. So he knows that he needs God and that he lives by God’s goodness, which he cannot force God to give him and which he cannot procure for himself. He knows that he needs mercy and so he will learn from God’s mercy to become merciful himself, and thereby to become like God. He draws life from being-in-relation, from receiving all as gift; he will always need the gift of goodness, of forgiveness, but in receiving it he will always learn to pass the gift on to others. The grace for which he prays does not dispense him from ethics. It is what makes him truly capable to doing good in the first place. He needs God, and because he recognizes that, he begins through God’s goodness to become good himself. Ethics is not denied; it is freed from the constraints of moralism and set in the context of a relationship of love–of relationship to God. And that is how it comes truly into its own.
Covenant, Cross and Resurrection: A Hermeneutical Proposition
“Every scribe instructed concerning the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure things new and old.” – Matthew 13:52
As with most everything I’ve brought up here recently, be sure to take the content of this post with a grain of salt. I’m by no means settled on all of this. My intent is not to teach as much as it is to sharpen and provoke thought, and hopefully be sharpened and provoked myself. But I’d like to develop a point I hinted at a while back, a point which could be taken (wrongly) to mean that I regard OT prophecy as no longer relevant.
Since the kingdom is no longer ethnocentric, but is instead Jesus-centric with the “middle wall of separation” broken down – making us Gentiles partakers of the “commonwealth of Israel,” fellow heirs of the “covenants of promise,” and thus nullifying the civil ordinances which were once meant to keep Israel separate from the Gentiles – then the OT promises made to Israel must now be understood, in light of what Jesus has done, to include saved Gentiles in every respect. This doesn’t mean that we now hold the OT with a different hermeneutic than the NT, rather it simply means that we must read the whole Bible for what it truly is: a story, a great moving narrative spanning across the ages, and as such we must read each chapter within the context of the whole, recognizing where we are at each point along the way.
Many today read the Bible in far too much of a Neo-Platonic “fortune cookie” manner, treating the 66 books as just a collection of timeless revelatory truths as if all communicated from one author at one time. It’s directly out of this thinking (as it was basically rehashed through the Enlightenment) that Dispensationalism emerged in the 19th century, treating eschatology as a big puzzle in which we simply grab all of the passages that have apocalyptic language and try to fit them into our timeline of the end-time events, without regard for their context and place within the grand covenantal narrative of history. If you do this, you will quickly find that there are things in the OT regarding the way God related to Israel that don’t quite line up with what He did through Jesus in the NT, and in pulling the testaments together you’ll inevitably have to compromise a plain sense reading of one or the other. In and of itself this reveals that something is amiss, that a good step back and a rethinking of some basic presuppositions is probably in order.
While my recent thoughts on Israel are built upon a pretty big hermeneutical shift in regards to my understanding of the OT, I want to be clear that I do not think the original meaning of OT prophecy is annulled or abdicated, and neither do I think the NT writers looked for a deeper or more “spiritual” meaning underneath the surface of the text that they regarded as its “true” meaning. Far from abdicating OT prophecy of its original meaning, I believe that the core of that meaning – that is, the actual redemptive goal of which all OT prophecy speaks – is confirmed and actually expanded through Christ. What is abdicated, or rather what is overhauled and reworked, is not the prophetic program itself but rather the means through which that program finds fulfillment. It’s not as if the NT writers had a special authority to change the meaning of Scripture arbitrarily simply because they were apostles and we then don’t have that authority, as many suggest when their only concern is to defend grammatical-historical interpretation. That’s really just an easy cop-out to a hard question. And yet neither do the NT writers suggest that their strange interpretations of many OT passages are in fact what those texts were “really” saying, as many fundamentalists feel forced to say in the wake of post-enlightenment liberal criticism. To suggest that is to take a dangerous step toward Gnosticism and to fortify oneself in an always-changing tradition that has no historical legs to stand on.
The answer, I suggest, over against both of these approaches, is to derive our hermeneutic and establish our theology first and foremost from reading the whole Bible as a narrative, allowing for all of the unexpected twists and turns that any real drama would present, specifically those twists that occur when God’s chosen vessels don’t do their part and so God takes it upon himself to do what they could not. It is in recognizing (a) the historical and covenantal progression that the each book of the Bible comes in, climaxing in the first century with the death and resurrection of Jesus, and (b) the relational nature of God that often subjects the advancement of His redemptive program to human participation, that I believe frees us to make sense of the New Testament’s interpretation (or rather, reinterpretation) of the Old while still remaining faithful to the grammatical-historical process, understanding that those texts really weren’t, in their original setting, saying the same thing that they were subsequently used to say post-advent. The key, in other words, lies in understanding that what the text meant and what the text now means are sometimes two entirely different things.
This obviously needs clarification.
Much OT prophecy expresses God’s desire and call to ethnic Israel that they would be the vehicle of redemption to the rest of the world, that they would indeed be “Israel” and not “Jacob”. The point that the NT emphasizes again and again, both in Paul and in the Gospels as well as in several other places throughout, is that Israel could not fulfill that calling, for the simple reason that they were plagued by the same problem as the rest of humanity, the problem of sin; and as good and holy as the law was, by itself it was impotent to free Israel from its fallen state and help toward the renewal of creation. God needed to act on Israel’s behalf; He needed to take Israel’s vocation upon Himself in order to save Israel and the world. This is Paul’s point in Romans 3:3-4, that although Israel has been faithless, although she has abdicated her place and turned from her God, still God will be faithful, still He will act to save the world while remaining just in his judgment of sin.
But in this way – through placing Israel in the same boat with the Gentiles, together in need of redemption – Paul sets the stage to show how God’s covenant faithfulness has been revealed, how He intends to rescue humanity and restore what was lost at the fall. And surprisingly, he doesn’t say that it’s revealed through Israel’s walking out the written code given at Sinai as they would have expected; it’s not through the chosen nation separating itself from the world around and observing all its various national ordinances. No, Paul doesn’t say says that the “righteousness of God” has been revealed through Israel, but that it has been revealed through Jesus of Nazareth, Israel’s representative, who happens to be God-in-person and who offered himself as a “mercy seat” so that all, both Jews and Gentiles, might be justified freely by God’s grace through him.
Now this doesn’t at all imply that ethnic Israel is no longer called to the place the OT prophets envisaged. The NT is clear upon that as well. But what it does mean is that the way by which ethnic Israel is called to that place is no longer the way the OT prophets envisaged, for the old way could never bring forth life. It was far too weak. The temple system has been rendered obsolete, because the purpose it served has been met fully by the Messiah (Heb 8:13); and it is no longer important for Israel to remain separate from the nations, because, as Paul says, summing up a massive theme in Galatians, all are one in the Messiah, and through him all become Abraham’s children (Gal 3:26-29).
When this is truly taken into account and its consequences considered at a hermeneutical level, we find that there are two common fixtures in OT prophecy that now must be reworked in light of what was, to the eschatological sensibilities of any Jew in the first century, a truly surprising turn of events. These relate to the ceremonial and civil aspects of the law respectively. The first, more obvious fixture is actually a subset of the second, less obvious one. When we see the first we can be sure of the second, and thereby we will have a consistent guide in wading through the whole and re-reading it, like the early church did, in light of the new age launched by Christ.
First, whenever a rebuilt temple is envisaged as playing a central role in the life of God’s people as they fulfill their calling. Before the church’s christology had even developed into the Trinitarian creed we find articulated later in places like John’s epistles, it was absolutely clear concerning one thing about Jesus of Nazareth; they knew that he was the fulfillment of that which the temple was only a mere type and foreshadowing. What before could only be had through presenting oneself regularly before a priest in the temple, the apostles preached confidently was now on offer to all through the “once for all” sacrifice of the one whom God has raised up: Jesus of Nazareth has power on earth to forgive sins. And what’s more, they soon came to realize that God’s Spirit, the Shekinah glory itself, had also become available through him, not only to the Jews, who as we see in Acts were becoming increasingly obstinate, but also to the Gentiles, who were now beginning to come to the faith in droves. This realization in particular, that God’s program for worldwide redemption had moved past Israel’s widespread rejection of the Gospel and was in fact advancing through Jesus’ followers out to the nations, caused them to re-read passages about the temple in a totally new light (e.g. Acts 15:15-17). In their view – and we see this especially from Steven’s sermon in Acts 7 – the temple in Jerusalem was always designed to act as a pointer to, and an advance symbol for, the presence of God himself, as it was always his intention for the entire earth to be filled with his glory as the waters cover the sea.
Second, whenever the nation of Israel is envisaged as fulfilling its calling and ushering in God’s new age under the Mosaic covenant. In the same way that passages about the temple had to be reworked, so too passages about Israel itself as it was previously constituted had to be reworked in light of its renewal and reconstitution in the Messiah. This pertains, notably, to Amos 9:11 as well as to passages like Ezekiel 40-48 and much of Isaiah 40-55, but goes beyond them as a paradigm that permeates the OT. Early on in its development the church began to delineate between those aspects of the law which pertained previously to Israel under Moses, which they believed were no longer relevant, and the directly moral aspects of the law which go beyond the Old Covenant into the ethnically diverse body of the Messiah (Acts 15; Gal 1). The civil law was a custodian, a “tutor” which kept Israel until Christ, but now that Christ has come the tutor is no longer necessary. It has served its purpose; it has guarded and constrained Israel under sin up to the appointed time. Now, through his faithfulness, Jesus has redeemed Israel from her sin, thus freeing her also from the constraint of her tutor. This is the inescapable point of Galatians 3. The civil law has been rendered entirely redundant. Keep it if you like, purely for traditions sake, but it no longer serves the purpose it once did. It is no longer necessary for Israel to be constrained as a slave, because God sent His Son into the world so that Israel might receive the adoption as sons themselves.
Now let me be clear now about what I am not saying. I am not saying that God didn’t know it would happen this way. I’m not saying that Israel’s failure caught Him by surprise and that Christ’s coming was actually His second option. The incarnation was no more God’s “plan b” after Israel’s failure than it was after Adam’s failure. He always knew it would happen like this. He knew His image-bearers would eat of that tree, and He knew exactly how He would go about this large-scale rescue operation. But the real question isn’t whether or not God knew exactly how it would all play out; the real question is whether or not the OT prophets carried the same exhaustive and infallible foreknowledge as God Himself. The obvious answer, however uncomfortable it might feel, is that they didn’t. When Paul said that we prophesy in part, looking as though into a dim mirror, he wasn’t leaving the canonized prophets exempt from that statement. God became a man, died a sinner’s death, and after three days rose again – and this was the most unexpected and surprising thing that could have happened; hence the reason Jesus had such a hard time getting it through his disciples thick heads.
This is the mystery kept secret since the world began, but now revealed for all to see and wonder: that God would resurrect and exalt one man in the middle of history, out of step with the general resurrection at the end of history, and thus that He would vindicate that man’s message and claims, that He really was God’s son, and that through this vindication He would open a door for all to come to Him, cleansed and forgiven, free from sin and empowered by grace – all of this was completely shocking to Jesus’ disciples, even as he stood right in front of them, changed and yet the same, with wounds in his hands and feet from three days before. By way of analogy, it was as if they were each presented with a painting unlike any they had ever seen, yet the only problem was that there was no existing place in any of their houses that could showcase such a wonderful piece; it simply wouldn’t fit. And so the only option was to reconstruct their houses to fit around the unexpected gift instead. I imagine the forty days after Easter looked something like this, with Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom continually blowing the disciples minds, changing their paradigms, and reaching down to the most fundamental issues of wordview, rebuilding them from the ground up through the subversive and transforming themes of cross and resurrection. As he said to a couple disillusioned followers three days after his death: “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”
My suggestion is that the cross and resurrection provide us with a hermeneutical key to pick up when history and etymology have done their work, a principle which gives us a way to move beyond the old (and slightly Gnostic) spiritualizing method of Origen and Augustine and yet still remain faithful to the apostolic use of the OT. All of Israel’s hopes were nailed to the cross in the death of her Messiah, but in his resurrection God raised those same hopes out of the tomb, injecting them with life and transforming them by His powerful grace. They now look to what they were before as an oak tree looks to its original seed. Just as the seed must be sown for the tree to be born, so it was necessary for God’s chosen people to be committed to disobedience that He might have mercy on all, and so it was necessary that their Messiah should die and be raised the third day. So, yes, we read the Canon as a whole; yes, we read the OT in its original historical context; but we recognize that Jesus Christ is the climax of the Canon. All the promises of God find their “yes” and “amen” in him.
Out of the ashes of Israel’s failure God has brought forth something far more beautiful than Israel could have ever imagined. That’s the mysterious and resurrecting power of grace, that when mankind fell with Adam God set a plan of redemption in motion which in the end far surpasses the original glory of Adam’s garden. And just as it was with Adam’s failure, so it is with Israel’s failure. It was for Israel’s sake that Christ became the mediator of a better covenant established on better promises (Heb 8:6). Does that mean that the old promises are revoked because of Israel’s failure? No, it means that they have been reworked, transformed, because of Christ’s faithfulness. “For where sin abounded,” says Paul, with one eye toward the widespread disobedience of humanity and one eye toward the remarkable obedience of Christ, “there grace abounded much more.”
In Him,
Matt
The Spritual Jew: An Exegetical Dialog On Romans 2
There are definitely more important things we could talk about, but this is the vein I’ve been in, so you’ll just have to indulge me. With all this talk about Israel recently I thought it would be a good idea to hone in on some of the particular passages from which the differing opinions gain their steam. We’re going to have to get a bit more involved in the texts we appeal to if we want to make any progress. I figure Romans 2:26-29 comes up as much as any passage when talking about Israel, and it’s the one that initially challenged my old view some time ago, so it’s where I’ll set up camp for now.
In the last verse of the chapter Paul says that “he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter…” Now what exactly does this mean? Is Paul actually suggesting that a Christian Gentile could appropriately be called a “Jew”? Or is his discussion here restricted to actual ethnic Jews, those who are saved and those who are not? Or still, is this all just a hypothetical “straw man” that he builds up only to tear down later? Attempting to answer all of this and come out with a clean exegesis of Romans 2 is the purpose of this post. I invite any and all to contribute in the comments.
An introductory word is necessary: It must be assumed that, if indeed the term “Jew” and its equivalents were applied to Gentiles by Paul or any other of the NT writers, it wasn’t at all meant to infer that there are now no such things as actual ethnic Jews, that in Christ people no longer hold distinctive qualities such as race and gender. That would be absurd! It would be only natural to take it as speaking of citizenship; that through Christ Gentile believers become a part of the spiritual commonwealth of Israel, as Paul says in Ephesians 2. This must be clearly maintained if we are to have sensible dialog on these important passages.
Now for Romans 2: There’s a contrast made consistently throughout this passage between unsaved ethnic Israel and believing Gentiles, between the “circumcised” and the “uncircumcised”. Since the beginning of the chapter Paul has been advancing an argument against non-messianic Judaism, focusing in particular on the civil law and its fundamental inability to produce Torah-faithfulness within the nation. This is the whole point of the series of rhetorical questions to the self-proclaimed “Jew” in vv. 17-24.
In as early as vv. 14-15, however, he introduces another party into the discussion, a party who, though they are physically uncircumcised and do not possess the law, are actually bearing fruit to God and thus (this is more implicit in v. 15 and 29, but it becomes abundantly clear in chs. 5-8) stand as a testimony that He has renewed the covenant, writing His law on the hearts of His people by the power of the Spirit (cf., Jer 31:31-34; Ezek 36:26). This contrast between the unfruitful Jew and the fruitful Gentile resounds in vv. 25-29. The Jew, though he is physically circumcised, still remains a breaker of the law (v. 25); but the Gentile, though he is physically uncircumcised, astoundingly keeps the heart-level requirement of the law (vv. 26-27).
It’s important to note that the singular “Jew” who is the subject of this polemic stands for unsaved Israel corporately; it isn’t aimed at an individual. This becomes clear as Paul moves into ch. 3, where he refers back to the same singular noun with the pronouns “them”, “us” and “we”. The reason that’s important is because it makes it clear that this isn’t a wholesale old covenant vs. new covenant contrast, as if no one could be counted right under the old covenant, or as if they were included within God’s family by a different means than in the new. The example of Abraham in ch. 4 obviously negates such a conclusion. (Incidentally, 3:25-26 gives the key to reconciling the tension of the old covenant’s weakness and inability to justify with the fact that there was a faithful remnant prior to the Christ event.) But Paul is definitely saying that the old covenant was imperfect, that the nation of Israel could not be redeemed and the cosmos could not be restored through dry-road adherence to the “written code”. He makes it abundantly clear that God needed to act on Israel’s behalf. Thus the contrast is between “law” and “grace”, between the impotency of Israel’s civil ordinances and the power of the Spirit to produce true law-keepers.
Now, with all of the above in mind, especially the Jew/Gentile contrast of vv.25-27, notice the “for” that Paul begins v. 28 with. That conjunction links the argument he has been mounting in the previous three verses with the conclusion he draws in the next two. So then, the “Jew who is one inwardly” must be referring to the same company that has been the positive side of the contrast consistently throughout the chapter, namely uncircumcised Gentiles. This is confirmed once more by what Paul goes on to say in 3:1 (“what advantage then has the Jew?”); because ethnic Israel’s position of honor wouldn’t even be called into question if the contrasted subjects of 2:28-29 were both of Jewish decent, as many suggest.
Aside from denying that the true “Jew” here is actually a Gentile, however, some still maintain the old Lutheran notion that the Gentile who fulfills the law in this passage is merely a hypothetical rhetorical device, and that such a thing is in fact impossible. In this way they feel justified in avoiding Paul’s point. The real problem with this view is that it stems from an over-generalization of what Paul’s point really is in this section of the letter, reducing the many-sided argument of 1:18-3:20 to one line: “all have sinnned”.
But it’s extremely doubtful that Paul is just being “hypothetical” here about something that is in fact “impossible”, for many reasons, the greatest of which is that he insists in this very passage that it is possible, “in the Spirit” (v. 29), when a renewed people have “the works of the law written in their hearts” (v. 15), just as Jeremiah and the other prophets foretold (Jer 31:33; Ezek 36:26). Though it isn’t his main focus, the weight of Paul’s argument here rests on the fact that there actually is a renewed company who are carrying forth God’s redemptive purpose in the power of the Spirit. He isn’t just interested in saying that all have sinned. If that was the case he could have proved that in much fewer words. But in support his overall goal of placing Israel in the same boat with unsaved Gentiles (together in need of an outside agent of redemption), he argues that being in the covenant is not a matter of possessing Torah, but rather that its a matter of inward transformation by the Spirit. When one is transformed by the Spirit, he fulfills Torah.
It’s important to grasp the nuances of Paul’s terse language here, because this is the foundation upon which the rest of his discourse stands. The apostle is polemically redefining what it means to be a member of Israel, the covenant people of God, and his point is that membership within the covenant is not decided by ones external Jewishness, by being a natural descendant of Abraham, but rather it is decided by the inward renewal of the Spirit. Thus he is paving the way for where he intends go in chapters 4-8, with all his talk of Abraham’s children being a people of faith marked out for redemption by the Spirit and not by the flesh.
The fact that Paul doesn’t elaborate on that point in more detail here in no way suggests that it isn’t true. Rather it simply means that he has a greater argument at this juncture which he doesn’t want to get sidetracked from. Later on, in the midst of an extended contrast making exactly the same point as 2:25-29, he declares triumphantly, having laid the foundation of what the advanced redemption of the Messiah means in chaps. 5-6, that through the Messiah God has made it possible that “the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh (like unsaved Israel in 7:5-25) but according to the Spirit” (8:3-4). Through Jesus’ sacrifice and vindication by God, all those “in him” are delivered, both from the power of sin which held them captive and therein from the futility of trying to overcome sin through their unrenewed effort. In contrast to the past (very personally portrayed in 7:7-25), they are now, through his redemptive act and by the power of the Spirit, those who fulfill Torah (8:1-17). They are thus the “first fruits” of an entire restored created order (8:18-23).
Structurally speaking, this all makes perfect sense. In offering 7:7-25 as the first side of an extended contrast, and 8:1-17 as the second, Paul is able to bring to climax the theme he began developing in 2:25-29 but could not treat in detail there. Such a reading also comports with what follows in chapters 9-11, seeing in those chapters an expansion of the cord struck in 3:1-8. Just as the question “what is the advantage of being a Jew?” is the natural response to what Paul said of the believing Gentile being a “Jew inwardly”, and his response is a balanced though incomplete answer to that question (note that, speaking of Israel’s advantage in 3:2, he says “first of all”, implying that there is more to come), so 9-11 comprises the complete response to the same question, which would naturally again arise after his filled-in presentation of what the distinguishing marks of this new covenant community are in chapters 5-8.
Now, it’s beyond argument to say that Gentiles stand on the positive side of Paul’s contrast in 2:26-27. This considered, as well as all of the above, it seems hard to avoid granting Gentiles the title of “Jew” in 2:28-29. Still, I’m sure many will contest this, so let the dialog begin!
I feel like Kierkegaard
These starkly candid autobiographical quotes from Søren Kierkegaard really hit home with me when I first read them in Either/Or a few weeks back, and they’ve been on my mind ever since, so I thought I’d put them up here for posterity.
I have, I believe, the courage to doubt everything; I have, I believe, the courage to fight against everything; but I do not have the courage to acknowledge anything, the courage to possess, to own, anything.
My soul has lost possibility. If I were to wish for something, I would wish not for wealth or power but for the passion of possibility, for the eye, eternally young, eternally ardent, that sees possibility everywhere. Pleasure disappoints; possibility does not.
Trying to find that Biblical middle ground between Zionism and Supercessionism
As I hinted in my last note on this all-but-abandoned space, the reason I haven’t been posting lately is because most anything I’d want to talk about is really up in the air right now. This isn’t just limited to that old justification series either. There are quite a few things shifting around in my eschatology; categories that I used to think were really important have diminished while the underlying principles have become all the more exalted, and I feel that over all I’m becoming much more balanced. It’s still too early to report most of my musings, however, which is why this all sounds so terribly vague.
But I really hate to see this blog so desolate, and there is something that I’d like to throw out here, something I’ve been wrestling over for a while. This is a topic which often provokes a lot of emotion and heated debate, and understandably so, because the corridors of church history are riddled with the horrendous consequences of wrong answers. But perhaps the consequences of those wrong answers have themselves induced a reactionary posture on the other side of the fence. Perhaps the Biblical answer isn’t truly represented in either of the two extremes. Whatever the truth is, I hope that I can throw out my tentative thoughts and we can get some productive dialog going in a humble spirit. I invite anyone who has wrestled over this to contribute.
For those who haven’t already guessed, I want to talk about Israel and the Church. Specifically, as the title says, I want to see if we can arrive at a happy middle ground between the extremes of Zionism and Supercessionism (aka, replacement theology), because it’s pretty clear to me that neither of those polarizing schemes lead to the convictions which the authors of the New Testament carried. The following is my current take. It seems to make the most sense to me, but of course it’s open to revision.
Often times as Premillennialists we think (or at least I know I used to think), that if we maintain a Hebraic understanding of the kingdom then we must believe in a distinct eschatological calling and promise for ethnic Israel. Barry E. Horner belabors this point in his Future Israel, pointing the finger at Reformed folk and claiming that giving the title of “Israel” to Gentile believers while denying the covenantal use of that same term from unsaved Jews is unavoidably rooted in a Greek Neo-Platonic worldview and not in the thinking of the New Testament authors. But I think that N.T. Wright makes an excellent point and shows that this accusation is unfounded.
Neither the recognition that Paul’s main target was paganism, and the Caesar-cult in particular, nor the equal recognition that he remained a thoroughly Jewish thinker, should blind us for a moment to the fact that Paul still expressed a thorough critique of non-messianic Judaism. Paul remains at this point on the map of second-temple Judaism: believing that God had acted to remodel the covenant people necessarily entailed believing that those who refused to join this remodeled people were missing out on God’s eschatological purpose. As post-holocaust thinkers we will of course be careful how we say all this. As historians of the first century, we will recognise that it must be said. As Pauline theologians we will recognize that it contains no shadow, no hint, of anything that can be called anti-Judaism, still less anti-semitism.
There’s a big difference between replacement theology and remnant theology, and often times the latter is confused with the former. There wasn’t a single sect within first century Judaism that wouldn’t have been in full agreement with Paul that (a) not all ethnic Israel was truly the “Israel” to which God would fulfill his promises, and that (b) when God renewed the covenant He would throw open its doors to let the Gentiles in. Their disagreement would have arisen over (a) what exactly makes one a member of the true Israel and (b) the means through which God would renew the covenant.
While they would have maintained (to varying degrees of course, according to the standards of each respective sect) that their strict adherence to the civil law would produce righteousness within the nation, thus ushering in the messianic age where God would renew the covenant with them, Paul and the rest of the early church declared, in contrast, that that new age had already dawned, not through their corporate adherence to the law (for Paul insists that this would have been impossible [Gal 3:21; Rom 3:20]), but through the faithfulness of Jesus of Nazareth, who was “born under the law, that he might redeem those who were under the law” (Gal 4:3-4). Jesus – the one whom they crucified and whom God raised from the dead – he is Israel’s Messiah, her representative, and it was stunningly through his death and resurrection that (in fulfillment of the Scriptures) God has renewed the covenant with his followers, opening up its membership to all the nations that they too might be saved and receive of the promises made to the fathers. This is what the early church believed, and there is nothing “supercessionist” about it.
It’s quite easy to pick out the anti-semitics like Luther and accuse the whole lot (from the patristics to the present) of holding to an inherently anti-Judaistic eschatology, but such an argument is hardly objective or Biblically based. There definitely still remains a remnant of that eschatology in many circles within the Reformed tradition, but titles like “replacement theology” and “supersessionism” have largely become straw-man caricatures that misframe the discussion when in fact relatively few NT scholars these days would personally wear that badge. For the most part the discussion has shifted, and there is usually much more nuance and balance to a Reformed take on Israel than the other guys usually portray in their ad hominem appeals to a post-holocaust pro-Israel sentiment.
Setting the various agendas to the side and reading the NT honestly, however, and we find that it’s abundantly clear about the fact that we Gentiles who were once strangers and aliens have now been grafted into Abraham’s family through Jesus, who is the perfect “Seed,” the “true Israel,” so that we too are God’s Israel, the Sons of God, heirs of the promise. To reject that is to outright ignore huge portions of the NT – not only bits of Romans, Galatians and Ephesians, but also Matthew, Hebrews, Revelation, etc. In telling Jesus’ story as the climax of Israel’s history, the NT writers proclaim that it was he who walked out Israel’s calling and that therefore the covenant has been reconstituted around him. That’s why all of those aspects of the law that were meant to keep Israel separate from other ethnicities (e.g., circumcision, dietary laws, etc) are no longer necessary – because the covenant is no longer ethnocentric and the calling of Israel to be the light of the world, the city on a hill, the ministers of God’s covenant faithfulness to the earth, is now the calling of everyone in Jesus, both Jew and Gentile alike (Gal 3; Eph 2).
Now, since the kingdom is no longer ethnocentric, but is instead Jesus-centric with the “middle wall of separation” broken down – making us Gentiles partakers of the “commonwealth of Israel,” fellow heirs of the “covenants of promise,” and thus nullifying the civil ordinances which were once meant to keep Israel separate from the Gentiles – then the OT promises made to Israel must now be understood, in light of what Jesus has done, to include saved Gentiles in every respect. This doesn’t mean that we now hold the OT with a different hermeneutic than the NT, rather it simply means that we must read the whole Bible for what it truly is: a story, a great moving narrative spanning across the ages, and as such we must read each chapter within the context of the whole, recognizing where we are at each point along the way.
Many today read the Bible in far too much of a Neo-Platonic “fortune cookie” manner, treating the 66 books as just a collection of timeless revelatory truths as if all communicated from one author at one time. It’s directly out of this thinking (as it was basically rehashed through the Enlightenment) that Dispensationalism emerged in the 19th century, treating eschatology as a big puzzle in which we simply grab all of the passages that have apocalyptic language and try to fit them into our timeline of the end-time events, without regard for their context and place within the grand covenantal narrative of history. If you do this, you will quickly find that there are things in the OT regarding the way God related to Israel that don’t quite line up with what He did through Jesus in the NT, and in pulling the testaments together you’ll inevitably have to compromise a plain sense reading of one or the other. In and of itself this reveals that something is amiss, that a good step back and a rethinking of some basic presuppositions is probably in order.
But I digress. Let’s get back to the discussion at hand.
Through Christ we have been brought into God’s family, a family which was once limited to one ethnicity but which has now opened up to include many, all on equal footing with the first, so that whatever promises pertain to the family corporately pertain to each and every individual as well. I don’t see how a distinction could be made between God’s calling to Gentile believers and His calling to Israel as a nation and people, because God’s calling to Israel as a nation and people is precisely that they would be the light of the world, and his promises of exaltation and prosperity are for that vocational purpose, that His name might be declared in all the earth, that His people would partner with Him in redeeming the earth (Isa 42; 49; Matt 5:14). And it was precisely this commission which Jesus gave to his followers after the resurrection (Matt 28:18-20). As the people of God, the new community of Christ, we are, as Revelation 1:6 says, a “kingdom of priests” – meaning that all who participate in the kingdom share in God’s great mediatory task of reconciling everything in heaven and on earth in Christ. That is the one calling of “Israel,” to Jew and Gentile alike, for that is the one purpose of the covenant (I say the to include every covenant, assuming one great overarching story in Scripture), spanning across the ages from the patriarchs to Christ to the new heavens and new earth.
This is obviously all very one sided and there is a lot more that needs to be said now that the box has been opened, but I think it’s as good a place to start as any. Taking my queue from Paul, this seems to be the route he takes in Romans before he moves into his “hearts desire and prayer to God for Israel” in chs. 9-11. It’s obvious that our eschatology really matters and has implications for how we relate to Israel in the present. But does it follow that for us to come out with a loving and prayerful attitude toward Israel like that which Paul exemplifies we must believe that they have a wholly distinct covenantal role to play in the future? Wouldn’t it bear the same fruit, and even greater fruit, to simply say that we should love and pray for unsaved Jews because YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, cares for them deeply, and that while they are His enemies, yet “they are beloved for the sake of the fathers” (Rom 11:28)?
In Christ,
Matt
This is why I could never keep a journal…
Coming with the landscape of my Myers-Briggs INTP personality type, I’m a perfectionist to the uttermost, especially when it comes to articulating ideas. What this means in outworking is that it’s completely normal for me to just stop in the middle of a series and disappear from the blogosphere for a couple months; because if I find that I’m unsettled about the content of that series, or if I find that in digging I’ve come upon a whole new batch of ideas that need to be cleaned up and worked into its presentation, then I must take my fingers off of the keyboard and go back to the process of excavation.
So I’ve been plowing away at Romans and Galatians in prayer, careful reading, rereading, consulting commentaries and having conversation after conversation. My heart is alive while I sit with at the feet of the Apostle and hear him tell the story of redemption, exulting the faithfulness of our God now unveiled through Jesus the Messiah. I’m stopping by to reassure you, I will return to this blog. There’s still a long way to go and a whole lot more to say on Paul’s theme of justification by faith. But If you’re an INTP, I’m sure you understand how it is.
Don’t worry, I’m still here…
I know we have a series hanging out here unfinished. I do intend to get to it, but the Gospel of Matthew just came out of nowhere and stole my attention for a week, and then I went on vacation to Seattle for a week, and then back to Matthew… Focus Matt! I will finish this series. I will.
Edit: I’ve decided I’m officially going to take a few week long break from a few things, including this blog. I’ll be back to finally finish the series on justification in June.
Justification by Faithfulness – Paul the Interpreter of Jesus (Part 2)
So we’ve answered one of the three questions put forth at the beginning of our study in Paul. We know that he maintained the traditional approval of Torah in his new theology, seeing it not as a taskmaster now unarmed by Calvary but instead as an eternal reflection of God’s character, laying out for us in this age the lifestyle pattern necessary for participation with Him. Through the Spirit everyone “in Christ” is enabled to walk out the same radical life of devotion to God as that which Christ himself lives (Rom 6:10-14). It’s important to note also that Paul interpreted Torah through the same relational hermeneutic as Jesus, teaching in similar terms that every command is “summed up” in the one command to love (Rom 13:8-10; Gal 5:14). Moving on now, two questions still face us, both with louder voice than before: Since Paul didn’t teach, as he is so often misrepresented as doing, that the law’s standard is overruled by the New Covenant, what place does faith then have in his Gospel, and on what grounds are we then justified?
Faith – In our English dictionaries it means something like “complete trust or confidence in someone or something”. Used in a religious sense it usually means “strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof”. I think this definition captures well the thought that comes to most people’s minds when they hear or talk about faith today, reflecting the heavy influence that Enlightenment and Existentialist thought has had on the Church over the last few centuries with the emphasis on mental assent to “doctrine” and personal experiences of “spiritual apprehension”. Now we know there is at least some truth to this definition of faith; for it’s clear that Paul emphasizes belief in the God “who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead” as necessary for salvation (Rom 4:24). But is believing in God through either the cognitive acceptance of truths about Him and/or a spiritual encounter with Him all that Biblical faith means? Indeed, is that all that Paul means when he speaks of faith in his epistles? He talks the most about it in Romans, so let’s look at a few key places in that letter and see if our findings line up with the definition above.
The first place in which pistis (the Greek word for faith) appears in Romans is in 1:5, where Paul is introducing himself, his vocation and his vision. Through the God of Jesus Christ, he says, he has received “grace and apostleship” for a particular purpose: to call the Gentiles into the “obedience of faith”. The NIV translates this tightly packed phrase as “the obedience that comes from faith,” suggesting that obedience and faith are separate, that obedience is something which should result from faith. But it is far more likely that the phrase means “the obedience of faith,” as in the NASB. Now it’s significant – and should give more than a second’s pause – that in Paul’s greatest letter, thought for centuries to be mostly about “justification by faith alone,” the emphasis from the outset is upon allegiance to Jesus’ Lordship; and it’s no less significant that this allegiance is said to consist in pistis. While it’s clear that pistis helps define hupakoe here, this cannot mean that mere belief is itself counted as obedience; we know that by what Paul goes on say of hupakoe later (5:19; 6:12-16; 10:16; 15:18; 16:19). As noted before, “obedience” is not a nebulous concept; it has direct ethical and moral connotations, and Paul consistently uses it that way. Therefore the two words must be mutually defining to mean something like “faithful commitment” or “believing obedience”.
Paul is saying that through the proclamation of the Gospel – as it’s been revealed in Israel’s Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth – he seeks to call the nations into covenant relationship with Israel’s God, thus forming one renewed Jew-plus-Gentile family of God. So it is that in this dense phrase, concluding his introduction, Paul is mapping out for us the course and destination for his whole discourse in Romans; and surprisingly, he does not say that it’s about belief in Christ, but rather that it’s about faithful commitment to Christ.
The next key place where pistis appears is in Paul’s initial thesis statement of 1:17, where, again in terse form, he uses the word three times: “For in it (the Gospel) the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘The just shall live by faith.’” When we compare the first part of this verse with the restated thesis of 3:21-26 its message becomes much clearer: God’s righteousness is manifested clearly in this age through the good news of the faithfulness (pistis) of His Son to all who respond in faith (pistis). “From faith to faith” is not about the believer’s process of maturing in faith, rather it’s about a faithful response to the faithfulness of Christ. Now the important thing to note here is that human pistis is the reciprocation of God’s pistis revealed in Jesus. So the question we must then ask is this: If our faith is a response to His faith, how can our faith be defined simply as our belief in God? Is God’s pistis His belief in us? This may seem to some like an over exhaustion of the phrase in 1:17, however, so we’ll leave this question until Paul forces us to bring it up again in 3:3.
Moving on to 1:17b, we come upon Paul’s strategic quotation of Habakkuk 2:4: “The righteous shall live by faith.” It was over an intense scrutiny of this verse that an uncertain Martin Luther, struggling with thoughts of an angry and vindictive God, had what he later called his “tower experience,” the most pivotal moment of his life. Prior to this event, whenever he came upon the phrase “the righteousness of God” in Scripture he tells us that he was filled with anger and hatred toward God. “I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.” Luther’s soul finally found comfort and shelter from that mental image of God when in reading this verse the idea struck him that perhaps it was not talking about an active righteousness that God demands, but rather a passive righteousness that He gives to those who believe the Gospel. He concluded that Paul, in quoting this phrase from Habakkuk, meant that the sinner is justified – i.e., declared righteous – by God through faith alone in the work and death of Jesus, not by his or her own work or keeping of the law. Or as He would say later, we are saved by the “alien” righteousness of Christ, not by a righteousness of our own. Thus Martin Luther escaped the unsympathetic wrath of the indulgence preacher’s God, through simply believing in the placating death of His righteous Son.
Personally, I think that in his vexation Luther had the right question but ultimately gave the wrong answer. That he had the right question is evident by the state of the Church in the late Middle Ages and how the “righteousness of God” was perceived and preached. Reading about the righteousness of that God invokes pictures of a capricious and unsympathetic tyrant who, with the ever-foreboding threat of prison, demands the riches of the world from a kingdom of mere peasants. He was nothing like the relational God of the patriarchs and prophets, and he was definitely not the God revealed in Jesus. A drastic theological change was obviously in order. The fact that Luther offered the wrong answer, however, is clear by a sound reading of Romans 1:17 and its OT background.
When we look to Habakkuk 2:4 and its context we see something far different than what Luther came away from Romans 1:17 with. In defense of Luther’s interpretation some commentators have suggested that Paul simply ran through his mental concordance for passages in which “faith” and “righteousness” appear side by side, came up with Habakkuk 2:4 and Genesis 15:6, and then liberally applied them to his doctrine of “justification by faith” without regard for their original context and meaning. But this will not do; for when we observe the way Paul generally uses Scripture in deliberative arguments, and the intentional way in which he uses these specific passages at key places in the present argument (and in Galatians 3), we find that reason insists we go to the OT and learn why exactly it is that he uses them.
Following reason to Habakkuk we find a prophet puzzling about the purposes of God as he witnesses the Chaldean’s march against Israel and prevail. How could YHWH allow His chosen people to be overrun and defeated by a godless nation? Does this not call into question His righteousness? Are not His faithfulness and justice on the line? Right away we see that the question plaguing Habakkuk is the very question Paul is answering in Romans; the question God answered when He reached down from heaven in the death and resurrection of His Son. The initial response to Habakkuk’s questioning, however, is given in the form of a vision, and the fulfillment of the vision is said to wait for a day in the distant future (Hab 2:3). For the time being, God says, His true people, living in an evil age in the midst of an evil nation, “will live by faith.”
What “faith” means here is not an abstract believe in the existence of God, as it has become since the Enlightenment, but rather the firm conviction, borne out by a responsive faithfulness, that God Himself will be faithful and act in time and space to deliver the one who believes. The Hebrew word translated pistis in Greek and faith in English actually has a much stronger connotation of faithfulness and fidelity than either the Greek or the English suggest. Of its forty-eight different appearances in the OT, thirty-six of those are translated “faithfulness,” “faithfully,” or “faithful” in the NASB. Quite surprisingly however, and undoubtedly due to the traditional Protestant understanding of Romans 1:17, only once, in Habakkuk 2:4, is it translated simply as “faith”. Now considering the context of Habakkuk, and the actual meaning of the word used in 2:4, how can the traditional rendering as “faith” be justifiable?
So far the evidence in Romans has been unanimously in favor of translating pistis as “faithfulness,” but the case becomes even stronger when we arrive at Paul’s next use of the word: “For what if some did not believe (apisteo)? Will their unbelief (apistia) make the faithfulness (pistis) of God without effect?” (Rom 3:3) Here Paul is addressing directly the question of God’s righteousness related to Israel’s current state. If Israel has been unfaithful to the covenant, as Paul has shown they have (2:1-29), what does this mean for God? Will He turn his back on them as they have on Him, or will His arms remain outstretched to any and all who might return? Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, is resolute: God will remain steadfast. Though he opens the doors of the covenant to welcome in the Gentiles, still He will not forget ethnic Israel. Interestingly, pistis is the word Paul uses to describe God’s commitment to the covenant in 3:3. This brings up the same question we asked in 1:17a, but it now comes much clearer. If Israel’s lack of faith is defined by God’s steadfast faith, how can human faith be then defined as mere belief? God’s pistis is His commitment to His saving purpose, His faithfulness. Therefore human pistis (or lack thereof, as in 3:3) is a responsive commitment to that saving purpose, an answering faithfulness.
We could go on throughout Romans; however, I believe the point has been made well enough that in Paul pistis does not merely mean belief, but also includes faithful commitment, or believing obedience, and therefore involves the subsequent action that proves that belief. Paul puts it best when talking about the scope of Abraham’s family in chapter 4. He says that those who are yet uncircumcised (i.e., Gentiles) will be counted right and included in the covenant family when they “walk in the steps of faith” which Abraham had before he was circumcised (4:9-12). If Paul were contrasting faith with works in the absolute sense, he would not have insisted that there are steps to be walked out in faith. One could easily replace “walk in the steps of faith” with “do the works of faith”. In conclusion, then, we find that “faith” in Paul means much the same thing that we saw “mercy” means in Jesus. Both our Lord and the Apostle stress faithful devotion in their treatment of the law, and, as we will see in the next post, they both insist that such devotion is required for justification. Or, to say it the way Paul does in Romans 2, it’s the doers of the law who will be justified in the day when God judges the secrets of men by Jesus Christ.
