Election-Historical Thinking in Romans 9-11, and Ourselves

From the patristic era, East and West, to the nineteenth century, the classical exegesis of Romans 9-11 and especially of Romans 9 failed to find the real question shaping the Pauline text. That real question asked how finally to make religious sense of Israel's refusal to enter into messianic salvation. Had the word of God—the word promising Israel salvation—failed?

Paul rejected the notion that the word of God had failed. Romans 9 says: no, for the word of God was addressed not to the physical but to the election-historical children of Abraham. Romans 10 says: no, it was Israel that failed, namely by preferring a righteousness of its own devising to "the righteousness of God." Romans 11 says: no, for he saved a remnant; moreover, just as God turned the refusal of Israel into the salvation of the Gentiles, so he will turn the salvation of the "full number" of Gentiles into the salvation of "all Israel" (Rom 11:25-26).

Classical exegesis took the key question to be: why are some people saved and others damned? That the original Pauline point of a text might be missed is understandable, but how did it happen that readers installed themselves in this misconstrual, mounting and sustaining for centuries a dedicated exploration of issues that Paul himself had not raised? Whatever the worth of the inquiry into the predestination of the individual to glory, that question was not Paul's question and none of the answers given to it over more than a thousand years can be attributed to Paul. (Indeed, many if not most of the answers, from the Greek Church Fathers to the Reformers, would have to be adjudged incompatible with Paul's own theology.)

It is clear that the Pauline text was in several respects opaque to the gentile Church. Without elaboration or insistence Paul had supposed a certain set of questions vital to the earliest Christian thinking, such as the primary question in these chapters: how to make coherent sense of Israel's unbelief in Jesus? Paul furthermore had proceeded to deal with his questions and sub-questions in a way intelligible, no doubt, in his own time and milieu, but profoundly perplexing in a new time and new milieu. Paul's style included a way of drawing on biblical resources and notably on the biblical writers' election-historical schemes of thought. In Paul, questions and answers alike belonged to the horizons and perspectives—to the "code"—of biblical thought forms. But among gentile Christians a generation or two later, there was no longer the sheer wonder that even Gentiles could be saved. Having lost interest in Israel as the primary rightful heir to messianic salvation, and hence incurious respecting the intricate and remote resources that Paul had deployed in his passionate pondering of the destiny of Israel, gentile Christians could no longer lock easily onto Paul's level and line of discourse. As the burden of his meditation became progressively foreign to them, they had to find a different meaning in the text. It was not until the latter-nineteenth century that a philologically instructed historical exegesis in Germany finally broke through the constraint of classical theology and recovered the structural lines of the thought of the historical Paul.

We are now aware that Paul was not bent on a theology of the predestination of the individual to glory. This, however, does not mean that we have managed to measure up to the Pauline text. The text, it seems, continues to be alien to us. It is little preached. The Church at large seems to have relegated these chapters to "time-conditioned material," that is, what Austin Farrar once called "period trash."¹ It is not that concern for Israel or for Jewish-Christian relations is of little interest among interpreters and thinkers today. On the contrary, this concern has never been more intense. But so far from promoting a sober and solid recovery of Paul's own thinking, it has led to the most well-intentioned but extraordinarily misleading efforts of inter-faith...