Tag Archive - Israel

By Gentiles, By Jesus

September 3, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 11 Comments

When we last left our hero, he was explaining how Isa 59 refers to the going out of the gospel to the gentiles:

I do not want you to be uniformed of this mystery, brothers and sisters, that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the gentiles has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved; as it is written, “The deliverer will go forth out of Zion, he will remove ungodliness from Jacob, and this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins.”

It is crucial to keep together Paul’s own claim and the verse he cites to support it.

The first part of Paul’s claim is that the hardening of Israel leads to gentile in-gathering. This assertion he supports by appeal to Isa 59: “the deliverer will go forth out of Zion.”

So what about “all Israel will be saved”? The idea that Israel awaits a coming day of salvation has been an important element in the widespread reading of this verse that looks forward to Israel’s salvation with the return of Jesus.

Within the context of Romans 11, the return-of-Jesus mechanism for Israel’s salvation is problematic. You see, before Paul cites Isa 59, and afterwards also, he puts forth a very different mechanism for Israel’s salvation.

The in-gathering of the gentiles will, itself, be the means God uses to save ethnic Israel.

Israel is not saved by the going forth of Jesus out of heaven at his return; Israel is saved by the going forth of Jesus out of Zion to save the gentiles.

  • Israel’s transgression→Gentile salvation→Israel Jealous (v. 13)
  • Gentile mission glorified→Israel saved (vv. 13-14)
  • Israel’s disobedience→Gentile mercy→Israel mercy (v. 31)

Gentile salvation is the direct result of Israel’s rejection of the gospel. And, Paul anticipates that this gentile salvation will come full circle: the Judeans, recognizing that the gentiles have what is rightfully Israel’s, will turn and believe the gospel, thus receiving mercy and attaining salvation.

In other words, the idea that Israel will be saved by a direct heavenly intervention at Jesus’ return meets an insurmountable hurdle in Romans 11 itself. The way that Paul anticipates Israel being saved is not through Jesus’ return but through Paul’s own gentile mission.

So let’s come back to 11:25: “A partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the gentiles has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved.”

See how this verse contains the exact same expectations as the rest of the chapter: Israel’s rejection leads to gentile ingathering, which is itself the means by which Israel will be saved.

This is exactly the story of Israel’s ultimate salvation that Paul intends to prove by his citation of Isa 59

And so, when we read this: “The deliverer will go forth from Zion, he will remove ungodliness from Jacob,” we should understand that the going forth from Zion is the means by which the gentiles are included within the people of God, and the “removing ungodliness from Jacob” is the subsequent, and consequent, in-gathering of Israel.

Isa 59 does not anticipate the parousia, as Paul reads it, it anticipates Israel responding to the gentiles salvation by putting their faith in Christ.

The Return of Jesus for Israel in Rom 11?

September 2, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 8 Comments

“The deliverer will come from Zion, he will remove ungodliness from Jacob” (Rom 11:25).

Among many Christians, this is a popular verse about the return of Jesus. Among American evangelicals and Dispensationals, it has often been a source of hope for Israel’s final salvation. The verse in Paul is a citation from Isaiah, and Paul says, “Thus all Israel shall be saved, as it is written, the deliverer will come from Zion…”

All Israel, then, will be saved when Jesus comes back.

But does this “Jesus is coming, look Jewish” reading hold up?

Let’s look at a couple of factors. First, how does Paul use the word “Zion”?

The only other use of this word in the Pauline corpus is also part of an OT citation, his invocation of Isa 28:16 in Rom 9:33: “Israel… did not attain to the law. Why? Because no through faithfulness but as through works–they stumbled over the stumbling stone, just as it is written, ‘Behold! I lay in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, and everyone who believes in him shall not be put to shame” (Rom 9:32-33).

Here, the referent of Zion is quite earthly. The one who has been placed as stumbling stone is the crucified and risen Christ. His faithfulness is to be the object of the people’s faith. The point of laying the stone “in Zion” is precisely so that it can be in the presence of the people–to be believed or stumbled upon.

Is it possible to read this verse as referring to an earthly Jerusalem? Indeed it is–and to do so brings us within the orbit of not only the previous mention of Zion in Rom 9, but the overall argument of Rom 11.

If we hold the idea from ch. 9 in our heads, we come to ch. 11 with the notion that the presence of Jesus in Zion is a cause of Israel’s stumbling–paradoxically, he is present both as the one who can save and as the one who is stumbled over.

In fact, this is exactly the problem Paul is dealing with throughout ch. 11: Israel has stumbled over the stumbling stone–they have rejected Jesus as God’s promised salvation.

What is the result of Israel’s rejection of the gospel? As Paul delineates it in ch. 11, it is this: salvation goes out to the gentiles:

  • By their transgression salvation has come to gentiles, 11:11
  • their transgression is riches for the world, 11:12
  • their rejection is reconciliation of the world, 11:15
  • they were broken off in order that gentiles might be ingrafted, 11:17
  • they are enemies for the gentiles’ sake, 11:28
  • they were faithless so that gentiles might be shown mercy, 11:31

The entire chapter, in other words, points toward one particular result of Israel “stumbling over the stumbling stone”: salvation goes out from Israel to the Gentiles.

Or, as 11:26 puts it, citing Isa 59: “The deliverer will go out from Zion.”

Indeed, the statement for which Paul offers Isa 59 as proof is this: “A partial hardening has happened until the fulness of the Gentiles has come in, and thus all Israel shall be saved. As it is written, ‘The deliverer will go forth out of Zion…’”

The “going out of Zion” is not the eschatological future, it is the eschatological present. It is not about the return of Jesus some years hence, but the proclamation of the gospel to the ends of the earth.

This part of the citation, the deliverer going forth out of Zion, speaks to Paul’s and others’ work in bringing in the full number of the gentiles (11:25)

But what about “removing ungodliness from Jacob”? What about “all Israel shall be saved”?

That is the next act in the story as Paul was anticipating it to unfold. We’ll look at that tomorrow.

Judgment & the Story of Israel

May 22, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 0 Comments

Atonement is tricky. On Thursday I was wrestling with the giving of Jesus by the Father in comparison to the self-giving God of more developed Trinitarian thought. Part of the challenge is that the language and larger theological framework of God giving God’s beloved for the sake of the world is larger than just Jesus’ self-giving.

Jesus’ becomes the pattern for believers’. And, tying together earlier posts about Romans 11 and atonement, it seem to be the language Paul uses to describe how God is currently postured for Israel: “If their rejection be the reconciliation of the world…”

Karl Barth places the whole idea of judgment on God’s people within a much larger biblical story.

As the bearer of the revelation imparted to it, Israel only too clearly means catastrophe for the surrounding world. But even more clearly Israel itself as the recipient of revelation has to suffer in this world. It encounters in its history incomparably much more evil than good. (Dogmatics 1.2, 86)

Prophets can’t advocate the cause of the nation AND YHWH, but must always advocate for YHWH, and so are rejected. The constant rebellion and rejection of God means that its only hope, continually, is in deliverance and salvation, unmerited, by its God: “Between covenant and its fulfillment there is suffering and death for those in whom it ought to be fulfilled.”

And as if Barth insists on saying in its most dangerous form what is most dangerous to say, he continues about the faithful ones in Israel:

They are themselves the first to have to suffer, and they are themselves the ones who have to suffer most, for the truth of their proclamation, for the fact that the God who has ever loved Israel is such a hidden God. And the same order is repeated again in the figure of the single righteous man, who, without special office, simply lives concretely the existence of Israel before his God… Thus the end of the world, or the judgment of the world, is seen above all in Israel. To it especially God is a hidden God. It especially, the beloved, chosen, sanctified nation, the house of God, must be the place where the old aeon begins to pass in face of the coming of God and His new work. (88-89)

From the NT we might remember the saying that it’s time for judgment to begin with the house of God, or we may think of Jesus’ prophetic ministry about the coming destruction of Jerusalem–and then, also, we must think of the cross.

This is, of course, all quite dangerous. It can lead to the problem of thinking that Israel bears all of this judgment, or is the place of all this judgment, because it is especially bad and thus especially worthy of judgment.

But there are two very good ways of heading this off.

The first is to recognize that in this pattern of giving the beloved in judgment, Jesus does stand at the middle. Jesus becomes the curse of the Law, death, thus ending the reign of the Law as the curse- and death-bringer. Jesus himself stands in this role of judged with death.

And the pattern does continue out into the church. We are summoned to take up our cross and follow. We are called to be the judgment-bearers. We are called *gulp* to fill up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.

This talk of being the place where judgment is made known to foreshadow the final judgment is not only about Israel, it is about the cross, and it is about the church. Perhaps getting hold of this is a first key in getting hold of a more biblical understanding of the death of Jesus and our own participation in it.

Here, in this death, in this judgment, the holy God is revealed. Because the holy God must be revealed in a world of sin and death.

A Flawed Gospel?

May 6, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews, Quotes with 3 Comments

What does a flawed gospel look like? Dunn reads Paul like this:

What is so agonizing for Paul is that if Israel does not finally embrace the Christ, then his own gospel is flawed at its heart–the gospel of God’s righteousness, his free grace and faithfulness to the undeserving and ungodly; if it does not continue to Israel despite Israel’s unfaithfulness then it is not the gospel which he proclaims to all. (Romans 9-16, 532)

The Death of Jesus–some wonderings

April 16, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 24 Comments

In Rom 3, Paul says that God publicly displayed Jesus as a hilasterion.

Some of our Bibles translate this “sacrifice of atonement,” some “a propitiation.”

The other option is that this word is being used as it was employed in the Greek Old Testament (LXX): a place where sacrifice is made. The point would be here that God’s patience and passing over of earlier sins comes to an end when he publicly displays Jesus as the place where humanity is reconciled with God, the mercy seat.

This reading has the advantage of fitting into the argument Paul has been making for 2.5 chapters and will make for another full chapter afterward: God is not only the God of Jews. God did not make final atonement in a hidden, secret inner room of the Temple. He made it in public, on the cross. Or, as Paul says in Gal 3: “Before your eyes Jesus was publicly placarded as crucified.”

Hmmm….

The other wondering I had was tied into questions of law, sin, and atonement. As it is laid out in some of its renditions, the penal substitution idea begins with the twin premises that God is holy and we are unholy–the latter being more clearly articulated as, “we are law-breakers.”

But Paul doesn’t seem to think that the appellation “law breaker” applies to all of us.

Just Jewish people.

In Rom 5, the one place where the notion of sin being “imputed” to someone is spoken of, what we hear is that sin is not imputed where there is no law. The points are that (a) Adam did break a rule from God; (b) death still reigned even over people who had not broken any kind of law; and (c) there is still a sense of all people sinning–despite not having a law to break.

So it seems to me that Penal Substitution, and a number of Christian theologies in general, have some work to do in reframing how it is that all people are guilty. It’s not by breaking some law–that’s what happens to Adam, what happens in Israel, but not to everyone.

It also seems to me, that as much as I want to avoid it, I keep coming around again to N. T. Wright’s claim that the purpose of the law is to exacerbate sin and death within Israel per se, so that God could disarm them where they were strongest. Sin is not reckoned where there is no law, and that is why God gives a law–so that through Israel’s faithlessness God’s faithfulness might abound (3:1ff.), so that within a world that manifests God’s wrath God’s righteousness might be made known (1:16-19).

Jesus: One Scene in a Larger Story

October 5, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 0 Comments

Jesus as we meet him on the pages of the Gospels is not living out a self-contained story, but is acting out a final, climactic scene in the on-going drama of Israel that stretches back to creation itself.

In Paul’s letters as well, the story of the church is only intelligible as the continuation of the story of Israel. Paul is not merely making arguments, he is narrating the story of Israel with his gentile churches as full participants in the story. Paul is a narrative theologian, striving to help his Jesus-following churches understand a new past, present, and future that are all-determinative for their identity now that they are followers of Jesus. To understand who they are in Christ, Paul’s gentile churches no less than we ourselves required a comprehensive reframing of their story, what Richard Hays refers to as a “conversion of the imagination.”[i]

[i] Richard B. Hays, “The Conversion of the Imagination: Scripture and Eschatology in 1 Corinthians,” in The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel’s Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 1-24.

Encore Presentation: The Structure of the Universe (part 6: Why Israel?)

April 21, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

Note: This is the 6th installment of a series of posts making an encore presentation after their previous happy home, Sibboleth, was unceremoniously executed this past fall.

The Structure of the Universe (Part 6: Why Israel?)

“There is the first Adam and the Second Adam, and there is none in between.” Those frightening words, uttered in the context of a course on Christology in a Reformed seminary setting, starkly raise the question: why Israel?

In Westminster Calvinism, the Law is the structuring principle for the universe–at least as pertains to the relationship between God and humanity. When people, through Adam’s sin, became incapable of attaining to the Law, God created a co-context of a covenant of grace which would be good for us so long as God brought Jesus into the equation to keep the Law for us so that we could be saved on the basis of the covenant of works.

All of this supposedly happens in Genesis 1-3.

But once the Reformed Tradition has taken the notion of Law and teleported it back from Sinai to the Garden; and once it has taken the notion of world-blessing covenant and teleported it back from Abraham to the gates east of Eden, there is no reason why Israel has to exist except as a contingent container for receiving the truth of God as God saw fit to reveal it from time to time.

Once again I invite you to study the footnotes of the Westminster Confession. Every place where the Confession footnotes scripture to support its idea of a “covenant of works,” what scripture is talking about is the Law God gave at Sinai. And every place where the Confession footnotes scripture in support of its idea of a “covenant of grace,” what scripture is talking about is an actual covenant made in time with Abraham and/or his descendants. For this moment in the scholastic Reformed Tradition, what is “real” is not what happens in history, but the transhistorical entities that hover beyond space and time–abstract concepts of works and grace.

In such a world, there is no inherent value in the story of Israel. It is simply a place-holder until the non-Israel-bound covenant of works can be fulfilled so that the non-Israel-bound covenant of grace might be consummated so that the non-Israel-tied Law by which all are judged alike might have its fulfillment imputed to some and its condemnation wrought in others.

Tellingly, when the Reformed Tradition began to dabble in Biblical Theology with the work of Geerhardus Vos, it fancied itself studying “the history of special revelation.” See what that’s saying: the story of Israel is merely a container for what’s really important: the increasing revelation of the knowledge of transhistorical truths about God (that would find their consummation when Jesus comes to do the Law and thereby show us who God really is: the righteous law-keeping One).

Even for Vos, the story isn’t the thing, the revelation of the propositional truths about who God is, that’s the thing.

So once again we step back to ask what difference it makes whether or not one sees the cosmos structured on a system of law.

It makes a difference for how we see the place of Israel within God’s story. Why did it take 2,000 years for Christians in the West to see that Paul really means Rom 9-11? Our idea of the gospel was too far removed from the narrative of Israel.

Why does the New Perspective, with its insistence on seeing the story of Israel at the middle of everything, garner such harsh opposition? Because to say that Israel is at the middle of everything means that God’s relationship with the cosmos and humans in particular is tied to deeply contingent and historical factors: actual covenants in space and time, eras of history within which God acts differently toward different people, an identity for God that is tied to events and people within history rather than abstract, absolute categories.

Once you have said that Israel matters–that the actual covenants with Abraham and Moses and David matter–then you have cut away the exegetical moorings by which Reformed theology has created its Works versus Grace antithesis, cut away the scriptural “proof” for the Reformed version of the covenantal structure of the cosmos, and thereby undermined the way in which the early Reformed Tradition opposed Roman Catholicism and articulated its doctrine of justification.

This does not mean that Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again; and it doesn’t mean that in the framework of the 16th century debates that the Roman Catholics were right about everything after all. But it does mean that the recognition that Israel really matters, like the recognition that Jesus’ humanity is richly textured in its importance, like the recognition that “atonement” is about more (not less!) than the law court, like the recognition that Christ is the goal of the Law and not vice versa–this recognition sends us back to the beginning to ask afresh: What is the world and God’s intention for it? What’s wrong with the world? Is God’s purpose to rescue from or redeem the world with these sets of problems? And what, if the latter, must God do to affect that redemption?

Encore Presentation: The Structure of the Universe (part 4: WDJD)

April 19, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 7 Comments

Note: the following is part 4 in an on-going encore presentation of a series that appeared last summer on my former blog, Sibboleth.

The Structure of the Universe (Part 4: WDJD?)

There you were, 12 years ago, having gotten your hands on a copy of Jesus and the Victory of God. You and all your cigar smokin’, whiskey drinkin’, Southern Presbyterian friends were starting to develop man crushes on N. T. Wright.

Then it happened: What Saint Paul Really Said came along, in close proximity to “The Shape of Justification,” and the hatred with which you hated him became greater than the love with which you loved him.

What happened?

The picture of the cosmos on offer in the conservative Reformed tradition is based almost entirely on a particular reading of Paul. (Check out the footnotes to the Westminster Confession sometime: the legal structure of the universe is a theological axiom built on reading Galatians 3 as referring to Adam where the text is clearly referring to Moses.) This picture of the cosmos is, of course, tied up with a reading of Paul’s view of the solution to humanity’s problem: we need to be justified in the heavenly courtroom, Jesus’ life and death enables that justification, Rom 3 says so, etc.

As I mentioned yesterday, this leaves the question of Jesus’ ministry wide open as, in fact, we see that in the Reformed Tradition and the evangelical heritage it’s spawned we have traditionally had very little idea what to do with the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels.

So, when N. T. Wright stepped in, this is what he offered: (1) A reading of Jesus that connected his ministry deeply with the covenant(s) God had made with Israel. This was an instant point of affinity for Reformed types. (2) A reading of Jesus that emphasized the kingdom of God–something that Reformed types had been made aware of through the work of Herman Ridderbos et al. (3) A reading of Jesus that stuck it to the minimalist historical Jesus scholars–a purportedly “historical Jesus” work that never says that any piece of data from the NT isn’t historical. Here, surely, was a friend!

But the picture of salvation that Wright drew was dependent on a different view of the structure and order of the cosmos–one in which the particulars of God’s covenant relationship with Israel are the particulars through which God is going to exercise a universal saving action to restore the entire world to Godself. In other words, this reading of Jesus depends on a fundamentally different understanding of the cosmos than the law-based picture of Reformed Theology, but folks in the Reformed world were able to appropriate it unawares because conservative, traditional Reformed Theology did not have any stake in the Gospels. Its adherents didn’t see the crack in the door because they were only dealing with Jesus.

Because here’s the thing that happened with What Saint Paul Really Said: Wright simply took his understanding of the cosmos in need of restoration, Israel as God’s agent, and Jesus as the one fulfilling the destiny of Israel (i.e., his reading of the story of the Gospels) and read that same narrative off the pages of Paul. But now he was coming into direct conflict with passages in which the Reformed folk had a stake. And the jig was up.

When Wright wants to set the stage to answer the question, “What did Jesus do?”, he, in step with the Reformed tradition he came out of, began his answer with an assessment of the connection between creation and covenant. But…

There are two crucial differences: (1) Wright sees in the OT’s assessment of the “problem” not only sin but also injustice, persecution, groaning creation, etc. In other words, the restoration of the cosmos is going to have to deal with the powers that war against God’s good purposes–powers that are greater than the sum of the rebellion lodged in persons’ hearts.

(2) For Wright the covenants made by YHWH to deal with the problem are covenants established with people in time. This points to the most significant underlying difference in perspective: For scripture and for Wright what matter are the actual things that God does in history. Confessional Reformed Theology has taken the covenant language of scripture, translated it into extra-biblical ideas of non-historical covenants of works and of grace, and then read those extra-biblical ideas back into the biblical accounts of how salvation works. Israel doesn’t matter in the least, it all could have been done without her.

What did Jesus do? For Wright, Jesus restored the reign of God, overcoming the powers of sin and death, dying to absorb the penalty due for sin, replacing humanity in its seat as rightful ruler of the world on YHWH’s behalf–and all this as a way of saying, “Fulfilled Israel’s vocation to restore humanity, became the faithful God-honoring second Adam, and offered restoration from ‘exile’.”

For the Reformed world, Jesus kept the law for us, died to take our condemnation, and rises to… well… that doesn’t really matter. And all this as a way of saying, “Jesus fulfilled Adam’s vocation to be obedient so we could be rewarded under the provisions of the covenant of works.”

What does it mean to be second Adam? Does Israel have a place in the story? Is the original vision of humanity’s purpose being to rule the world on God’s behalf significant? Are the narrative threads of creation’s curse, of broken human relationships, of broken relations between humans and the created order–do these play into the work of Jesus? Are they part of the structure of God’s cosmos which Jesus came to restore?

When the universe is understood to be structured in a relationship to God that sustains all these other relationships, those questions become the heart of the question “What did Jesus do?” When the moral law is understood to be the structure of the universe, those are back-burner questions, questions that do not demand our attention as followers of Jesus, things for which we can simply wait and hope so long as we have been made right with God.

N. T. Wright is correctly drawing our attention to the fact that being made right with God comes hand in hand with the restoration of the cosmos. This is what Jesus did. We can’t have one without the other–and having both as our “gospel” should markedly affect how we view our vocation, and how we assess whether we and our communities are living faithfully.

Adam is Israel? Ok, maybe not so fast…

March 3, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

I hereby repent in sackcloth and ashes for saying “YES!”

Yesterday I linked to a post by Pete Enns entitled, “Adam is Israel,” and simply said, “YES!”

The beauty of a blog is that it’s a work in progress, and I can perpetuate my posting by disagreeing not only with the rest of the world but also myself.

Ok, so, maybe I’m not totally disagreeing with myself. But I think I’d nuance the issue a bit differently than Pete does over there.

My primary concern is to say that the creation stories are written for the purpose of prequelling the story of Israel. That is to say, they are not written to be allegories of Israel’s creation (as some seem to be taking Pete’s post, though I don’t think that’s what he’d say); and I don’t think they’re even written to be metaphors of Israel’s life before God.

I’d say that they are written to tell the story of the world in such a way that the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and possibly even the Davidic Kings, would be seen as fulfilling God’s purposes for His human creations.

So yes, they are stories of everything, but stories of everything for the purpose of privileging the subsequent Israelite narratives as being the continuation of the creational purposes of YHWH.

So I think I’d rather say, “Israel is Adam,” than, “Adam is Israel,” eschewing all notions that the transitive property is relevant to theological articulation. Such a fine distinction also enables one to make some important caveats that I think are essential (that creation and covenant are two different ways of being related to God, for one thing).

That is all. For now. Until I get Pete my post on Adam and Jesus to put up at Biologos…