Today we begin the second half of Romans. From the jump there is a remarkable shift in tone and argument. You see, here Paul starts to address the elephant in the room: If everything he’s said is true, why have the vast majority of Jews not accepted his gospel?
Let’s see what he has to say.
(Note, There was not good way to divide this post up thematically, so in the interest of time, I’m splitting it into two half-posts.)
Summary of the Text
Just like back in chapter 4, Paul has zoomed out and is making a big, broad-strokes argument here. As such, I’ll be tackling all of chapter 9 here. Please see your favourite Bible for the full text, but here is a summary:
[9.1-5] Paul is grieved by his people’s rejection of the gospel. Everything he holds dear about Jesus — adoption, glory, covenants of faith, the precepts, liturgical ceremonies, and promises of the Law, and Jesus himself — belong first and foremost to them.
[9.6-18] Their rejection of the gospel is not because all these things have failed them. Election has always been a mystery. Abraham was chosen but not all of his sons were; Isaac was chosen but not all of his sons were. The Scriptures even say that God hated Isaac’s son Esau! Does this mean God is unjust? No, God’s election God’s business alone.
[9.19-33] We have no right to complain about election one way or the other; a creature has no say in how or for what purpose it was made. But none of this is cut-and-dry: The Gentiles were ‘not chosen’ and yet God has called many of them. Likewise, God chose Israel, yet as Isaiah complains, only a small remnant of the people remained faithful. So Gentiles have obtained a righteousness they never sought, and Jews who were given the law failed to live it out. And why is that? Because they didn’t approach the Law from a position of faith, but from a position of merit-seeking. The law of faith has become for them like the stumbling stone about which Isaiah prophesied: “See, I am laying in Zion a stone that will make people stumble, a rock that will make them fall, and whoever trusts in him will not be put to shame.”
Experience & Encounter
I have to admit that I feel some sympathy for the scholars who feel like this second half of Romans is somehow less important than the first (Witherington 220).* It really does feel like crashing from heaven to earth, from the heights of promises of future glory and the victory we have in Christ, to the muck and mire of concerns about who is in and who is out and God’s justice in that. But of course, Paul is writing the letter to demonstrate that the gospel reveals rather than complicates God’s justice. So these questions make sense, even if I don’t ‘like’ them.
God is really the main character in this passage. The picture Paul paints of God is one of absolute transcendence and sovereignty: Not only is God above and beyond the world, moulding creation like a potter moulds clay, but also above human questions of fairness. It’s a majestic vision of God, one who decides the fates of people and peoples with the stroke of a proverbial pen, but it’s not one that meshes well with how God is conceived more generally in the New Testament. I really feel the tensions between divine transcendence and immanence, and human contingency and freedom here.
Explore
I think what Paul is saying in Romans 9 is pretty straightforward: His own people’s rejection of the gospel creates a problem for his thesis that the gospel about Jesus reveals God’s justice. Basically, if God’s act to turn outsiders into insiders has ended up turning many insiders into outsiders, how is this just? Romans 9 starts a new three-chapter-long section defending God’s ongoing faithfulness to the covenants with Israel. In chapter 9, Paul argues that God can, and has throughout Israel’s own history, treated different people differently in order to enact salvation, and Israel has in turn responded differently at different times to God’s activities. In other words, there is nothing new with what Paul has experienced, and God remains faithful.
But our study so far has raised some questions that might help us better understand what’s happening:
- How does Romans 9 fit into the bigger arc of the letter?
- How does Paul see God’s justice at work in salvation history?
- What do the case studies Paul pulls out tell us?
- How might Paul’s description of God’s sovereignty here inform the earlier discussion about predestination and human freedom?
Romans 9 within Romans
Romans 9 marks a clear departure from what it follows. This separation is marked by not only by a shift in topic, but also but dramatic changes in tone and rhetorical style (Eberhart; Witherington 237). For example, Paul shifts once again to the first person — this time likely not taking on a character like last time, but in order to better make an emotional plea. He also starts extensively quoting scripture: close to a third of Paul’s quotations in his letters are in Romans 9-11 (Witherington 237).
If everybody agrees that Paul is doing something new here, they don’t agree on what exactly it is he’s doing. I think it’s best to consider it a refutation or prolepsis, “an anticipatory rebuttal which forestalls certain arguments Paul might expect to hear when he gets to Rome” (Witherington 238). Not only has Paul has been anticipating rebuttals throughout the text so far (e.g., much of chapters 6-7), but the appeals to emotion and mercy we see here are characteristic of this mode of Roman rhetoric (See Quintillian, Instit. Or. 4.1.49-50). No matter which way we interpret it, we do see that it is still in service to Paul’s major theme: God’s justice. As Witherington points out, Paul “takes on the role of witness for the defense,” making emotional appeals in defense of both God and Israel (Witherington 237).
Paul’s Critique and Defense of Judaism
It’s almost impossible to strike the right balance when talking about the New Testament and its relationship to Judaism, thanks to two thousand years of antisemitism and supercessionism. But two things are clear when reading Paul: 1. He is critical of his fellow Jews for not accepting Jesus as their Messiah; and 2. He loves Judaism, continues to identify as Jewish, and sees the emerging Christian faith as the logical next step in Judaism and not as a refutation of the tradition.
At the end of chapter 9, Paul explains why he thinks Jesus has been a stumbling block to his people:
Israel, who did strive for the law of righteousness, did not attain that law. Why not? Because they did not strive for it on the basis of faith but as if it were based on works. They have stumbled over the stumbling stone. (Romans 9.31b-32)
There is an open question about what Paul means by ‘works’ here and elsewhere (see Witherington 245 and Nanos for opposing perspectives). But, no matter where we come down on the question, it remains that both ways of judging Law-adherence miss the point as far as Paul is concerned: Keeping the Law of Moses was supposed to be a manifestation of, and response to a good-faith relationship with, God, not a to-do list to earn salvation, nor, far less, the sign of ‘being on the right team’ before God. (Whether this was a fair assessment of Second Temple Judaism we’ll leave for the Challenge section of the study.)
But this section is not about criticizing his fellow Jews, but defending their role, both historical and ongoing, in God’s plans (Kruse 367ff). In a sense, then, Paul has two aims here: defending God’s justice and “undercut[ting] Gentile hubris” (Witherington 245). Israel has everything going for it (”the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; … the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Christ” (9.4f)), and they continue to be a “divinely constituted people with many gifts from God” (Witherington 251; cf. Eberhart). God’s people have not been replaced!
But, as has been true throughout the whole history of God’s dealings with Israel, God’s justice and faithfulness are not dependent or contingent on Israel’s faithfulness. Once again, “all stand only on the basis of God’s mercy and grace” (Witherington 238). Paul will make this case by referencing several stories and prophetic oracles from Israel’s Scriptures that together emphasize God’s sovereignty — and specifically God’s sovereign mercy. Let’s look at these stories more closely.
Scriptural Examples
In ancient rhetoric as much as today, case studies are among the most convincing kinds of arguments. The examples Paul pulls in defense of God’s faithfulness to Israel tell us quite a bit about what he’s trying to say. Together they create “a detailed exposition of how God’s relationship with Israel had never been based on works of the law but on God’s sovereign will to show mercy” (MarySylvia Nwachukwu, in Eberhart). The emphasis is not on Israel’s long history of failure to live up to its covenant responsibilities, but rather God’s long and merciful history of guiding Israel towards God’s own purposes.
Isaac and Ishmael & Jacob and Esau
As we saw last week, God choosing some implies God does not choose others. The first two stories Paul references are classic examples of this: God’s choice of the younger son Isaac to be the child of promise over his older half-brother Ishmael, and the younger and less impressive Jacob over his older and more impressive twin Esau. The latter story is particularly striking, since God’s sovereign choice is made between two twins; even if you could brush off God’s choice of Isaac over Ishmael as being about his legitimacy as compared to Ishmael’s status as the son of one of the family’s enslaved women, there’s no such distinction here: they share the same mother and father, and are conceived at the same time (SBL; Nanos 320; Kruse 379)!
God’s choice of Jacob is emphasized in the Scriptures by the statement that God “loved Jacob but hated Esau.” This has led many Christians to assume this means that Esau was damned. But, the language is simply there to add contrast and means in context little more than “chosen and not chosen” (SBL; cf. Kruse 380). We see this in the Genesis stories: Ishmael is not chosen but is blessed with words reminiscent of Abraham’s own promise (Genesis 16.10-12, 17.20); and when Jacob meets Esau again later in life, we find Esau blessed with a large herd and household, and every sign of success available to a nomadic pastoralist (Genesis 33).
These stories, and God’s continued blessing of the ‘not chosen’ sons, is a reminder of the vocational aspect of election in the Old Testament. Election is not about ‘saved’ vs. ‘damned’ rather, one is chosen to fulfill a role in God’s plans for the world (Witherington 253). Nanos picks up on this idea in his summary of Paul’s conflict with the Jewish authorities about Jesus: in Paul’s mind, Judaism writ large is not undertaking its vocation to bless the nations by bringing them into the community of faith (Nanos 320). But by appealing to this story, Paul would also be saying that it is “by God’s design [that] they are not yet persuaded of the gospel” — this too is part of God’s plans for the redemption of the whole creation (Nanos 320).
Moses and Pharaoh
This vocational emphasis continues with the quick references to the Exodus story in 9.14-18:
What then are we to say? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! 15 For he says to Moses: “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So it depends not on human will or exertion but on God who shows mercy. For the scripture says to Pharaoh, “I have raised you up for this very purpose, that I may show my power in you and that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.” So then he has mercy on whomever he chooses, and he hardens the heart of whomever he chooses.
In context, Exodus 33.19 is a message about God’s self-revelation, but Paul interprets here in a way that emphasizes God’s sovereignty (Nanos 320). But even here, the negative side is still ‘vocational’; God “raised up” Pharaoh in order to reveal the power and glory of God’s mercy (Witherington 256).
Potter and Clay
The image of the potter forming clay as a metaphor for God’s sovereignty has a strong biblical pedigree, bringing to mind particularly Jeremiah 18, where it’s used in the context of God remaking Judah through the Exile. While there’s no question that Paul’s language here feels extreme, this is lessened when we understand the Exile as a time of re-formation rather than destruction. Moreover, closer to the spirit of Romans 9 is Wisdom 15, which explicitly speaks about God’s patience with a potter who makes idols (’the objects of wrath’). While it’s not entirely clear to whom ‘the objects of wrath’ refer here, the focus is that yes, God acts sovereignly, but that God chooses to use that sovereignty to show patience and mercy to those who are ‘naturally’ deserving of wrath (Witherington 256; Eberhart).
Prophecy of Hosea
That we are to read this discussion of divine sovereignty in terms of mercy and grace rather than damnation is further suggested by the next example, taken from Hosea 1. In its original context, God’s calling of those “not my people” “my people” is about the promise of God’s restoration of Israel following the Exile: Their actions have caused God to reject them, but only for a time. Here, Paul uses that ability to uncreate and create a people by an act of divine will as a reference to God’s bringing the Gentiles into “my people” (Eberhart; Nanos 320).
Prophecy of Isaiah
The chapter ends with three brief quotations from Isaiah, all of which focus on God’s continued faithfulness to Israel despite all appearances. Even when all has seemed lost, “the story of God and Israel nevertheless continues” (Eberhart). The final reference, to Isaiah 28.16, is one where the New Testament’s dependence on the Septuagint biblical tradition is important. For the Hebrew text contains no reference to a stumbling block, focusing instead on the stone’s beauty and suitability. It’s not entirely clear in this passage whether he intends the stumbling block to be Christ himself, or the gospel, or the inclusion of Gentiles into the community of faith without conversion to Judaism (Nanos 320). It’s likely all three. But again, the focus is on God’s faithfulness. People may trip up over Paul’s gospel, but God remains faithful.
(To be continued)
* For full information please see the series bibliography.
Matthew Root 