Fourth Phase

DIVINE PROMISE AND IMPROVISATION (9:1–11:36)

The unshakeable assurance of Romans 8:31–39 must be tested. It has so far been grounded in the experience of the faithful in two ways: their own response to the glad-making proclamation in terms of the acclamation of God as abba/Pater, and the endurance of the community and its members in the face of affliction and persecution. Moreover, Paul has sought to ground this assurance in ways we might term “ontological” or “cosmological.” This corresponds to and even exceeds the Adamic dimension that had been introduced in chapter 5. But Paul is by no means finished. From the very beginning he has signaled his interest in and concern for the way in which the action of God takes into account both Judeans and gentiles. At 1:16, he had announced that the gospel was directed “to the Judean first and also to the Greek.” This formula is repeated in 2:9 with respect to tribulation and distress for those who do evil, and at 2:10 with respect to glory, honor, and peace for those who do good. We noted then that Paul’s actual procedure in the opening argument seemed to reverse that priority, dealing first with gentiles and subsequently with Judeans. In the argument of the three chapters beginning at 9:1, Paul will now make good on the previously announced priority.

At the beginning of chapter 3 was a series of questions that seemed to be left hanging: If some were unfaithful, does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? (3:3). If our wickedness serves to show the justice of God . . . is God unjust to inflict wrath on us? (3:5). If through my falsehood God’s truthfulness abounds to his glory, why am I still condemned as a sinner? (3:7–8). The argument of the long discourse that we will track through the next three chapters serves as a reply to these questions. In the meantime, Paul has attempted to clarify the question of faithfulness outside the law and to argue that this faithfulness actually must produce justice rather than the perpetuation of injustice. He is now ready to take up questions earlier announced but left hanging. Thus, what follows is no mere appendix but has been aimed at from the very beginning of Paul’s letter.

The basic issue—Will their unfaithfulness nullify the faithfulness of God? (3:3)—is now going to be addressed. But there is even more, for Paul had just maintained that those whom he foreknew he predestined and those he predestined he also called justified, glorified. Can this confidence be maintained in the face of the situation of the people of Israel who had rejected the messiah? Above all, they were foreknown, predestined, and called. Has that then been overthrown? If so, nothing can stand of this great hymnic riff of unshakeable assurance. If the promise of God has failed with respect to Israel, it cannot stand with respect to us. Who could then have confidence in the divine promise?

14. Has the Promise Failed? (9:1–29)

An issue must be resolved: How is it that God’s promise to Abraham, a promise that has been the motor of Israel’s history, can be utterly relied upon if Israel itself has turned away from the promise, has rejected the messiah? If human rejection can stop or stall the divine determination to save or redeem, how can we really have confidence? How can our assurance be other than hollow?

Of course, some maintain that this is all unnecessary. About a century later Marcion, believing himself to have the mind of Paul, will maintain simply that Israel’s God is a different God and that the redemption that is in Christ is for the nations independently of the promise and the covenant with Israel. Thus, to read this argument, we must begin with the recognition that this is simply impossible for Paul. And we must ask why.

Before trying to answer this question, we must recognize that the history of the interpretation of Romans 9–11 has been semi-Marcionite. Christianity has often assumed it can do without a relation to the root of Israel’s history. The result has been the enablement of tacit or terrifyingly explicit anti-Judaism. The interpretation of the argument of this section of Romans is decisive in this regard, as Jacob Taubes dramatically confirmed in conversation with Carl Schmitt, who had given intellectual cover for many of the policies of Hitler’s National Socialist Party. When Taubes read with Schmitt this passage from Paul, Schmitt reacted with surprise. Taubes remarks: “It is possible to read texts without noticing what their core point is,” especially when this not noticing is protected by a “fifteen-hundred-year-old Christian history” of not attending to the point (51).

It is important to keep in mind two interrelated coordinates: history and Israel. History is crucial since God is involved in history, including some relationship to the history of the rejection and execution of the messiah. And God is bringing history to a consummation precisely through this act. Moreover, this act must be made sense of in terms of God’s activity in history, above all, in history as the history of God’s people. We are returning from the Adamic, which reached out to include all creation, to the Abrahamic as inclusive of Judean and gentile and thus of all humanity, considered as peoples in history.

Since the time of Augustine, the tendency has been to read Romans as if the basic argument had been determined by chapter 4; the chapter to which we are about to turn was read as entirely concerned with a question about something like predestination. The arguments about predestination, however, have ignored Paul’s focus on political history generally and the history of Israel in particular. Accordingly, the talk of predestination has fallen into a non-Pauline (and nonbiblical) individualism. On these views, God predestines individuals to salvation or damnation. But that is not Paul’s argument at all. Moreover, it ignores the fact that with Paul’s emphasis on social or political history, the aim of the divine will is salvation for all rather than any sort of double predestination of either damnation or salvation. Karl Barth recognized that the doctrine of predestination as initiated by Augustine and then made rigorous in the early Middle Ages by Gottschalk (a view that becomes determinative for Wycliffe and Calvin) is both antibiblical and antievangelical, lacking relation to the proclamation of God’s act in Christ (Church Dogmatics 3–34). Without endorsing (or contesting) Barth’s particular way of resolving this issue, we will have to be attentive to this question in our reading of Paul’s argument.

In Galatians, Paul had put forward a very different argument concerning the election of Israel, a view that certainly lends itself to the idea that Christianity supersedes Israel. But in the letter to the Romans, Paul will make a very different argument about the irrevocability of God’s election of Israel. While specific factors concerning the audience addressed in each letter undoubtedly play a role in the fundamental shift in Paul’s argument, his discussion in Romans seems to be far better thought out and at the same time more deeply connected to Paul’s own commitments and concerns. The latter becomes evident from the very beginning.

I am speaking the truth in messiah—I am not lying; my conscience confirms it in holy spirit.

Recall that it is the spirit that has been spoken of as groaning with us—as yearning with us and all creation—for redemption. Precisely this spirit of solidarity and yearning is invoked here. That Paul speaks the truth in the messiah means that his words share in the yearning of the messiah for the messiah’s own people, the people who have priority in the messianic purpose and passion.

I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.

This is the very language of spirit, not in triumph but in sorrow and anguish. As earth groans for redemption of humanity, so Paul groans for the redemption of Israel: For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from messiah for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh. Paul knows something about being accursed and cut off. This is his own experience with his own people. But his response is not to desire their destruction but to desire to substitute himself for them. In this case kindred according to the flesh refers to religiocultural identity rather than the spirited kinship that leads Paul to refer to fellow messianists as “brothers.”

To what extent is the desire to be accursed for the sake of the other the mark of messianic desire? He is saying in essence, “I would rather that I be damned than that others be condemned.” Is this not precisely what the messiah has done? Has he not become accursed for the sake of the deliverance of the others from the curse—even from the curse that they have brought upon themselves? The reference to the messianic here is so far double: Paul speaks in messiah, and this speaking in messiah is a desire to be cut off from the messiah so that others might be joined to the messiah. This is not simply an extreme expression. It is the very heart and substance of messianic faithfulness, of solidarity in the suffering of messiah.

They are Israelites and to them belong the adoption, the glory [radiance], the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and from them according to the flesh comes the messiah. Blessed forever be God, who is over all, amen.

Earlier he had said of the Israelite’s advantages, much in every way, for in the first place they were entrusted with the oracles of God (3:2). Here this is expanded in the most extraordinary way. The reference to oracles has been expanded to the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship. Moreover, Paul adds, adoption and radiance. These are the very critical terms he has just been using regarding the messianic in the previous section. They designate the beginning (adoption) and the end (radiance) of the redemptive act. What he ascribes to those who are participants in the messianic reality belongs already to Israel! We shall see that this “belonging” is inalienable.

This will be true first of all because of the promises given to the patriarchs (Paul no longer makes use of the argument about two different seeds of Abraham that he had employed in Galatians). It is from the patriarchs that the messiah, hence the messiah of Israel, comes. The concluding “promise,” then, is what connects all of this to where we began with Abraham and where we are headed, with messiah. Thus, the comprehensive promise comes to a head with the coming of the messiah, whose coming is good news “to the Judeans first, and then the Greeks.”

The last clause (Blessed forever be God) should not be translated in such a way as to suggest a proto-Nicene-type creedal formulation of the divinity of Christ. The idea is that all of the “gifts” received by Israel are gifts that come from God and precisely the God whose sending of the messiah is the focal point of the divine action: from promise to ultimate radiance or shining forth, passing through covenants, law, worship, and so on. His assertion is not that the messiah is God “overall” but rather that it is God whose ordering of all is manifest in the coming of the messiah as the fulfillment of promise, and thus as the basis of adoption and consummation in the divine radiance.

It is not as though the word of God had failed. This is the nub of the problem that must be dealt with if the promise is to really be secure. The promise that has been expanded to include the nations and that extends from progeny to resurrection, so to the hope for cosmic transformation, must be secured at its core as a promise in the beginning to and for Israel.

Precisely because Paul is attempting to place “covenant, law, and worship” within this trajectory from promise to shining forth, the issue of God’s having failed comes into view. If, as Paul believes, the coming of the messiah coheres with the promise that drives the history of Israel, then the rejection of that messiah by the official guardians of “covenant, law and worship” could be construed as the failure of the divine word. It is thus incumbent on Paul to show that the decisive features of Israel’s covenant history may properly be understood as pointing to the shape of the divine “plan” or ordering of history toward the goal of the inclusion of the gentiles while affirming that every “setback” in this trajectory serves only to drive it toward its appointed goal.

Paul will now offer a number of arguments and analogies to establish this point, just as he had offered the sequence of arguments and analogies in chapter 6 to establish the before-and-after elements of his claim that sin is abolished through grace. It is important that these new analogies not be separated either from one another or from the series to which they belong and the point that they attempt to establish. This is all the more true since it is not Paul’s intent to offer an “objective” survey of the history of Israel but to interpret key elements in accordance with what he now supposes the goal of that history to be. His survey hits upon key moments: the patriarchal history, the Exodus from Egypt (which includes the giving of the law), and especially, the perspectives of the prophets.

We begin therefore with the patriarchal sagas:

For not all Israelites truly belong to Israel.

Is this something that a Pharisee, rather than a Sadducee, might have said? This seems likely. It may also have been the basis for the work of John the Baptizer, since baptism may have served for the Pharisees and for John as an entry or reentry into the people of Israel. In any case, what will now follow is a way of maintaining that some serve in the place of all. Later, however, this will be reversed so that “some” leads to “all.” Thus, the complex use of synecdoche enables Paul to move from representation as substitution to representation as vanguard.

The next sentences are concerned with the inheritors of the promise to Abraham. Significantly, he does not repeat the analogy he used in this regard in Galatians, where those who are in messiah are the exclusive children of the promise, while Israel is understood to be in the situation of Ishmael, children of the flesh. What is common to the two texts, however, is the emphasis on promise and who is the inheritor (son) of promise: Isaac, rather than Ishmael. Not all the seed of Abraham are children of Abraham. But: “Through Isaac shall your descendants be named” (referring to Genesis 21:12). Moreover, we see that the promise is set in some basic tension with “flesh.” This means it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God but the children of the promise are counted as seed. We should note that here “children of God,” a term applied by adoption to those who are incorporated into the messianic event, is also applied to those in the line of Isaac. To them also belongs, as Paul had said, the adoption. Adoption applies first to Israel and then subsequently to the recipients of the messianic proclamation and promise. There is no attempt to relegate Israel to the “flesh” instead of promise. On the contrary, the argument would lead one to suppose that flesh is somehow the bearer of promise, but always in a surprising way. One would even be led to say that the flesh of Sarah rather than that of Abraham is decisive here. About this time I will return and Sarah shall have a son. Thus, we have to do here not with the patriarch but the matriarch whose child is the fruit of the promise.

A second analogy comes from reference to Rebecca. Rebecca and Isaac are the parents of Jacob/Israel.

And not only so but when Rebecca had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done neither good nor bad, in order that the purpose of God might abide according to [God’s] choice, not because of works but because of the one who calls, it was said to her “the greater will serve the lesser,” even as it has been written “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

Neither Isaac nor Jacob is the elder son. In each case, we could say that the elder is “sacrificed” so that the younger might be the bearer of promise in opposition to the tendency of patriarchy. Thus, the promise of God is realized in such a way that it is utterly reliable yet completely unpredictable from human custom or expectation. Once again we notice that Paul has substituted matriarchal history for patriarchal history.

The reference to Esau and Jacob allows Paul to introduce another of his basic themes (not works but “call”). In this argument against works, however, the stress lies not on the faithfulness of the one called, as it had earlier, but simply on the origin of the call itself, that it is entirely the choice of God. The citation of Malachi 1:2–3 concerning loving Jacob and hating Esau does not refer to emotional states but to the decision that serves the interest of one rather than the other. The choice operates in such a way as to undermine the sense of entitlement of the “elder.” The selection of one for favor occurs in advance of any merit, just as in the case of Abraham. Thus, the choice, the decision, the action, and promise of God are not as unreliable as our response but as reliable as is God’s own word.

In this saga of Esau and Jacob, not only does the line of promise continue through Jacob rather than Esau in the absence of or in advance of any merit. Beyond that, it seems that if we were to calculate merit, we would have to go with Esau. He is not only the elder but he is also by far the more noble. Jacob is an utter scoundrel who robs his brother’s inheritance (not without the collaboration of his scheming mother). In contrast, Esau’s behavior in welcoming this scoundrel back without exacting the revenge that Jacob fully and reasonably expected is exemplary. But that is not Paul’s point here. He is not really attempting to give an exegesis of the biblical story but to select one element from it to make the point that the fulfillment of God’s promise does not depend on the “faithfulness” of the human actors.

Is there injustice on God’s part? This would be an issue since Paul’s whole argument depends on the call and claim of justice. The answer might seem unsatisfactory. Absolutely not! The point is that God acts precisely as God has said God will act. This echoes the question and answer already broached in 3:5.

Here he cites Moses (in the context of Law in Exodus 33:19) to establish his point: “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” This citation stands in tension with the earlier “Jacob I loved but Esau I hated.” What has changed is that Paul emphasizes mercy and compassion. Those who have used this text to support “double predestination” of some to heaven and others to hell have completely missed Paul’s point. He is shaping or bending everything toward mercy rather than judgment, to compassion rather than condemnation. So it depends not on human exertion or will but on God who shows mercy. Paul is trying to keep this focused on mercy or generosity rather than on judgment. God’s justice is precisely God’s mercy now, not quite the wrath that we heard of earlier. But that will return in a new guise.

With the citation from Moses, we turn to the saga of liberation from Egypt and the example of Pharaoh. Of course, Pharaoh opposed the divine mercy that sought to deliver the Hebrew people from bondage, but in spite of his opposition he becomes an instrument of divine mercy. Now we enter the world-historical sphere: the arrogance of the powerful is precisely their hardness of heart, but this will nonetheless be bent to serve the purposes of mercy and compassion. We may apply this, for example, to Pontius Pilate or even the Sanhedrin. What they do may be opposed to divine justice and mercy but will in fact be made to serve that justice and mercy.

Thus, the rulers of this age owe their position and power to divine permission. But this permission has in view simply that they be made to be, in spite of themselves, the occasion for the “publicity” that their demise affords to the divine name. (We will recall this when we discuss the much controverted reference to “rulers” in chapter 13.) Their rule is ordered to their own destruction or frustration so that history may marvel at the faithfulness of God to those who are oppressed by these powers.

In the case of Pharaoh, we may read the story as the way that God (through Moses) seems only to make Pharaoh dig in his heels at the demand to let the people go. But this obstinacy only makes the eventual liberation more comprehensive (the Hebrew people don’t simply go out to worship but go out to stay out) and more astonishing. For the written says to Pharaoh: “I have raised you up for the very purpose of showing my power in you.” This is, of course, read as an anticipation of the way the rejection of the messiah by the powerful will only serve to make the “good news” more comprehensive (to the nations) and more astonishing (cross/resurrection). So that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth. This is indeed the very scope of Paul’s own proclamation. So then he has mercy on whom he wishes; he hardens whom he wishes. Although there are both hardening and mercy, the hardening serves only the aim of mercy, to make it all the more astonishing and comprehensive.

Why then does he still find fault? For who can resist him? If even opposition to God’s intent can be bent to serve that intent, then why should God even care whether national leaders (for we must keep in mind that this is the level at which Paul’s argument is proceeding) agree with the divine intent? Why does God condemn political and historical injustice? We recall that Paul had affirmed that God does indeed condemn that injustice in the first two chapters of Romans. Moreover, he had anticipated precisely this sort of question already in his discussion of the coming of messianic justice (3:5–7).

This question offers Paul the chance to move forward into the history of the prophets of Israel, the ones who most clearly articulate the action of God on the stage of world history. Here he offers a number of analogies drawn from the oracles of Israel’s own prophets.

The response of Paul first sets the situation of the human as such who would contend with the divine. O man, as in chapter 2, has a universal referent but may also be understood as having the imperial authority in view (Pharaoh, for example).

Do you presume to argue with God? Surely what is molded will not say to the one who molded it: why did you make me like this? Or doesn’t the potter have the right over the clay to make from the same lump either something honored or something dishonored?

The notion of the molded versus the molder goes back to a prophetic tradition and most closely resembles Isaiah 29:16: “You who turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay? Shall the thing made say of its maker, ‘He did not make me,’ or the thing formed say of the one who formed it, ‘He has no understanding’?” As in that text, here also it is not the situation of the individual that is in view but that of the people and the nations. The analogy is brought forward with this contrast: from the same clay may be made something that has an honorable use and something that has a dishonorable use. From the same material may be made a bedpan or a wine goblet; either serves the intention of the maker.

What if God, desiring to show wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the instruments of wrath made for destruction? This is an image again taken from prophetic tradition that refers to the great empires that serve the purposes of God in punishing Israel for its injustice. The ascendancy of these powers, which might seem to contravene the authority of God, winds up serving the divine purposes. They are temporary instruments of wrath, but they are themselves destined for destruction.

The purpose of these afflicting instruments is now further bent toward the overriding purpose of demonstrating the riches of his radiance/shining forth for the instruments of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for radiance [shining forth]. The point is that the use of the afflicting power is temporary, but the use of the instrument of mercy is from forever and to forever, that is, it is everlasting. This is what the divine “plan” aims at: mercy rather than wrath. And this mercy is itself the divine shining forth or radiance in which what serves that goal also partakes or shares in that radiance.

Us, whom he called, not from the Judeans only but also from the nations [pagans]. Here we come into view, that is, Paul’s readers or hearers who now are those who are molded to be instruments of divine mercy. It is important to note, however, that these are still merely instruments (skeous). They/we are not the goal of the divine action. We serve the purpose of the divine radiance so have a certain security as those in whom that radiance is to be manifest. But we are by no means its exclusive object. The object, as we have heard and will hear again, is “all.” It is precisely this that is anticipated in the coming together of both Judean and pagan to be shaped as an instrument of mercy rather than of condemnation or wrath.

It is, alas, well known that the church has come to be as much an instrument of wrath as the empires or those who persecuted the community ever were. For the church often punishes, ostracizes, and afflicts, not only in the Inquisitions of old but also in its presumed authority to exclude those of another faith or no faith or those of disapproved “lifestyles.” Thus, we cannot understand ourselves to be those who are here designated “instruments of mercy.” Earlier we were called to be instruments or even weapons of justice. This justice is now increasingly clearly identified with compassion.

There now follow three citations from Hosea and Isaiah that have the purpose of exhibiting the unpredictable but reliable way in which the divine mercy comes to be demonstrated in the history of God’s people.

The first, from Hosea (Those who were not my people) comes from the end of that book. What happens here is that the earlier rejection of Israel (transgendered as YHWH’s unfaithful and promiscuous wife) is finally overturned and those who were divorced, abandoned, and rejected are now reclaimed (in contravention of the legal codes of Deuteronomy 22:21–22). This is an anticipation of the argument that Paul will make in chapter 11. The point now is that the rejection and punishment of the faithless Israel simply aim at restoration. The judgment of Israel aims at the redemption of Israel.

A similar point is made with a quotation from Isaiah, in which the notion of the remnant (to which Paul will return) is first deployed as an illustration of divine wrath (only a remnant will survive) and then as a demonstration of mercy: without a remnant [but here called a seed (sperma)] we would have perished as completely as Sodom. Thus, the threat begins to appear as promise or as serving the promise.

As an earlier generation of theologians learned from reading Karl Barth, the divine NO, however severe and unrelenting, has no other aim than that it serve the manifestation of the divine YES. These are not to be thought of as alternatives that are “side by side” but rather as subordinate and superordinant or as arranged in such a way that the judgment has no other meaning than that all be saved.

We come then to the (provisional) conclusion of this segment of the argument, a conclusion that brings us back to where we were in chapters 2–4: the question of the astonishing fact that it is the pagans who respond to the message of the messiah and thus who embody a certain justice. This consideration most immediately returns to the problem that Paul had set out at the beginning of this section of his argument. The problem was that many of those who seem to represent the people chosen by God to be the object of God’s promise have rejected the one who is to bring that promise to fruition. And in an even more pointed fashion the problem remains (which is yet to be addressed) of the consummation of that promise for Israel as such or as a whole.

In this argument Paul has attempted to show the complete reliability of the divine word, promise, and election. This has been maintained in at least three ways.

First, Paul has demonstrated that God acts in accordance with what God has spoken. In accordance with the pronouncement of God to Moses “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy,” God had chosen Isaac rather than Ishmael, Jacob rather than Esau. In accordance with the word transmitted through the prophets, God has chosen pagan empires as instruments of punishment or of mercy. In accordance with the word of the prophets, only a remnant of Israel (so far) welcomes the messiah. That is, what has happened thus far with respect to the proclamation of the good news (that the nations are responding but much of Israel is not) conforms to rather than contravenes God’s word.

Mixed in with this argument is another that aims to show that God’s way of acting does not conform to human expectations but is based solely on the divine good pleasure. Thus, the divine choice does not depend on physical or social priority (not the firstborn Ishmael but Isaac), nor on works or apparent moral priority (not the noble Esau but the scheming Jacob). For this reason, God’s act is not forced or constrained by presumed right or even by the better claim of being obedient.

Finally, Paul has shown that even that which opposes the divine promise and act is made to serve the divine intention. Thus, the opposition of Pharaoh or the actions of unjust empires were made to serve the divine purpose against their own intentions. This will set up Paul’s argument that even the opposition of God’s own people will come to serve the divine purpose of the coming of messianic justice for all people.

In consequence, God’s word can be shown to be utterly reliable. But it is absolutely crucial to keep in mind that we have here not many words or decrees but basically one: the promise to save, the promise to take back all creation. That is the point at which Paul ended chapter 8. He will come back to this assertion of total victory of the gospel (of which we recall he is not ashamed) by the end of this argument, and we will gain new insight concerning the totality of the redemptive aim. It is critical to keep the idea of election in this passage connected to the idea of total redemption that we have heard in chapters 5 and 8. When the pieces get separated, theology runs off the rails and antievangelical doctrines (like that of double predestination) are generated. Even more ominously, some might look to this prophetic history of the use of the unjust empires to discipline Israel as a way of interpreting the horrors of the twentieth-century Shoah. But this would be quite impossible for Paul. It would suppose that we are still living in pre-messianic time—for in the now-time, the divine justice is fundamentally bent toward mercy, as the prophets Paul has been quoting also realize. Just as there can be no justification for the empire’s injustice elaborated in chapter 1, injustice that executed the messiah, so also there can be no legitimation for the unspeakable rebellion against God perpetrated upon the people of the messiah in the Holocaust.

15. The History of Justice (9:30–10:4)

We have seen Paul argue for the reliability of the divine promise despite the vicissitudes of history. But this is only one side of what needs to be established. The reliability of God’s promise must also be connected to the question of justice. What the promise, the mercy, the generous gift of God aims at is precisely justice, a just social order or polity. Some aspects of the previous argument might have led us to forget the insistence upon justice: the apparently arbitrary nature of the divine choices and perhaps especially the fact that these choices are not dependent upon whether anyone is just (as in the case of the preference of Jacob over Esau before either one had done good or bad). In the section that follows Paul turns from what has been the objective basis of confidence in the divine promise to something like the subjective basis. He will again show the relation between faith and works that had been set up in chapters 3–4.

What shall we say? Nations that did not pursue justice arrived at [or were found by] justice, but a justice of loyalty [or faithfulness]; but Israel pursuing a just law did not arrive at that law. We are seeing set up a distinction between justice of faithfulness and justice of law. Only faithfulness will actually arrive at justice. Despite the seeking and pursuing of justice through law, the justice at which law aims is not arrived at. But why? Because it did not pursue it through faith(fulness) but as if by works. The point is that Israel seeks to achieve justice through what it can control—its works or compliance with legal requirements—rather than by way of faithful adherence to the claim and call of God.

We are returned to the argument of 3:20–31. The apparently scrupulous yet also mechanical compliance with rules and regulations that the law specifies can lead one to lose sight of what the law fundamentally aims at: justice. The justice that comes to the nations who are bereft of the law in the Israelite sense is one provoked by gift and promise (or the gift of promise) and thus awakens faithfulness rather than scrupulous observance. Legal compliance cannot truly correspond with the call for justice. This can happen only through loyalty or faithfulness. Justice cannot be captured in a knowable legal system that one needs only to repeat and obey. Justice is an immeasurable claim that bends toward mercy and compassion. It is only love, as we shall hear, that can do what the law ultimately intends or requires: justice, whose other name we are beginning to learn, is mercy (or, as we have already heard, generosity or gift).

In our own time we find many who seek to comply with a law or legality that they believe represents the will of God. On this basis they think they are entitled to exclude or condemn those whose lifestyle, as they call it, seems to them to be condemned by “the law.” Yet there are others who suppose that God is doing a new thing, that this is a “stone of stumbling,” that what is called for is not mere inclusion but welcome, not condemnation but celebration.

They have stumbled over the stumbling stone as it is written (Isaiah 28:16, 8:14–15). How they have done so Paul will now clarify: it has to do with the now familiar question of loyalty or faithfulness, understood in contrast to seeking reward for work done or rules complied with. The image of the stumbling stone conflates Isaiah 8:14–15 with Isaiah 28:16. How does this conflation occur? Käsemann agrees that it is something of a mystery but the two may have already made up something of a messianic text (Romans 278), perhaps cited by the Pharisees. The point is that what God is doing will bring many to stumble. But not all will stumble, for some—those who rely on the promise or are faithful to it—will not be put to shame. Note here the return of the theme of shame that began the whole argument of Romans when Paul claimed that he was not ashamed of the gospel because it is the justice of God (1:17).

The heart of the passage is the reference to Isaiah 8, which has Israel stumble over a rock in its path, a rock that is God, God’s will or judgment. Put differently, what causes the religiously privileged to stumble is God’s own call and claim. It is common for Christian theologians to give this a Christological interpretation, but the justification is slender at best. The point is that God’s unpredictable way of fulfilling God’s promise is a cause of stumbling for those who think they can go on “automatic pilot”—who believe that they know how it is supposed to be or turn out and that they therefore can keep going in accordance with their own understanding or knowledge. They run into a rock over which they stumble, stagger, and fall. That rock is God, who, as we have seen, improvises in history to be faithful to the divine promise.

Paul returns to his yearning for the salvation, healing, and inclusion of those who have been the instruments of condemnation of the messiah and those who ally themselves with that messiah: Comrades [brothers], my heart’s desire for them, and my plea to God on their behalf is for [their] salvation. This is, of course, quite different from what the church will subsequently think it can justify from Paul: an altogether too complacent and sometimes even vengeful or gleeful desire for their destruction, a destruction that has appeared all too clearly in history. If the reference to so many passages from the law and the prophets has caused us to lose track of what is going on here, Paul brings us back to his own passion. He had said, I have great sorrow and anguish. Paul yearns for salvation for his people. Recall the yearning of creation and how this yearning now connects to the historical reality of Israel. If we hear the echo of that earlier yearning, we will not be astonished at where this is headed in the conclusion to this penultimate phase of Paul’s argument.

For I testify [or witness] of [or for or to] them that they have zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. Paul knows a thing or two about zeal and how this sincere zeal can run off the cliff. His own zeal (in Philippians 3:6 he had said that he was, prior to his messianic call, “as to zeal a persecutor of the church”), like that he is attributing to his fellow Israelites (Pharisees), is, however, one that does not correspond to its object. The proper object is the will of God or the call to true justice. Note that the problem is not hypocrisy (as in the Gospel of Matthew) but a certain fervent sincerity that has misplaced its object or true orientation. Indeed, as we learn every day in the newspapers, a misplaced sincere commitment often does enormous damage and produces horrifying injustice. The attacks on civilians by Al Qaeda and the “righteous” crusade against “terrorism” are made all the more ruthless through their manifest sincerity, their fervent zeal. Zeal may be a good thing, to be sure, but only when guided by understanding, in this case an understanding of justice (and mercy).

For not knowing the justice of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to the justice of God. They have sought to establish a different basis for justice, for divine justice, than the foundation to which the justice of God called them. The desire to be “right” with respect to the other or the outsider, or even in relation to God, leaves us in the situation of establishing for ourselves the rules of just behavior that prevent us from relying on what is the very call and claim of justice itself. It is all too easy to recognize this situation in what is called the church. Communities of Christians are only too glad to invent for themselves ways of being obedient to God and of requiring others to be obedient: don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t dance in some traditions; attend church, tithe, and so on in others or the same traditions; attend Mass, go to confession, and so on in others. Wherever one turns, one finds the zeal for God deflected into the proliferation of rules and regulations that have nothing whatever to do with justice and mercy. Indeed, the very meaning of the transformation in English of Paul’s concern for justice into a concern for righteousness is the deflection into institutional petty moralizing of the call and claim of justice.

For messiah is the end [telos] of law so that justice may be based on loyalty.

The term telos signifies the end of the law both as fulfillment (because the end or goal is still justice) and as catastrophe of the law (because of the force or violence of the law). The messiah does not abolish the call and claim of justice but sets justice on a new “foundation,” that of loyalty or faithfulness that comes outside the law and that the law had seemed to condemn or outlaw.

16. Speaking and Hearing: How Justice Comes (10:5–21)

The argument that follows serves as a counterpoint to the argument about how justice derives from faithfulness. If this is so, then how does faithfulness itself arise? Paul will seek to show that faithfulness is awakened or provoked through the hearing of the announcement of the gospel rather than through compliance with the (written) law. This hearing, and the speaking that awakens it, stands in contrast with what we might term the “distance and inaccessibility” of the law. This inaccessibility of the law is brought to expression in Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” which receives a remarkable reading in an essay with the same title by Derrida, which will also link it to Paul’s argument in Romans.

The first part of this argument at first looks like a further contrast between law and the justice that is aimed at through adherence to the law, on the one hand, and the faithfulness (and justice) that is enacted through the hearing and heeding of the word addressed, on the other. Paul will first notice that this contrast, or even opposition, is already found within the law itself.

Moses writes [graphei]: “The one who does the justice of the law will live in it” [Leviticus 10:5]. But the justice [that comes] from faithfulness says: “Do not say in your heart, who will ascend into heaven (that is, to bring the messiah down) or who will descend into the abyss (to bring the messiah up from the dead).” But what does it say [legei]? “The word is near you, on your lips, in your heart [will]” [Deuteronomy 30:11–14]. This is the word of faithfulness that we announce.

Paul first sets up a contrast between Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The former might well serve as a kind of proof text for compliance with the written law. It is introduced with the association of Moses and the written (graphei). But the modified citation from Deuteronomy is introduced with the assertion that the justice (that comes from) of faithfulness says (legei). The contrast between law and faithfulness is thus inscribed within the law itself.

The revision of Deuteronomy is quite audacious. Most obviously it introduces a substitution of the messianic for the law. The passage from Deuteronomy refers to the commandment (30:11) and even to “the commandments and statutes written in this book” (30:10). In place of this assertion regarding the “written commandments” Paul substitutes the messianic event: the coming of the messiah and the raising of the messiah from the dead.

Leaving aside the question about whether Paul has invented this messianic substitution or whether it is something already to hand in a messianic Judaism that he has appropriated, what seems to license this gloss in his mind concerns the question of the drawing near of the word: “the word is near you,” in contrast to the distance to be associated with the law as legal edifice. He may have adopted this contrast from, for example, Jeremiah’s contrast between a law written on stone or tablet and a law inscribed on the heart. It has to do with the will (heart) that acts not so much out of duty as out of desire. We might say that the justice of faithfulness is not heteronomous but springs from the wholehearted commitment of loyalty to another. Simon Critchley has pointed out that for Rousseau the basic issue had to do with how citizens of a democratic polity could be induced to love the law rather than simply fear or obey it (40–42). The answer Paul provides is not something like a civil religion (as Rousseau and Critchley seem to suggest is necessary) but rather the nearness of heart and lips, of loyalty to the messianic, which will issue in social solidarity.

Here what is near is the word that Paul announces and that provokes loyalty: Because if you affirm with your mouth that Joshua is the leader and from your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. We have, on the one hand, the depiction of an unreserved commitment (mouth, heart), and on the other, the object of that commitment, which is the impossible. We recall that this orientation to the impossible has already characterized the faithfulness of Abraham. He adheres unwaveringly to a promise whose content is the impossible. And we recall that Derrida had spoken of gift (and thus of justice) as not merely impossible but the impossible. Here the impossible has to do with the affirmation that the executed is the messiah and that the one executed through the law has been raised from among the dead. This affirmation (homologetai) is a basic “yes-saying,” a vow or oath (Agamben, Time 113–118) that affirms the promise and thus the impossible, so confirms one’s orientation toward the impossible as the origin of faithfulness and thus of justice. Concerning the relation between oath and faithfulness Agamben notes that in many Greek expressions “pistis is synonymous with horkos” and points to “binding ourselves in a relationship of loyalty” (Sacrament of Language 25). In reference to this passage in Romans, therefore, he suggests that the connection between lips and heart signals that “it is the performative experience of veridiction that [Paul] has in mind” (58).

The confession and faithfulness that Paul refers to are not something that substitutes for the claim of justice but is the way that claim becomes effective. The affirmation, or yes-saying, concerning the messiah is what sets one on the road to a comprehensive wholeness (salvation) through orienting one’s life to this impossibility, to the event. Here we may recall Alain Badiou’s suggestion that a “truth process,” through which one becomes a subject, has precisely to do with the reorientation of one’s existence on the basis of the event. But any such event is a rupture with what the world knows and thinks, so is, from the standpoint of a given situation, strictly impossible. The affirmation is a vowing of loyalty to the messianic, a swearing of allegiance that is therefore the ground of an unwavering loyalty or faithfulness. For with the heart [will] one is faithful to justice and with the oath of loyalty is saved. Again it is justice that produces wholeness or salvation, and this justice is produced through loyalty. Thus, anticipating what he will say in his reflections on the oath, Agamben notes that “the word of faith enacts its meaning through its utterance,” so it is possible to think of “something like a performative efficacy of the word of faith realized in its very pronouncement” (Time 131).

In this respect Paul maintains once again that there is no distinction between Judean and Greek; the same Lord of all is generous toward all who call on him. This double reference to “all” (God as lord of all, as generous to all) recalls elements of Paul’s argument in chapter 2 and 3:22. Here it is sandwiched between a citation of Isaiah and one of Joel, both of which also aim at a certain “all” (none put to shame; everyone who calls will be saved).

Thus far, Paul has sought to establish a connection between hearing and heeding the proclamation concerning the messiah, and the faithfulness that leads to justice and to “salvation.” But now he turns to underscore the connection between that hearing and the proclamation itself.

But how are they to call on one to whom they are not faithful? And how are they to be loyal to one of whom they have not heard? And how are they to have heard without one announcing? And how are they to announce who have not been commissioned [apostolousin]?

Justice enters into human history, the human world, through an announcement and thus through the hearing of an announcement that awakens glad adherence or loyalty. This is to be contrasted to a dutiful compliance with a certain legality, a legality that even aims at justice or that operates in the name of justice but comes to substitute itself for the call and claim of justice.

In its place we have the announcement of that which exceeds every expectation and is therefore contrary to what might be expected. Only through such an announcement does hearing as an affirmation of the impossible come into being. The announcing itself, however, comes from a call, a commissioning, a being seized by the event and set in motion by it. It is how Paul described himself at the beginning of this letter, as one who had been set apart to announce the glad proclamation to all the nations, so to those in Rome.

That the mode of proclamation is affirmed by the written is verified by reference to Isaiah 52:7—but not without introducing the discordant note from Isaiah 53:1 concerning the “not all” of those who have not heeded what has been announced. This is setting up the issue to which Paul will turn soon. But first a summation:

So faithfulness has come through what is heard and what is heard comes through the messianic announcement.

In affirming the role of proclamation or announcement here, Paul is in accord with what he had already said in 1 Corinthians concerning the essential role of proclamation, which is the weak instrument adopted by God for the salvation of God’s world (2:18). Whereas here Paul emphasizes the resurrection from the dead, in 1 Corinthians he emphasized the crucifixion of the messiah at the hands of those he called “the rulers of this age” (2:6, 8). For Paul these are two sides of the same event, the messianic event. We should, however, note that the messianic announcement does not begin either with Joshua messiah or with Paul’s proclamation. Paul is asserting that it is always already somehow there: in the prophetic word (for example, of Isaiah) and in the word (of promise) to the patriarch Abraham.

Although Paul has developed a distinction between the written and the spoken that is already inscribed in the law itself, he will now refer to a (spoken) proclamation that is already written, this time in the prophets, that will appear to answer the question of how the proclamation has come to the Judeans. Have they not heard? Certainly! Instead of referring to apostles to the Judeans, he refers to the proclamation whose written trace is found in the Psalms. The citations that follow, however, make what might seem to be a contrary case: that the proclamation did not have the desired effect with respect to its intended recipients but instead “spilled over” into the wider sphere of the nations. This is verified with reference to the law (Deuteronomy 32:21) and the prophets (Isaiah 65:1–2).

These texts confirm the centrality of proclamation and at the same time open up a gap between announcing and hearing (and faithfulness and justice). This gap is Paul’s chief concern, as it bears upon Israel. The texts cited by Paul already set up the basic form of the argument to follow: God did announce good news to Israel. Those who were not of Israel heard and heeded this proclamation, but only “some” of Israel did. The response of the gentiles or pagans will make Israel jealous. This jealousy will itself become the instrument for the salvation of Israel.

Before turning to that argument, however, we briefly note some issues raised by the foregoing interpretation of these texts. The first concerns the traditional tendency to overemphasize the Christological concentration in Paul’s argument. I am persuaded that the attempt of standard exegesis to impose a specifically Christological focus on Paul’s text is a mistake. The agent of promise and of salvation is God throughout. The object of faithfulness and of obedience throughout is God, not Christ—who is, rather, the exemplar of obedience and faithfulness. What is at stake in the resurrection of the messiah is the focalizing on the messianic proclamation of God that, for Paul, has been present in the word spoken (by God) to Abraham and the word spoken to Israel through the prophets.

The citation from the written, which is extraordinarily supple here, has the goal of demonstrating that what has happened in Israel conforms to Israel’s own literature and history, to the oracles of which it is the trustee and legatee. The collection of texts appears to be the fruit of reflection on the unexpected reality that all Israel has not yet recognized the messiah of God. But the citation of these texts also seeks to vindicate God and to assert that God’s word, God’s promise, has not failed. In this context, they also serve to demonstrate to the gentile readers of Paul’s text in Rome that Paul can be of some help to them in deploying Israel’s texts in ways that will defend them against possible marginalization or exclusion on the part of the Judeans. Paul is (deliberately or not) brandishing his expertise as an interpreter of Israel’s texts, of the law and the prophets, with the aim of validating the faithfulness of the gentiles.

Paul is able to do this precisely because he remains a Judean. He is not a convert to some non-Judean religion or faith. Rather, his commitment to the God of Israel remains unshaken, but his contention is that the God of Israel is the God of all, which is consistent with Israel’s own self-understanding as this had come to expression in the prophets. That God is the God of all and is, moreover, benevolent to all and intends the salvation of all is what Paul articulates as the messianic announcement.

The basic issue, then, has to do with the relation between the messianic horizon of the “all” and the historical reality (so far at least) of the “not all” of Israel’s response to the announcement of God’s grace or gift. Upon this “all” depends the faithfulness, the reliability, of the divine promise that has in view justice for “all flesh” and thus the salvation of all creation. All that we have had thus far is prologue to Paul’s decisive response to this question.

17. The Redemption of (All) Israel (11:1–12)

In chapter 9 we heard that the promise of God depends upon God alone and that God’s work in history proceeds in spite of and even through rejection and opposition. By itself this would suggest that the response doesn’t matter. Accordingly, Paul has argued in chapter 10 that the response to the act of God comes through the hearing of the proclamation and that responding does make a difference. But then we may be back to the problem of the reliability of the divine word and promise. If Israel has had the chance to hear and some at least have rejected, does this rejection mean that they are rejected in turn—in which case the promise, from Paul’s point of view, would have failed, at least in regard to the “all”? Of course, there would be no problem if God did not intend that all would become just, or if becoming just (through hearing and faithfulness) didn’t matter, or if the salvation of a few were enough for God. There are many ways to make this issue less daunting, and theologians have at one time or another chosen all of them. But Paul will not take any straightforward or easy way out of this aporia. He will not relinquish the universality of the promise, the seriousness of the claim of justice, or the responsibility of the hearer to be or become truly just.

Again the question: Has God rejected his people? Absolutely not! (11:1). Isaiah has been quoted as characterizing Israel as a “disobedient and contrary people.” Obedience in the sense of hearing and heeding the proclamation is essential to faithfulness and so to justice and so to salvation. It would seem to follow that God would reject those who reject his word or promise, yet, Absolutely not!

We recall that what is at stake is the reliability of the divine promise, gift, election, as the reliability of the promise to the nations depends upon the reliability of the promise to Israel. This is not just a question of Israel; it is a question that bears upon the very possibility of relying upon the promise of God also for gentiles.

I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. In Philippians 3:5–6 he had expanded this to include “a Pharisee, as to the law blameless, as to zeal a persecutor of the church.” What is at stake here at first is the question of whether “some” have responded to the call and promise of God. It would not be out of place to recall that for Paul his own inclusion in those who have been called to be faithful to the promise is itself a matter of an extreme gratuity. By his own admission he had been an enemy of the gospel, a persecutor of the messiah and the messiah’s people. He was one who had the zeal he spoke of earlier, but not according to knowledge. That an enemy of the gospel should be made its advocate is a demonstration of absolute gratuity: While we were yet enemies. Paul himself then is a demonstration: if even he could be chosen by sheer gift, then who not? But this is getting ahead of the story.

God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. Paul has maintained that foreknowing and predestining refer to Israel. This means not this or that individual (still less, individual gentiles) but precisely a people in its extension through time as a history. In terms of Paul’s argument the “foreknowledge” is that of promise, the promise to Abraham concerning his seed. (This sort of foreknowledge is quite different from, indeed opposed to, the sort of abstract and timeless foreknowledge that Augustine, in a Platonizing move, attributed to God in such a way as to make predestination an inevitable consequence of the unchanging foreknowledge of history attributed to the divine unchanging aseity.) This promise, which launches a new history, is not without effect, because some descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have responded to it—for example, Paul of the tribe of Benjamin, a son of Jacob. Predestination and foreknowledge here do not have to do with some abstraction that can be made into an aspect of the doctrine of the nature of God but, rather, with the history of promise to Abraham. God’s “pre”-knowledge is quite simply God’s promise; the same is true of god’s “pre”-destination. This has to do exclusively with the character of promise as promise.

Moreover, Paul is not alone either in being a descendant of Abraham or in being one who has heard and responded to the promise. Here he turns to another moment in Israel’s history when it seemed that all had deserted the call and claim of God: Do you not know what the written says of Elijah? . . . “I have kept for myself 7000.” This Paul applies to the current situation by saying, So too at the present time there is a remnant. The idea of a remnant has been anticipated earlier in chapter 9 where the sparing of a remnant prevented Israel from the total elimination that had characterized the fate of Sodom (9:27, 29). So therefore also in the present time a remnant has come to be according to a selection of favor [generosity].

Giorgio Agamben has shown that the idea of a remnant that arises in the prophetic literature of Israel has an eschatological or messianic character. A remnant is that which survives judgment but is also the bearer of salvation. In Pauline thought the remnant has to do with the now-time, which is for Paul the messianic time, the time in which time comes to its messianic end. Agamben notes, “The remnant is not so much the object of salvation as that which properly makes salvation possible” (Time 56). The idea of the remnant exists only in messianic time, the now-time.

The remnant in Paul’s thought is a particularly loaded form of synecdoche, a rhetorical figure in which the whole and the part enter into substitutability. On the one hand, the remnant is only a part of the whole, for example, the part of Israel that survives the Babylonian captivity (Isaiah) or the part that is faithful to YHWH in the time of Elijah. Yet this part is also the whole as the bearer of the promise to the whole people. We may recall the bargaining of Abraham with YHWH about the fate of Sodom, in which a few just persons would substitute for the demand of justice and avert judgment from (all of) Sodom. Thus, the part tends to include the whole. In Paul’s argument thus far, this has happened already in interesting ways. His condemnation of pagan social order, for example, is a condemnation of that part (the elite) that represents the whole. Or in another example, Paul can suppose that some, considered as not all, of the pagans may be just (that is, fulfill the requirements of the law so become a law to themselves). However, viewed more precisely as a part of the whole, they may be swallowed up in the judgment that overtakes the whole, and this will be said again soon both of Judeans and gentiles.

In the messianic time, the now-time, the remnant (not all) and the “all” will enter into a sort of interchangeability with one another. The remnant will serve as a testimony to the divine commitment to justice and to the reliability of the promise but will also serve as the anticipation of a whole or all that will overflow both the remnant and the whole itself (thus, the all of Israel will come to include as well all the nations). Agamben notes concerning Paul’s view of Israel at this point: “It is therefore neither the all, nor a part of the all, but the impossibility for the part and the all to coincide with themselves or with each other” (Time 55). Agamben goes on to suggest certain parallels between this notion of the remnant as an all-inclusive part in Marx’s reflections on the proletariat, which also assumes a certain messianic function. In Marx’s view the proletariat is a certain part of society (an excluded part as it turns out). However, because its condition is the sum of all oppressions, its liberation as a class entails the abolition of classes as such, so the anticipation of the classless society (64–65), or as one might now say, the messianic society.

The remnant, Paul insists, is one that is selected altogether without its own merit but simply on account of unconditional generosity: If it is by generosity, it is no longer from works; otherwise generosity would not be generosity. Earlier Paul had insisted that the promise rests on generosity (gift) (4:16). And he had already pointed out that what is paid out as a wage is certainly not “generosity” but is instead a debt (4:4). In this way Paul transfers the meaning of remnant from that of judgment (all that is left after destruction) to that of gift, of a generosity that intends salvation or wholeness.

The passages Paul then cites pick up the problem of Israel not responding to the messianic proclamation that had been the subject of the previous chapter—as we might expect, a word from Isaiah (29:10) and from the Psalms (69:22–23). They are connected by the trope of unseeing eyes, and the latter passage is especially harsh, calling a curse upon those who persecute the just. These seem to articulate judgment, so Paul immediately corrects course: So have they stumbled so as to fall? Absolutely not! The stumbling metaphor reminds us that those who now persecute the faithful are those who have stumbled upon the strange, even if reliable—the strangely reliable and reliably strange—way in which God (or justice) acts in history. But as Paul makes haste to say, this stumbling opens up an unexpected way for justice, and the promise that is its actual basis, to take effect, again, unexpectedly: Through their trespass salvation has come to the pagans in order to make Israel jealous.

Israel’s rejection of the messiah and the messianic event opens up the way to the announcement of the messianic event to (all) the nations. What does this concretely mean? We may surmise that for Paul the repudiation of the messiah (condemned according to the law by its official interpreters) places the messiah outside the people of Israel in such a way as to become the messiah of those outside, the nations or pagans. Joshua is turned over to the pagans (the Romans) by the leaders of Israel, and in this way the law is exposed as that which is an instrument of injustice opening the way for the coming of justice “outside the law.” (I have attempted to offer a more extended explication of this in Transforming Atonement.)

We should note in addition that the trespass is said to be of the “whole” Israel even though it is of the part (though not the remnant), namely, certain elites or opponents. Here again we find a synecdoche: The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened. But all this, Paul suggests, is going to make Israel jealous. Of what? Of the opening of the announcement of Israel’s God to the outsiders. The notion of jealousy here is quite wonderful. Israel has, it supposes, a “monogamous” relation with his “husband,” God. Even if Israel is not impeccably faithful, still Israel wants his husband to be so. Yet God woos another, the dreaded pagans. So Israel is jealous. This strange and wonderful soap opera will play out in surprising ways. (It is odd how seldom people notice that both Israel and God are putatively male characters in this improbable love story!) Note that in this love story, God acts with a close eye on Israel: the turn to the gentiles is supposed to have an effect on Israel. The gentiles, as we will see, are simply a tool to get Israel’s attention.

The purpose of their stumbling over God, over the surprising way that God acts, is not that they might be rejected but that others might (also) be included. Thus, even the “hardening” of Israel means only that redemption is now immeasurably widened in scope. Israel is an instrument of justice and mercy, whether as elect or as hardened. Now if their trespass means riches for the world, and if their failure means wealth for the nations, how much more their fullness? The point is that if the reduction to a remnant is what makes for wealth (the gifts of God or the favors of God) for the world of the nations, then how much more wealth will the inclusion of all of Israel (not a remnant only) mean for the world? We should note that cosmos and nations name the two keys in which Paul has been developing his argument: cosmos as that which yearns for deliverance (Romans 8); nations as that which had been without hope of redemption. The redemption of Israel can only mean the ratification of this astonishing hope.

The logic here is that some means wealth and all means astonishing wealth. This is obviously not a zero-sum game in which wealth for one means impoverishment for the other. One of the most important characteristics of messianic politics is that it is not based upon a logic of scarcity, with zero-sum games abounding. Rather, the messianic entails a logic of abundance in which more for some means an exponential increase in more for all. Or in Paul’s regular phrase: “how much more” (posō mallon). We might call this messianic math.

18. Warning to the Nations (11:12–24)

Here Paul already signals his conclusion, a conclusion that will give the definite answer as to whether God has rejected God’s people or whether the failure of Israel to receive the messiah of Israel means that they have stumbled so as to fall. And the answer, he is signaling, is that all Israel will be included and that this is also good news for the gentiles since it means that their wealth (the promise of God) abounds or multiplies exponentially, all the more. Let’s see how this works.

First, Paul indicates that because he is the delegate of God’s good news, his own vocation is subservient to God’s purpose with respect to God’s (original) people. He makes this clear by taking his (gentile) reader into his confidence: Now I am speaking to you nations. Inasmuch as I am a delegate [apostle] to the nations, I glorify my own service in order to provoke those of my own flesh to jealousy so that I might save some of them. Paul has a small part in what God is doing. What God is doing is provoking jealousy in Israel; what Paul is doing is provoking jealousy in some of them. What God is doing will result in the salvation of all; what Paul is doing is aimed at the salvation of some (not yet all).

But what is most astonishing is that the apostleship to the gentiles is really aimed at the salvation of those who are not gentiles! The mission to the gentiles is simply a sort of detour to the true mission to Israel. Paul exaggerates his own mission to the gentiles in order to save some of Israel. The gentiles aren’t the point. They are the means. The potential “arrogance of nations” (the title of a splendid study of Romans by Neil Elliott) is here undercut in the most decisive way. They might suppose, as Christians have for millennia, “We got it, but they didn’t. They rejected, but we accepted. They were the chosen, but now we are.” Christian anti-Judaism and even supersessionism are radically undercut, made impossible, by Paul’s argument here. If only Christians had read carefully! Here we may recall again the discussion between Carl Schmitt and Jacob Taubes (Taubes 51, 97–113) in which Taubes demonstrates that Paul is no supersessionist.

What of this “some” who are the remnant of Israel or who are being saved through the jealousy provoked by Paul’s mission to the gentiles? Are they only a fragment? Or is the synecdochal machine going to surprise us once again?

First of all, the part is not just a part: If their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead? If those who seem to be rejected serve by their rejection to lead to the reconciliation of the world (composed after all of those who had themselves seemed to be rejected), then their inclusion, their welcome back, can only mean the sort of thing that has been in view all along: the resurrection of the dead. What is the resurrection of the dead, after all? Is it not that all who fell by the wayside, all who were rejected, receive an unexpected future, an unanticipated life? Paul had said, while we were yet enemies. Should it be any different for those we think are our enemies? For those we think of as having utterly failed to heed the claim of justice? If they cannot be included, how could we?

Now the notion of a remnant is utterly transformed from the “key” of judgment to that of redemption: If the dough offered as first fruits is holy, so is the whole lump [Numbers 15:18–21]; if the root is holy, so are the branches [Jeremiah 11:16–17]. Here the remnant intends the whole; the part includes the totality. This also helps answer the question that we noted at the very beginning of this letter with respect to its address to those in Rome: the Romans. We asked, Does this mean the faithful in Rome or the whole of Rome? And the answer is yes. For if the “some” are made holy, the whole lump is holy. We could break this out: as some are now, all will be later. But this is not the way messianic time works. Messianic time is the compression of times so that what is future characterizes the now-time. With respect to Israel the part that is faithful includes all, as well as the part that is characterized as “trespass.” The “some” is bigger than the whole (for the some will also include the gentiles).

The mention of branches in this regard is not fortuitous since it announces the extended metaphor that Paul will now develop to address the idea he had broached about the gentiles being included in order to include Israel. Paul will return to the current argument at 11:25 after he has warned the pagan nations (non-Judeans) against arrogance and pride in relation to the favored people of God. Alas, it is an argument that gentiles have been all too eager to misunderstand. Or as Paul has said, quoting Isaiah and the Psalm, having eyes they [we] are blinded.

The discourse is about roots and branches: But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot were grafted in among them and became a partaker of the sap of the root, do not exult over the branches. Clearly, this means don’t pretend that you are now the chosen in their place. Your only nourishment, your only source of life and fruitfulness, is still that root, the root of Israel. If you exult, remember that you do not support the root, but the root supports you. Don’t brag about your status: You will say, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in”; that is true. They were broken off because of their unfaithfulness, but you endure only on account of your faithfulness; so don’t be proud but be afraid. One is tempted to add: be very afraid! Why fear? If God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you. Paul wants to awaken assurance for those who are faithful, but he is also ready to provoke fear among those who may be tempted to take divine favor for granted as something that is now a possession. If we recall that the faithfulness Paul speaks of here produces justice and that injustice is itself unfaithfulness, we may see that there is indeed reason to fear. For who would maintain that the history of the people who are here spoken of as grafted into the root has been characterized by justice or mercy, above all, their justice and mercy with respect to the favored people of God?

For what is the relation of Christianity to Judaism if it is not a boasting over the branches that were cut out? And this history that bears the bitter fruit of Christian anti-Judaism, a deformity whose consequences are too horrifying even to name—Shoah, the unspeakable itself—is it not a testimony to our desire to be not branches but the very root itself? Indeed, it is the desire to tear up the root of the promise of God to Israel and to supplant this root and suppose that it is only by being grafted onto us that Jews can find the nourishment of the root. It was for this reason that the later Karl Barth could rightly suppose that Christian anti-Semitism is the unpardonable sin. It is unpardonable because it is the absolute refusal of grace, because it is this willful severance of itself from the root of God’s unfailing promise to Israel.

See then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen; kindness to you, if you imitate that kindness. To continue in the kindness of God is to continue to exhibit that kindness, that inclusion for the undeserving. Hardly anything is clearer in biblical faith than that the merciful receive mercy and the merciless receive no mercy: Otherwise, you too will be cut off.

And even the others, if they do not insist on unfaithfulness, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again. But they are not grafted into a gentile root but back into the root of Israel, where they belong. Not by becoming what we call Christians (a gentile phenomenon now) but by becoming who they “naturally” are: the favored people of Israel who are destined to faithfulness and so to justice. In this connection it is important to bear in mind something noted by Krister Stendahl, that Paul does not urge Jewish Christians to renounce circumcision or the observance of food regulations. He simply maintains that these should not be imposed upon gentiles (Stendahl 2; cf. Esler 306–307, 354–355). Paul is concerned with the eschatological incorporation of Judeans as Judeans, and how should Judean identity be recognized save through adherence to the “law”? To be sure, this adherence would be understood as that which awakens one to the seriousness of the claim of justice, so is faithful to that claim. But that is precisely what the great Jewish thinkers from Maimonides through Rosenzweig and Levinas have asserted about maintaining the particularity of Jewish identity through adherence to the laws transmitted across history. Later Paul will argue, with respect to such differences as those between Judeans and gentile believers, that each should adhere firmly to their own view and practice as a matter of conscience, but in ways that do not lead to mutual condemnation (Romans 15).

For if you have been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree and grafted, against nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these natural branches be grafted back into their own olive tree? The image depends upon the contravention of normal or customary (natural in that sense) horticultural practice. Usually the cultivated shoot is grafted into the wild root in order to produce edible fruit. (This is the way of California vineyards, for example: native wild root stock produce less desirable grapes, so cultivated branches are grafted in to produce higher-quality grapes.) The act of God in history then is “against nature” (and here we should recall the discussion of what is “against nature” in Romans 1).

But when the cut-off branches are restored, they return to their own (idia) olive tree, where they (not we) belong (by nature in another sense). This image of olives is addressed to the “nations” whose potential arrogance Paul seeks to interdict. Centuries of Christian history show that he had good reason to worry. We may even reflect upon a certain history of gentile branches being cast off. From the seventh century onward, is it not the case that even the most powerful branches of what was then Christianity came to be cast off and to wither with the spread of Islam? Had Christianity itself become so self-preoccupied with its alliance to imperial power and prosperity, so arrogant with respect to its own dogmatic certitudes as itself to expel Arians and Nestorians and Monophysites, that it had become useless to the divine project of mercy and justice? Were not branches of Islam grafted on in the place of an arrogant Christianity that had forgotten a commitment to the poor? Even today when the allegedly Christian nations seek to cast suspicion upon Islam, do they not confront the implacable commitment to the poor as the strength of “traditional” (some even say, “fundamentalist”) Islam?

And at the beginning of the twentieth century it is not too great a stretch to see the corrupt Christianity of the czars being overwhelmed by a Marxist-Leninist commitment to the working class. That is, a forgetfulness of justice and mercy on the part of Christianity led to many branches being cut off. But we seem incapable of learning from history, even a history that is remarkably prefigured in Paul’s warning here.

Whether we restrict ourselves to the history that Paul already knew or expand this history forward to our time, we must be struck by the way in which Paul underscores what seems to be the curious ability of the divine to improvise. God (or we might say, justice) does not operate in accordance with hard-and-fast rules, by any sort of iron law of history. God (or justice) improvises, which makes this “history of salvation” so unpredictable. God promises seed, but not the firstborn. Pharaoh opposes liberation—but never mind; we can use that. Israel or some elements of Israel reject the messiah—that will only mean including the nations. Divine justice responds to what we might call the fluid situation on the ground.

But this unpredictability is at the same time utterly reliable. It has a single aim: justice that flows from mercy. This is the unchanging decree, if we may use that language, of the way justice works out in history. But because human history is itself uncoerced (otherwise, we could speak of neither justice nor mercy), justice must come to terms with obstinacy and arrogance as well as unexpected faithfulness and loyalty. Hence God is never predictable but always reliable. God improvises. History is the history of divine improvisation to the tune of justice and mercy.

And because this is so, Paul warns his readers: For I want you not to be ignorant of this mystery so that you not use your own “wisdom.” The mystery turns out to be what I am terming “improvisation.” And having our own wisdom is the gentile equivalent of Israel seeking to possess its own justice, taking it for granted that it knew what justice was. For the wisdom (phronein) of which Paul speaks here is precisely the supposition that we can work this out in accordance with our own knowledge, that the way of justice conforms to our “common sense,” that reason alone will tell us how justice comes—in short, that it is a kind of deductive system so there are no surprises left, no ground for sheer astonishment. But the gospel, the glad-making announcement, is all about surprising us, all about taking our breath away. That is what Paul means by mystery.

19. Eucatastrophe (11:25–36)

Paul is now ready to bring this argument concerning God’s history with Israel and the nations to a close. He has prepared the ground in various ways. But he may also only now be beginning to realize the full impact of his own argument. In any case it is the declaration of a “mystery,” of an unveiling of what has been hidden—of a completely unpredictable yet, in retrospect, inevitable working out of God’s promise to Israel as extended to the nations but by no means revoked for Israel.

So that you not have a certain wisdom [phronein] in yourselves, I want you not to be ignorant of this mystery. To have wisdom that comes from oneself is somehow parallel to having a certain righteousness that is based in oneself. It is to be ignorant. For the basis of justice and of wisdom must lie outside ourselves, not be deducible from that with which we are familiar or at home.

The mystery here has to do with the relation of Israel and the nations: Hardness has happened to part of Israel until the totality [pleroma] of the nations enters. And so all Israel will be saved. The relation of part to whole here has been prepared in 11:14 (dough/lump, branch/root). Part of Israel has had hardness befall it (like Pharaoh), but the aim of this hardness is that all, the totality, of the nations shall enter into the promise. And then comes another totality: all Israel. We might have supposed that Paul had said his last word about the salvation of (some of) Israel when he spoke of trying to make Israel jealous by his mission to the nations. There it was “some,” but now it is “all.” The rejection of (part) of Israel is simply a tool for the bringing in of all nations. And the bringing in of all nations is merely a tool for the consummation of the divine promise to Israel: The deliverer will come from Zion; he will banish impiety from Jacob. The citations from Isaiah 59:20–21 and 29:9 recall that when all is said and done, Jacob will receive the blessing promised, in spite of all that may happen along the winding road to this redemption.

To his gentile readers Paul says, As regards the gospel they are enemies of God for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. Those who are hardened are the theme of this affirmation: they are enemies of the gospel (just as Paul had been), and this redounds to the advantage of the nations (for your sake). How then are we to regard the refusal of the messiah on the part of (part of) Israel? Quite simply as that which provides the opening for us to be the ones who hear and heed the gospel. It is precisely insofar as they are, to use contemporary categories, Jews rather than Christians that they are our benefactors.

Those who are now enemies of the gospel are nevertheless beloved. They remain forever the elect, the chosen, the singular people of God. For God does not take back God’s word, God’s gift, God’s calling. These are irrevocable. Thus, God can be trusted. Indeed, we here confront the basis of Christian anxiety about salvation: if God can reject his chosen people, then God can reject us. This is what Paul himself had pointed to (11:22–24). But this sort of anxiety is what produces all the deformities of religion. And what produces the contrary? The assurance that “nothing can separate us from the love of God”—that the promise, the gift, the call of God, is irrevocable, above all for Israel and therefore also for us.

We thus emphasize that to be beloved for the sake of their forefathers means that Judeans are incorporated in divine salvation simply because they are Israelites, the inheritors of the promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and for no other reason. It is not because they are better or more deserving or more observant, but simply because God promised. For this reason it is absolutely essential that we not disturb or limit this “all.” But that is precisely what Western Christian exegesis has done almost from the very beginning. In doing so, in thinking only of a remnant or of those who come to be converted to a Christian religion, the whole of Paul’s argument has been reduced to utter nonsense. Thus, in this now-time Judaism as Judaism remains. It is not destined to be evaporated into the universal, for then the promise to Israel would have been in vain.

Here then is the answer to the questions: Has God rejected his people? Absolutely not [11:1]; Have they stumbled so as to fall? Absolutely not [11:11]. Paul is thus able to draw the consequences: Just as you were once disobedient to God but now have received mercy because of their disobedience, so they have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also now receive mercy. We, after all, were the enemies of God, yet we have been given the gift of the divine promise. Shall their being enemies prevent them from receiving the same mercy? On the contrary, the very fact that we receive this gift makes it evident that Israel does as well. In Paul’s vision, what we may term “Christianity” is simply a long detour or parenthesis that leads to what God had intended all along: the blessing of the whole of Israel. In order to reach this goal, however, it was necessary to also include all the nations.

These two “alls” are now brought into clear focus: For God has consigned all in disobedience in order that God may have mercy on all. Simply all. It is just as we heard at the end of chapter 3: all are disobedient. So now all receive mercy, favor, blessing, not because it has been deserved but because it is God who has promised. Of course, there will always be those who take offense at this “all.” But Eastern theology from Origen to Gregory understood that this “all” was the essence of the gospel. For Gregory it included not only all people but even Satan—just because God is God, and good news is simply and astonishingly good news.

Paul has earned his rapturous conclusion: O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments, how inscrutable his ways. Beyond what could be seen, understood, or known by human imagining, God has found a way to make even disaster (catastrophe) turn into radiant consummation (eucatastrophe).

Yet even the astonishing and inscrutable coheres with what God had already intimated. Isaiah had already asked, For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor? (40:13). This shows that no one can dictate to God how it ought to turn out, or how God will act to achieve those ends. And Job had asked, Who has given a gift to God so as to deserve repayment? (35:7; 41:11), thereby anticipating that God gives not out of obligation but out of sheer unmeritable generosity. The freedom of God goes together with the unpredictability and reliability of God—this is what it means to say that God improvises in history so as to take into account human response without being defeated by it.

For from, through, and to [ward] God—everything. To God the shining forth through all the ages. Everything, all, absolutely all, is incorporated in the gracious determination of the divine. Indeed, that is the divine as such, this all-encompassing divine radiance. The point of what God is up to in the world is neither Israel nor the nations. It is, quite simply, all.