For more info on this book, you can take a peek at its page at pactumbooks.com, my site for Pactum Reformanda Publishing (that I formed back in 2002 to publish Feed My Lambs). I’ll be revamping and updating the Pactum site over the next couple of days – presently, it doesn’t even have a link to the CreateSpace store page, which just went live. (Will correct that shortly.)

I was sort of commissioned to write this piece back in 2004, but the book in which it was to appear fell on hard times and was not published. I later had a contract with another publisher to have it released on its own, but it fell victim to cutbacks. Knowing that I do not have present resources to publish in paperback as I did with Feed My Lambs, I decided on my first ebook-only (PDF) release.

You can get more information and learn how to purchase by going to my Pactum Reformanda Publishing web site.

Now, of course, God does lay requirements upon man, and God does grant forgiveness of sins apart from works. But the Bible’s use of the terms “gospel” and “law,” particularly in Paul’s writings, where Protestant discussion on these subjects tends to centre around, is very different from these definitions.

Paul always uses nomos (“law”) to refer to Torah, whether in the sense of “the Mosaic covenant” (by far his most frequent usage) or in the more general sense of “the five books of Moses.” In the second sense, his focus is on Torah as Scripture, as e.g. the Genesis narratives concerning Abraham are referred to as nomos in Galatians 4.24 and, given the immediately following context, likely in Romans 3.31 as well.

Similarly – and not surprisingly, given the content of the books we call Gospels – the term “gospel” is a very concrete term with definite historical connections (after all, it means “good news“). While free forgiveness of sins has always been God’s way of dealing with sinners, the term “gospel” is tied to God’s concrete and dateable historical actions related to what some scholars call “the Christ event,” with Christ’s death and resurrection at the center (see e.g. 1 Cor 15.1-4).

I have become increasingly convinced of the importance of abandoning the abstract usage of these terms, not because the general theological point is wrong; it is not. God saved us, out of His own sovereign mercy, not because of works of righteousness which we have done (Titus 3.5). But the problem with using the specific terms law and gospel in the way that we do means that inevitably those “synthetic” meanings get read into all the biblical texts where the terms appear. And that is not a good thing.

What follows is a lightly modified version of a private post I made on this subject. I have tried to clean up the style slightly, as well as eliminate points that were really germane only to a narrower discussion. To aid clarity, I have also added a couple of brief statements that distill thoughts I had made in the more extended discussion.  I trust making this public will prove somewhat helpful in terms of clarifying the importance of the fight for biblical language.

Nobody in my sphere denies that one’s acceptance with God is not dependent upon anything they do, but rather God’s love in Christ. Not only do we not deny it, I doubt that anyone of us are the slightest bit unclear on it either.

That is not at all the point of my tirades regarding the terminology of law and gospel. My point is that by using the terms “law” and “gospel” to give this assurance (and ubiquitously, as people prone to use the terms generally do), the possibility of reading the texts correctly is effectively destroyed. And that does far more harm than anyone can imagine.

Now, taking Galatians as a sort of example. If we go to what Paul is actually talking about, where will we derive application? Is it really such a big deal that we skip the circumcision issue and jump right to “the heart of the matter”?

It’s all well and good to say that we don’t face the circumcision issue in our churches. But just because we need to make an extra step in application doesn’t mean that understanding the text properly to begin with is unimportant. To the contrary, the applications that would be much closer to the heart of the issue are completely lost because certain preachers think that all those Pauline texts are harangues about law and gospel, defined in their traditional Protestant terms.

There are all sorts of issues much closer to the surface application than dealing with some supposed merit theology that dwells in every man’s Pelagian heart. Frankly, paedocommunion and “close communion” are a lot more relevant to Galatians than is merit theology. Does paedocommunion have to do with assurance? Absolutely, but it’s a lot more practical and on the ground than the gospel-law treatment ever makes possible.

The whole matter of Jew and Gentile, which Paul broadens out explicitly into barbarian, Scythian etc – these are the immediate implications of the gospel, and if the churches had been preaching what Paul actually says rather than hammering on a pet doctrine, racism could never have taken hold anywhere.

Then too the use of “gospel” and “law” with a different, extrabiblical meaning and then reading that meaning into Scripture not only buries the native and should-be obvious applications. People express concern about the fine distinctions which systematic theology makes. Some of those distinctions are valid. Fine. But I worry about the distinctions that Scripture itself makes, distinctions which become not merely unaccented but unallowable because systematic theology’s forcible takeover of the key terms cannot allow the texts like James to say what they actually do say. They do not allow the texts like Galatians 5.4 to say what they actually do say. They do not allow the texts like Galatians 6.7-9 to say what they actually do say. Ad infinitum.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are all sorts of implications that hardly anyone has even begun to think about. How does it affect the church that while the NT is all about Israel, it wouldn’t make a difference to most preaching if Jesus were born in Quebec?

I preach free grace clearly and quite consistently as well. I have no problem with that. But I will not bow to this confusion that has been wrought by distorting the biblical terminology. It has done more damage than we can possibly know.

Frankly, I increasingly think the ubiquitous law-gospel thing is a crutch. I wonder if where it’s preached most strongly is in fact where it least needs to be preached – where folks are much more prone to feel secure when they ought not, because they believe “the right thing” about justification.

In his new book Deep Exegesis, Peter Leithart warns about treating the actual words of Scripture as “husk” which we can safely discard as long as we have what’s really important, the “meaning.” (And all too often, “meaning” is boiled down even further, so that it is not even merely a summary of the text, but a systematic statement of the supposed “doctrine” we are to take from the text.)

If we actually understand the text, we can revisit in every generation and every situation and come back with a fitting application. But if we boil all the meat off and say it’s all about free grace in the abstract, we will lose any particular witness (or at least, the most biblically-relevant) on the ground to what the gospel is about.

The battles in the early church over the law were not about theological theorems. Every last one of them were battles over practical issues of
fellowship and exclusion, and if we learned those lessons, church life would be much different than it is in conservative Reformed-dom. The exclusivism of conservative Reformed and Lutheran churches bears eloquent witness to the fact that their law-gospel construct is a monumental hindrance to actually living by the letters that Paul really wrote.

“For,” Paul adds, “Christ is the telos of the law.” Actually, he says more than that, but we need to sort out several things, so let’s deal with telos first.

So, what does telos mean? Its field of meaning revolves around the idea of “end,” but there are nuances. It can of course simply mean “end.” (E.g. Mt 10.22, “The one who endures to the end will be saved; Mt 24.6: “The end is not yet.”) This is the most common usage in the Gospels; and it appears frequently in Paul.

Telos can also mean something like “fulfillment.” In the garden, Jesus says that the things written about Him being numbered with the transgressors now have their telos (Lk 22.37). This usage shades into the more general idea of goal.

In Romans 6.21-22, the telos of lawless deeds is death, whereas the telos of sanctification is eternal life. Telos is here the fitting outcome, the native destination.

In 1 Cor 10.11, Paul refers to believers as those upon whom the telos of the ages has come. Generally, this seems to mean something like: the ages have culminated in the gospel.

As can be seen, along with others, Paul has a usage that essentially means goal. Given the metaphors of pursuit, overtaking, and stumbling that Paul has been using in the context, we have good reason to think that is what Paul has in mind here. What is in view is in some sense “the goal of the law.”

Now we must try to establish the overall structure of the verse, and here the terrain is a lot tougher. In English, a great deal of meaning and grammatical relationship is determined by simple word order. In Greek, however, word order plays a different role. It can define phrases, but there are also conventional placements (prepositions are almost always the second word in a grammatical unit) and placement for emphasis (the first word is frequently being highlighted). Relationships are determined by prepositions and by factors such as declensions, gender, and number.

In Greek, Romans 10.4 reads: telos gar nomou Christos eis dikaiosunen panti to pisteuonti.

A horribly wooden “literal” English rendering would be something like: Goal for of the law Christ unto righteousness to all who believe.

Telos appears first, and seems to be receiving emphasis. The genitive nomou (“of [the] law”) clearly modifies telos: “goal of the law.”

“Christ” is also nominative and therefore is in an “is” relationship with telos: Christ is the goal of the law.

Now things get tricky.

What is eis dikaiosunen doing? What does it modify?

The most likely candidates appear to be telos and Christos, although nomou is also technically possible, and wouldn’t be unexpected, given 9.31: Israel pursued “a law of righteousness.” That connection here would lead to something like: “Christ is the goal of the-law-unto-righteousness for those who believe.” I don’t really think that works with Paul’s point in 9.30ff.

I don’t really think “Christ is the goal-unto-righteousness of the law” makes any real sense at all. Perhaps one of my readers can discern order in that, but I’m not seeing it.

(I made the choice for goal already above, due to contextual indicators. I’m ready to admit that if we take telos as end, it makes perfect sense with eis dikaiosunen modifying nomou. “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness.” On this reading, the advent of Christ spells the end of the law as the definer of righteousness, which fits well enough with my understanding of Paul that I wouldn’t object to it. I’m just not convinced that’s exactly what Paul is saying.)

So then, if telos is understood in the sense of goal, then eis dikaiosunen surely modifies “Christ.” We’ll start off with the generic “unto” for eis to begin: “For Christ-unto-righteousness is the goal of the law.” Now we’re getting somewhere; granted the roughness of eis, this is a statement that actually makes some sense. But let’s explore the preposition further.

Eis generally carries ideas of direction or purpose. In the former role, it frequently gets translated as into or unto. But this role generally requires some sort of verb of motion; here, the verb is the implicit stative “is.” Technically, this could still have a sort of local sense, depending on the noun, but “in righteousness” doesn’t make much sense here.

Consequently, eis here has an idea of purpose. In this role, it is frequently rendered simply as for, which would give us “Christ-for-righteousness is the goal of the law.” Which is a pretty decent rendering, and we could stop there. We now have the preposition translated the way the versions usually render it (“for”), but we’ve clarified what it’s modifying.

“For” is of course quite general, and the precise role of eis is left somewhat indeterminate by that rendering. But it seems to me that the context provides a sufficient guide for us here. Christ serves as righteousness (for all who believe), and this is the goal of the law.

With this, Paul has completed his vindication of the law which he commenced in chapter 7. To be sure, his vindication is not a “this is why you should live under the law” sort of vindication. For Paul, the believer is not under Torah (6.14).

Yet Paul does wish to vindicate the law, and he has set himself a hard task. For he himself has identified Torah as one of the constitutive elements (stoicheia) of the world, the old creation, in Galatians 4, and in Romans 5 he has shown how Torah has increased the trespass. So Paul vindicates Torah in two stages. In Romans 7, he vindicates it by saying that its norms are in fact holy, spiritual, just, good. In other words, he assigns it to an expired age, but not because it was wrongheaded or bad. And now here, Paul vindicates Torah by saying that its telos lay beyond itself. It did not exist for itself, but as a running path whose goal was Christ.

To put it another way, the stumbling stone was actually the finish line.

I think now we can understand why Paul says that Israel pursued a law of righteousness, but did not succeed in reaching the law. It is because Torah itself had Christ Himself as the righteousness of God as its goal. And because Israel pursued Torah’s righteousness as if by works, they upset the order of the things.

The righteousness of God is His own action in Christ, and this is the goal of the law. When Israel focuses upon the law to trigger the Age to Come, they in effect confuse themselves with God; they are trying to do what He alone can do. They must submit to His own righteousness. They belong to “this present age,” an age which Paul has characterized as death. Their only hope is resurrection; their only hope is in the God who raises the dead and calls the things which are not as though they are, and so they become; their only hope is in the righteousness of God.

Gentiles were not pursuing (dioko) righteousness. But nonetheless, they overtook it. They caught up to something (faith-righteousness) they were not chasing (9.30).

Israel, on the other hand, were pursuing. Well, they were pursuing nomon dikaiosunes – the law of righteousness. And the result was that they did not reach (phthano) the law (9.31).

As we can recognize, Paul is expressing a paradox. The chasers did not catch; the non-chasers caught. The Gentiles weren’t chasing anything, and they got the right thing. Israel wasn’t quite chasing the right thing, and they didn’t even get the thing they were chasing.

The paradox is more than that the non-chasers caught and the chasers didn’t. The paradox is also that Paul says that Israel did not reach the law. For few observers would have had that thought. The law, after all, was Israel’s possession. And it won’t do simply to say that Paul means they didn’t keep the law perfectly, for the simple reason that the law never said they had to, and in any case, Paul never hints at anything like that being in his mind.

But the real reason Paul says this is that, as so often, he is anticipating himself; he will complete the thought much more fully in 10.4.

For now, Paul asks why Israel did not reach their goal (the law of righteousness). “Because not from faith, but as if from works” (9.32a). (The Byzantine text adds nomou, “of law,” but that doesn’t alter the sense.) Now, there’s an elliptical statement that takes us from paradox to conundrum and back again. What would one expect from law but works? Of course, if you pursue law, you’re doing so by works, no?

But again, Paul is leaving us hanging for 10.4.

“(For) they stumbled at the stumbling stone; just as it is written, ‘Behold, I set in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, and whoever believes upon Him shall not be put to shame’” (9.32b-33).

Here Paul kind of leaves us wondering which came first, the chicken or the egg. Did they pursue the law of righteousness as if by works because they stumbled at the stumbling stone? Or did they stumble at the stumbling stone because they were pursuing the law of righteousness as if by works?

Yes.

Whatever else may be said, some things are very clear. First of all, Christ is a scandal to a “law of righteousness as if by works.” Second, the conflict is not between one impersonal set of doctrines versus another. It is a conflict between the offensive Christ (who is God’s righteousness) and the “law of righteousness as if by works.”

Paul now goes on to say that his heart’s desire and prayer is Israel’s salvation. They indeed have zeal for God, but “not according to knowledge” (10.1-2). Which reference to knowledge brings us back to the ignorance mentioned in 10.3, where we began our previous post: they are “ignorant of the righteousness of God.” Not of course that they plain don’t know about it, but that they have stumbled over it, or shall we say Him.

Now, I think that what this means is that Paul doesn’t invent the meaning of the term. Throughout the Old Testament, wherever the divine righteousness is referred to, it has to do with God’s verity, His faithfulness. Usually, this centers upon promises of salvation, although the flip side of judgment of those who would harm His faithful ones is bound up with that.

This explains why in Romans 3.1-8, Paul (1) speaks about the oracles of God – and given 1.2, his central view is on the prophetic Word concerning God’s Son; and (2) veers between language of faithfulness, righteousness, and truth. In Hebrew, we are looking at ‘emunah, which captures all of these. God’s righteousness is His faithfulness, trustworthiness, verity with His commitments.

I guess you could say, then, that I am one of those people who takes the term to mean something like “covenant faithfulness.”

With regard to Romans 9-10, I recently heard a preacher object to this reading of the phrase, on the basis of Romans 10.3: “for being ignorant of the rightousness of God, and seeking to establish their own [righteousness], they [i.e. Israel] have not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God.” The objection went something like this: Israelites knew that God would keep His promises, therefore they did not reject the righteousness of God in that sense.

But this confuses the actual righteousness of God with a doctrine of the righteousness of God.

Paul’s point in Romans 3 is to show that Christ is the righteousness of God. (Note that I did not say that Christ’s lawkeeping is the righteousness of God.) God’s righteousness is embodied in His Son, and in particular in His self-giving death. That is why Israel’s unrighteousness serves to display the righteousness of God (3.5), for in their very act of rejecting and crucifying the Son, God’s righteousness was being realized, carried out. (Romans 3.1-8 is thus not a general statement about generic sinfulness; nor is 3.9ff, for that matter. It is a programmatic statement of Israel’s fall which Paul refers to again and again, and makes explicit in 9.32-33: Christ is Israel’s stumbling stone, not generic failure to keep the law.)

This is confirmed by Paul’s choice of the word hupotasso: “they did not obey the righteousness of God.” If, as is widely thought, “the righteousness of God” refers to something “imputed,” Paul’s wording is rather strange. Would he really say that Israel failed to obey the imputed righteousness of Christ, or even submit to the imputed righteousness of Christ?

But when we see that Christ is the righteousness of God, everything starts to come together. For “the righteousness ek pisteos” (from faith/faithfulness) says, don’t ask who will ascend into heaven, i.e. in order to bring Christ down, or who will descend into the deep, i.e. to bring Christ up from the dead (10.6-7). We see first of all that faith’s concern is Christ Himself. But then, what is the word of faith: “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (10.9).

The significance of the resurrection has already been established by Paul in chapters 4-8, and I won’t speak of that in detail here. Suffice to say that Abrahamic faith is in the God who raises the dead, and 4.25 indicates that Christ was raised “because of our justification.” Since Adam, the great mark of the old creation is death, and therefore salvation is resurrection.

But what I want to stress here is the central confession, “Jesus is Lord.” It is this Jesus who is the stumbling stone who is God’s righteousness, who is Lord – i.e. the One to be obeyed, submitted to. Israel has not obeyed God’s righteousness – they have not recognized Jesus as their true Lord, but rather have stumbled over Him, and therefore the salvation (resurrection) found in Christ is lost to them.

But what does it mean that Israel sought to establish their own righteousness? Does this mean that, rather than accepting the imputed active obedience of Christ, they were attempting to keep the law perfectly for themselves?

Well, not exactly. To be sure, there is a strong note of something human-centred in their efforts, although it is not necessarily quite the Pelagian picture we may assume. Dale Allison has shown that one of the key themes of the most rigorous religious communities of first century Judaism, such as the Pharisees and Essenes, was that they were eager to keep Torah faithfully, as a means to an end, viz, so that God would send His Messiah. Keeping Torah faithfully did not mean “sinlessly,” but it did mean carefully, including making use of the means of reconciliation when appropriate (sin offerings, guilt offerings etc). The understanding was that the arrival of the Age to Come was dependent upon faithfulness on the part of the people.

There are all sorts of ways we could look at that, and I can’t get into them here. If you prefer to think this must have been an effort to earn the arrival of the Age to Come, you can think that way if you like; I don’t particularly think either biblical or extrabiblical evidence supports it. But it may surprise you to learn that the New Testament itself ties the consummation’s arrival to the holiness and godliness of believers, who are not only awaiting but also hastening the coming of “the day of  God” (2 Peter 3.11-12).

But the important thing for our purposes is that Paul denies that the righteousness of God can be had through the law. (And just for those who aren’t aware of things I’ve detailed elsewhere, nomos in Paul almost always refers to the Mosaic covenant in that precise role, although occasionally he will play on words and use nomos to refer to the Mosaic books as Scripture, as e.g. the wordplay in Gal 4.24.)

I noted earlier that the principle of election articulated in Rom 9 can cut two ways. On the one hand, it can be used to defend a “narrowing of the field”: God is still faithful even if He saves only a remnant of Israel. On the other, since consideration of works, willing or running are all excluded, God is free to save “all Israel” even if they are marked by prolonged hardness and rebellion.

This silent undercurrent also works with Paul’s quotation of Hosea later in the chapter: “I will call those who were not My people, ‘My people,’ and those who were not beloved, ‘Beloved’” (9.25). In chapter 9, Paul is making this point regarding the Gentiles, over against the mass of Israel that has fallen.

But the careful reader cannot fail to note that the original Hosea quotation is referring to lost Israelites. If God can call Gentiles “My people,” much more can He recover Israel; and the telling word here is beloved, which recurs again in 11.28: though presently hardened, the mass of Israel is “beloved for the sake of the fathers.”

Something similar can be said of the next verse: “and it shall be in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not My people,’ there they shall be called the sons of the living God’” (9.26).

I think this is the answer to those who simply displace unbelieving Israel and say: “Well, Jesus Himself says they are not sons of Abraham, but children of their father the devil. There are no promises to them.” Not so. It is true, in a very real and direct sense, He has said: “You are not My people.” But there is a promise beyond that, and the disenfranchised will once again be called sons of the living God.

I hope to post further on Romans tonight, but the subject matter is going to shift somewhat, so I’ll leave the rest for another post.

There are numerous problems with this way of dealing with Romans 11, however.

1) Romans 9 has at least as many obscurities and difficulties as does Romans 11. So why is it that the latter chapter is treated like it must be subjected to Romans 9, but not vice-versa?

2) The principle of election articulated in Romans 9 is in fact a double-edged sword that can cut two ways.

3) While Romans 9 makes a comparison between the hardness of the Pharaoh of the exodus and that of Israel contemporary to Paul, careful reading of the two passages reveals an explicit disanalogy at a very critical point.

I’m not going to argue for (1) here, but I do want to reflect a bit on (2) and (3).

The principle of election – double-edged sword

It is clear enough that in Romans 9, Paul deploys the election argument to demonstrate that God’s Word has not failed. The hardening of the bulk of his kinsmen is not a failure of God’s faithfulness; according to His own sovereign election, He Himself has determined whom He will count as seed (9.6-8).

Nonetheless, one must not ignore the fact that in 9.4, concerning presently-lost Israel, Paul does affirm that they are Israelites, and the sonship, glory, covenants, and promises do belong to them. I don’t think we can simply pretend that in 9.6-8, Paul is simply flat out denying what he has just said.

Equally important, we must notice just what the principle of election is. That is articulated by use of the example of Esau and Jacob (9.11): God chose one and not the other before either had done anything whether good of evil (indeed, before they were born), so that the purpose of God might stand according to election.

The principle of election is that God freely makes a choice apart from any works whatsoever. But if this is the case, this not only buttresses Paul’s case in Romans 9 (and, for that matter, 11.7), where it serves to ground the selection of a remnant. It also buttresses Paul’s case in 11.28, where he says that Israel taken as a whole (i.e. the preponderance beyond the remnant) are enemies of God “for your sake,” but as regards election, they remain beloved for the sake of the fathers.

In other words, the very principle of election apart from works – indeed, apart from willing or running (9.16) – is what underlies the election of the presently-hardened mass. The fact that they presently reject Christ and despise the gospel is not any ground for assuming that there is no future for the bulk of Israel. Because God is not identifying them on the basis of their own willing or running.

Analogies and disanalogies

It is a point well-taken that in Romans 9.17, Paul implicitly compares Israel’s present hardened situation with the hardening of Pharaoh. God is free to have mercy or to harden whomsoever He will (9.18). And so, at present God has hardened the mass of Israel even as He hardened the heart of Pharaoh.

There is, however, a striking, explicit contrast between the two cases, which becomes evident when we compare 9.17 with 11.11.

“For this cause I raised you up, so that I might display my power in you….” (9.17)

“Did they stumble in order that they may fall? By no means!” (11.11)

The context of 9.17 indicates that God displays His power through Pharaoh precisely as one who is hardened. God’s stated intention in raising up Pharaoh was to make him a vessel of wrath (9.22).

But Paul pointedly denies that something similar is the case with Israel, and interestingly, he highlights his denial by using some counterpoint. God raised up Pharaoh in order to harden him unto judgment; Israel’s stumble is not in order that they may fall.

This is not a denial that Israel did fall; indeed, that is part of Paul’s point not merely in Romans 9, but also in Romans 11. But the point is that the intention is different, and that ties in to the ultimate outcome. It is one thing for God to raise up hardened Pharaoh merely as a display of His power; it is quite another for God to cast down hardened Israel for the sake of Gentile salvation. The former perishes in the Red Sea. The latter continue on in history, and ultimately find salvation as a collective people.

And one more thing….

When I was looking at OT prophecies during the process of studying paedocommunion a number of years back, I got a bit intrigued by the promise that “they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest” (Jer 31.34). It interested me, because I discovered that the terms in question for least and greatest are the same terms we would translate “youngest” and “eldest.”

In Romans 9.12, of course, Paul picks up on the prophecy to Rebekah that “the elder will serve the younger.” The greater will serve the lesser.

That’s a principle we see take many forms in Scripture – Joseph’s older brothers bow before him, for instance. But then, there is also our elder Brother among us as One who serves, and when some of His disciples dispute regarding who will be greatest among them, He tells them that those who desire to be great must serve.

I believe that God’s temporary rejection of Israel fits this pattern of the greater serving the lesser, the elder serving the younger.

In 9.13, Paul references Malachi 9.13: “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated.” Given the nature of the context, we may be led to think that God despises the bulk of Israel and only loves the believing remnant.

But we need to factor in a lot of biblical evidence in order to grasp the total picture here.

For one, “hatred” need not mean what we assume, as Jordan has pointed out. Esau himself, although he could not repent with reference to recovering his birthright and blessing, nonetheless appears to have repented with regard to his relationship to his brother. Similarly, Genesis tells us that Jacob loved Rachel and “hated” Leah, but that surely simply means that she was not the kind of object of his affections like Rachel was, not that he despised her and wished her ill.

As significant as that data is, much more weighty is Paul’s own direct language in 11.28, referenced earlier: they are beloved for the sake of the fathers.

It seems to me that the case of the temporary rejection of Israel is a case again of the greater serving the lesser. Paul more or less says so in Romans 11.12, 15: it is through Israel’s fall that life has come to the Gentiles. In His wise and mysterious purpose, God has made the firstborn (which is how God identifies Israel in Ex 4.22) serve the younger, so that both ultimately may be saved.

Thus, election is not a case against the recovery of Israel to salvation. It is the very ground and guarantee of that recovery.

Because the creation itself will be freed from the slavery of the corruption unto the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
[Romans 8.21; translation mine]

This is an interesting text on a wide variety of levels, not least of which is the central point, viz. that just as God’s people look forward to an eschatological hope, so does the creation itself.

In my reading today, though, the thing that intrigued me was the parallelism.

I think I’ve seen some translations render thn eleutherian ths doxhs as “the glorious freedom,” and while that is a grammatically possible (and very Hebraic) translation, it is an unfortunate weakening of doxa here. Paul is not talking simply about how wonderful freedom is, and our frequent usages of terms like “wonderful,” “marvelous,” and “glorious” as interchangeable superlatives is bound to get us off track.

In truth, the two phrases “from the slavery of the corruption” and “unto the freedom of the glory” are direct antithetic parallels, and just as “corrupt slavery” won’t work for the former, neither will “glorious freedom” work for the latter. The contrast is between “corruption” (elaborated in the preceding verses as “mortality” – death-subjection, and is posited in particular of the body in 8.11′s ta thnhta somata; thnhta is closely related to thanatos, the primary Greek word for death).

Given this, just as corruption here is synonymous with death-subjection, so glory is synonymous with resurrection (or “resurrectedness”). The genitive is not merely a superlative adjective; it is very much the defining noun for the freedom in question.

Over the course of Romans 5-8, we are given a two-stage resolution to the problem of death incurred by Adam and inflicted upon the race. Paul says that the fall constituted all men as sinners, subject to Sin (the capitalization here is intentional, because Paul’s description is not simply of particular wrongs committed, but Sin as a dominion or even as a lord).

The first stage has come. Already in the present, the believer is “not under Torah but under grace,” with the implication that “Sin shall have no dominion [lordship] over you” (Rom 6.14). (Nomos/Torah here is shorthand for the old creation; as Paul explains elsewhere – e.g. Gal 4 – Torah is among the constitutive elements of the first kosmos.) Already we walk in newness of life, because we have been joined to Christ not only in His death but also His resurrection (6.4).

And yet, thoughout, the second stage is interwoven as something “not yet,” as something promised. In the context of saying that sin shall have no dominion over us, he makes this rather paradoxical statement: “Therefore let not Sin reign in your mortal bodies, so that you would obey their passions” (6.12).

While union with Christ means a transference of dominions brought about by salvation history (note 6.14 again), it nonetheless remains a fact that our bodies are death-subject, and their “native” passions belong to Sin.

However we interpret Romans 7, there is an analogy and indeed a strong thread that runs between the old creation from which we have been released, and our bodies, so that “body of death” (cf 7.24) can refer either to the corporate and total life of the believer under Torah, or to the present life of the new covenant believer as one yet living in a “mortal body.”

We should not think that Paul is being dualistic in the Greek sense of that term. It is not at all that he is anti-creational, or thinks that body is bad and spirit is good. If Paul were anti-creational, he would not say what he does in 8.21; nor would he place the tremendous accent upon bodily resurrection which he does.

Rather, Paul’s point is salvation-historical. It concerns what facets of redemption have and have not been brought into present reality. One aspect of us has been redeemed (“in Him we have redemption through His blood,” Eph 1.7), while another aspect has not (“we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies,” Rom 8.23). As the apostle says in 2 Cor 4, the (current) outer man is “perishing” (corrupting, dying), even while the inner man is being renewed.

Paul succinctly says here that those whom God foreknew are predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son (8.29). This conformity has already occurred in principle and is occurring in practice even now, both as gift and mandate (cf 12.2: do not be conformed to this present kosmos, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, which must in turn be aligned with 1 Cor 2, where Paul says we have the mind of Christ).

But this “already” conformity excepts our bodies, whose conformity to Christ is by promise, and refers to the consummation: “who will transform our lowly body [and] conform it to the body of His glory, according to the working of His power even to subject all things to Himself” (Phi 3.21). Even as in His death and resurrection, Christ has effected the transference of lordship from Sin to Himself, that same power of subjecting all things to Himself will conform our bodies to His own, so that the mastery of His resurrection over us will be complete.

And not only over us. Coming back to Rom 8.21, that mastery will also be over “the creation itself.” No more will the creation be a decaying creation that we pollute and deface; when we are liberated from our death-bodies, the creation will be liberated too. One may say that the creation will be liberated from our death-bodies, since so often it is our sin which destroys it, but what we learn elsewhere is more total even than that. Even as glory for us is not simply having death removed from our present state, so glory for the creation will mean newness. The second stage of redemption will be complete, and it will be comprehensive.

But I’ve largely remained indifferent to whether there remains a future land promise (built e.g. on Gen 12 and a host of related passages), and I’m more than wary of Zionism, which I take to be a very misguided attempt to manufacture a fulfillment of God’s promises without understanding either the promises or the corollary conditions.

I still don’t claim to have a settled position on the land issue. But I was forced to lean toward it when I was struck recently by how much sense it would make. After all:

1. We know that a whole host of Israelites have savingly believed God over the years, both before and after the advent of Christ.
2. We believe in the resurrection of the body, not an eternal state of disembodied “spirituality.”
3. Correspondingly, we believe in the renovation of the earth, just as we believe in the renovation of the body.
4. Surely a renovated earth would have geography, and since the renovation is a renovation of this earth, it seems at least plausible – nay, overwhelmingly likely – that the new earth will have the land of Canaan.
5. Since everyone has to live somewhere – why wouldn’t believing Israelites live in Palestine? Why should that be thought the least bit “strange”?