N T Wright on Replacement Theology

N T Wright

Romans 9–11 is, in fact, a massive retelling of the scriptural narrative, on a par in its way with the remarkable retelling in the second half of the Wisdom of Solomon and other similar second-Temple narratival passages. The point throughout 9:6–29 is that what has happened to Israel is what God always intended. As Paul thinks his way through the story of the patriarchs, the Exodus and the time of the prophets, it is clear that God never intended Israel to be affirmed as it stood. God had, it seems, called Abraham and his family to be the solution-bearing family knowing that, because they too were ‘in Adam’, they were themselves bound to become part of the problem, and that the shape of their own history was thus bound to bear witness to their own share in the problem whose solution they were none the less carrying. This line of thought reaches its height at the start of chapter 10, where, just as in 3:21, the Messiah himself reveals what God’s covenant plan had been all along. But as the argument of chapter 10 works through to the statement of Paul’s missionary policy in verses 14–18, it leaves him still with the puzzle: if God has, as he promised, made Israel jealous by bringing in Gentiles to share the covenant privileges, what is now to happen to ‘Israel according to the flesh’?

It is at this point, of course, that many have tried to mount an exegetical argument to say that, while Paul has indeed explained the renewal of the covenant, the rethinking of election, as I have expounded it above, he here offers a different argument, supremely in 11:25–26, for thinking that God is also providing a special way of salvation, still reserved for Jews and Jews only. Indeed, not to mount such an argument is to run the risk of being accused of that current heresy, ‘supersessionism’, the mere mention of which is enough to drive otherwise clear-headed exegetes into abject apology and hasty backtracking. Has Paul really so redefined election around Messiah and Spirit that there is no room for anyone who clings to the original election while rejecting those two redefining poles? Is not Paul’s whole argument in chapter 11 that, despite their unbelief, the Jewish people are still ‘beloved because of the patriarchs’ (v. 28)?

Yes, but this does not mean what the revisionist argument tries to make it mean. As I have argued in considerable detail elsewhere, the promise Paul holds out for at present unbelieving Jews is not that they are actually all right as they are, but that they are not debarred, in virtue of their ethnic origin, from coming back into the family, their own family, that has been renewed in the gospel, and from which they are currently separated because it is marked out solely by faith, and they are currently in ‘unbelief’. Romans 10:1–13 remains, in fact, a crucial driver of the argument right through chapter 11, as the various links between the two passages (not often enough noted) indicate; in particular, when Paul says ‘all Israel shall be saved’ in 11:26 he is consciously echoing ‘all who call on the name of the Lord shall be saved’ in 10:13, which is offered as the answer to the question of 10:1 about the salvation for presently unbelieving Jews. As he says in 11:23, they can be grafted in if they do not remain in unbelief. Had he held the views normally attributed to him, he could not have written that line.

Paul’s argument is not aimed at our modern western context, in which centuries of horrible European anti-Semitism have finally worked their way out in an orgy of violence, implicating many parts of the Christian church. His argument is aimed at the proto-Marcionism he suspects may exist in the Roman church, an attitude which really would deserve the name ‘supersessionism’, a belief according to which God has effected a simple transfer of promises and privileges from Jews to Gentiles, so that Jews are just as shut out now as Gentiles were before (a very convenient thing to believe in Rome in the middle or late 50s after those unpopular Jews were allowed back again upon Nero’s accession). This argument has nothing to do, either, with the idea, which neither Paul nor his contemporaries would have understood, since it belongs primarily with the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, that each religion is more or less as good as each other one, and that Judaism and Christianity are parallel ways of believing in the one God and should each learn to shrug their shoulders and go their separate ways. That, for Paul, would paradoxically have been the ultimate form of anti-Judaism—the idea that the Jews should be encouraged to ignore their own Messiah, to sidestep the renewal of their own covenant, and to remain in ignorance of the dikaiosynē theou, of what the creator God had righteously been doing in Israel’s own history.

Rather, Romans 9–11 as a whole, though it does not say very much about Messiah and Spirit, is in fact shaped according to the pattern which Paul elsewhere works out very explicitly in those terms. It is as though, soaked in the thought expressed in Galatians 2:11–21 and similar passages explored above, he were to set himself the task of thinking through what it means that, as he says in 9:5, the Messiah is Israel’s Messiah according to the flesh and also ‘God over all, blessed for ever’. What we see worked out in 9–11, in other words, is the Messiah-shaped pattern of Israel’s history, with the Spirit-driven pathway to covenant renewal blazed through the middle of it. As in 11:11–15, Israel itself is ‘cast away’ for the reconciliation of the world, and thus can and will be ‘received back again’ with a meaning of nothing short of ‘life from the dead’. Paul has so retold the story of Israel according to the Messianic pattern worked out earlier in the letter that, when we stand back and look at the picture as a whole, what strikes us is not the relative absence of Messiah and Spirit but the fact that the whole of Israel’s story is laid before us as the outworking in history of what it means that, as the fulfilment of God’s promises to Abraham, the Messiah was crucified and raised to new life.

Wright, N. T. (2005). Paul: Fresh Perspectives (125–128). London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

N T Wright is a leading New Testament scholar and retired Anglican bishop. In academia, he is published as N. T. Wright, but otherwise tends to be known as Tom Wright. Between 2003 and his retirement in 2010, he was the Bishop of Durham. He is now Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Mary's College in the University of St Andrews in Scotland.