In a series of posts, I have been implicitly advancing an overarching thesis that the theological content in Paul’s letter to the Romans is largely a response to the influence that some Second Temple Literature such as Wisdom of Solomon and 1 Maccabees could have had on some Jews to embrace a more ethnocentric nationalism in response to Roman imperialism and oppression. While I have not provided the entirety of my evidence in my blog posts, my reasoning for such rests upon (1) similarities between Romans and these texts that can are best explained by direct influence from the STJ literature on Paul’s discourse and (2) as a consequence, how the ideas and narratives given in these texts can be employed to provide both a plausible and coherent account of Paul’s discourse. If these two reasons are sufficient reason to argue that Paul’s discourse is a response to both the Wisdom of Solomon and 1 Maccabees, then we have possible evidence that can be used in favor of arguing that Paul has other STJ literature in mind.

With this in mind, I think it can be similarily advanced that Paul’s discourse was also influenced by 4 Maccabees, a philosophical treatise that uses the persecution of Eleazer and of the seven brothers by Antiochus to demonstrate that reason obtained through the Torah has control over the emotional passions. 4 Maccabees can be best described as the combination of Stoicism and Jewish devotion to Torah. When wisdom is defined by “The knowledge divine and human matters and the causes of these things” (4 Maccabees 1.16), this is the same definition of wisdom offered by the Stoics (SVF 2.35; Seneca, Letters 89.45; see Long and Sedley’s The Hellenistic Philosophers, 26A and 26G). However, whereas Paul more directly seeks to refutes and directly challenge the ideas that are supported by Wisdom of Solomon and 1 Maccabees, it is argued that Paul’s response to the ideas contained in 4 Maccabees can be understood as more as a correction than refutation.

The best textual evidence for Paul’s engagement with the ideas in 4 Maccabees is Romans 3.25. There, Paul describes Jesus death as a ἱλαστήριον. Similarly, the death of the seven brothers was described as a ἱλαστήριον in 4 Maccabees 17.22. The similarities go further. Both Jesus’ death and the death of the brothers are referring to by the metonym of blood. The significance of their deaths is considered to confer benefits upon others (Jesus’ death is a release in Romans 3.24 [τῆς ἀπολυτρώσεως]; the seven brother’s death is a substitution of life [ἀντίψυχον]). Their death is understood to be necessary due to the sins of others. For Paul, everyone’s sin has made them fall short of God’s glory (Rom. 3.23) and the death of the seven brothers helps to restore the observance of Torah (4 Macc. 18.4) that has been stopped by Antiochus (4 Macc. 4.15-26¹). The conferral of benefits to others is necessitated by the presence of faithlessness and sin. Finally, the “divine Providence” (θεία πρόνοια), a common way the Stoic’s understood divine causality, is said to have worked through Antiochus witnessing the endurance of the seven brothers (4 Maccabees 17.33). In the same way, Jesus’ death is described as a public demonstration (προέθετο). The shared features of (1) ἱλαστήριον, (2) the metonym of blood for the death of a martyr, (3) martyrdom conferring benefits to others, (4) the faithlessness that necessitates such benefits to others, and (5) public demonstration of the martyrdom, suggests it is very probable that Paul in Romans 3.21-26 has 4 Maccabees in mind.

However, even with many of these similarities, there are noticeable differences. Whereas the blood of the seven brothers is said to be the instrumentally effective part of the divine Providence through the usage of the preposition δία, Jesus’ blood is spoken of as being the cause/source of the ἱλαστήριον by the preposition ἐν. It would be consistent with there subtly different construal of the relationship between martyrdom and God’s deliverance for Paul and the author of 4 Maccabees. This is further evident by the fact that the benefits conferred to others is describing differently: the martyrdom of the brothers evokes an idea of substitution of life, whereas Paul describes the benefits in terms of freedom. Also, whereas the benefits of the martyrdom in 4 Maccabees is conferred onto the nation as a whole, the benefits from Christ are conferred upon “all who believe” (3.22). In other words, even as the degree of similarities between 4 Maccabees 17.22 and context with Romans 3.25 and context is highly suggestive of direct familiarity on the part of Paul, the various differences in Paul’s description of Jesus’ ἱλαστήριον would suggest Paul has some disagreements in the portrayal of ἱλαστήριον in 4 Maccabees.

Assuming Paul has 4 Maccabees in mind, what then is it about 4 Maccabees and the portrayal of the martyrdom of the seven brothers does Paul reject? Is it simply that it isn’t Jesus? Is it that Israel simply wasn’t delivered by the brother’s sacrifice? Or, is there a deeper reason?

I would contend that the best explanation would be the way that the narrative of 4 Maccabees finds it as a validation of Stoic philosophy. The overall purpose of what the author is writing about in 4 Maccabees 1.6-11, where the stories of Eleazar and the seven brothers serve as an account that demonstrates (1) that reason rules over the emotions and (2) this reason gives perseverance that can overcome tyrants. In other words, reason’s control over our lives is the tool of resistance. This reason is obtained through the love of wisdom (4 Macc. 1.15) that is found Torah as the source of the wisdom (4 Macc. 1.16-17). In the end, the hearing and study of the Torah gives people reason that empowers Eleazar and the seven brothers to faithfully resist Antiochus.

While not a prevalent theme in Roman Stoicism, overcome the control of tyrants was occasionally given as a situation that distinguished those livng their lives by wisdom from others. For instance, the Stoic Epictetus said:

‘Perhaps not, but Caesar has the power to take my life.’

Then tell the truth, you wretch, and instead of bragging as you do, don’t claim to be a philosopher, and don’t fail to recognize who your masters are, but as long as you let them have this hold on you through your body, place yourself at the beck and call of everyone who is stronger than you.  Now Socrates had learned to speak as one ought, to be able to speak as he did to the tyrants, to his judges, and in prison. Diogenes had learned to speak as one ought, to be able to speak as he did to Alexander, to Philip, to the pirates, to the man who bought him as a slave. Leave these matters to those who are properly prepared for them, to those with courage. As for you, turn to your own affairs and never depart from them. Go and sit in a corner, and construct syllogisms, and propose them to others—‘ In you assuredly there is no captain of a state.’²

It is this resistance to tyrants that is given as an explanation as to how the brother’s control over their emotions as they faced death courageously overcame Antiochus on behalf of the nation (4 Macc. 17.22-23). However, a closer look at 4 Maccabees can show us that the events that took place does not seems to neatly fit into explanation that the martyrs were a mercy seat/atonement for the nation. The author’s argument essentially suggests that Antiochus solider’s were emboldened (4 Macc. 14.24) as a result of their examples and that because Antiochus could not get the Jews to give in on their ancestral custom, he diverted his focus to war with Syria, that is the Parthians (4 Macc. 18.5-6), when in fact Antiochus diverted to Syria because the Parthians began to take advantage of his weakness. In short, 4 Maccabees seems to go to great extent to try to fit his Stoicized view of Torah, reason, and wisdom as an explanation as to why Israel prevailed over Antiochus,

Paul, however, does not share the confidence reason through the Torah that the author of 4 Maccabees does. In fact, if one compares their two accounts of how a hearer of the commandment about not coveting from Exodus 20.17, it becomes clear that Paul does not think that the Torah enables a person to be wise.

Romans 7.7-13 What then should we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died, and the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.

4 Maccabees 2.1-6: And why is it amazing that the desires of the mind for the enjoyment of beauty are rendered powerless? It is for this reason, certainly, that the temperate Joseph is praised, because by mental effort he overcame sexual desire. For when he was young and in his prime for intercourse, by his reason he nullified the frenzy of the passions. Not only is reason proved to rule over the frenzied urge of sexual desire, but also over every desire. Thus the law says, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or anything that is your neighbor’s.” In fact, since the law has told us not to covet, I could prove to you all the more that reason is able to control desires.

Whereas the author of 4 Maccabees believes the commandment against coveting is evidence that reason can control human desires, Paul presents it to be the opposite case: the Torah is good but it does not indicate anything about the power of human reason and volition over the passions (see further in Romans 7.14-25). The Torah provides a person the capacity to recognize and understand something as sin (Rom. 3.20; 7.7), but it doesn’t empower them. Instead, the passions are overcome through the believer’s baptismal union with Christ in His death and resurrection (Romans 6.1-14).

This helps us to begin to comprehend what the distinction is between Paul and 4 Maccabees when it comes to the ἱλαστήριον. For 4 Maccabees, the brothers function as a ἱλαστήριον ultimately by being a demonstration of the wisdom of the Torah amidst the cessation of Temple service and Torah obedience. Through their example, the capacity to control one’s life in accordance to the Torah is witnessed and observed. One could say that in a sense they are seen as functioning as a substitute for the Temple, as ἱλαστήριον was used in the LXX to refer to the mercy seat, the golden plate on the Ark of the Covenant. By contrast, Jesus does not exemplify the wisdom of the Torah, but rather God’s righteousness. In Christ, God reveals Himself in such a way that the people themselves can come to be empowered to live righteously in Christ through the Spirit (Rom. 8.1-4). Jesus is not instrumental (δία) in being a ἱλαστήριον, but rather it is in His sacrificial death (ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι) that people are united and formed to overcome the passions that lead to sin. Jesus as the mercy seat on the ark of the covenant, into which God’s people are united through baptism. Jesus is the Temple that believers are located in through the Spirit.

In summary, then, Paul’s letter to the Romans may be considered to address some of the ideas expressed about Torah, wisdom, and martyrdom in 4 Maccabees, in addition to other STJ literature such as the Wisdom of Solomon and 1 Maccabees. By comparing and contrasting sections that have similar language and content, it can be argued that Paul om Romans 3.21-8.39 is primarily focused on uprooting a certain view of Torah that saw it as enabling people to be wise and to overcome the passions. In the cognitive gap that Paul portrays between Torah and the righteous life, Paul sees Christ bridging the gap for Jewish Christians through the leading of the Spirit. The Torah helps people to recognize what in their life is resistant to the will and purposes of God, but the Torah itself is not a source from which people can find the strength and resources to find power over sin, much less death.

If there is one thing I have learned in the past couple months in my study and work on Romans along with 1 Corinthians while at the University of St. Andrews, it is that there is a peculiar social reality that is envisioned by Paul that comes about under the shadow of the cross. For Paul, the calling from God is not framed in terms of an either-or scenario, where to be on God’s side, to be part of God’s people, you can’t be on the other “side.” For Paul, the calling from God is a work of God to orchestrate the lives of specific people to play a special part in the redemption of the world, with Jesus Christ as the “Temple plan” to fit all the called people together into through the power and pedagogical instruction of the Spirit.

Firstly, it is helpful to state that this group of people is not, properly speaking, the Church that we Christians know of today. This calling of God’s people includes Abraham and specifically chosen descendants of Abraham that came before Christ. In Romans 8.29, Paul speaks of those who were foreknown, which for Paul includes many Israelites prior to Christ as in Romans 11.1-6, as being predestined to be conformed to Jesus Christ. Not all of them understand or even see the fruition of their work, as the author of Hebrews state in 11.13 about the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob along with Abraham’s wife Sarah: “All of these died without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.” Going back a verse to Hebrews 11.12, Abraham was one such person whose life was specially called to be a part of God’s promised plan for the world. This calling spans the long distance of human history. This calling that spans history means the called in Jesus Christ in today’s age have more in common with a nomad and his wife from many millennia ago who seem to have no children in sight than they would with the neighbor who lives next door when it comes to consider how they are at work in God’s plan.

I say that to say that God’s vision for the world did not suddenly get off the ground when Jesus Christ came into the picture. It was going on long beforehand. But what happened in Christ coming into the world is now the vision of what God is doing made visible before human eyes, knowable through the testimony of Scripture. As Romans 3.25 says, Jesus Christ was “publicly displayed as a mercy seat,” describing Jesus as the golden lid on the Ark of the Covenant, where atonement was made and above which stood a pillar of smoke representing the presence of God. However, Paul does not say Christ died and therefore all is simply well, but rather those united in Christ are being brought to a new life in the pattern of Christ (Romans 6.1-4). The revelation of Christ provides the vision of God’s redemption of humanity that becomes realized in people’s lives through the Holy Spirit, by Whom the condemnation of sin in the body of Christ becomes realized in people to live out the true righteousness that God had been teaching (Romans 8.3-4). The calling of God is not a call to simply flee the wrath to come, but it is the call from God to be God’s secret force equipped from heaven, sent to fight a spiritual war by being the first spiritual combatants to land on the beaches of the unredeemed kingdoms of this world, who fight not with weapons that pierce flesh that takes life, but with the Word that can wound the heart to give people life anew.

From there, the called come together in colonies among the world, by which others can come to hear and in the midst of the hear, hear a calling and come to faith. When Paul, an apostle to the Gentiles, writes to the largely Jewish Christian congregation in Rome, he says he wants to come to get some fruit among them (Romans 1.13), it isn’t to reap from Jewish believers as people, but rather, it is almost as if the presence of believers in Rome were planting seeds, some of which would be harvested. They had made a colony of God’s Kingdom, finding the opportunity to plant seeds among the fields of people’s hearts, to which Paul comes as one who is specially trained to be one of the harvesters, whereas others lacked the gifts to effectively cross the boundary between Jew and Gentile.

What is important to understand here is that God’s calling brings people to bond together with others similarly called as part of a larger mission. People are not called as individuals to find a new way of doing religion and spiritually that suits them, but that they are brought together to be part of a newly formed people, calling them from among the diverse peoples. These people are not called to abandon their present identities however, as Paul does not tell Jews to cease to be Jews, nor does he tell Gentiles that they must live as Jews. Rather, each are called to submit their past way of life the would be expected for those who were members of that social identity to now be accountable to and empowered from the Lordship of Jesus Christ, but not calling them to forget everything that made them who they once were. An African American who hears the call of God is not called to stop being black to be part of God’s People, but he is to live his life as a black person with the dignity and significance that Jesus Christ gave to them, as He died for them. A gay male powerfully called by God is not called to cease to forgot his past, but he is called to submit his life to the Lordship of Christ to be a beacon of His word. A woman unsure and uncertain of her place with others and in the church, remains a woman but finds her calling as a woman of God to go where many men of the world would not allow her to tread. A white, heterosexual male who hears and dreams a calling from God doesn’t have to cease to be who they are, but in Christ they are called to understand what those like him have long forgotten. The calling of God does not lead us to abandon all our identities and become simply “Christian,” but rather the call of God calls us to live into our old identities with new significances and purposes as God’s people, point forward to new creation, where in Christ where there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, where there is neither marriage nor being given in marriage, even as in the present day these identities and statuses still have purposes.

This is what awakenings look like: people awakening to a new purpose and way of life that Christ calls them to, as God proleptically brings His future into our present through the Spirit giving us the foretaste of the age to come. However, the world, even the Christianized world, can hinder awakenings because of the difficulty that comes with seeing the new creation stemming from the way our social identities can perpetually hinder a vision of God’s future. The world can only see the future through the lens of the past, whether to rebuild it once was or or tear it down to build something to replace it. As a result, people’s identities are constantly being fit into the ways of the past, while changing more in response to the conflict than for some greater purpose. Incredulity and disbelief that “those sorts of people” could be favored by God; anger and rage when a member of tribe steps out of line to follow the call. But for those who have the ears to hear and the eyes to see, a calling from God into the vision cast forth in Jesus Christ lay in front of them.

In the midst of this past, the liminal transition from seeing the future in terms of the past to seeing the present in terms of God’s future goes through the practices of repentance and forgiveness, for the sins of the past to be simultaneously acknowledged and let go, so that people can move beyond the past and follow the calling of God to live as part of God’s future that He has brought into our present. Jesus Christ, His cross, His ministry, and His teachings are a pedagogical training give to us that, when followed, brings about our transformation from this old way we have left behind with repentance and forgiveness, so through bearing our own cross in faith, we can see in the midst of the desolation in the present, there sits the Son of Man on His throne in the Kingdom of God right in the middle of the kingdoms of this world and, even to this day and is expanding to this day, and that the gates of hell will not prevail over it, even as the kingdoms of this world crumble.

One of the hopes I had had if the day were ever to come to be a scholar, professor, and/or writer was to write a New Testament theology. It is this that I would put forward as perhaps a partial, organizing theme for how to understanding the New Testament as a vision of how God’s redemptive awakening in Christ through the Spirit takes place, works, and is realized. If, by chance I am on the right direction, then this tear stained fabric of my life in the 2010s may have served a purpose, as this is the fruit of my journey in this decade and the decades past. But, even in this, there is something further to come to comprehend: love and the refreshing rest that God gives in the midst of the desolation.

In terms of trying to break down what the emotion is about, jealousy is an interesting emotion. It usually isn’t a good thing, to be sure, but jealousy is interesting because it an emotion that is highly specific. Most emotions, such as sadness, grief, anger, happiness, etc. can arise for a variety of reasons. Jealousy, however, happens in a very specific condition: where a person feels they are entitled to something that should be only be their privilege. It is most common in social relationships, where one person (a) wants the attention, recognition affection, sex, etc. of another person but (b) goes further than simply desire and includes some some belief that they should have this relationship rather than another. What makes jealousy jealousy, and where it can become such a problem, is that some of the reasons people have for believing they should have the exclusive privilege amounts to nothing more than they want something, without regard for having any sort of commitment for establishing that relationship.

It is this nature of jealousy that I want to bring to the table when looking at what Paul says in Romans 11.11-16 about Israel and his hope regarding them. While Paul did not have such an analytic analysis of jealousy in mind, this framework can be useful for provoking further questions in seeking to understand why Paul thinks Israel might be moved to jealousy, specifically, because of the Gentiles.

Robert Jewett describes some problems with translated παραζηλόω, including the traditional translation as jealousy:

If the traditional translation “jealousy” is elected, the “fantastic” improbability in believing that envy could lead to salvation along with the inherent unworthiness of envy as a motivation for conversion are hard to deny. In view of the fact that Jewish legalists viewed the early Christian proclamation as heretical, no satisfactory explanation has ever been given to explain why they would have been “jealous” when Gentiles accepted this allegedly mistaken doctrine. Moreover, the links with the earlier argument of Romans are weakened by the traditional translation, because ζηλόω has the sense of religious zeal and rage rather than jealousy in 10:2, as generally acknowledged, and also in 10:19, as argued above on contextual and poetic grounds. If “emulation” is selected, Bell has a hard time explaining how “jealous anger,” preferred translation for 10:19, could have been thought to shift into the positive desire to emulate the behavior of the previously hated Gentiles. If one selects “provoke to zealous rage” or “make make zealous,” thus providing the best continuity with the probable connotation of παραζηλόω in 10:19 and the certain meaning of ζηλόω in 10:2, it remains puzzling that such religious hostility could be thought to lead to their salvation, for which Paul hopes in 11:14. Perhaps he as the model of his own conversion in mind, namely, that when his zeal reached its violent climax in the persecution of the believers in Damascus, the risen Christ was revealed to him and his desire to destroy alleged evildoers turned into its opposite, a desire for coexistence with those whom the Messiah had chosen to accept. Zeal to exclude hated Gentiles turned into a comparable zeal to include them as part of the people of God. It appears that Paul hoped for some similar process of conversion for current Jewish critics of the Gospel.¹

There are two problems with Jewett’s analysis. Firstly, Paul does not seem to be arriving to a belief that Israel will be provoked to παραζηλόω because he has developed some specific strategy in mind that he thinks will work. Rather, as the language recalls back to Paul’s quotation of Deuteronomy 32.21 back in Romans 10.19, it is more reasonable to think that Paul thinks God is the one who is going to move Israel to jealousy and that Paul’s ministry to the Gentiles will be instrumental in that.

Secondly, Jewett’s comments focus more on the feelings of hatred that some Israelites held towards the Gentiles. As such, it might seem hard to imagine how an object of hatred and contempt could motivate jealousy, if you are looking at things only through a sociological lens of relationships between social groups.

This is where a theological interpretation provides an extra dimension to the reading: it isn’t that the Gentiles as an object of derision will magically change the mind of the hardened Israelites, EXCEPT on the grounds that the belief that God was blessed the Gentiles would spur hardened Israel to think their special relationship with God had been encroached upon if not even broken by God. As a nationalist brand of Judaism could have strongly established the belief that Israel has a special privileged relationship in God in virtue of birth, circumcision, and Torah, the very thought that God was blessing the Gentiles would poke a whole in this false preconception.

Put more specifically, the hardened Israelites could be moved to jealousy in virtue of the belief that corporate Israel had an exclusive, privileged relationship with the God of the patriarchs. At stake here is a belief that stands at the intersection of social identity and theology: as Jewish identity is tied up with beliefs about the nation of Israel’s special relationship with God, the blessing of the Gentiles would light a fire under the hardened Israel. In Paul’s view, their belief about their privileged relationship is false, but nevertheless, this false belief can be used to bring them to God.

As an analogy, imagine a long lasting dating relationship where the relationship had grown stale, partly due to the complacency of the male, taking his relationship granted. Say the female decides to ask for some space to figure things out. The male interprets this not as breaking up the relationship, but simply a time apart. However, the female means this more that she wants to explore other relationships and decides to go out with another guy. The male has a mistaken belief about the nature of the relationship. Then, news arrives to him that she is seeing another guy. How would he respond? There are many ways he could respond, such as recognizing the relationship is over and moving on. But, one potential response would be to think she moved on because he didn’t show here enough affection, spend enough time, etc. and so he offers to step up his game. In the midst of the breaking thorough the illusion of what he thought was the continuing of the relationship, he realizes if he doesn’t change he will lose who he cared for. What is going on here? The male receives news that shows him that he view of the relationship is mistaken. Now, he realizes that he needs to be more engaged and involved if he wants to keep the relationship.

I would suggest this is much closer to what Paul is envisioning here, with a few caveats. The first caveat is that Israel’s perceived relationship to God is not framed in Romans in terms of romance and marriage, but rather in terms of social status and hierarchy. For some Jews, Israel is supposed to be on the top of the food-chain in God’s economy. God’s rich blessing of the Gentiles would show that Gentiles are occupying the favored position that they as Israelites believed that themselves should have had for themselves. Secondly, whereas exclusive monogamy remains the social norms and conventions for dating and marital relationships, Paul’s conviction is that God does not have an an exclusive, special relationship with one people.

With these two caveats in mind, we can perhaps have a way for understanding what Paul is saying in provoking Israel to jealousy. In their religious activities, many Israelites were not properly engaged in seeking God’s righteousness, but they had established their own righteousness by reducing righteousness down to matters of obeying Torah (Rom. 9.30-10.3). As a result, they could not embraced Jesus as revelation of God’s righteousness. Jesus didn’t fit into their religious praxis. So, while they may believe that God has special favor for them as Second Temple literature such as Wisdom of Solomon would express, Paul’s argument is that they are self-deceived about their relationship with God in seeking God’s righteousness. There has never been a special, exclusive relationship between God and Israel *as a corporate body,* but membership in God’s special people has always been a matter of God’s grace to elect descendants of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Rom. 9.6-13; 11.1-10). Additionally, the political mythology that would develop from the Maccabean rebellion that God rewards Israel political victory by its exclusive, zealous devotion to circumcision and Torah as the heritage of Israel is also mistaken as God was never concerned about the circumcision of the flesh, but that of the heart as reflective of their life (Rom 2.25-29).

However, for Paul, what can happen upon realization of God’s inclusion and blessing to the Gentiles is that Israel can realize that they have been living under false pretenses about their relationship to God. God is going to make the Gentiles become a people who spur Israel to renew their relationship with God by realizing that they were not being truly faithful to God in the first place. It would spur them to a new sense of zeal/ζῆλος, but one with knowledge (cf. Romans 10.2) that is in actual accordance to the truth about God and His relationships with humanity through faith rather than believe that Israel’s had a more or less automatic and exclusively privileged relationship with God that puts the halakhic traditions, which would focus more or less exclusively on Torah, at the center of Israel’s response to God.

However, to be clear, it isn’t that this new zeal would suddenly make the harden Israel included again in God’s chosen people. Paul maintains it is God’s gracious election. Paul doesn’t explore the relationship of God’s mercy and hardening of Israel and the jealousy they would experience, but Paul simply implies and assumes that Israel’s being provoked to jealousy would lead to their inclusion because God has a special love for the descendants of the patriarchs that will culminate in Israel’s full inclusion and salvation (Rom. 11.25-32). What this suggests is that God’s hardening is not intended as an eternal condemnation as per double predestination, as if salvation history is simply the manifestation of God’s salvation to all of the personally elected and judgment to all the personally condemned. Instead, Paul believes what happens salvation history of God’s work among His elect has an actual on the non-elect such that they may be included at a later point. Paul does not further expand upon this point, as Paul is not trying to address modern theological metaphysics about the relationship of God’s action to individual salvation, but rather is trying to address questions of Jewish social identity and their future, even as much of Israel had rejected Jesus as their Lord. This becomes evident in Paul’s understanding of his own ministry. He believes by letting the world know about his ministry to the Gentiles, his own apostleship would be instrumental in salvation history to bringing forth the partial inclusion of corporate Israel into God’s elect people (Rom. 11.13-14).

In summary, what is at stake in Paul’s beliefs about provoking Israel to jealousy is that the visible blessing and inclusion of the Gentiles into God’s people would poke a hole in the mistaken notions about corporate Israel’s exclusive, privileged relationship with God. Paul hopes that they would be woken from their stupor and that they will realize they have been mistaken about God and His righteousness, so that they will rightly come to know Jesus as their Lord as the Gentile inclusion shows that their beliefs about God were not from God, but from themselves.

Romans 10.5-8 is a perilously difficult passage to make sense of. On the one hand, scholars have pretty clearly identifies the Scriptures in the Old Testament that Jesus is pulling from in Leviticus 18.5, Deuteronomy 8.17, 9.4, and 30.12-14¹ On the other hand hand, determining what sense Paul’s discourse would have had to his intended audience is a whole other matter.

Douglas Moo reads Paul’s argument in Romans 10.5-13 to be the division between law, that is what God gives people to do, and gospel, that is what God does for us: whereas vs. 5 is about law, vss. 6-13 is about the gospel of faith. According to Moo, Paul finds this division in the Old Testament Scriptures. ² While a contrast between human and divine agency is perhaps merited in the background of Paul’s discourse, Paul is not intending to provide a strong contrast that the sharp Lutheran distinction between Law and Gospel suggests. Paul does not use the sharper άλλα to make a decisive contrast between the righteousness of law in vs. 5 and the righteousness that comes from faith in vss. 6-13. Instead, he uses δέ, which Stephen Runge, disagreeing with BDAG, “does not mark the presence of semantic discontinuity… Contrast has everything to do with the semantics of the elements present in the context.”³ In other words, if there is a contrast between Romans 10.5 and 10.6-13, the nature of the contrast should be understood based upon the differences specifically given before and after the δέ.

What contrast, if any, is Paul providing? Not of some abstracted understanding of law and gospel, but rather of two different communicators. In vs. 5, Paul quotes from Lev. 18.5 as coming from the hand of Moses (Μωϋσῆς… γράφει). On the other hand, in vs. 6, it is not Moses but the righteousness from faith (ἡ… ἐκ πίστεως δικαιοσύνη). Furthermore, this ‘righteousness from faith’ does not write as Moses does, but rather he speaks (λέγει). While we who have becomes very accustomed to the written word as a common vehicle of communication and as a result can read and use the verbs “write” and “say” interchangeably, we should not assume this of Paul. Paul will regularly refer to the written medium (γράμμα) of the Torah, seeing it as powerless and even can kill a person (Romans 2.27-29, 7.6, 2 Cor. 3.6-7). To describe Moses as writing what he quotes from Leviticus 18.5, Paul is make a more specific statement about the mode of communication. Meanwhile, Paul says the righteousness of faith speaks, and assigns to this figure what amounts to a interpretive paraphrase of Deuteronomy that comes from passages such as Deuteronomy 8.17, 9.4, and 30.12-14. Rather than presenting a contrast between Law and Gospel, Paul is presenting a contrast between two distinct communicators: Moses and the “righteousness from faith.”

However, because Paul does not use άλλα, we do not need to assume that Paul is trying to pit the figure of Moses against the “righteousness from faith,” as if the two are opposed to each other. Rather, the opposition is given just prior as being between those who did not submit to God’s righteousness and those who believe (Rom. 10.3-4). What happens with what Moses writes is that many read Moses words in Leviticus 18.5 and interpret it as a basis for giving a whole system of interpretive traditions and applications that people should follow. In other words, they take Moses words to saying the pathway to righteousness comes through the establishment of various halakhic principles and regulations (τὴν ἰδίαν ζητοῦντες στῆσαι: Rom. 10.3). Paul considers submission to these principles have lead them to ignore God’s own righteousness (ἀγνοοῦντες… τὴν τοῦ θεοῦ δικαιοσύνην: Rom. 10.3) expressed in Torah.

Therefore, it seems the contrast that Paul is giving is not between Law and Gospel, but rather those who interpret Moses’ words in Leviticus 18.5 as legitimating the submission to a specific moral program that isn’t the Torah itself with what the righteousness of faith is communicating.

In order to validate the idea that Paul quotes Leviticus 18.5 to provide a “proof-text” for a specific program of righteousness through halakhic prescriptions, a closer consideration of the relationship of Romans 10.5-8 with Romans 10.4 is helpful. It is common for commentaries and translations to treat Romans 10.4 as the end the section/paragraph that starts in Romans 10.1. However, upon closer examination, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to treat Romans 10.4 as the end of a section, as there is different content in 10.1-3 that focuses on Paul’s understanding about many Israelites who failed to believe in Jesus. Vs. 4 can then be understood as an explanation for why they failed to believe: their actions to try to establish their own righteousness failed to take into account that Jesus is the τέλος, variously consider to be end or goal , of the Torah.

Another explanation is that Romans 10.4 is the beginning of the section that extends to 10.13. I would put forward that vs. 4 still functions to explain why the unbelieving Israelites were mistaken in their zealous pursuit of righteousness, but the verse is not intended to be understood to be an explanation on its own, but as it is expounded upon in following verses. This can then provide a sense of the significance of Paul’s usage of τέλος. Whereas Paul quotes from Leviticus in 10.5, Paul’s employment of the passages in Deuteronomy in 10.6-8 and that he reads these passages in light of Christ suggest that Paul’s usage of τέλος refers to the way Christ is a fulfillment of what comes at the end of the Torah from Moses. Romans 10.4-8 is suggesting that one should understand the Pentateuch as a whole and that for Paul, Christ is, quite literally, understood as being pointed to at the end of the Torah. In other words, τέλος is not functioning as some sort of statement of theological epistemology about the source of the Torah in relationship to Christ, but rather a specific reference to where Christ is understood within the Torah: at the end in Deuteronomy 30.

If this is the case, then the function of Paul’s quotation in Leviticus 18.5 is to start to give an account of righteousness as explicated in the Torah. This passage by itself could have serve as a legitimating proof-text for righteousness based upon halakhic traditions that seek to apply Torah. However, Paul’s account pushes further to take Leviticus 18.5 in light of what comes in Deuteronomy. The essential effect of the contrast between Leviticus 18.5 and Paul’s interpretation of Deuteronomy is not to state “the Torah is now useless for righteousness” as it often the interpretation of Paul, ignoring what Paul says in Romans 7.12. Rather, it is to argue that one can not pursue and develop a program of righteousness based upon an understanding of Leviticus 18.5 alone, but one has to understand what comes at the end in Deuteronomy. We see a similar pattern in Galatians 3.12-13, where Paul contrast the quote from Leviticus 18.5 with follows in Jesus’ curse on the cross as a ‘fulfillment’ of Deuteronomy 21.23. For Paul, one can not understand the pursuit of righteousness based upon Leviticus 18.5 alone, but one must set it in context of how Christ is a fulfillment of what comes in Deuteronomy.

This would make sense of why Paul supports faith as the basis of righteousness through Deuteronomic quotations in contrast to Leviticus 18.5 standing for righteousness based upon upon. Deuteronomy as a whole could be understood as encouraging Israel to be obedient to God’s commands based upon faith in God’s future blessings. So, in appealing to Deuteronomy, Paul is finds the overarching theme and concern of Deuteronomy to be in support of righteousness that comes through faith.

This isn’t to suggest that Paul is setting Leviticus 18.5 over and against Deuteronomy but that a program of righteousness based upon Leviticus 18.5, which only discusses righteousness in relationship to the Torah regulations, has failed to take into account an understanding of righteousness as it is expressed in the “faith-saturated” Deuteronomy. Just as an account of Christian soteriology should not be based upon John 3.16 along, but should incorporate the wider concerns of the New Testament canon, an account of righteousness should be formed with the whole of the Torah in mind, including the faith in the future of blessings for a faithful nation that Deuteronomy points towards.

So, this brings us back to Romans 10.5-8, seeing vs. 5 and vss. 6-8 as differing communicators, one from Moses and one from faith, but not contrasting ideas strictly speaking. Furthermore, because Deuteronomy is saturated in faith, Paul has a reason to assign the language of Deuteronomy to the communicator of “righteousness by faith.” However, more that than, because the faith of Deuteronomy is connected to the future fulfillment of God’s blessing, Paul can rework the Deuteronomic passages in light of Christ as the fulfillment.

Therefore, what appears to be happening in Romans 10.5-8 is that Paul is giving a Torah-wide vision of righteousness, which is ultimately realized in Christ as the fulfillment of the Deuteronomic hope. Avoiding what we might consider the “proof-texting” approach that would see Leviticus 18.5 as a potential legitimization of the halakhic traditions to obey the regulations of Torah, Paul see the righteousness of the Torah as a whole pointing towards Christ.

Those who have rejected Christ as guilty of developing a program of righteousness that is closed-off to only concerns about obeying the regulations of the Torah, rather than a vision of righteousness that looks forwards to God’s fulfillment of His promises. They have embraced a very narrow account of righteousness based upon a proof-texting approach. As such, they have trouble placing Christ into their understanding of righteousness.

In his propositio for his letters to the Romans in 1.16-17, Paul briefly describes two key themes that are salient throughout his letter: (1) salvation through faith as not being an exclusive privileges of Jews as mentioned in 1.16 and (2) this salvation is universal because God has revealed of His righteousness through faith. However, in reading Romans 1.16, there can a tendency to downplay the centrality of Ἰουδαίῳ τε πρῶτον καὶ Ἕλληνι in Rom 1.16d.  For instance, in recounting the argument of Romans 1.15-17, Schreiner does not even mention Paul’s reference to the Jews and Gentiles.¹ Rather, he places the emphasis on the universality of salvation in his commentary, with 1.16d being a description of Paul’s missionary strategy.²

However, this tendency isn’t universal among the scholarship. There is often an attempt to make sense of 1.16 along the opposing themes of universality and particularity. Douglas Moo believes that an appropriate understanding of Romans rests on how one brings the universalism and particularism together in 1.16.⁵ Similarly but without the abstract language of universality and particularity, Ben Witherington perceives a balance between the “all” of 1.16c and “to the Jew first” in 1.16d.⁶

However, there is a problem with interpreting Romans 1.16 in terms of the theme/counter-theme set of universalism and particular. The abstract themes of universality and particularity is largely a modern, Enlightenment preoccupation that is mapped on top of the more subconscious theme/counter-theme set of inclusion and exclusion. In other words, there is an inclination to construe universality in terms of inclusivity and particularism in terms of exclusivity. There are no doubt some reasons for drawing this connection as there is a general association between universality and inclusivity, as there also is with particularism and exclusivity. As a consequence, reading Romans through post-Enlightenment lenses can lead to a reading of Romans as about the universal inclusion, as opposed to particular exclusion. While it is certainly a legitimate theological interpretation of Romans to recognize that the Gospel is God’s universal gift to all humanity as there are parts of what Paul says that is consistent with a specific brand of universality, whether Paul was communicating in these categories is more suspect.

When Paul mentions both Jews and Greeks immediately together in Romans 2.9-10, 3.9, and 10.12, Paul establishes that there are no significant differences between the two peoples. They are judged and rewarded equally, they are equally under the power of sin, and God’s make no distinction between them when they call on him. In each of these three places, the concern about differences is principally about status in relation to God’s mercies and judgment. Even in 3.9, the significance of the statement that both Jews and Greeks are under the power of sin, which is then demonstrated through a catena of OT Scriptures in 3.10-18, is that the whole world is accountable to God as stated in 3.19. Paul’s concern to place both Jews and Greeks as having an equal status before God connects with various other themes and language throughout Romans, such as boasting as a matter of claiming higher social status, shame (Romans 1.16, 6.21 9.33, 10.11), access to God (προσαγωγὴν: Rom. 5.2), slavery in chapters 6-7, subjugation and victory in 512-21, 8.37, 11.12, etc. In other words, Paul’s concern about the Jews and Gentiles does not amount to modern concerns about universality/particularity and inclusion/exclusion, as much as those may occasionally be a concern at select points, as much as matters of social status and hierarchy. 

It seems then Romans 1.16 gives a taste of what Paul is going to address as to how Jew and Gentiles are socially integrated into the “all” who believe. But mentioning the Jew comes first, Paul’s language appears on the surface to be suggested is that there is a hierarchical priority of Israelites over Gentiles in God’s salvation. One way a Jew might read Paul to be saying is that “Everyone is included in God’s Kingdom, but Jews have priority.” However, Paul argument goes decisively against this, instead saying that the graciously chosen Israelites as being the first people whom God “knew” (προέγνω: Romans 11.2). Jews are first in terms of salvation history, rather than first in terms of social standing before God. If this case, one of Paul’s discursive purposes in Romans as briefly given in Romans 1.16 is to define the status of Jews in relationship to Gentiles.

Furthermore, given that social status is tied up with a sense of people’s and group’s identity, especially for Israel whose self-definition was grounded in their relationship to YHWH, Paul’s putting forward matters of status as part of the purpose of his letter ties into matters of Jewish identity. As I have argued in my last post, Romans 9-11 seems to be about dissociating the inherent connection between the identifies of Israel and God’s people such that they can not be considered synonymous and coextensive upon a look at Israel’s Scriptures. In other words, matters of social status are intrinsically tied to matters of identity.

The correspondence between status and identity becomes most salient in Romans 2.17-24, where a figure whose characteristics are those of a Jewish sage is said to boast about their relationship to God. However, in fact their behavior is inconsistent with what they teach to the point that the Gentiles blaspheme God as a result. While one might interpret this to be an act of hypocrisy as if a teacher is saying “never commit adultery, “never steal,” etc. and then goes and does the very specific thing that goes against his prohibitions, another explanation is that Jewish sages are very selective and inconsistent in what they condemn. Considering matters more relevant to Jewish matters more important, they cast judgment on Gentiles for violating matters important to Jews, while they fail to then apply any sense of consistency to other matters that are less immediately relevant to them Jews. As Wayne Meeks notes, “Most individuals tend to measure themselves by standards of some group that is very important to them-their reference group, whether or not they belong in it-rather than by the standards of the whole society.”⁷ In the celebration of their own Jewish identity and faithfulness to they Torah that they consider to give them a special relationship with God, God, who the Jewish sage teaches about, has becomes treated with contempt, thereby undermining the very status the teacher so sets themselves up to have. This Jewish sage has acted in a way that appears deeply inconsistent with what they teach. 

So, while we see the interconnection of social status and identity in Romans 2.17-24, we also see an additional, third theme at play that makes sense of the whole: praxis. Romans 2.17 provides specific instances of identity, praxis, and social status in being a Jew, depending on Torah, and a boast of their relationship to God.

It it these three themes of social status, identity, and praxis that can be used to make sense of Romans 1.16. Most salient is the language of social status through a relationship to God: the language of shame, power, salvation, and the Jew as first all convey notions of social status. However, reference to Jew and Greek also contains reference to social identity. Finally, believers as the recipients of salvation becomes a key theme in describing the Pauline praxis, as faith is contrasted with the works of the Torah.

Most attempts to understand Romans, including Romans 1.16-17 try to make sense of Paul’s letter by reference to specific words such as faith/faithfulness, salvation, and righteousness. This would certainly seem plausible as one would expect Paul’s letter to be understood in terms of what has been said. Nevertheless, texts becomes meaningful discourses because there are concepts and worldviews that stand in the background, rarely explicitly mentioned, that allow what is explicitly written or said to become meaningful. What is said is only meaningful in light of specific background beliefs, knowledge, and assumptions that are present. If words and grammar are the visible flesh of a meaningful discourse, then background beliefs, knowledge, and assumptions are the bones that holds the flesh together and give it the specific shape it has. Put more analytically, the relationships of the various parts of Paul’s argument are not to be described by and found in simply the language that is used, but specific concepts and ideas in their Jewish and Greco-Roman background that Paul’s language would bring out background and more so into the “midground,” operated somewhere between the conscious foreground and the otherwise subconscious background, where it isn’t explicitly expressed but it is nevertheless understood.

This midground is conjunction of various cognitive structures and schemas. The midground can include theology and worldviews, as per NT Wright, but it also includes shared knowledge, personal circumstances and perspectives, etc. What is necessary for some cognitive schema to be in the midground is that it is (a) thinkable by the communicators and interpreters, (b) is encoded in their memory, whether long-term or short-term memory, (c) the words and phrases used in communication have significant associations with these schemas and (d) there is minimal amount of explicit reference to these schemas. So, on the one hand, Romans should be understood along the lines of more circumstantial and social concerns, such as social as per Philip Esler.

Nevertheless, because theological beliefs can match (a) and (b) as necessary conditions of midground schemas, and we can argue that much of what Paul said in Romans can be considered connected to theological schemas about God without them being regularly expressed, it can be argued that a good, coherent interpretation of Romans must take into account theological matters in order to make sense of it. The connection of Romans 1.16, as containing associations with social status, identity, and praxis, with Romans 1.17 through the conjunction γὰρ suggests that the theological schemas related to God’s righteousness and revelation suggest that we need to include theology as a fourth theme to make sense of Romans.

In other words, for Paul, concerns about social status, social identity, and praxis were all understood to be situated around a theological center: the revelation of Jesus Christ as the righteousness of God. Before God, all human boasted is found to be sorely mistake. Before God, there is no favoritism for Jew or Gentile. Before God, there is no ethical substitutions for faith that seeks to comprehend God righteousness in Christ except through the Holy Spirit. For Paul. the revelation of Christ, while consistent with and the fulfillment of God’s purpose as told in Israel’s Scriptures, is not tame, regulated, or determined by any preexisting hermeneutical commitments that outlines a specific way of life to be faithful, which incorporates status, identity, and praxis, but instead, one’s way of life should be found to be a part of one’s service to the Lord.

In conclusion, I put forward that to make coherent sense of Romans, there are four over-arching conceptual domains of social status, identity, praxis, and theology into which Paul’s discourse can be understood. Of course, these four domains are not free floating domains from which anyone can pick whatever knowledge they have in those four domains to interpret Paul, but there are specific schemas and themes that cognitively belong to each of those domains.

Romans 9-11 has had an unfortunate history of being overlooked when it comes to understanding Paul’s letter to the Romans. Martin Luther, in his Preface to Romans, commented that Romans 9-11 was about the “eternal providence of God.” Whereas chapters 1-8 was about the struggle with sin, with chapter 8 highlighting suffering, chapters 9-11 are then to be a source of comfort to the suffering in chapter 8 through the discussion of God’s providence. Luther mentions nothing about Israel or the Gentiles, but rather Luther sees 9-11 as a discussion of the specific theological idea of providence. Calvin and the Reformed tradition saw these chapters as a source of the doctrine of predestination and personal election by God’s grace, most vividly expressed Romans 9.

Among the scholars of the New Perspective, the shift has occurred to try to understand Romans 9-11 in light of God’s faithfulness to Israel. James Dunn considers the chapters as posing a challenge. “has God’s word failed?, ” based upon Romans 9.6. For Dunn, the section should be understood as an exposition of a problem of God’s promise to Abraham not being fulfilled to which Paul describes the solution of God’s faithfulness.¹ NT Wright understands these chapters as Paul attempts to sketch out a fresh new understanding of Jewish eschatology in light of Jesus the Messiah and the Spirit.²

While not a proponent of the New Perspective, Douglas Moo recognizes 9-11 isn’t about many of the important themes in early Protestantism, such as predestination or God’s righteousness, but that Paul’s Gospel fully recognizes the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel in light of Israel’s belief.³ Similarly, the Reformed Thomas Schreiner sees Romans 9-11 is Paul’s further development of his previously abbreviated defense of God’s faithfulness in Romans 3.1-8.⁴

It is safe to say that for recent scholarship, the central organizing theme used to comprehend Romans 9-11 has shifted from early Protestant concerns about predestination and providence to bigger questions about God’s faithfulness. This is no doubt a better frame to read Romans 9-11 with because more of Paul’s discourse fits into questions about God’s faithfulness, whereas the early Protestant doctrines are, at best, ancillary to the whole of Romans 9-11.

However, I would put forward that to describe Paul’s discursive purpose of Romans 9-11 as about addressing questions about God’s faithfulness and eschatology is to miss what I consider to be a more overarching concern and purpose for Paul in Romans that unites the whole letter together: convincing a Jewish Christian audience in Rome of a different meaning and significance of their Jewish/Israelite identity so as to make congenial to Paul’s mission to the Gentiles.

This premise should be distinguished from Philip Esler’s thesis in Conflict and Identity. For Esler, Paul’s central purpose is to:

strengthen the social identity that his addressees in Rome gain from belonging to the Christ-movement, particularly by emphasizing its supremacy over other identities, ethnic especially, on offer. To this extent his activity can be construed as an attempt to exercise leadership over groups of Christ-followers in Rome, torn by division related at least in part to their ethnic status as either Judeans or Greeks, in order to influence his audience in a manner that is likely to enhance their contribution to the enhancement of group goals.⁵

Whereas Esler construes Paul as trying to strengthening the Christian identity so as to create peace between people of various ethnic statuses, I argue that Paul is trying to established a different understanding of Jewish  identity in light of Jesus the Messiah than what was commonly espoused in Second Temple Judaism, especially as it was expressed in STJ literature such as Wisdom of Solomon, 1 Maccabees, etc., so as to reduce Jewish Christian ethnic tensions with the Gentiles and (b) enlist their assistance in his preaching of the Gospel to the Gentiles in Rome and out towards Spain. The two critical differences between Esler’s and my understanding of the issues surrounding social identity in Romans is that (1) I don’t postulate there being an ecclesial division between Jewish and Gentile Christians in Rome as much as Paul’s is addressing potential hostility by some Jews towards Gentile converts to his preaching and (2) Paul is more focused on redefining Jewish identity and reestablishing a different understanding of Israelite identity based upon both Israel’s Scriptures and the faith or unbelief at the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

However, given their history and the Scriptures, Jewish and Israelite identity was tightly bound up with Israel’s understanding of God and Torah. In Romans 1-8, Paul helps redefine Jewish identity away from a reliance upon halakhic prescriptions to obey the Torah (“works of Torah) to the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead. This is expressed in a seminal form in Romans 2.28-29 and then further developed in a vision of the person justified by God through the crucified and resurrected Messiah in chapters 3-8. As the Jewish identity was formed out of the Maccabean rebellion’s zeal for maintaining adherence and practice of Israel’s ethnoreligious customs, that is circumcision and Torah, Paul downplays the importance of physical circumcision in being Jew in palace of the circumcision of the heart as an echo of Deuteronomy, which Paul then says is by the Spirit. It is a matter of one’s faithfulness to God in being doers of the Torah which the Spirit enables (Rom 8.4), not one’s faithfulness to the ethnic customs through what one does in regards to the flesh/σάρξ.

Having redefined Jewish in relationship to circumcision and Torah in Romans 1-8, Paul then focuses on the true significance of genealogical descent from the patriarchs in Romans 9-11. As presented in Romans 9.6-13, not every person who has descended from Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob is the direct recipient of God’s promises. Not every descendant of Israel is truly Israel, not everyone is seed/σπέρμα of Abraham. Instead, appealing to the example of God’s selection of Jacob over Esau, Paul’s overarching point is that the election of specific descendants of patriarchs is a matter of God’s choice rather than biological descent. In short, Paul draws from the language about Abraham’s progeny and the example of Isaac’s children to subvert any idea that findings one’s genealogy from Jacob/Israel provides any specific privilege that that individual. God has not elected every descendant of Israel. What Paul’s argument does is further invalidate the notion of innate Israelite privilege, which he had already done previously in Romans 3.1-20. In so doing, Paul joins in with the criticism of John the Baptist against those who would say, “We have Abraham as our father.” (Matt. 3.9).

The implication of this argument is to make the point that God’s faithfulness is not tied up with any sense of favoritism for specific Israelites. Romans 9.14-18 expresses this is a rather sharp way, using the example of God’s compassion to Israel and hardening the heart of Pharaoh to develop the general theological principle that God’s has his own choice to whom he will show mercy and whom he will harden to imply that Israelite identity does not force God’s hand.

Paul’s quotation of God’s words to Moses about mercy and compassion in Exodus 33.19 was given in the middle of the episode of Israel’s idolatry with the Golden Calf, where not everyone received this mercy. Paul doesn’t say it explicitly here, but the implication by reference to this story is that some Israelites during the Golden Calf incident were not the recipients of God’s mercy. As a result, Paul’s argument makes an implicit connection between Pharaoh’s hardening and the Israelites in the wilderness, suggesting the possibility of God regarding an Israelite as if they are like the super-villain in Israel’s story. Elsewhere in early Christian literature, we see the king Herod’s slaughter of the innocents of Bethlehem (Matthew 2.13-18) being implicitly cast as imitating the Egyptian Pharoah’s orders to kill Israel’s newborn baby boys (Exodus 1.8-22).

At this point, the hypothetical interlocutor of Romans 9.19 retorts back with a question that essentially amounts to arguing God’s hardening an Israelite would be unfair. However, this language can also be considered  an echo of the Wisdom of Solomon 12.12, which precedes the discourse saying that God is merciful does not wrongly punish those who do not deserve it in 12.13-18. Ultimately, the Wisdom of Solomon transitions to the wicked who are punished in 12.23ff as being ignorant of God by nature (Wis. 13.1-9), which explains why they ignore God’s mild rebukes (Wis. 12.26) which the faithful do not overlook (Wis. 12.19-22). Paul places in the mouth of the hypothetical interlocutor the language of the Wisdom of Solomon, which was used to describe why the Gentiles are such great sinner, but Paul uses it to describe why not all Israelites receive mercy from God.

In response to the interlocutor, Paul throws back at this interlocutor the language about the potter making different forms of vessels in Wisdom of Solomon 15.7, but with God as the potter rather than Gentile idolaters. Whereas the faithful are given a special status and protection from their sin by God in Wisdom of Solomon 15.1-5, which is not offered the wicked idolater described in the surrounding discourses. So at one level, Paul’s language of the potter is an indirect reminder of the attitude that this hypothetical interlocutor shares towards Gentiles. At the same time, Paul transforms the metaphor so that it is God who is making human vessels, rather than humans making (pseudo-)divine idols. In so doing, Paul redirects attention away from human idolaters that drew the ire of many Jews and towards God and His sovereign authority. The effect of this argument is to say that God is sovereign over the descendants of Israel; they are not individually entitled to any sort of mercy.

At this, Paul quotes from Hosea 2.23 and 1.10 as an example of God’s simultaneous rejection and acceptance of Jews in Romans 9.25-26. While some commentators see Paul’s point to bring in the inclusion of Gentiles, it is more likely Paul’s point that the Hosea prophecies show that Israel is on equal footing with Gentiles before God.⁶ However, it is more coherent with Paul’s developing argument to take Hosea as an example of God’s dual response to Israel: God can show them mercy as His people who are fulfilling His purposes, or God can harden them and not deem them to serving God’s purposes and rejecting them as His people. AT this point in Paul’s argument, both Jews and Gentiles are equal ground, and so the only thing that matters when it comes to God is whether God has called (ἐκάλεσεν) them as His people or not (Rom. 9.24). In other words, what was true of God’s selection of Jacob is also true from all Jews in addition to the Gentiles: it is God who calls individuals as belonging to His people, it is not a birthright. Paul’s appeals to Isaiah in Romans 9.27-29 go on to attempt to solidify the point: God’s mercy and calling may only be at work among a remnant of Israel and not the whole nation.

Romans 9.30-10.3 suggests the reason many Israelites are hardened was that they did not actually seek God and His righteousness, which was revealed by Jesus Christ, because they were focused on following specific, halakhic prescriptions (“works”) and had become ignorant of God. While Paul doesn’t say it, this behavior compares to the idolatry described in the Wisdom of Solomon, as idols nor the halakhic traditions convey God or possess His presence. Only in Christ as the bearer of the title of κύριος as the Greek translation of the Jewish name of God can one realize the true righteousness of God that the Torah would point to (Romans 10.4-13). At this point then, Paul has brought back the discussion of Jewish identity in relation to the Torah as expounded in Romans 1-8 back into the discussion about the question of genealogical descent from Israel started in Romans 9.

In response to the hypothetical interlocutor that make try to rebut Paul’s argument as wrong through a series of objections suggest that those Israelites who have rejected Jesus as the Lord were ignorant of Jesus’ identity because no one had preached this to them in Romans 10.14-15a, Paul’s says that the story of the good news preached about Christ is sufficient on its own ground to bring about faith in Romans 10.15b-17. There was no need for a separate mission to be sent that Jesus is the Lord, but the Gospel itself was enough itself. Then, in Romans 10.18, Paul quotes from Psalm 19 as a testimony that an understanding of God’s glory has gone out throughout the world, so, we might say, the unbelieving Israelites are without excuse just as the idolatrous Gentiles were without excuse for not being able to understand God’s nature in creation (Romans 1.19-21).  However, to paraphrase Paul’s argument in modern language, a theology of God from nature and the revelation of God through evangelism should have been enough testimony to recognize Jesus as Lord. It wasn’t. And, so, by this point, Paul has turned the natural theology argument against the Gentiles of Romans 1 on its head against the hypothetical interlocutor and his insistence that the corporate nation of Israel is as a whole God’s people.

To conclude this section of his argument, Paul quotes from Deuteronomy 32.21 and Isaiah 65.1-2 to show that boundary between God’s people and the world  never drawn along the lines of ethnic boundaries. God had said as far back as Moses that God would be at work among other peoples besides Israel, including to spark jealousy among the Jews.
 Paul first proceeds to clarify that God’s hardening of Israelites is not equal to rejecting His People. God has still kept his promises to the patriarchs by having descendants of them as part of His People. Paul presents himself as an example of this in Romans 11.1.

Then, Paul quickly transitions to a more general statement: “God has not rejected his people who he knew beforehand (προέγνω).” While προγινώσκω/foreknowledge has often been interpreted as some sort of eternal foreknowledge of who God would elect for salvation as a result of the theological debates between Calvinist and Wesleyan-Arminians, the word probably does not refer to an eternal foreknowledge, but likely God’s foreknowledge that God had as He expressed His promises to the patriarchs. Rather than προγινώσκω referring to God’s foreseeing of faith that distinguishes that boundaries between the chosen believers and the unbeliever, it rather refers to the faithful Israelites God knew of when He made his promises with the patriarchs as distinct from unfaithful Israel. In other words, προγινώσκω highlights those descendants of the patriarchs who were chosen according to the promises ahead of time like Jacob/Israel, further undermining any notion that God’s election was about the corporate body of Israel.

This language of God’s knowledge might echo the Wisdom of Solomon 15.1-5, where it is said that the faithful will not sin because they know (εἰδότες) that are regarded (λελογίσμεθα; cf. the usage of λογίζομαι in Romans 4) as God’s people (Wis. 15.2). Paul’s emphasis on God’s foreknowledge undercuts any connection between an Israelite’s election and their personal confidence that they are a part of God’s people (cf. the Jewish sage of Rom. 2.17-24). It is about who God knew and had in mind when He made the promise to the patriarchs. In other words, the election into God’s people is about being known before birth when God made the promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, instead of God’s People being coterminous with all who have genealogical descent from Jacob.

So for Paul, it is those who God has foreknown that God has protected from sin and idolatry, not simply any Israelite who deems themselves a part of God’s people. Hence, Paul makes reference to the story of Elijah’s exasperation at feeling alone in the midst of an age of darkness, violence, and apostasy in Romans 11.3-4. God responds to Elijah that he has kept 7000 Israelites from idolatry. In other words, God continues the preservation of His people, even as corporate Israel has become apostate and lost into idolatry. God’s mercies to protect, to strengthen, to guide is not given to Israel corporately, but it is given to those whom God chooses to show mercy to.

As Paul’s overarching argument about the identity of Israel and God’s People started in 9.6 comes to a close in 11.10, Paul has begun to demonstrate the principle of God’s free choice to show mercy and to harden mentioned in Roman 9.18. The remnant in Elijah’s day is a Scriptural narrative that demonstrates God’s mercy to a limited portion of Israelites. In so doing, Paul draws the conclusion in Romans 11.5 that in a similar fashion, God has chosen a remnant of Israel based upon His mercy and grace in Paul’s own day. And, to continue to connect this discussion of the identities of Israel and His People with the related but slightly different discussion on the behavioral prescriptions derived from Torah previously discussed up in Romans 1-8 and briefly brought up in 9.30-10.4, Paul further defines this election as not being based the adherence and practice of specific types of prescribed behaviors.

The other demonstration of Paul’s statement about God’s free choice in Romans 9.18 from Israel’s past takes place in Romans 11.7-10. Explaining that the rest of the Israelites who were not graciously chosen were hardened, Paul provides a compound quotation from Deuteronomy 29.4 and Isaiah 29.10, describe God’s act to obscure understanding from some Israelites. Paul then quotes from a David Psalm, Psalm 69, that implicitly drawing a connection between those Israelites who were King David’s enemies, oh whom David prayed for their ignorance, and those Jews hostile to the Lord Jesus. At this point, Paul has finalized his point overarching point about Israelite identity: those Israelites who did not believe that Jesus was Lord with the preaching of the Gospel are those who are hardened and do not belong to God’s People. Rejection of Jesus as Messiah is tantamount to those who committed idolatry and fought against God’s chosen king in Israel’s history.

So, Paul engages in one final conversation with the hypothetical interlocutor he has been engaging throughout Romans 2-11 before he shifts conversations partners to the Gentiles in 11.13-32. He explains that Israel’s rejection was not meaningless or purposeless, as if was simply some arbitrary act of God. Rather, the stumbling of Israel has led to the gift of salvation the Gentiles into God’s people. Paul ends here with a note of hope their rejection was of benefit to the world of the Gentiles, how much more so will Israel’s inclusion become of a benefit to them, as the jealousy of the blessing of the Gentiles will move them to return to God. In so doing, Paul gives greater significance to his reference to Deuteronomy 32.21 as quoted in Romans 10.19: the jealousy stirred up among Israel though the foreign nation of the Gentiles is not to their everlasting rejection, but it is, in fact, to restore to them the blessings from God as mentioned in Deuteronomy 30.1-10.

From Romans 9.6-11.12, Paul has thoroughly attempted to undermine any sense of a special privilege that comes in virtue of being a descendant of Jacob/Israel. It is only those who know God who was revealed in Jesus, and not those who are creating an “idol” out of ethical prescriptions, who are part of God’s people. Paul’s argument has essentially disconnected God’s election from ethnicity and genealogical descent. In so doing, Paul has simultaneously established a Scriptural case for the boundary between God’s people and the world not being drawn along the lines of Jewish ethnicity that, if accepted by Jews, would cease to make Jews pessimistic about and suspicious, if not even hostile, towards potential Gentile converts that Paul hopes to preach the Gospel to in Rome.

At this point, Paul’s argument might present suspicion that he had simply accommodated to the Greco-Roman society, gone off the reservation, and denied his Jewish ancestry and heritage. Paul had already preemptively expressed his own motivations in Romans 9.1-5, likely so as to strategically frame his discussions about Israel and election as not being about abandonment of his ethnic heritage. However, to further demonstrate that he has not abandoned his fellow Israelites, he lets the Jewish audience into a conversation he would have with hypothetical Gentiles who might grow arrogant after hearing what Paul said in Romans 11.13-32. In doing this, Paul accomplishes two things: he firstly punctures a hole in the ego of arrogant Gentiles, just as he has been doing the whole time to his fellow Israelites who were tempted to think their ethnic heritage was a source of pride, boasting, and privilege.

However, it also gives him the opportunity to more fully give an account of the hope for Israel that he had just previously mentioned in Romans 11.11-12. He does this by taking a metaphor used to describe the faithful followers of God in Wisdom of Solomon 15.3, that of a root (ῥίζα) which portrays the relationship of the faithful to God’s power as one that gives life the faithful one. In Wisdom, the metaphor of the root may be an echo and metaphorical extension of the tree as the righteous person in Psalm 1, who is distinguished from the ungodly. For Paul, however, rather than casting individual people as being like an individual tree, he cast them as branches that shoot off from a tree. Who does the cultivated olive tree that Paul mentions metaphorically refers to? The patriarchs, and more particularly that of Abraham, as the imagery of branches resembles the “branching” of descendants.

Within this metaphor, both Jews and Gentiles are portrayed as being broken off from their original, respective trees. But, as the metaphor goes, either of the branches, either the one from the wild olive tree as representing the Gentiles or the cultivated olive tree as representing Israel’s patriarchs are not any fundamentally different, and so they can both in the same manner be grafted onto the cultivated olive tree of the patriarchs. Just as Paul made the argument back in Romans 2.1-3.9 that there is no fundamental difference of privilege or status between Jews and Gentiles, Paul brings that concept back up again in the imagery of the broken branches.

Paul’s usage of this metaphor has two discursive functions. Firstly, to let the Gentiles know that hardened Israel can be included God’s People just as the Gentiles had been. Secondly, just as Israelites had been hardened, so too could Gentiles become hardened themselves. In so doing, Paul makes the point that God’s inclusion of the Gentiles is NOT a switching of priority, status, and privilege to the Gentiles or an elevation of Gentiles about Israelites. Just as the Jews are no better off than the Gentiles, the Gentiles are no better than the Jews. Just as God shows no favoritism for the Jews, but will judge them for their disobedience, so too God shows no favoritism for the Gentiles, and will judge them for their disobedience. Paul is making a rhetorical effort to make clear to his Jewish audience that he has not gone over to the “Gentiles” and favored them to Israel, even as he is an apostle to the Gentiles.

In beginning to make his way towards the conclusion of his argument in Romans 9-11, Paul emphasizes the analogy of similarity between Jews and Gentiles in Romans 11.25-26. Just as God’s salvation (ἡ σωτηρία) of the Gentiles leads to the inclusion (τὸ πλήρωμα) of Israel in Romans 11.11-12, the inclusion (τὸ πλήρωμα) of the Gentiles will lead to the salvation (σωθήσεται) of all of Israel. While being an Israelite is not a guarantee of one’s membership in God’s people, there will be a future, eschatological inclusion of all of Israel. Paul’s language does not give much hint as to whether this is all of Israel through all of history or all of history as a specific point in history, but my suspicion is that it is the latter. Whichever reference Paul has in mind by “all Israel,” what seems likely here is that Paul is attempting to leaving a note of hope with his Jewish audience after disconnected membership in God’s people from genealogical descent from Israel. The identity of Israel is not meaningless now, even if much of Israel has been hardened. God still has future plans for Israel and their inclusion, just as the quotations from Isaiah and Jeremiah in Romans 11.26-27 speak to.

So Paul concludes his comments about Israel’s identity and significance with a final note that acknowledges the significance of Israel in God’s eyes in Romans 11.28-29. Even though much of Israel has been hardened and rejected, this does not change the promises God gave to Israel’s patriarchs. A future election of Israel based upon God’s continued love of Israel waits on the horizon, even as much of Israel has rejected Jesus and has actively made themselves and enemy of the Gospel that Paul preaches.

Then, to rhetorically conclude his argument, Paul makes a connection between God’s hardening of the disobedient, which Paul now uses the metaphor of imprisoning to refer to, and God’s mercy in Romans 11.30-32. God’s action of hardening Gentiles and Jews into disobedience was not done with some arbitrary decree, but even those actions God has taken with the hope of inclusion of Jews and Gentiles alike. With this note, even Israel’s hardening is included part of God’s purpose to fulfill His promises to the patriarchs.

 I have offered this overview of to show how the idea that Paul is reestablishing a Scriptural understanding of Israelite identity can feasibly serve as the skeletal topoi that brings together the rhetorical and argumentative flesh of Paul’s argument in Romans 9-11. Insofar as the redefinition of identity can provide a parsimonious, coherent account of Romans 9-11, the stronger the evidence there is that Romans is written very specifically with addressing questions of social identity in mind, although not in quite the same manner that Esler conceives it. Esler believes that Paul’s purpose in Romans 9-11 is found in the eschatological hope at the end in chapter 11:

In spite of the failure of the Mosaic law, Israel is not to be scorned. In the end all Israel will be saved. Issues of divine justice do appear in these chapters, but in the course of an argument moving resolutely toward a conclusion that has direct relevance to solving ethnic tensions and conflict between Greeks and Judeans in the Roman Christ-movement. But Paul’s resolution does not entail eliminating the distinction between the two subgroups. As in the metaphor of the olive tree, they are incorporated within one new identity but not at the price of losing their subgroup identities. The tree and cut-off branches are distinct from the wild olive shoots that are grafted on-one tree, but recognizably separate parts. Yet neither here nor elsewhere in Romans does Paul call the new entity Israel. He is noticeably reticent about this, unlike in Galatians, where he comes close by referring to the Christ-movement as the Israel of God (6:16).⁷

Esler intimates that Paul is pushing towards a redefinition of Israel so as to be inclusive of the Gentiles, although Esler does not think Paul does so explicitly in Romans, but he appeals to Paul’s usage of “Israel of God” in Galatians 6.16 as a precedent for a redefinition of the identity of Israel as inclusive of Gentiles.

However, as I have given above, an alternative is being offered. In Romans 9-11, Paul’s primary purpose is to redefine Israel’s identity to bring it in line with the two basis “data points” of Israel’s Scripture and the overwhelming rejection of Jesus as Lord while in rendering asunder any intrinsic connection between God’s people and Israel while, at the same time, maintain a note of an eschatological hope on behalf of Israel. This reading of Romans 9-11 can then offer a different understanding of the “Israel of God’ in Galatians 6.16 as a reference to Israelites that are foreknown by God but had not given into the national “idolatry” that place all importance upon Jewish identity and circumcision. In other words, the “Israel of God” could refer to those Jews who had yet to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ but in virtue of being chosen by God, they have not substituted God’s righteousness with something else, but remain faithful to God and will upon hearing the Gospel preached, recognize Jesus as Lord. Just as argued here in Romans 9-11, the phrase “Israel of God” is intended as a phrase that narrow’s down the chosen people of Israel to those who have been elected by God, as distinct from those who simply have been born an Israelite.

To this end, Paul’s redefining the boundaries of God’s people looks similar to what is observed of the Essenes at Qumran. However, there is one critical difference between Paul and the Essenes. Whereas the Essenes saw themselves as the true Israel, Paul does not, strictly speaking, change what it means to be an Israelite: it is to be a person whose genealogical heritage is believed to have come from Jacob/Israel. That does not change. What has changed for Paul, however, is the relationship between Israel and God’s people; the two identities are not coextensive. The effect of Paul’s reestablishing the significance of Jewish identity as not being the same thing as God’s people is to embrace a broader inclusion of Jews and Gentiles alike, as opposed to the Essenes who thought that God’s people as the true Israel were simply a much smaller subset of those who physically descended from Israel and remained dutifully faithful to the community’s sectarian covenant.

It bears mentioning that Esler’s tendency to bracket out more systematic theological considerations from Paul’s discussion of social identity in Romans⁸ overlooks a critical way in which systematic theological reflection and social identity often interpenetrate and overlap: thought leaders, such as prominent teachers, who spent time in more thorough reflection on the sources of cultural meaning, including religious texts, influence societal conceptions and perceptions about social identity. When such thought leaders are recognized as authorities among a specific social identity group, the way they think influences how members understand their own identity. To that end, insofar as Jewish sages, whom Paul alludes to in Romans 2.17-24 and through the multiple allusions and echoes of the Wisdom of Solomon, were instrumental in determining perceptions of Jewish and Israelite identity, more systematic reflection becomes increasingly relevant in trying to shape understandings of these social identities. With that in mind, Romans 9-11 can be understood as a more systematic, theological reflection on the relationship of Israel and God’s election that engages in “interpretation and explanation” that Esler suggests defines systematic theology by explain Israel’s story through idea of God’s gracious action of election, rather than simply “designation and description” that defines the mere ideational content of theology.⁹

However, even as theology is brought to bear on the questions on Israelite identity in Romans 9-11, there is a mistake in treating theology in general or some specific branch of modern theological investigation as Paul’s overarching concern. For instance, Paul’s purpose in Romans 9-11 as a whole does not appear to be developing a Jewish eschatology as NT Wright suggests. Eschatology is only salient in Romans 11.11-32. Perhaps one can argue that the discursive purpose of Paul’s argument is to set up for the eschatological vision of Israel’s inclusion in Romans 11, but that doesn’t explain what Romans 9.6-11.10 is about on its own terms. At best, eschatology is only beneath the surface. One would expect that if the purpose of a discourse is to set up for what comes at the end, there would be preliminary references and allusions to those concerns and themes that sets up for the conclusion. However, asides from possibly the language of salvation in 10.9-13 associated with confessing Jesus’ Lordship, there are no clear indication of reflections on eschatology in Romans 9.6-11.10; it is by and large a reflection of Israel’s history in the Scriptures. It seems better then to perhaps cast Romans 9-11 as Paul’s theological reflections on the relationship of Israelite identity with God’s election and regard the eschatology mentioned at the end as fitting within that larger theological frame.

In summary, it can be argued that Paul’s purpose in Romans 9-11 is to shift an understanding of the relationship of Israel’s identity as it relates to the identity of God’s people, to undermine the understanding of Jewish identity that the Jewish Christians in Rome might have acquired from influential Jewish sages and literature, like the Wisdom of Solomon, of the time period.

On July 25, 1741, John Wesley preached his sermon “The Almost Christian” before St. Mary’s at Oxford. His sermons starts off by listing the noble and good traits of the almost Christian. They are honest, help each other, is dutiful to not break the laws of the Gospel, has self-control in his emotions and in what he consumes, works diligently to help others, is involved in the religious life through the means of grace, and is dutiful in family prayer, are sincere in their faith, and they want to do God’s will. What separated this almost Christian from an altogether Christian was the love of God, the love of neighbor, a firm faith that purifies the heart from sin. At the point of describing the altogether Christian, it would sound like he was simultaneously extolling the virtues of his audience while seeking to encourage them to come into the fullness of the Gospel. But, then Wesley asks people to reflect on their own lives to see if they even match up to the almost Christian, which he follows up with saying:

Are not many of you conscious, that you never came thus far; that you have not been even almost a Christian; that you have not come up to the standard of heathen honesty; at least, not to the form of Christian godliness?—Much less hath God seen sincerity in you, a real design of pleasing him in all things. You never so much as intended to devote all your words and works, your business, studies, diversions, to his glory. You never even designed or desired, that whatsoever you did should be done “in the name of the Lord Jesus,” and as such should be “a spiritual sacrifice, acceptable to God through Christ.”¹

Wesley’s sermon goes from the appearances of exhorting people to simply perfect their religious life with love and faith to saying they didn’t even have the religious life of an almost Christian. Some might have responded that they thought they had good intentions, but Wesley reminds them of the saying “Hell is paved with good intentions” and calls them not to the religious life of the almost Christians, but rather towards the love of God, the love of brother and even of enemy, and faith in Jesus Christ as the Lamb of God who takes away our sins. Wesley doesn’t try to fix their sins and injustices, but calls them to the love and faith that would purify them of their sins.

There are some points of exegetical and theology that Wesley’s sermon got wrong; most particuarly that faith for the New Testament was directed towards the atonement of Christ rather than the resurrection of Christ. Nevertheless, Wesley sermon hit on something: not only were the crowds of religious people not dutiful in their religion: they did not have have the love of God or neighbor nor the form of faith that purifies from sin. Whatever their religion was, it wasn’t a religion that had God and people at the center through faith in the Incarnate Jesus Christ who died on behalf of our sins.

It is time to say something similar today. In the United States, evangelicals as a whole today are not saved. Their lives are not lived by the grace of God through the love of God and neighbor and faith in the crucified-and-resurrected Christ. Their lives are controlled by two things: power and morality. Supposing their “faith” has saved them, many had the wrong type of fiath and were never purifed of their sins. As a result, their flesh cries out for control, for dominance, for war, for fighting, for the very deeds of the flesh. They never knew the Savior, even as they say to Him “Lord, Lord.” Rather, they used the words of God and religion as a cloak for the unpurified sins that remains deep in their hearts. As a result, they worship people who seduce them by their sense of power and morality, all while cloaking it in the sheep’s clothing of Christian language and religion. They love Trump more than Jesus, because Trump promises them what they want while Jesus refuses to give to them the sinful desires of their evil, idolatrous hearts. Becaues God has given them over to the lusts of their heart, they worship someone who will give them what they want rather than the God who is redeeming from sin. They would rather live in their sin and evil. It is evident in the fact that what they fear isn’t sin or evil, but “liberals.” They care nothing for God’s will, but they are motived by a hatred of those on the different side of the political spectrum.

It is time for evangelicals in this modern day to be saved. It is time for them to come to Jesus Christ with a faith from a sincere heart, rather than being people with a faith of ulterior motives to whom Jesus does not entrust Himself to (John 2.23-25), or face the eternal judgment they have warned others of.

In the past, being evangelical used to mean something about people’s holy faith in Jesus Christ. But that is not the case today. It has become a tool used for something else. No doubt, there are many faithful followers of Jesus who call themselves evangelical. But, there were also many faithful followers of Jesus among Catholicism before the Protestant Reformation, but the new movement did not remain Catholic. There were many faithful followers of Jesus in the Church of England before the Wesleyan revival, but the world-wide Wesleyan revival was not attached to an Anglican identity. But we have to make a choice, do we love God and people more or the names and institutions more? If we love people more, we must seek clarity so that people can hear the word of Jesus Christ undistored by the lies of the devil that has evily appropriated the form of godliness. We must find a new social identity so that we will not be confused with the idol worshippers of modern, American evangelicals and to say to them, “You need Jesus, not Trump and you can not worship Jesus and Trump at the same time. Choose today who your Savior will be!”

After the Protestant Reformation, it became taken as a near axiomatic assumption that the Christianity given in the New Testament was in conflict with Judaism. The Lutheran antithesis of Law and Grace had become a controlling meta-narrative for understanding the contrast between Judaism to Christianity. Judaism began to become characterized as a legalistic, works-righteousness religion compared to the pure Gospel of justification by faith. However, within the 20th century, a sustained push-back took place against this portrayal of Judaism as a caricature. Since the New Testament defines Christian faith in contrast with Jewish religious teachers, primarily the Pharisees, and the works of the Torah, a new understanding of Judaism would lead to a different understanding of Christianity, one that did not easily fit within the Law and Grace metanarrative in its various forms.

As a result, it has become much more common to suggest that the early Church saw themselves as a branch of Judaism. To put it differently, the discussions with Jewish religious leaders about Torah may be considered to be more appropriately described as an intra-Jewish division rather than a conflict between two different religions. Using a modern analogy, it would be like the difference between evangelical Presbyterians and evangelical Methodists. While both share many similar beliefs in orthodoxy and practices such as infant baptism, they can be sharply divided in their understanding of God. While this is not a perfect analogy as there is simultaneously more of a common identity between Judaism and the early church more hostility and antagonism between the two, it casts a picture that early Christianity was not a new religion that just simply popped into existence in a vacuum when Jesus was conceived in the Virgin Mary’s womb.

However, there are some problems with this way of understanding the relationship of the early Christians with Judaism. In Gal 1.13-17, Paul contrasts his previous life and identity in ‘Judaism’ (Ἰουδαϊσμός) with what occurs to him after he was called by a revelation of Jesus Christ. Paul does not identify a specific branch of Judaism in the form of the Pharisees, but he uses the overarching, more general term that was used to define Israelites who were faith to the way of life, including diet, given in the Torah, including those who fought against Antiochus during the Maccabean rebellion (2 Macc. 2.21, 8.1, 14.38; 4 Macc. 4.26). By referring to Judaism, Paul has a particular way of life, rather than what we today would call a religion, as is evident by using the word ἀναστροφήν to refer to his involvement in Judaism. That Paul’s former way of life is further described not simply by a specific diet or concern about purity, but resembling the violent behavior of the Maccabean revolt by his own similarly violent attack against Christians suggests something: the early Paul thought there was a difference between early Christians and Judaism in thinking that the followers of Jesus were abandoning Torah, much like the Gentiles accomodates to Antiochus’ pressures. The echoes of the Maccabean zealotry in Gal. 1.13-17 strongly suggests Paul believed there to a difference between Judaism and the early followers of Jesus such that they were considered worthy of being as a threat to the Jewish faith. This is perhaps further evidenced by his somewhat vague statement in Galatians 2.18 about building up what was once torn down as a reference to a life lived by the works of Torah. Devoting themselves to the teachings of Jesus, early Jewish Christians would look like they were abandoning the Torah. In what was considered to be most determinative of Jewish identity for Paul, one’s adherence to the Torah, Paul saw a marked difference between the early Jesus movement and Judaism.

A critical difference is that many of Jesus’ words and actions seem to flout how the Pharisees understood the Torah to be rightly understood and applied, Jesus could have appeared to be bordering on apostasy as Jews did under Antiochus’s oppression. Consistent with perception is the Babylonian Talmud from a few centuries later, which century recounts traditions about Jesus “the Nazarene” as one who mocked the teaching of the Jewish sages, was a prophet of the nations seeking the well-being of the Gentiles rather than the Jews, tried to seduce people into idolatry, was a sinner, and was favored by the Roman government.¹ Compared to the teachings of the Pharisees/Sages, Jesus and his early followers might have looked as downright apostates and traitors to the Jewish people and way of life, which foment a Maccabean zeal to protect and preserve the Torah once again. 

However, this doesn’t mean the perceptions of Jesus by the Pharisaical Paul or the Rabbinic tradition were accurate. In devoting themselves to the teachings of Jesus rather than to the traditional conventions as to how one was taught to obey Torah, the early Christians may be understood as engaging in a very different manner of submitting to the Torah based upon a different hermeneutical grid, with Jesus’ teachings as the way to understand how to live faithful to God’s Torah. In that way, they would have been similar to the Qumranic community’s ‘Teacher of Righteousness.’ After the revelation of Christ, Paul came to understand the early Christians as obedient to the Torah in the way Christ taught from it (Gal. 6.1: τὸν νόμον τοῦ Χριστοῦ) through the Spirit. While abandoning the body of traditions that prescribed specifics works for obeying Torah (Gal. 2.16: ἔργων νόμου),  Paul expresses elsewhere in Romans that the Spirit leads people to uphold the righteousness that the Torah taught (Rom. 8.4: τὸ δικαίωμα τοῦ νόμου).

While Romans is perhaps written in part with Paul working against a perceived suspicion from other Jews that he could have been acting as an apostate and an agent of the Gentiles, Paul takes pains to clarify himself to his fellow Jewish Christians. While he does not think the teachings of the Sages in prescribing specific works to obey Torah as effective for God’s redemption, he does still see the Torah as teaching righteousness, is deeply concerned about the well-being of his fellow Israelites (Rom. 9.1-5), that God has faithfully kept a remnant among Israel (Rom. 11.1-5), believes Israel will be redeemed by God in the end (Rom. 11.25-27), and affirms the promises given to the patriarchs (Rom. 11.28). Rather than defining Judaism according to the tradition of Maccabean zeal and observance, Paul instead reconceptualizes a Jew as one who sees the Torah as good, affirms the promises given to the patriarchs, and seeks and wants the good of his fellow Israelites.²

In other words, there seems to be a social disagreement and conflict over what defines and makes a person a Jew when it came to the early followers of Jesus. For those most resonant with the victorious Maccabean rebels, to be a Jew means to hold firm and steadfast to the Torah, even to the point of taking violent action to fight off those who would threaten that. To those who were more influenced by the combative mentality, the definition of being a Jew would be more determined by maintaining the commitment to Torah observed as espoused by the Sages during the Second Temple period. In case of of hostility, suspicion would be easily provoked, leading to ready distortions and understandings of anyone who smelled fishy. People like Jesus and later Paul would have been seemed as too deviant from the Torah and were considered apostates and enemy of the people, making room and loving the Gentiles more than they care for their own people. On the other hand, Paul in his letters to the Romans, seems to envision a true Jew without this strong attachment to hearing and learning the Torah from the specific traditions of the Jewish Sages. This is not to mention to apparently brazen authority that Jesus Himself act with when it came to teaching and observing the Torah, acting as if He had the authority to do with it as He wished would have certainly rejected the Jewish traditions having any merit or authority.

So, was the early Christian movement Jewish? Your answer would depend on who you ask. If you ask a modern European or American scholar, it would depend on a variety iof factors such as whether one is talking about ethnicity or religion, how influenced they are by the 20th-century shift away from the earlier Protestant division, etc. If you were to ask an ethnic Jew during the 1st century, it would have depended on how zealous they were for the Jewish traditions stemming from the Maccabean period onwards. In the end, it may be best to either not be more specific until we can answer the question “Jewish according to who?” or, if we wish to give an answer that attempts to represent the period of late Second Temple Judaism, the identity of the early Christian movement as Jewish was highly ambiguous and often on the margins because of the teachings of Jesus and the later leadership of Paul and the inclusion of the Gentiles. Even if we try to go with early Jewish believer’s own sense of the definition of Judaism, they would have probably considered themselves closer to a reforming movement that would simultaneously make them Jewish while setting them at odds with the prominent Jewish leaders and teachers. Yet, once the movement infirmly entrenched the inclusion of the Gentiles without requiring circumcision and Torah, even this self-identity would have undergone serious reformulations and challenges.

Questions of identity are often thorny questions in periods of societal change and conflict. The question of who is considered to belong to a specific identity group significantly depends on what prototypes and criteria one has for defining that identity. Through time, these prototypes and criteria for membership and identity can change markedly in such a way that they simultaneously (a) retain some continuity with the past while yet (b) being different enough that other could think they have distorted what the identity either originally meant or what it should mean. The community and Qumran and the Essenes seemed to have thought so, and so they had a radical redefinition of Judaism. So too did the early Christians, but their radical redefinition in the teachings of Jesus was so different from the traditions of the elders that they would have themselves been considered as operating on the margins by those Jewish leaders who had influence and authority.

Yesterday, Christianity Today posted an excerpt from Rebecca Laughlin’s Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion addressing Ephesians 5.22ff and the idea of women submitted to their husbands. Laughlin’s premise is that “Ephesians 5 grounds our roles in marriage not in gendered psychology but Christ-centered theology.” As a result, “Ephesians 5 is a withering critique of common conceptions of ‘traditional’ gender roles that have often amounted to privileging men and patronizing women.”

Insofar as the article represents Laughlin’s work, I want whole-heartedly support the direction of Laughlin’s interprets of Ephesians 5. The Roman world was a highly patriarchal society that placed a large amount of power and responsibility upon men and an emphasis on manliness, although it is not a perfect match with modern, Western visions of masculinity. In instructing husbands to love their wife as Christ loved and gave himself for the the church, Paul is making an implicit echo to the narrative traditions of Jesus who was a servant of humanity. While Paul could not have directly told husbands to be a servant of the wife as this would have deeply offended the sensibilities of Roman masculinity, calling them to act as Christ would be calling them to adopt the behaviors and attitudes of a servant.

However, I want to push our understanding of Paul’s instructions a bit further. It is important to keep in that Paul’s instructions to the wives in v. 22 did not include the verb for submit, but rather ὑποτάσσω is in v. 21 when Paul instructs the whole church to submit to each other. Through ellipsis, Paul’s instruction towards wives assumes this action of submission mentioned in the previous. Now, some have taken this as a basis to understand Paul instructing both men and women to be in mutual submission; if Paul calls the church to submit to each other and the wife is to submit each other, then does not also Paul consider the husband needing to submit to his wife. While I want to affirm the sentiment trying to be expressed in this interpretation and agree with the egalitarian values being sought, I would suggest that it is actually not a good interpretation of what Paul says towards husbands.

Rather than trying to suggest that Paul is teaching the idea of “mutual submission,” I am putting forward the idea that we need to shift what type of authority we are thinking and speaking of when we hear the word “submission.” We often hear the word submission against the background of a authoritarian hierarchy of command: the one who is in submission does anything and everything that the one with authority commands. I would push back against this interpretation in favor of a different type of authority: a pedagogical authority of learning. In short, it is perhaps best to state that Paul calling for the relationship between husband and wife should be formed in a Christ-centered manner where the husband takes on the role of the wise, sagacious teacher and the wife submits as a form of discipleship and learning.

We can begin to see this by digging a little deeper into what Paul means by “submission” in Ephesians 5. When he instructs the whole church to submit to each other, it comes on the heels of his casting the vision for their worship in 5.17-21:

So do not be foolish, but comprehend (συνίετε) what the will of the Lord is. Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. (NRSV except text in bolded font)

Here, Paul encourages believers to push towards comprehension of God’s will and then provides three instructions that can be placed within the setting of worship: (1) being filling with the Holy Spirit, (2) musical worship, and (3) thanksgiving. While we might be inclined to see the enouragement to be filled with the Spirit as some sort of moment of experiential or ecstatic overwhelming by the Spirit, Paul’s principle understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit in worship is as the one who enables believers to instruct and build up each other. We see this most evident in 1 Corinthians 14.26-32. As many people are variously gifted by the Spirit, so the whole church is taught by God through the Spirit’s gifts. We see this theme brought up elsewhere in Ephesians in 4.7-16. Christ’s work through the Holy Spirit is a gift given to teach and instruct the whole body of Christ.

So, when Paul calls the Church to submit to each other, Paul is referring to the manner in which fellow believers should learn from each other through the Spirit at work in them. Hence, Paul says they are to submit out of the fear of Christ, which is an echo of Proverbs 9:10: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.” (NRSV) That Paul have Proverbs 9.10 in mind is further evident by the fact the Septuagint uses word σύνεσις for knowledge, which is a cognate συνίημι which Paul uses in Ephesians 5.17. Their submission to each other was a pedagogical submission to Christ through the fullest expression of the Holy Spirit, much like the disciples submitted to the rabbinic instruction of Christ.

While ὑποτάσσω was not a customary term for describing the teacher-disciple relationship and was more regularly used to refer to more traditional hierarchical relationships of command, it could occasionally be used to refer to the type of learning that people had from teachers of wisdom. For instance, consider what the Stoic philosopher Epictetus said in  Discourses 3.7.34:

Make us admire you, make us want to emulate you, as Socrates did with his followers. He was someone who truly knew how to govern his fellow men, because he led people to submit (ὑποτεταχότας) their desires to him, their aversions, their motives to act or not to act.¹

Now, previously, Paul had described Jesus has put everything into submission in Ephesians 1.22. So, we may consider that Paul’s usage of ὑποτάσσω in 5.21 as referring to the way this submission to Christ is taking place in worship through the teaching of the Spirit. Believers are bringing their life into conformity to Christ through how they learn from each other.

So, when Paul then extends this submission to the wife’s relationship with her husband, Paul still has in mind this same pedagogical submission to Christ. In other words, Paul is essentially saying: “Wives, learn about God through your husbands.” We see a similar sentiment expressed in 1 Corinthians 14.34-35 when he talks about women being submissive rather than speaking. Paul has just told the whole church to be silent when another person is speaking by the inspiration of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 14.26-31. So, likewise for the women, instead of interrupting the worship if they needed to learn (μαθεῖν) something, Paul tells them to learn from their husbands at home.² In 1 Corinthians 14, Paul envisions the whole church learning from each other AND for women to be able to learn from their husbands at home. Just as Paul transition between the whole church’s learning to the wives’ learning in 1 Corinthians, Paul does the same move in Ephesians 5.21-24.

The reason for this is best explained not by some intrinsic order of creation where only men should be teachers and women should be learners. Rather, what Paul is describing taking place among the Body of Christ is quite revolutionary for the day. The Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus, a slightly younger contemporary of Paul, made the argument that women should be able to learn philosophy alongside men because philosophy can also be deeply useful to the work that they do.³ To open up women to the place of discipleship and learning, Paul was doing something quite counter-cultural: women were just as capable of learning the Gospel of Jesus Christ and all its wisdom as men were. When the intellectual power of half the population was kept in the intellectual dark, Paul’s instructions to women is actually a statement of liberation: learn from your husbands the things of God. They are not reserved just for men.

This pedagogical relationship of wife to husband is then explicitly connected to the church’s pedagogical submission to Christ in Ephesians 5.24. Furthermore, the submission ‘in everything’ (ἐν παντί) Paul instucts them in corresponds to thanksgiving in worship in v. 20 in all times (πάντοτε) and for everything (ὑπὲρ πάντων). So, when Paul calls the women to submit, quite literally “in all,” he is talking about submission at all times and in regarding to everything that God has given. This is not a blank-check for the husband’s arbitrary authority to boss and command their wife to do whatever the husband things the wife should do, but rather that women were to learn about all aspects about the wisdom of God in Jesus Christ at all times through their husbands. In essence, Paul is saying to women “You are free to learn everything that men do. There is nothing off limits.” In their learning of Christ, women are called to submit to their husbands in regards to learning everything from God in all times.

Before pushing forward into what Paul says to the husbands, it is important to note that Paul does not live in a post-modern world where every person’s thoughts and teachings about God’s were considered to be equally valid. Thus, we don’t need to hear Paul saying that women should just accept anything and everything their husbands are saying about God and Christ. There is true teaching and false teaching in Paul’s mind. We can imagine that in Paul’s mind, any husband who would share a teaching about God that is in utter defiance with the whole Body of Christ, inspired by the Spirit, was teaching should not have been listened to. The women would have had the Church’s teaching to compare their husband’s teaching to, so if they say anything discrepancy that showed their husband was in error or in sin, they should follow what the Spirit is is teaching and not the error and sin of their husband.

So, there is no reason for us to think just anything the husband teaches should have been accepted arbitrarily. However, for Paul, the wife should not be the one trying to argue with their husband if there is some sin or error in what the husband is teaching. It is this type of resistance against the husband that I think Paul is forbidding in 1 Timothy 2.11-12. Rather than trying to counter the husband’s teaching when they are in error and sin, to whom Paul had just given instructions against men and their anger in 1 Timothy 2.8, they should not seek to forget the appropriate way to learn about God through a humble, submissive attitude rather than an argumentative, conflictual attitude.

Paul then appeals to the example of Eve in 1 Timothy 2.13-15, not as a demonstration of the inherent order of the relationships between men and women, but as a prototype of what happens when someone who is confused by God’s will. Notice the difference between what Eve says to the serpent that God commands about the tree of knowledge in Genesis 3.3 what God told Adam in Genesis 2.16: the initial question by the serpent manipulatively leads to Eve’s confusion about God’s will.⁴ Instead of seeking to argue with the husband and try to usurp the role of teaching, the wife can trust that there is salvation through the childbearing (διὰ τῆς τεκνογονίας), which is an echo of Genesis 3.15 and an allusion to Christ as the fulfillment, if only they continue their in faith, love, and holiness with modesty as the model virtue of a learning disciple.

I would put forward that in 1 Timothy 2.10-15, Paul assumes that the husband can act like one of the two other roles in the creation narrative: the role of Adam who receives the instruction from God and transmits it to Eve or the role of serpent who deceives Eve. If the husband is closer to the deceptive seducer, or even an angry abuser that Paul warns against in 1 Timothy 2.10, rather than Adam, the wife can still trust that God will continue to work and save her through Christ. She does not need to try to fight and argue to take over the role of teacher of her husband if she sees her husband is closer to the child of the serpent, that is the devil, but she should seek to continue to live her life in God’s will. The presence of the word μείνωσιν in 1 Timothy 2.15 can be used to describe a person who continues in the faith depite hardships and challenges, and in this case, is probably Paul referring to a woman continuing in the faith in case their husband is a faithless child of the devil that would deceive her rather than an Adam who would teach her what is true.

This leads me to return back to Ephesians 5 and looking at what Paul says to the husband. In calling the husband to love and give himself up like Christ did for the church in Ephesians 5.25, Paul’s instructions would not have not just been understood just as some sort of moral exhortation to be a sacrificial guy. Teachers of wisdom in the Greco-Roman world were expected to exemplify the very wisdom they taught in their lives. Furthermore, Jesus himself warns about teachers trying to judge and correct the ‘minor’ sins of others while they themselves have a near monopoly on that sin (Matthew 7.1-5). Teachers were expected and exhorted to exemplify the very wisdom that they taught. And so, men were to exemplify the wisdom of God in Christ, the servant of humanity, in their own relationship to their wife.

This would explain what Paul says in Ephesians 5.26 is connected to 5.25 with a ἵνα purpose clause. Paul speaks of Jesus cleansing the Church by his word. While Paul is explicitly speaking about what Christ does to and for the Church, since he has given Christ as a model for the husbands, what Christ is doing for the church, husbands  should do for their wives. Thus, the model of Christ when realized by the husband will lead to cleansing of the wive by the husbands words, that is their teaching, but only if the husband himself exemplifies the wisdom of Christ in his life that his words teach of. If there is a massive dissonance between the spiritual life of the husband and what they teach such that they do not wholly reflect Christ, there would be no spiritual power in their relationship to their spouse. The second ἵνα clause of Ephesians 5.27 then expresses Paul’s abiding concern that the husbands should be an embodied representative of Christ and His wisdom to his wife so that he may have a glorious wife who is holy and blemish, just as Christ presents a glorious church to himself.

What should be noted up to this point is how much Paul is framing his instructions to husbands by explicitly describing what Christ has done and is doing, while it is implicit that this is what he is calling the husbands to do. For Paul, Jesus was not some person who gives us theological evidence of am model for men to be kings over their wives as if Jesus is the embodiment of the order of creation. Rather, that men should become as Christ in their relationship to the wives such that how they treat their wives is spiritually Jesus Himself loving the church.

It is here that want to take an exegetical recess and wander into theology for just a moment. I recall something that one of my professors as Alan Torrance taught when I was at the University of St. Andrews. He would present to us the class the question “Why is it that Jesus was incarnated as a male?” His answer: “Because He became like the least of these.” I appreciated that answer, but I would like to push it just a bit further on that to make someone more explicit. “Why is it that Jesus was incarnated as a male?” The Incarnation was God’s response to redeem humanity from our sin, and so Jesus took on the gender that was more responsible for the sin tearing about the fabric of God’s creation and God’s image: men. Jesus came to redeem all sinners, especially many men who had fallen into deep sin and have caused untold traumas and horrors throughout human history and have lost what God created Adam to be. Ceasing to become like Adam in the garden, many men have become more like the serpent in the garden. And so, the last Adam comes to redeem humanity from the fallen Adam.

To return back to Ephesians 5, I would put forward that Paul’s instructions towards husbands is built on the assumption that in Christ they are being redeemed from the violence and abuse that men had inflicted and were inflicting in the highly patriarchal Roman society. That Paul is more spiritually concerned about men more than women is evident that he gives more than twice the space to address husbands than wives in Ephesians 5. This concern becomes more evident in Ephesians 5.28-31 when he talks about the body. Just as Paul calls for men to raise their worshipful hands in a holy manner rather than a raised, abusive hand of anger and abuse in 1 Timothy 2.10, likewise Paul exhorts husbands to in Ephesians 5.28-31 to take tender care of her wife’s body. Paul is recognizing the abusive tendencies among many men in the Roman society, and he spends time encouraging the men to not inflict physical harm on their wive’s body.

It was often the case that corporal punishment was a tactic used to try to teach others.⁵ So, Paul’s instructions to husbands in treated their wives’ bodies with care is also Paul outline what type of pedagogical training they should and should not give to their spouses. They should not try to teach through inflicting abuse, but rather as Christ gave Himself up to those who would abuse Him, so the husband should endure abuse for his wife.

In summary, then, I would put forward that that Pauline passages regularly used for the subjection of women such as Ephesians 5, 1 Corinthians 14, and 1 Timothy 2 is in fact Paul address pedagogical matters by seeking to bring women into the wisdom of Christ through how they are trained to learn about Christ and the way a faithful husband would disciple them. Paul’s overriding concern is that Christ become known and experienced and manifest, that Christ becomes all in all, including in the way a man teaches their wife as a member of the Church as the spiritual embodiment of Jesus Christ, who taught and redeemed the whole Church. For Paul, the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is not some basic axiom that then provides us some sort of disembodied salvation, but Jesus is bringing into submission the whole creation and filling it with God’s glory. As such, Paul understands the relationship of husband and wife in a Christ-o-centric way.

Attempts to try to read Paul providing some inherent order of authority between the genders in fact replaces Christ with the idols of order, power, and dominance that manifest themselves through one’s hermeneutic. Paul nowhere says says he is describing a fixed, universal relationship between men and women. Paul is not a child of the Enlightenment. In fact, Paul thinks the present order of the world is passing away (1 Cor. 7.31) to make way for the new creation in Christ. In trying to find some fixed order and relationship between men and women in Paul’s letters and other parts of the Bible, many Christians have been unwittingly serving an idol of their own making and, as a result, are vulnerable to the seduction of the serpent to become children of the serpent. Just look at John MacArthur who told Beth Moore to “Go home!” a few weeks back. Just as the serpent deceived Eve and as a result of the sin, women experienced a curse that would make them subject to the domination of the husband (Gen 3.16), so John MacArthur sought to do the same work the ancient serpent did. Let those who are the children of God do as Christ does and those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

It is often recommend that people seeing a therapist should seek to journal their thoughts. The advice of how to journal can be diverse, but there is evidence that journaling provides a useful therapeutic tool to aid in the process of recovery.

There are probably multiple mechanisms that go into why writing can be therapeutic. In many cases, it may be beneficial to simply write about one’s thoughts and feelings to help people to discover and reflect what is going on in them. I certainly agree with tihs idea, but I want to suggest from my own experiences that there may be another benefit, particuarly in cases of post traumatic stress: the restoration of our linguistic capacities so as to be able to effectively comprehend and integrate our live experiences.

One of the effects of long-term, persistent physiological response of stress is the steady stream of cortisol that is put into the blood stream. Coritsol is incredibly helpful is enable us to respond effective to the stress of the immediate circumstance. However, the value of cortisol is more so for the short term, whereas in the long run it can have deleterious effects on a person’s well-being and mental capacity. One particularly pernicious side effect is the damage that is done to memory through damage to the hippocampus, the part of our brain that is responsible for encoding and recalling most of our memories.

It has been theorized that the hippocampus is an important part of our usage and understanding of language. A famous patient known HM who had both of his medial temporal lobes surgically removed began to have severe memory problems, including all memories after he was 16 and basic life facts such as his age, what he had just eaten, etc. In addition to these memory deficits, he also was largely unable to learn the meanings of new words.¹ Developing a hypothesis for this reason, one of the roles of the hippocampus in encoding and recalling memories is integrate and activate information from various sensory modalites elsewhere in the brain to fire synchronously. This allows us to remember various details such as a person’s first date with their spouse, the excitement we had when we first got a driver’s licence, the pain we experienced when someone we love died, etc. It would also likely have a role in our memory of the basic concrete conceptualizations for the words we use, such as associated the word ‘dog’ with a animal that has a littany of features that we might consider prototypical of dogs such as four legs, a tail, barking, often a pet, etc. While episodic memory is more complex than semantic memory in virtue of episodic memory being filled with a lot more necessary details, both require the ability of the brain to integrate various information from throughout the brain into a composite whole.

If there is this vital connection between the hippocampus and the semantic memory of language, then we are one step away from possibly explaining the instrumental role of journaling in healing from trauma. Through writing, it can suggested that we are retraining our brains in the usage of memory so as to be able to more effectively integrate life experiences, past and future. Journaling and other forms of thoughtful, reflective writing, in effect, offers a form of “exercise” for the hippocampus in order to overcome the deleterious effects that perpetually high degrees of stress can cause. The hippocampus happens to be one of the few areas of the brain where adults reguarly have neurogenesis in which the hippocampus integrates new neurons. Just as the hippocampus is suscpetible to degradion under stress, it is also able to be made new.

If this is the case, it isn’t necessary the case that we need to write directly about traumatic memories or other problems that ail us. It is only necessary that we write about things that are related to our trauma. Upon the emergence, strengthening, and consolodiation of semantic memories, the hippocampus is further ‘strengthened’ so as to also be able to the concepts uses in language to also process and integrate traumatic experiences. This reintegration can happen outside of our cosncious thoughts about the trauma, as the brain processes a whole lot more than what goes on in our conscious awareness.

I am also left with a curiosity about the possible value of learning a new language for traumatied people. In the past month, I have spent every day trying to learn German, while also taking small bits of time to try to refresh my somewhat rusty Greek, my largely forgotten Hebrew, and my Latin that I have engaged with in very shorts spurts since taking it in college. I have found that my thinking has been benefitted while facing this linguistic challenge, althugh I am not sure if it is the confidence that comes from successfully learning a language or from the stand point of broading my languages skills that provides a mental benefit. Probably a combination of both.