Provoked To Saving Jealousy

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Provoked to Saving Jealousy Reading Romans 9–11 as Theological Performance

Chris E.W. Green

Pentecostal Theological Seminary, Cleveland, Tennessee

Abstract

The history of interpretation indicates that Christian interpretations take Romans 9–11 as a single, coherently designed statement of doctrine. There are, of course, disagree- ments within the consensus, but most readers seem to share two basic assumptions: (1) the apostle had a particular point to make, which he crafted with perfect success, and (2) a good reading of the passage discovers that point and makes it understand- able so it can be used to build or support a particular Christian teaching. At an angle to that tradition, I want to suggest that Romans 9–11 can perhaps also (if not more) fruit- fully be read not as a tidy doctrinal treatise but as a torrid theological performance, a transfiguring work of art staged as a series of rhetorical moves and countermoves that in the end leaves us not with nothing but with more than we dared to imagine possi- ble.

Keywords

Romans 9–11 – soteriology – Pauline theology – election/predestination

Introduction

The history of interpretation indicates that Christian interpretations typically take Romans 9–11 as a single argument,1 a coherently designed statement of

1 Contemporary scholars as a rule see Romans 9–11 as not only internally coherent, but also

consistent with the overall argument of the letter. For the purposes of this article, I can afford

simply to agree with this consensus and focus my attention on the passage itself.

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doctrine.2 Readers are quick to acknowledge the passage’s difficulties,3 and of course numerous disagreements emerge on other fronts—for example, about which doctrine or doctrines Paul in fact is teaching and how, if at all, the passage relates to the rest of Romans.4But most readers seem to share two basic assumptions: (1) the apostle had a particular point to make, which he crafted with perfect success, and (2) a good reading of the passage discovers that point and makes it understandable so it can be used to build or support a particular Christian teaching.5At an angle to that tradition, I want to suggest that Romans

2 For example, David Wallace (Election of the Lesser Son: Paul’s Lament-Midrash in Romans 9–11

[Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014], 3) holds that “Paul’s argument is tightly integrated” and

so must be read very closely. Similarly, Richard B. Hays (Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of

Paul [New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1989], 64) insists that Romans 9–11 has a single,

guiding purpose—“to show that God’s dealing with Israel and the nations in the present age

is fully consistent with God’s modus operandi in the past and with his declared purposes”—

and that “despite the difficulty of interpreting many of its individual statements, Romans

9–11 has a clearly recognizable overall structure.” Hays acknowledges that Paul “dialectically

deconstructs” his own deconstructive reading of Israel’s privileged status, but in my judgment

he downplays the radicality of both the dialectic and the deconstruction. Also Douglas

Moo (The Epistle to the Romans [Grand Rapids, mi: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996], 554), while

acknowledging that some readers “may be guilty of imposing a neat ‘outline’ format on Paul

that he never intended,” nonetheless holds that Paul’s arguments proceeds “in a more ‘linear’

fashion, with each new section building on, or responding to, points in the previous section

(or sections).”

3 As N.T. Wright (Paul and the Faithfulness of God [Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2013],

1156) explains, “It is easy to be overwhelmed by Romans 9–11: its scale and scope, the mass

of secondary literature, the controversial theological and also political topics, and the huge

and difficult questions of the overall flow of thought on the one hand and the complex details

of exegesis and interpretation on the other.” For a brief, but illuminating sketch of the many

interpretive difficulties presented by Romans 9–11 and some of the various interpretations

that have been offered in the history of interpretation, see, for example, N.T. Wright, Climax

of the Covenant (London: t&t Clark, 1991), 231–257 and Charles H. Talbert, Romans (Macon,

ga: Smyth and Helwys, 2002), 24–245.

4 Even interpreters from the same Christian theological and spiritual tradition can and often

do disagree sharply on this point. For example, Theodore Beza understood Romans 9–11 to

be a treatise on predestination, but Heinrich Bullinger did not. See Peter Opitz, “Bullinger on

Romans,” in Kathy Ehrensperger and R. Ward Holder, eds., Reformation Readings of Romans

(London:t&tClark, 2008), 148–170.

5 Often, readers in the Augustinian/Calvinist tradition find in this passage strong support for a

particular doctrine of predestination. John Piper (“Universalism in Romans 9–11? Testing the

Exegesis of Thomas Talbott,”Reformed Journal 33, no. 7 [July 1983]: 11–14 [14]), for example,

refers to Romans 9–11 as “a grand pillar in the Reformed doctrine of God’s sovereign freedom

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9–11 can perhaps also (if not more) fruitfully be read not as a tightly ordered doctrinal treatise but as a torrid theological performance, a transfiguring work of art staged as a series of rhetorical moves and countermoves that in the end leaves us not with nothing but with more than we dared to imagine possible.6

Paul—and by “Paul” I mean the text as I am reading it—is deeply troubled by the faithlessness of Israel, his kin kata sarka.7 The troubledness expresses itself all the more intensely because it emerges out of the ecstatic celebration of cosmic reconciliation in Christ.8 If it is, in fact, true that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38–39), then how can it be that Israel, God’s covenanted people, have been separated from Christ?

to have mercy on whomever he wills and harden whomever he wills.” David Bentley Hart

(“Traditio Deformis,”First Things253 [May 2015], 72) finds this interpretation especially prob-

lematic: “in the whole long, rich history of Christian misreadings of Scripture, none I think

has ever been more consequential, more invincibly perennial, or more disastrous.” 6 James D.G. Dunn (The Theology of Paul the Apostle [Grand Rapids, mi: Wm. B. Eerdmans,

1998], 500–501) argues that interpreters seeking “a theological rationale” for the place of

Romans 9–11 [in Paul’s overall argument] have tended to find it in different sections of the

passage. For example, the traditional Protestant reading is centered in 9:14–23, because it

assumes that having delivered his doctrine of justification by faith in the first part of the

letter, Paul moves on in these chapters to the theology of predestination. But other Protestant

readers find the heart of the passage in 9:30–10:17, where Paul returns to the themes of

righteousness and faith. For my part, I am attempting an experimental theological reading,

perhaps in the vein of Barth’s reading of the same passage in his Römerbrief. Unlike Dunn, I

am not trying to determine Paul’s “original intent,” but to see what comes from attending to

some of the possibilities inherent in the text, possibilities Paul may or may not have intended

or foreseen but that nonetheless remain apt for the Spirit’s use.

7 Tommy Givens (We the People: Israel and the Catholicity of Jesus[Minneapolis: Fortress Press,

2014], 347) insists that “according to the flesh” must not be “reduced to the modern super-

stition of ethnicity or biology, of ‘merely physical descent.’” Instead, in his view, kata sarka

names “the gracious continuity—everywhere contingent and subject to decay—by which

the living relatives of Paul in view have emerged as such from the long past of Israel … It cer-

tainly involves procreation, but it also involves ‘mixed’ marriages, adoption, a constellation

of institutions and practices, and innumerable other contingencies …”

8 Theologically, this move from ecstatic celebration (at the end of Romans 8) to sorrow (in

the beginning of Romans 9) suggests perhaps that our celebration of God’s victories must

always lead into lament, even as the lament itself, at the right time, moves toward hopeful

doxology.

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Has Israel’s covenant with God been annulled? Is God unrighteous? Has God failed? Is Israel finally God-forsaken and God-damned?9

The text of Romans 9–11 materializes as an answer to these troubles. But I want to suggest that the “answer” does not come in the form of a discrete argu- ment or a well-ordered doctrinal statement. Instead, Paul performs a furious series of alternate visions—each of which he offers and then somehow takes away.10At the end of the performance, we, as readers of the text, are left not so much with answers to the questions that have been forced on us, as with some- thing deeper and more substantial, if not at all useful in the way we might have hoped.11

I have hanging in my bedroom at home a large, untitled, abstract painting. I was there the night it was created. The artist began with a finely detailed ink sketch of a samurai warring with a dragon. The moment this sketch was finished, he immediately began painting an image over the sketch. In the original sketch, the warrior’s right arm was thrown up, fingers splayed in spasm, as the dragon fell on him. To create the second image, which overlaid the first, the artist used the lines of that arm to paint a large, deeply rooted and widely branching tree under the moon in a perfectly green meadow. But as soon as the second image was finished, he began to paint a third image over it, reworking the trunk of the tree into the mast of a boat and the meadow into a raging sea. Once that image was finished, he threw down his brushes, and with his hands began to swirl the paint together wildly. At the end of everything, the canvas was a sea of colors with two swirling vortices in the center: one in blues and whites, the other in yellows, reds, and greens. Using that image as a paradigm, I want to argue that Paul’s performance develops in three stages, and ends in a doxological flood of meaning-beyond-understanding.

Although Paul raises these questions, or acknowledges that they have been raised, he does not attempt to answer all of them exactly. Instead, in the following sections, he reframes the broader issues that gave rise to the questions in the first place, and so renders them moot.

Hays (Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, 38–39) suggests that Romans 9–11 draws on form and language of the lament psalms. Wallace agrees (Election of the Lesser Son, 3): “Paul integrates an Old Testament literary form—the lament—with an exegetical style of argumentation best known from later rabbinical materials—the midrash—in order to reach a primarily gentileChristian audience.”

It perhaps should go without saying, but all readers come to Romans 9–11 needing it to say some things and/or needing it not to say other things. These needs go a long way to determining what we can see in the text, and only the grace of the Spirit saves us from allowing them to deafen us to the word of God.

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Not All Israel is “Israel”

Paul’s performance begins as meditation on Israel’s strange, unanticipated refusal of her Messiah and God’s strange, unexpected inclusion of the nations in Christ. He knows that Israel holds a privileged place in God’s purposes—“to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law …” (9:4–5). And yet they somehow have not received what is rightfully theirs and so have been “cut off from Christ.” What has happened? Has God failed to keep covenant? Paul insists (in 9:6–8) that that is not true:

6It is not as though the word of God had failed. For not all Israelites truly belong to Israel, 7and not all of Abraham’s children are his true descendants; but “It is through Isaac that descendants shall be named for you.” 8This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as descendants.

God did not fail Israel because God only ever cared for “Israel.”12 They are the true descendants of Abraham, the spirit-children of his faith and his promise.

Having drawn on this reading of the Isaac story, Paul takes up (in 9:10ff.) the story of Rebecca’s sons, Jacob and Esau, to develop his case. A few selected texts secure the point: before the boys had been born, “before they had done anything good or bad,” Rebecca was told that the older would serve the younger because God hated Esau but loved Jacob. This, then, is God’s way: he elects not only Israel from among the nations, but also a remnant from within Israel, and his elections have no reason accessible to us. We cannot call God unjust because God is beyond our reckoning of good and evil. And we, only creatures, have no right to speak against God in any case.

19You will say to me then, “Why then does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” 20But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, “Why have you made me like this?”21Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use?

Rom 9:19–21

For an exploration of some of the difficulties—textual and literary, as well as theological— with Paul’s use of “Israel” in Romans 9–11, see Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 539–543.

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Yet, no sooner has Paul refused our right to question God’s designs than he offers a justification for God’s actions: God has saved the true, spiritual Israel and rejected “Israel according to the flesh” because God wants to “show his wrath and to make known his power” (9:22). Having made this concession, he cites three passages of Scripture to seal it (9:25–29), one from Hosea and a pair from Isaiah:

25As indeed he says in Hosea, “Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people,’ and her who was not beloved I will call ‘beloved.’ 26And in the very place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ there they shall be called children of the living God.” 27And Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, “Though the number of the children of Israel were like the sand of the sea, only a remnant of them will be saved; 28for the Lord will execute his sentence on the earth quickly and decisively.” 29And as Isaiah predicted, “If the Lord of hosts had not left survivors to us, we would have fared like Sodom and been made like Gomorrah.”13

The logic of Paul’s use of these Scriptures is relatively obvious, but nonetheless shocking: in Christ, God has saved those who were not his people and damned all but a remnant of his own people to the same fate suffered by Sodom and Gomorrah. Along the way, God has used the “vessels of wrath” for the sake of the “vessels of mercy”:14 Esau for the good of Jacob, Pharaoh for the good of

Ben Witherington (Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary [Grand Rapids, mi: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004], 237–238) points out that Romans 9–11 is the most “Scripture-saturated” in the entire Pauline corpus. Nearly a third of the Scripture citations in the undisputed letters are found in this section. For critical analysis of use of Scripture in Romans 9–11, see Filippo Belli, Argumentation and the Use of Scripture in Romans 9–11 (Rome: Gregorian and Biblical Press, 2010). Most scholars argue for a Deuteronomistic underpinning of Romans 9–11. See James M. Scott, “Paul’s Use of Deuteronomic Tradi- tion(s),” jbl112 (1993): 659–665.

Hans Urs von Balthasar (“Vocation,”Communio37 [Spring 2010]: 111–128 [113]) argues that Paul understood “the teaching regarding individual election (Rom 9) only typologically, with a view to the election of Israel from among the nations.” And Balthasar also insists that the “dialectic” of Romans 11 should be understood only “functionally, for the totality of the nations.” In his words, “Israel is called for the sake of the Gentiles, and this call of Israel becomes a model for the call (‘calling out,’ecclesia) of the Church, which takes place for the sake of the world, and thus also for every personal call within the Church, which without exception demonstrates this same ecclesial figure of meaning: to be called for the sake of those who (for the time being) are not called.” He concludes that this “biblical- patristic and modern understanding leaves behind once and for all every theology of

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Israel to reveal the divine power and to lavish “the riches of his glory” on those predestined and called (9:22–24).15 The nonelect, it would seem, exist just for the sake of the elect.16

One Promise, All Peoples

But Paul immediately begins to paint another, alternative image. Israel’s unen- lightened zeal (10:2) has driven them into faithlessness.17 Stumbling in the dark of their self-righteousness, they have failed to see Christ, God’s righteous- ness, who in his life, death, and resurrection accomplishes the realization of all God’s promises as the telos of the covenant (10:4ff.). Therefore, as Paul puts it, “Gentiles, who did not strive for righteousness, have attained … righteousness through faith; but Israel, who did strive for the righteousness that is based on

individual predestination (the most consistent form of which was the theology of double predestination), according to which the one chosen is chosen primarily for his own sake, so much so that he must stand amazed and trembling before the mystery of others not- being-chosen (perhaps even being rejected)—whether these others be many or few.” As Dunn says (The Theology of Paul the Apostle, 511), in these opening paragraphs it is already becoming clear that Paul is engaging in “role reversal”: “The traditional reading of the Isaac-Ishmael and Jacob-Esau episodes was that Israel is defined by descent from Abraham through Isaac and Jacob, and subsequently by the works of the law required of the covenant people. By pressing behind these episodes to the principle involved in them (promise and election) Paul has secured a point of critical leverage by means of which he can reinforce his earlier arguments by calling for a redefinition of Israel itself. In that redefinition, historic Israel may find itself no longer in the role of Isaac and Jacob, but in the role of Ishmael and Esau, that is, in the role of those who represent the foil to God’s election of Israel.”

Katherine Grieb (The Story of Romans: A Narrative Defense of God’s Righteousness [Louis- ville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002], 95) makes what strikes me as an illuminating suggestion: “Paul breaks off in mid-sentence (anotheranacoluthon), perhaps not wanting to think too hard about the details of the present situation … he is forging an imaginative connection between the smashed vessel of Jesus Christ for the sake of sinners with the possible destruction of Israel, a vessel perhaps destined for destruction for the sake of the formation of the messianic people of God. That thought is terrible enough to make anyone break off in mid-sentence …”

Here, Paul apparently abandons the Israel/“Israel” distinction and starts again from the beginning of the problem. He does so, I think, at least in part because as Dunn puts it (The Theology of Paul the Apostle, 519), “‘Israel’ could not be so completely cut off from its history and still be ‘Israel.’”

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the law, did not succeed in fulfilling that law. Why not? Because they did not strive for it on the basis of faith, but as if it were based on works” (9:30–32).

But why did Israel not have faith? The text insists it is not due to any failure or injustice on God’s part. God gave them every chance. There is “no distinction between Jew and Greek” because “the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him” (10:12). Because of God’s love for all and generosity to all, God sends messengers to bring the “good news,” so that “no one who believes in [Christ] shall be put to shame” and “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (10:11, 13). And where the divine witness to Christ comes, faith awakens: “so faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard through the word of Christ” (10:17).

The trouble is, Israel has heard the divine witness and yet does not believe. The Nations, against all odds, have inadvertently stumbled into the revelation of God in Christ, and Israel, in spite of God’s constant nurturing and wooing, has given God only disobedience and disregard.

18But I ask, have they not heard? Indeed they have, for “Their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.”19Again I ask, did Israel not understand? First Moses says, “I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation; with a foolish nation I will make you angry.” 20Then Isaiah is so bold as to say, “I have been found by those who did not seek me; I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me.” 21But of Israel he says, “All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people.”

Rom 10:18–21

Clearly, this second image is a radical reworking of the first. In that first sketch, Paul argued that Israel has been rejected becauseGod has elected “Israel” from Israel and the Nations for reasons known only to God, and that God has used all the nonelect for the good of the elect. In this reworking, Paul contends that Israel has not been saved because Israel has tried to establish their own righteousness on the basis of “works” (9:32). In other words, what first appeared as a matter of divine choice now appears to be human failure. In his first image, everything depended on God’s electing decision. In this second image, everything depends onhuman response. In the first image, God had the power to do whatever God desired. In this alternative image, God seems powerless to generate a faithful response from Israel or to keep the Nations at bay. In short, this second image is seemingly not a satisfying alternative for Paul, and no less troubling than the first.

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God: Against Us for Our Good

At this stage of the performance, we see that we cannot make good sense of Israel’s faithlessness either by saying that God elected a remnant or by saying that only a remnant had faith. Both of those claims are true, so far as they go, but they do not go nearly far enough. They both fail to do justice to the majesty and ingenuity of God. In the performance’s third act, Paul strives to show that God has always been doing more than meets the eye.

He begins by refuting what it seems he has assumed from the first: God has notrejected his people, in spite of their apostasy. “Has God rejected his people? By no means!” (11:1). All of Israel—and not only “Israel” (the faithful remnant)— will be saved.

26And so all Israel will be saved; as it is written, “Out of Zion will come the Deliverer; he will banish ungodliness from Jacob.” 27“And this is my covenant with them, when I take away their sins.”

Rom 11:26–27

Creating this third image, Paul returns, briefly, to what he said in the beginning: God has saved a remnant out of Israel. But this time he also claims that God not only has saved a few from Israel but has also “hardened” the rest.18God has now done to Israel what God once did to Pharaoh, and Israel, which Paul first introduced as “vessels of mercy,” is seen to be (also) “vessels of wrath.”19Here is the good news: if then God hardened Pharaoh to save Israel, then God is now hardening Israel only to save “Pharaoh.”

7What then? Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking. The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened,8as it is written, “God gave them a sluggish spirit, eyes that would not see and ears that would not hear, down to this very day.” 9And David says, “Let their table become a snare and a trap, a

18 19

See Dunn,The Theology of Paul the Apostle, 522.

In Barth’s formulation (The Epistle to the Romans[London: Oxford University Press, 1968], 359): “But what if the process of the revelation of this one God moves always from time to eternity, from rejection to election, from Esau to Jacob, and from Pharaoh to Moses? What if the existence of vessels of wrath—which we all are in time!—should declare the divine endurance and forbearance, should be the veil of the long-suffering of God, behind which thevessels of mercy—which we all are in Eternity!—are not lost, but merely hidden?”

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stumbling block and a retribution for them; 10let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see, and keep their backs forever bent.”20

Rom 11:7–10

Israel is being hardened so that the Gentiles might be saved. But the Gentiles are being saved only so that Israel might be saved. This is the great “mystery” Paul proclaims ecstatically: “a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved” (11:25– 26).

How does the salvation of the Gentiles work the salvation of Israel? Because the Gentiles’ share in God’s blessings provokes Israel to jealousy, and just so moves them to repentance.21 In the mysteries of providence, God is using the Gentiles, who are “not a people,” to provoke Israel, the people of God, to saving jealousy.22

11So I ask, have they stumbled so as to fall? By no means! through their stumbling salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jeal- ous. 12Now if their stumbling means riches for the world, and if their defeat means riches for Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean! 13Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I glorify my ministry 14in order to make my own people jealous, and thus save some of them. 15For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead! 16If the part of the dough offered as first fruits is holy, then the whole batch is holy; and if the root is holy, then the branches also are holy.

Rom 11:11–16

As Dunn explains (The Theology of Paul the Apostle, 522), Paul’s use of this psalm is astounding, because he “takes a text originally directed against David’s enemies and turns David’s imprecations against David’s own people. This is the depth of Israel’s present plight: their failure to respond to Israel’s Messiah is not simply an act of disobedience; it is also God’s own response to David’s imprecation against the enemies of Israel!” For the intertextual development of the jealousy motif used in this passage, see Richard H. Bell, Provoked to Jealousy: The Origin and Purpose of the Jealousy Motif in Romans 9–11 (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1994).

Much like the well-known Gospel story (Luke 15) in which the father’s mercy on the prodigal son provokes the prodigal’s older brother to confront the father in jealous and judgmental anger.

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These dramatic reversals, subversions, overlays were prefigured for us in Paul’s use of Hosea in Romans 9:25–26:

It seems clear, at least on my reading, that Paul is bending the text of Hosea 2:25 (lxx) past the breaking point. In the prophet’s words, those who are “not my people” are in fact Israel—God’s people whom God has rejected. But Paul reads the phrase as a fitting title for theGentiles, so that Paul’s reworking of Hosea says in effect, “I will call the Gentiles ‘my people’ and ‘Esau’ (who was hated) I will call ‘beloved’ (as Jacob is beloved).” The people of Israel (Jacob, the beloved) are (like Esau) now the enemies of God for the sake of the Nations even while they are beloved by God for the sake of the fathers (who were themselves, of course, Gentiles made “Jews” by God’s creative fiat).23

But on a closer read, we see that Paulhas“heard” Hosea. The opening of the prophet’s story tells us that the Lord directed Hosea to take “a wife of whoredom and children of whoredom …” (Hos 1:2). So, as the story goes, Hosea “takes” Gomer and she bears him three children: Jezreel, Lo-ruhamah (whose name means “not pitied”), and Lo-ammi (whose name means “not my people”). Each time a child is born and named, God declares the dissolution of the covenant. And when the last son is born, God severs the final thread holding him to Israel: “And God said ‘Call his name Not My People, for you are not my people and I am not your I am’” (Hos 1:9).

Suddenly, however, everything is reversed and overturned: “… and it shall be, in the very place where it was said to them, ‘you are not my people,’ they too shall be called ‘sons of a living god”’ (Hos 1:10, lxx). Somehow, Paul recognizes in this astonishing reversal the defining habit of the God revealed in Jesus Christ. He sees what Jonah long before him had angrily discerned: God’s mercy runs deeper than his wrath, and his threats are always in service of his promises. Election is for the sake of the nonelect. Mercy triumphs over judgment. Yes, God “hands over” the wicked to their wickedness (Rom 1:26)— this is the divine wrath. But God also “hands over” his own Son for us and for our salvation (Rom 8:32)—this is his mercy. And that mercy “in Christ” is the “deeper magic” that overcomes and undoes the judgment that falls on us “in

See Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, 66–67.

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Adam.”24Therefore, the divine wrath on the disobedient elect somehow works God’s mercy for the nonelect, leading them into obedience. And God’s mercy on the obedient nonelect provokes the rebellious elect to jealousy, awakening them to repentance. God hardens Pharaoh for Israel’s sake and saves Israel for Pharaoh’s sake.

We may be tempted to ask what this could possibly mean. But Paul has no more words for it and can only conclude: “God has imprisoned all in disobedi- ence so that he may be merciful to all” (11:32). Then he throws down his brushes and floods the canvas in sheer doxology:

33O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!34“For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?” 35“Or who has given a gift to him, to receive a gift in return?”36For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen.

Rom 11:33–36

Concluding Reflections

I have tried to make a case for reading Romans 9–11 as a transfiguring theolog- ical performance rather than as a tightly ordered, neatly developed doctrinal treatise. The Spirit, I am trying to argue, desires to use this text not so much to teach us propositional truths (about providence, predestination, eschatology, the nature of faith, and so forth) but primarily to “convert our imaginations” by impressing on us performatively the riotous splendor of God’s unfathomable designs.25 To be clear, I do not mean that we cannot or should not draw on Romans 9–11 in our doctrinal formulations. After all, the Spirit of truth is con- cerned to lead our doctrinal reflection and construction, too, as we work our

So, in Balthasar’s words (“Vocation,” 113), “We can and must formulate this verse simply: everyone who is called in a biblical sense is called for the sake of those who are not called. Most centrally, this is true for Jesus Christ, who is predestined and thus called by God (Rom 1:4) to die and rise in substitution for all who have been rejected.”

This reading is a continuation of two other projects. First, the work on hermeneutics that I began inSanctifyingInterpretation:Vocation,Holiness,Scripture(Cleveland,tn: cptPress, 2014), in which I argue for a pentecostal way of engaging Scripture that prioritizes the use the Spirit makes of our reading to shape us in the image and likeness of Christ. Second, a smaller work on the doctrine of predestination, published as “Let It Be: Predestination, Salvation, and Divine/Human Agency,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology23 (2014): 171–190.

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way toward the unity of the faith. But Idomean that only as the Spirit-enlivened text is having its way with our imaginations and our affections are we ready to think what it might tell us about how to speak the gospel. It follows, then, that the best, most faithful readings do not attempt to use the text to prove the once- for-all rightness of a particular doctrine, but to open us to wonder, baptizing us into mystery so we are taken up into the doxological performance that is, in its depths, the very life of the transfigured and transfiguring God.

PNEUMA 38 (2016) 180–192

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