Friday, 1 January 2016

Paul and the Torah,
Lloyd Gaston, Wipf & Stock, 2006, page 148

Gaston's fifth answer to the question "Why will all Israel be saved?" takes a different approach and leads on to the next question:

Not by individual Jews converting to faith in Christ. The one place where this was happening in Paul's time, in the preaching of the gospel to the circumcised by the Jerusalem church, is completely ignored in this chapter Romans 11. This observation is, I believe, fatal to any attempt to understand Paul as blaming Jews for refusing to believe in Christ and hoping for Jews that they will come to such belief in the future. Nowhere in these chapters does Paul refer to Jewish Christians as such. When a distinction is made within Israel, it is between those few like Paul engaged in the Gentile mission and the "rest" who do not acknowledge it. Usually, however, he speaks about Israel as a whole in an undifferentiated manner. All Israel stumbled on the stone and all Israel will be saved.