Is the Church the New/True Israel?

In Dialogue with Matt Novenson (Part 2)

Inward and Outward Jews

At the end of Romans 2, Paul writes: “For a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision something external and physical. Rather, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not the written code. Such a person receives praise not from humans but from God” (Rom 2:28-29).

The Greek is this passage is disputed, so Novenson renders it: “For it is not the Jew on display, nor the circumcision in display in the flesh, but the Jew in secret, the circumcision of the heart in pneuma, not in the letter, whose praise comes not from people but from God” (173). On this translation, it is not about who is a “real” Jew, but who gets praise from God. Once more, Novenson premises this on his specific reading of the wider passage whereby the imaginary interlocutor “You, if you call yourself a Jew” (Rom 2:17) is not a Jew but a judaizing Gentile (i.e. a Gentile who follows Jewish customs perhaps even as far as circumcision). In other words, Paul’s retort to the self-labelled Jew of Gentile origin is that his circumcision is ostentatious, it is for display only, and it does not win favor from God. In which case, in Rom 2, Paul is not taking the honorific title “Jew” and applying it to “Christians,” the exact opposite, he is urging Christ-believing Gentiles not to seek praise from God through circumcision.

Now I admit that the imaginary interlocutor in Rom 2:1-29 is a bit vague and could apply to almost any moralist philosopher (esp. vv. 1-11). Perhaps the “if you call yourself a Jew” figure in v. 17 is similar to the Gentile adherents to Jewish customs of whom Epictetus said was “playing the part [of a Jew].”

Or then again, maybe it’s not!

In my reading of Rom 2:1-25, Paul argues (1) Presiding in judgment over others does not excuse one from judgment (2:1-11); (2) Performance of the Torah is the criterion for judgment (2:12-16); (3) Possessing the Torah does not amount to obeying Torah (2:17-24); and (4) Partaking of the emblems of Israel’s election such as circumcision does not guarantee salvation (2:25-29). Paul wants to show that Jews and Gentiles alike are both under sin and are equally condemned in the economy of judgment (Rom 3:9, 19-20).

The real barb in Paul’s argument is that (for Jews) disobedience of the Torah renders them as foreskinned (as Gentiles!), while the uncircumcised person (Gentiles) who obey the requirement of the Torah will have their uncircumcision reckoned as circumcision (reckoned as Jews). In other words, Paul is scandalously claiming that Jews can make themselves as covenant outsiders when disobeying the Torah and Gentiles who obey the Torah can have circumcision imputed to them! The circumcision that avails before God is not of flesh, but of heart, which is very a Jewish idea, found in the Torah (Deut 10:16; 30:6; Jer 4:4) and Philo (Spec. Leg. 1.1–11; Migr. Abr. 89–93)!

I take this as a fairly clear proposition that because circumcision, as the ultimate symbol of covenant belonging, is primarily internal, a matter ultimately of the heart, that the status of circumcision is therefore translatable and conferable on others who are not circumcised in the flesh.

Not All Those From Israel are Israel

When Paul comes to explaining why the vast majority of Jews do not believe in their own Messiah, Paul’s explanation is: “For not all those descended from Israel are Israelites, and not all of Abraham’s children are his descendants” (Rom 9:6-7). For Novenson, what Paul is doing here is not talking about an ethnic Israel versus a spiritual Israel, rather, he says it is about “those from Israel” and “Israel” itself so that Israel is narrower rather than broader. In other words, “far from redefining and expanding Israel, he winnows Israel down” (177-78). It is not about people outside Israel finding a way in (178).

Except that I think that is precisely the opposite of what Paul says. For Paul, there are two parallel or overlapping strands of Israel: Israel according to the flesh (ethnic descent and genealogy) and an Israel according to the promise (persons through whom God’s purposes find themselves worked out). Quite strikingly Paul says that it is not those of the flesh but those of the promise who are God’s children (Rom 9:8). Paul knows that is controversial and he engages in some hermeneutical ninjitsu with references Jacob and Esau, Pharoah, clay and potter imagery, before majoring on God’s mercy. And it is there, in the midst of divine mercy, that Paul says that God’s call has gone to Jews and even to Gentiles. Which he then backs up with a citation of Hos 2:23 and 1:10 about those who are not God’s people become “my people,” “the beloved,” and “sons of the living God” (Rom 9:24-26).

If it is promissory Israel who are God’s children (Rom 9:8), and if Gentiles become God’s people and God’s children (Rom 9:24-26), by faith (Rom 9:30) it is an inescapable conclusion that Gentiles become or join promissory Israel, because they are “reckoned as seed” (Rom 9:8)!

All Israel Will Be Saved

At the end of Romans 11, after Paul has discoursed on the remnant of Jewish Christ-believers as proof that God has not abandoned Israel, after he’s waxed on about the interlocking destiny of Jews and Gentiles, he finishes on a great note of hope that “And in this way all Israel will be saved” because God’s mercy will in the end triumph over Jewish disobedience (Rom 11:26).

Who is “all Israel”? Many think it is similar to the “Israel of God” in Gal 6:16 and it means the church – the view of N.T. Wright and Joseph Fitzmyer among others. While others think, no, this is a reference to empirical or ethnic Israel. On this point, I agree with Novenson that “all Israel” means ethnic Jews, “the whole Jewish people as opposed to the meager part who are presently on board with Paul’s message when he writes his letter to “Rome (179). But I arrive at that interpretation by a different formula than Novenson. (NB: Recently Jason Staples has argued that “Israel” means the ten northern tribes who have since been integrated into the Genitle world).

Novenson and his PwJ colleagues have a concern that any Gentile participation in Jewishness or Israelite identity would inevitably lead to the supersessionism of Jews by Christ-believing Gentiles. While the concern about supersessionism and its negative effects are legitimate, I cannot help but conclude that Paul does indeed exhibit of a sectarian supersessionism typical of rival factions within ancient Judaism.

I think Paul does address the supersessionism question very directly in his own time. Paul warns Christ-believing gentiles against treating the Jews as a branch permanently broken off (Rom 11:19-20), because God’s gifts and call to the Jews are irrevocable (Rom 11:28-29). That is a clear denial as one can imagine that Christ-believing Gentiles replace the Jews as God’s people. The gospel is for the Jew first, then the Gentile; not for the Gentile instead of the Jew! In addition, despite Jewish unbelief, hardness, and enmity, God’s mercy to them means that one day “all Israel” will be saved in a future time (Rom 11:25-26, 30-32). So I’m on board with Novenson that Israel here is ethnic or empirical Israel, not a “spiritual” or “true Israel” (I did a whole video on this). And yet, Paul did hold to a sectarian supersessionism, not with the church replacing Israel, but maintaining that Israel had been expanded to include Christ-believing Jews and Gentiles who were, at very least, the representatives of Israel in the messianic age. For more, see the book I edited and contributed to with Scot McKnight on this subject called God’s Israel and the Israel of God.

A Third Race?

Paul told the Corinthians: “Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God” (1 Cor 10:32) which makes it sound like the Corinthian believers are neither Jews nor Greeks but something else. Later in the same letter, Paul wants the Corinthians to recall “when you were pagans, somehow or other you were influenced and led astray to dumb idols” (1 Cor 12:2; cf. Eph 2:11).

If the Christ-believers in Corinth are no longer pagans as Paul says, while distinguishable from Jews and pagans, and if they are not Jews as Novenson alledges, then what prey-tell are they?

Christ-believers did inhabit a liminal religious space as neither Jewish in the sense of ethnicity and cultic practice, but were not Gentiles (i.e., pagans) in a religious sense. Josh Garroway uses a theory of hybridity to describe them as “Gentile-Jews” or “non-Jewish Jews.” That is an awkward and clunky but does capture the ambiguous peculiarity whereby Christ-believing Gentiles claimed to participate in Israel’s election, beliefs, ethics, and hopes without being Jews in the ordinary way. Novenson points out how he disagrees with Garroway because Garroway believes that Paul’s Gentile Christ-believers do become “Israel,” simply without proselytism, i.e., conversion to Judaism via circumcision. Here I suggest Garroway has the better of it than Novenson.

Novenson follows Christine Hayes by insisting that the ethnic difference between Jews and Gentiles is unbridgeable (183). I think that is problematic because proselytes were, even despite disputes on the matter among the later rabbis, Gentiles who had become Jews. Philo defends and eulogizes the place of proselytes in the commonwealth of Israel at length. The fact that Herod the Great was given the derisive epithet “the half-Jew” shows that participation in Jewishness could be flexible even as it was contested.

Several of the church fathers from Aristides to Clement of Alexandria referred to Christians as a “third race” or as a “new race.” Both N.T. Wright and E.P. Sanders agree that this is a legitimate reading of Paul. Paul himself certainly did not use such a term, but it does reflect something of the social reality that Christ-believers were in a liminal ethnographic space for which the language of a tertium quid, a third entity arose quite naturally. For Paul, God’s action in Jesus had altered how he read Scripture, his loyalties and loves, his sense of kinship and kingship, so that even ethnic identity was redrawn in light of the messianic event. As Love Sechrest puts it: “Paul and his Jewish-born and Gentile-born Christian family had become members of a new racial entity.”

Novenson contends that we would never think about the church in the categories of “true Israel,” “spiritual Israel,” or “Third Race,” if it were not for Justin, Aristides, and Tertullian (182). To which I respond that these church fathers were perhaps the earliest attempts to explain how the Christ-believing Gentiles were ingrafted into Israel’s sacred history and recipient of Israel’s embryonic eschatological restoration, participating in the Jewish ethos and ethics, but without having a biological connection to Jewish genealogy. How do you say “Christ-believing Jewish gentiles” in a way that makes sense to readers of the New Testament in the second century? Descriptors like “true Israel,” “spiritual Israel,” or “third race” are attempts to do so.

I should also add that Justin was not a reader of Paul, his writings are filled with quotes from the LXX and Synoptic Gospels, perhaps half-a dozen possible allusions to John’s Gospel, but Pauline echoes and allusions are either scant or entirely absent in Justin’s corpus, so Justin is not reliant on Paul here, but is perhaps riffing on the architecture of the entire new covenant for his inferences about the church as a “true, spiritual Israelite race.” In addition, Tertullian’s reference to “third race” is on the lips of pagan haters of Christianity who cry out “Death to this third race?” which means the designation “third race,” perhaps had its origins in pagan attempts to make sense of where the church sat in an ethnographical spectrum.

extra Israel nulla sallus

According to Novenson and others, Paul is a Jew, he inhabits the atmosphere of Judaism, his messianic faith is Jewish, he compels Gentile Christ-believers to judaize by abandoning polytheism and image-devotion for Jewish monotheism. Paul immerses his converts into messianism and exhorts them to adherence to parts of the Torah. Paul even regards them as former Gentiles. And yet these Christ-believers are not Jewish, nor do they participate in any of the currency of Israel’s election. Paul’s Christ-belief is Jewish, but Gentile Christ-believers are not and never can be Jews nor part of the commonwealth of Israel. And yet, I think Paul clearly does impute the emblems of Israelite status, circumcision (Rom 2:26) and seed (Rom 9:8), so as to include Gentiles as part of God’s people and God’s children, Israel according to the promise (Rom 9:6).

Novenson reads this to the effect that “Gentiles-in-Christ are annexed to the people Israel but do not become the people Israel” (184). An interesting distinction, I’m just not sure what it is, and how it would matter in the eyes of a synagogue elder demanding that Paul leave the synagogue and not come back! Neither am I persuaded by Novenson’s suggestion that Christ-believing Gentiles become children of Abraham, but not of Jacob (184-85). In Jewish discourse reflected in the Gospels and Paul’s letters, Abrahamic sonship is the premise for Israelite membership (see Lk 3:8; Jn 8:38-40; Rom 9:6-7). The Lucan Paul even differentiates God-fearing Gentiles from “fellow children of Abraham” (i.e., Jews) in Acts 13:26.

What is more, the attempt to insulate Paul’s Gentile-majority assemblies from Jewish identity and Israelite heritage runs aground of Paul’s call for unity between Jews and Gentiles among the network of Christ-believing assemblies, the solidarity he shares between himself as a Jewish Christ-believer with his Gentile converts, and the unity he attempts to foster between his Gentile-majority assemblies and the Judean assemblies.

I fear what Novenson – and PwJ in general – cannot explain is what precisely do Jewish Christ-believers and Gentile Christ-believers have in common as co-religionists in distinction to other Jews and Gentiles? What is it that matters most for their identity and sense of purpose. Is it their shared “in Christ-ness” with each other or their ethnic commonalities with other Jews and Gentiles? Is Paul a Christ-believing Jew or a Jew who happens to be a Christ-believer? (Think about how I framed that!) Are Paul’s assemblies filled with Christ-believing Gentiles or Gentiles who happen to be Christ-believers? Did Paul consider his messianic faith and pneumatic experience as more determinative for his sense of self and the basis for his closest bonds of kinship than his ancestry and biology? I think so, and this leads to a trajectory, that would become the “third race” of the second century and reach its apogee in the ethno-religious discourse of Epistle to Diognetus 5.

In my estimation, the Pauline assemblies regarded themselves as indelibly connected to the story of Israel, a sacred history into which they had been grafted, and recipients of salvific blessings they had received not instead of of the Jews but ahead of the Jews. Just as the Qumranites saw themselves as the priestly precursors to a restored Israel, and just as Enochic Jews regarded themselves as the sheep of a chastened Israel, so too did Paul see the Christ-believing assemblies, whether Jews or Gentiles, as the messianic vanguard for a reconstituted Israel.

To riff off Tom Wright, for Paul, Jesus is the Messiah, Israel’s Messiah, so to be “in the Messiah,” is to be in Israel. And being in the Messiah, for Paul, is a matter of grace not race. Paul believed that his apostolic work was not simply to bring Gentiles to the Messiah, but to bring Gentiles and Jews together in the Messiah. Paul was grieved by the unbelief of his fellow Jews and furious at the prospect that Christ-believing Gentiles would be treated as equal but separate from Christ-believing Jews. For him, the ultimate symbol of his apostolic labours was Jews and Gentiles together praising God for his mercy. Precisely what Paul spells out in the climax of Romans:

Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God. For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcision on behalf of God’s truth, so that the promises made to the patriarchs might be confirmed and, moreover, that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy (Rom 15:7-9).

Perhaps the place where this thesis is teased out the most is Ephesians 2–3. Even if we regard Ephesians as post-Pauline, its feel and vibe is still very Pauline, dealing with pre-70 issues, perhaps even “quintessential Paulinism” as F.F. Bruce called it. In this letter, Gentiles are former pagans, their inclusion in Christ means inclusion in the commonwealth of Israel (Eph 2:11-12). The two-groups have been made one for even the dividing wall (similar to the one that kept Gentiles out of the temple) has been broken down. Now, the church comprised of Jews and Gentiles is the eschatological temple indwelt by the Holy Spirit. In this dispensation of grace, “Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus” (Eph 3:6). If that is not Paul’s own words, it is probably the first interpretation of Paul’s apostolic labors.

Christ-believers are united with Israel because extra Israel nulla salus, “outside of Israel there is no salvation.” God’s promises for redemption come to Israel, for Israel, and through Israel to the world, and Gentiles can enjoy them only with Israel. The church is not a new Israel, created ex nihilo, but a renewed Israel, living out the promises of the new covenant, comprised of a multiethnic people just as God promised Abraham, among whom Jews are firstborn children.

Conclusion

In Novenson’s book – which is informative, challenging, and provocative - he quotes Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Ballad of East and West, and I could parody this poem to summarize PwJ when it comes to siloing the “identity” of Jewish Christ-believers and Gentile Christ-believers away from each other.

Jews are Jews and Gentiles are Gentiles, and never the twain shall meet.

To which I imagine Paul would respond:

Until the dividing wall brought down by Christ makes all Israel complete!