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In Quest of a Coherent Portrait of Paul: A Rejoinder to Michael Bird

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2020

Joel Kaminsky  and
Mark Reasoner
Joel Kaminsky
Affiliation:
Smith College; jkaminsk@smith.edu
Mark Reasoner
Affiliation:
Marian University; mreasoner@marian.edu
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Abstract

This rejoinder to Michael Bird’s critique of our argument in Joel Kaminsky and Mark Reasoner, “The Meaning and Telos of Israel’s Election: An Interfaith Response to N. T. Wright’s Reading of Paul,” HTR 112 (2019) 421–46, acknowledges that Wright recognizes a dimension of intrinsic value in God’s election of Israel, while it shows how Wright’s metanarrative is not only unduly skewed toward an instrumental view of Israel’s election but also, in effect, totally redefines Israel. Our rebuttal first reiterates some of our original claims and also presents new arguments against an exegesis of Second Isaiah that portrays Israel as divinely called to bring light or Torah to the nations. Later Second Temple sources also did not understand Israel as failing to fulfill a divine call to missionize the gentiles. Bird’s own inconsistency on the mission orientation of Israel weakens his defense of Wright here. Wright’s exegesis of Rom 5:20–21 as teaching that God intentionally gave Torah to draw the world’s sins onto Israel and Bird’s defense of this on the basis of Isaiah 53 are anomalous and untenable in the light of other scholars’ readings of Romans and the rest of the New Testament. Finally, against Bird, Wright does indeed read non-Christ-confessing Jews out of Israel in a highly problematic way. Bird’s agreement with us against Wright that “all Israel” in Rom 11:26 refers to corporeal Israel strengthens our original critique of Wright’s redefinition of Israel in Rom 9–11.

Keywords

PaulelectionIsraelIsaiah 40–66Romans 2, 5, 9–11N. T. WrightMichael F. Birdsupersessionism
Type
Articles
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 113 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 513 - 527
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Copyright
© President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2020

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References

1 Joel Kaminsky and Mark Reasoner, “The Meaning and Telos of Israel’s Election: An Interfaith Response to N. T. Wright’s Reading of Paul,” HTR 112 (2019) 421–46.

2 Both at the beginning of Bird’s introductory comments and in the opening of the following section, “Israel’s Election: Israel-for-the-Sake-of-the-World,” he claims that we criticized Wright because he reads “Israel’s election as instrumental rather than based on divine love” (499) or for our supposedly saying that Wright’s “insistence that Israel’s election is instrumental and based upon a vocation to be a ‘light to the gentiles’ (Isa 42:6; 49:6)” (500) is an idea we think has no validity.

3 Robert Martin-Achard, A Light to the Nations: A Study of the Old Testament Conception of Israel’s Mission to the World (trans. J. Penney Smith; Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1962 [French original, 1959]) 75.

4 Charles H. H. Scobie, “Israel and the Nations: An Essay in Biblical Theology,” TynBul 43 (1992) 283–305, here at 286 and n. 11. Christopher J. H. Wright represents Bird’s position in the way he insists on Israel’s call to bring the knowledge of God to the nations, without specifying how this was to be done, except through the observance of Torah (The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2006] 330–33).

5 Michael F. Bird, “‘A Light to the Nations’ (Isaiah 42:6 and 49:6): Inter-textuality and Mission Theology in the Early Church,” RTR 65.3 (2006) 122–31, esp. 126.

6 Scot McKnight, A Light among the Gentiles: Jewish Missionary Activity in the Second Temple Period (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) 116–17.

7 Michael F. Bird, Crossing over Land and Sea: Jewish Missionary Activity in the Second Temple Period (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010) 151 (Bird’s emphasis).

8 See, e.g., J. Ross Wagner, Heralds of the Good News: Isaiah and Paul “in Concert” in the Letter to the Romans (NovTSup 101; Leiden: Brill, 2002); Florian Wilk, Die Bedeutung des Jesajabuches für Paulus (FRLANT 179; Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1998).

9 Arland Hultgren, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011) 129. The “stunning misreading” quotation is from Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) 45.

10 Wagner, Heralds of the Good News, 177–78; N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013) 811–12 (hereafter abbreviated PFG).

11 Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans (AB 33; New York: Doubleday, 1993) 315.

12 Jeffrey S. Siker, Disinheriting the Jews: Abraham in Early Christian Controversy (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991) 195.

13 John Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans (trans. Ross MacKenzie; 1960; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973) 119.

14 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns; 1933; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1980) 185–86.

15 Alain Gignac, L’épître aux Romains (Commentaire biblique. Nouveau Testament 6; Paris: Cerf, 2014) 228.

16 James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1–8 (WBC 38A; Dallas: Word, 1988) 299.

17 Rom 3:1–2; 7:12, 14; 9:4. We discuss Dunn’s scholarship at length in our original essay, and on the whole we find Dunn’s approach to Paul judicious and balanced.

18 Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007) 389.

19 On Marcion’s use of Paul, see Judith M. Lieu, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015) 234–69.

20 Wright, PFG, 367–68.

21 Ibid., 1244–45.

22 Ibid., 1245.

23 Douglas Harink, Paul among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology beyond Christendom and Modernity (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2003) 159, citing N. T. Wright, “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire,” in Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Imperium, Interpretation. Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl (ed. Richard Horsley; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000) 160–83, here at 182.

24 Wright, PFG, 838 (Wright’s italics). Similarly, see PFG, 814, where Wright states: “The failure of God’s people as a whole has not thwarted the divine plan to save the world through Abraham’s family, to lighten the nations through Israel” (Wright’s emphasis).

25 Ibid., 922 (quotation) and 923 (fulfillment of prophets, citing Jer 31:33; 32:39–40; Ezek 11:19; 36:26–28).

26 Ibid., 842 (Wright’s italics).

27 See our original essay (430 n. 25) for supporting quotations and bibliography.

28 Harink, Paul among the Postliberals, 168 (emphasis his).

29 In this respect, Wright’s use of the New Perspective on Paul takes a turn never envisioned by W. D. Davies or his student E. P. Sanders.

30 The biblical exegeses and theological constructs that enabled Christians to countenance the Shoah are traced in: Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Wayne A. Meeks, “A Nazi New Testament Professor Reads His Bible: The Strange Case of Gerhard Kittel,” in The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel (ed. Hindy Najman and Judith H. Newman; Leiden: Brill, 2004) 513–44; Lenore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft vor der Judenfrage. Gerhard Kittels theologische Arbeit im Wandel deutscher Geschichte (Theologische Existenz heute 208; Munich: Christian Kaiser, 1980). The Church of England seems alert to the high stakes of any theology regarding Israel (Faith and Order Commission, God’s Unfailing Word: Theological and Practical Perspectives on Christian-Jewish Relations [London: Church House Publishing, 2019] 13–15).

31 See Nils Dahl, “The Crucified Messiah and the Endangered Promises,” in Dahl, Jesus the Christ: The Historical Origins of the Christological Doctrine (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) 65–81, here at 77.

32 Ibid., 78.

33 The Vatican II sources are Nostra Aetate §4 (663–67); Ad Gentes §8 (594–95); and Lumen Gentium §§1, 9, 48 (14–15, 24–26, 78–80). Page numbers in parentheses follow The Documents of Vatican II (ed. Walter M. Abbott, SJ; New York: America Press, 1966). The catechism source is Catechism of the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 1994) §840 (242).

34 Bruce D. Marshall, “Christ and Israel: An Unsolved Problem in Catholic Theology,” in The Call of Israel: Essays on the Election of Israel in Honor of Jon D. Levenson (ed. Gary A. Anderson and Joel S. Kaminsky; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013) 335–47.

35 Ephraim Mirvis, afterword to God’s Unfailing Word, 101–5.

36 For other New Perspective scholars’ critiques of Wright, see Kaminsky and Reasoner, “Meaning and Telos,” 440–42.