a friday night

My Friday evening was spent thus: after work I deposited my check at the bank. I went and got my tire fixed so I can go down to Cincinnati at the end of the month. Discovered the gas leak is worse in my car. Oh well. Went by work to do some coffee tasting (Espresso Roast) and to work on my PDP. Watched a few television shows while eating dinner (Subway). Spent the rest of the evening reading N.T. Wright's "Climax of the Covenant" while sitting on the front porch with lit candles. It's 9:10 and I'm going to bed in a moment. But first: 

One of my biggest interests in theology is the history of theology (i.e. how we came about, historically, to believe the way we do about various things within theology). In reading Wright's exegesis of Romans 9-11, especially of verses 25-27, I learned a little bit and it made me happy. One of the most popular interpretations of the passage is that Paul is speaking of a last-minute wide-scale salvation of the Jews, probably at or around Jesus' "2nd Coming." Their salvation is based upon their ethnic heritage alone; in this way, God is faithful to his covenant with Abraham. Never-mind that Paul has said throughout Romans in particular, and elsewhere as well--such as 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, and Philippians--that covenant membership and, consequently, salvation come about only by grace through faith. There are all sorts of scholarly explanations for how this passage is even present in the Romans discourse, all acknowledging--with the exception of most lay-Christians--that there is a brutal contradiction with the rest of Paul's literature. Suffice it to say, I don't (as with most New Testament scholars) agree with this conclusion, and I believe that there is a manner of reading the text that does justice both to the text itself and to the coherence of Paul's thought (i.e. the text is about the salvation of 'all Israel' in referent to both Jews and Gentiles as a whole). The interesting thing to me is where the idea that this speaks of a last-minute widespread ingathering of Jews comes from. Apparently this perspective became widespread following the Holocaust, when Christians were faced with the horrors the Jews underwent, the evil which they suffered under the Nazi regime, and then to go on 'missions' to the Jews was to be viewed as antisemitic or at least anti-Judaism. Face-to-face with the gas chambers at Auschwitz and the bones littering ditches all over France and Germany, the 'two-covenant' theology became very popular: Jews are saved by virtue of their ethnic heritage; faith in Jesus is about God's way of saving gentiles alone. I'll be honest: this is a very attractive portrait, and it gives some semblance of comfort when we contemplate all the innocent Jews slain in the concentration camps. Nevertheless, this two-covenant theology is, I am convinced, wrong. It's just interesting, I think, to see how theological beliefs are born and how they spread. There's a little lesson for you.