Well it only took a couple of weeks, but I finally got
around to finishing the last part to this. So rather than looking at many scriptures, I
want to focus on the most common rebuttal (from Christians) to my freewill case
and that comes at the expense of Romans 9. This chapter is usually pivotal in the
Calvinistic argument. However, I believe
if we can see that it cannot be read deterministically it will show that we
will also need to give fresh interpretations to other “seemingly” deterministic
verses. This is especially true given
that each Biblical book carries its own genre, themes and outworking of its issues.
With that said when the average
person arrives at deterministic resolutions for this chapter I am not entirely
surprised because the imagery the text creates can feel like an outworking of
the deterministic language Western philosophy has interjected into our social
thought. We will naturally then give it
a straightforward modern reading, but there is a good possibility Paul was not
thinking in such philosophical terms (in fact I’m convinced of it). I will go further and say most first-century
Jews were probably not entertaining the Stoic’s philosophical ideas
(deterministic or otherwise) except to challenge it. Nevertheless, here is the
bulk of this contentious chapter to see what I mean:
Romans 9
Rom. 9:9, For
this is what the promise said, “About this time I will return and Sarah shall
have a son.” 10 Nor is that all; something similar happened to Rebecca when she
had conceived children by one husband, our ancestor Isaac. 11 Even before they
had been born or had done anything good or bad (so that God’s purpose of
election might continue, 12 not by works but by his call) she was told, “The
elder shall serve the younger.” 13 As it is written.“I have loved Jacob, but I
have hated Esau.” 14 What then are we to say? Is there injustice on God’s part?
By no means! 15 For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,
and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”16 So then it does not
depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. 17
For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I raised you up, to
demonstrate My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed throughout
the whole earth.” 18 So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens
whom He desires.
19. You will say
to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” 20. On
the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded
will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it? 21. Or
does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one
vessel for honorable use and another for common use? 22. What if God, although
willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much
patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? 23. And He did so to make
known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared
beforehand for glory, 24. even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only,
but also from among Gentiles (NRSV).
Well, this would seem to complicate the persuasion of my
last post, except that Romans 8:29 shows Paul saying salvation is for
everyone. So did Paul contradict
himself? The simple answer is no, but
here’s why.
Divine-determinism
might be the case if Romans 9 was Paul directly responding to a question about
individual salvation (specifically how God chooses who he is going to save or
not save), but he is not. He is actually
answering the question did God make a blunder by “choosing” Israel as his
people (Rom. 9:6)? Paul is helping the
Jewish sect of his Roman audience come to a better understanding of their identity
since he just lamented over the Jewish rejection of the Messiah (9:1-3) and had
already made the points that Israel had failed her task, yet God’s promised
faithfulness was not reliant on Jewish nationality or obedience to the Torah
(Rom. 2-3). Salvation was inclusive for
all nations on the basis of faith (Rom. 3-4), so where does that leave the Jews
to whom adoption, covenants, giving of the law and promises had belonged (Rom.
9:1-5)? Suddenly we have moved from
questions of determinism to more difficult and dangerous questions which have been
used to justify the spread anti-Semitism.
However,
contrary to misinterpretations Paul does in fact affirm God’s choosing the Jews
and that Jesus is both Israel’s Messiah and the pinnacle of God’s promises (Note
that the veracity of the Messiah depends on the Jews having been chosen in the
first place). To add to this picture, Tom Wright says:
The whole letter
(Romans) is about the way God is fulfilling his ancient promises in and through
Jesus, and what this will mean in practice… The Messiah is from the Jewish people
‘according to the flesh’ in his flesh-and-blood identity. But he is also the
Lord of all: the incarnate God who claims the allegiance of people of every
race and nation. That is the point of tension, the fault line which Paul’s
argument will now straddle. The Jews really are the people of the Messiah, but
they are that ‘according to the flesh’. The Messiah really does belong to them,
but only in the ‘fleshly’ sense; and he also belongs to the whole world as its
rightful Lord.[1]
It takes Paul every
bit of chapters 9, 10 and 11 to draw this out, thus chapter 9 is only the
beginning of that answer (also meaning that I will not be answering it in full).
I will attempt to offer a sound and succinct
explanation of chapter 9 though.
Setting Interpretive
Scenes
We must go into it knowing a couple of things: first, no
matter what nation God chose for the task of defeating evil (Rom. 10:4) he could
only select a group of people who were (themselves) part of the problem (Rom.
3:23). So “moral-champion” was not a
criterion for God’s selective process (in fact a manipulative backstabbing guy
like Jacob proves this, Gen. 27).
Second, when Paul says God loved
Jacob but hated Esau that was hyperbolic language meaning to prefer one over
the other. In this case it was to prefer
to continue down One Jewish bloodline over the other (as they were both Isaac’s
children). Perhaps Jacob had a tenacity that Esau did not, but whatever the
reason it was because God had everybody’s interest at heart in how to continue
forward. Moreover, this forward
progression is for the eventuality of the Messiah who will, as Paul suggests,
carry the faithfulness of an entire nation all by himself.
Now, let’s
talk about potters and their clay. Most
people take the potter/clay reference to mean that God is the potter and we are
lifeless lumps of clay just here to be molded into whatever God decides. Yet, all it takes is watching a potter
working with clay to see that the potter spends just as much time responding to
what the clay is doing as the clay does to what the potter is doing. Paul’s point is similar here. He is referencing the Hebrew Scriptures that
critiqued Israel’s behavior (Isa. 29:16; 45:9).
To quote Wright again, these prophets “tell of a stage in Israel’s
history when God was struggling with a rebellious Israel, like a potter working
with clay that simply wouldn’t go into the right shape. The image of potter and clay was not designed
to speak in general terms about human beings as lifeless lumps of clay… it was
designed speak very specifically about God’s purpose in choosing and calling
Israel and what would happen if Israel, like a lump of clay, failed to respond
to the gentle moulding of his hands.”[2]
This
meaning that God was going to have to move forward in some way, but the
question was would it be with his original plan or would it mean throwing out
the misshapen clay? As Jeremiah suggests,
and Paul reiterates, God can and will reshape the clay (Jeremiah 18:1-6), but
it will take wilderness/exile to do it.
More to Paul’s point, God will be faithful to his original plan even
when humans are not. Hence the Exodus 33
reference when Pharaoh (the anti-creational force) opposes God’s choosing
Israel for the vocational task of moving creation forward even in the face of
opposition (and even when the rebellion came from Israel herself making golden calves)
God will still move forward. This is also the point behind Paul’s contentious
“what if” questions (Rom. 9:22-24). They
are hypothetical, but aim to make the point that it is God’s right and his
choice to choose who he wants to choose. He drastically shows it by calling the
Gentiles to share as full and equal members in this. Now both Jew and Gentile are to be vessels of
mercy in the sense that we are agents of mercy rather than mere receivers of
it.[3]
Now Pull it
Together
Now that we
are completely off track of determinism (and for good reason) we can see that
Paul needs to be allowed to speak for Paul and Romans 9 stands at a far
distance from our contemporary debates.
By the end, the theological doctrine gleaned is not that God has
orchestrated a predetermined creation, but rather that God is always faithful
to his promises to the Jews, the Gentiles and to all of creation. Any failure in God’s thwarted work thus only
belongs to unfaithful agents responsible in helping to carry it forward (i.e.
us). Yet, God thankfully does not give up, but makes a way to carry it all forward. Notice
the correlation between an exiled Israel and our Messiah exiled to the cross. Now we too can enter into the exile of the
cross (Matt. 16:24) in faithful response to our Potter who responds gently and
faithfully to us.
[1] N.T. Wright. Paul
for Everyone: Romans Part 2 (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press 2004), 5.
[2] Ibid, 13.
[3] Ibid, 16.
