The Meaning and Telos of Israel’s Election: An Interfaith Response to N.T. Wright’s Reading of Paul

Abstract

N. T. Wright offers a systematic and highly influential metanarrative to account for Paul’s theology of Israel. However, Wright overlooks or underemphasizes important dimensions of Paul’s thinking, leading to problematic distortions. Thus, Wright claims that God rejected the historic people of Israel due to their failure to missionize the gentile nations, an idea not easily found in the Hebrew Bible texts Paul utilizes or in Paul’s own statements concerning his fellow Jews. Wright relies heavily on the diatribe of Rom 2 to build a Pauline theology of Israel, but he downplays the many positive things Paul says elsewhere about Israel’s status. Particularly troubling is Wright’s use of Rom 5 to argue that Paul characterizes Torah as divinely intended to draw sin onto Israel, with the expected consequence that human sin would reach its zenith within Israel, a view that moves Wright toward the very supersessionism against which Paul cautioned his gentile followers. These exegetical decisions, which form a tightly structured messiah-oriented understanding of Israel’s election, ignore what the Hebrew Bible and Paul affirm: while God accomplishes certain larger aims through Israel, God’s election of Israel is ultimately grounded in God’s inalienable love for Israel and Israel’s ancestors.

Israel’s priority in Old Testament missiology

“… 2. The present article takes its place alongside several other recent critiques of prominent evangelical (biblical) theologians of mission, for example Soulen (2022: 71–95), van Driel (2023: 5–7), and Kaminsky and Reasoner (2019). Because its onus is mainly exegetical, this article does not defend or define the project of “post-supersessionist” Christian theology.…”