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N. T. Wright and Paul’s Supersessionism: A Response to Kaminsky and Reasoner

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2020

Michael F. Bird
Michael F. Bird*
Affiliation:
Ridley College; [email protected]
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Abstract

Joel Kaminsky and Mark Reasoner offered a concerted critique of N. T. Wright’s account of Israel’s election as well as Wright’s description of the apostle Paul’s messianic atonement theology. They allege that Wright treats Israel’s election as instrumental rather than intrinsic and his exegesis of Rom 5:20‒21 results in a rehearsal of anti-Jewish tropes. This essay responds to them by 1) claiming that many of their criticisms are inaccurate representations of Wright’s views; 2) defending a missional perspective of Israel’s view of election; 3) asserting that Wright’s reading of Rom 5:20 about the Torah multiplying sin within Israel is neither immoral, nor implausible, nor idiosyncratic; and 4) offering some final thoughts about Wright and Jewish-Christian relations.

Keywords

PaulPauline theologyelectionIsraelN. T. WrightJewish missionary activitysupersessionism
Type
Articles
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 113 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 498 - 512
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Copyright
© President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2020

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Footnotes

*

My thanks to the editors for correcting several of my infelicities and for making a couple of helpful suggestions. Any residual errors are my own fault.

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 Ibid., 422.

3 N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God 4; London: SPCK, 2014 [hereafter PFG]).

4 Contrast Wright, PFG, 1239–46; idem, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991) 233, 249–51; and idem, “The Letter to the Romans: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in NIB (ed. Leander E. Keck; 12 vols.; Nashville: Abingdon, 1994–2004) 10:688–91; with Michael F. Bird, Romans (Story of God Bible Commentary; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016) 390–94; Kaminsky and Reasoner, “Israel’s Election,” 438–40.

5 Kaminsky and Reasoner, “Israel’s Election,” 422, 422 n. 2, 423.

6 Wright, PFG, 810.

7 Kaminsky and Reasoner, “Israel’s Election,” 423.

8 Ibid., 425.

9 Ibid., 424, 426.

10 Ibid., 421–31.

11 Ibid., 431.

12 N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (London: Lion, 1997) 82: “The God of Israel had called Israel into being in order to save the world; that was the purpose of election in the first place.” And idem, PFG, 1199: “And, at the heart of this, he has endorsed not only Israel’s election but also the purpose of that election in bringing about worldwide salvation.”

13 Wright, PFG, 367–68, 542–43, 1206, 1254, 1416–17; idem, “Romans,” 693–94; idem, Climax of the Covenant, 253; idem, Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013) 403.

14 Wright, PFG, 368.

15 Wright, “Romans,” 693.

16 Ibid., 406; cf. idem, Climax of the Covenant, 234, 243; idem, Paul: Fresh Perspectives (London: SPCK, 2005) 127. Wright (Climax of the Covenant, 232) opines that the Protestant marginalization of Rom 9–11 “robbed the church of the best weapon it could have had for identifying and combating some of the worst evils of the Third Reich.”

17 Wright, PFG, 542.

18 Ibid., 804–6, 811, 1056–59; idem, The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God 1; London: SPCK, 1992) 264, 267–68.

19 Kaminsky and Reasoner, “Israel’s Election,” 424–25. Wright himself is quite aware of this (see New Testament and the People of God, 262–68).

20 Michael F. Bird, Jesus and the Origins of the Gentile Mission (LNTS 331; London: T&T Clark, 2007) 26–29.

21 See Craig A. Evans, “From ‘House of Prayer’ to ‘Cave of Robbers’: Jesus’ Prophetic Criticism of the Temple Establishment,” in The Quest for Context and Meaning (ed. Craig A. Evans and Shemaryahu Talmon; Leiden: Brill, 1997) 417–42, at 424–32.

22 See, e.g., 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 and Boyd, 1962); Charles H. H. Scobie, “Israel and the Nations: An Essay in Biblical Theology,” TynBul 43 (1992) 283–305; Christopher H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006) 166–67; Michael W. Goheen, A Light to the Nations: The Missional Church and the Biblical Story (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011) 23–73, esp. 66–68; Walter C. Kaiser, Mission in the Old Testament: Israel as a Light to the Nations (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2012) 51–64.

23 Kaminsky and Reasoner, “Israel’s Election,” 423–24.

24 Michael F. Bird, “‘A Light to the Nations’ (Isaiah 42:6 and 49:6): Intertextuality and Mission Theology in the Early Church,” RTR 65 (2006) 122–31.

25 T. W. Manson, Only to the House of Israel? Jesus and the Non-Jews (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964) 23–24.

26 Geza Vermes, Jesus and the World of Judaism (London: SCM, 1983) 35.

27 Philo, Spec. 1.96–97, 113; 2.163; Mos. 1.149–152; Legat. 306; cf. T. Levi 18.9.

28 Julius Wellhausen, Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1958) 152: “Es gibt keinen Gott als Jahve und Israel ist sein (Knecht d.h.) prophet.”

29 See discussion in Scot McKnight, A Light among the Gentiles: Jewish Missionary Activity in the Second Temple Period (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991); John P. Dickson, Mission-Commitment in Ancient Judaism and in the Pauline Communities: The Shape, Extent and Background of Early Christian Mission (WUNT 2.159; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); Terence L. Donaldson, Judaism and Gentiles: Jewish Patterns of Universalism (to 135 CE) (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008); Michael F. Bird, Crossing over Sea and Land: Jewish Missionary Activity in the Second Temple Period (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010); James Carleton Paget, “Hellenistic and Early Roman Period Jewish Missionary Efforts in the Diaspora,” in The Rise and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries of the Common Era (ed. Clare K. Rothschild and Jens Schröter; WUNT 301; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013) 11–49.

30 Wright, “Romans,” 445 (italics in original).

31 Ibid., 445–48, 453, 470; idem, Paul, 47; idem, PFG, 830–31, 836, 842–44, 931, 978, 1000, 1027, 1208, 1253–54; esp. idem, Pauline Perspectives, 489–509.

32 Kaminsky and Reasoner, “Israel’s Election,” 429–30.

33 Lionel J. Windsor, Reading Ephesians and Colossians after Supersessionism: Christ’s Mission through Israel to the Nations (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017).

34 Lionel J. Windsor, Paul and the Vocation of Israel (BZNW 205; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014) 34–35.

35 Ibid., 19–21.

36 Ibid., 20–21, and see also 143–44 n. 16

37 Sidney Schwarz, Judaism and Justice: The Jewish Passion to Repair the World (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2008) 5, 9.

38 Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 32.

39 Chris Sugden and Chertie Wetzel, “Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks Answers Questions on Covenants, Jesus and Peace,” Virtuosity: The Voice for Global Orthodox Anglicanism (ed. David Virtue), 30 July 2008, https://virtueonline.org/rabbi-sir-jonathan-sachs-answers-questions-covenants-jesus-and-peace.

40 Bird, Romans, 87–88.

41 See Michael Bird, An Anomalous Jew: Paul among Jews, Greeks, and Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016) 118–19; Dale B. Martin, “The Promise of Teleology, the Constraints of Epistemology, and the Universal Vision of Paul,” in St. Paul among the Philosophers (ed. John D. Caputo and Linda Martín Alcoff; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009) 91–108, at 101: “The theme of Romans, put in Latin, would not be extra ecclesiam nulla salus (no salvation outside of the church), but, and this is what so many Christians refuse to recognize when they read Romans, extra Israel nulla salus: ‘there is no salvation outside of Israel.’”

42 Paul S. Minear, Images of the Church in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960) 72.

43 Wright, PFG, 895–96; cf. idem, Climax of the Covenant, 239, 243, 247–48.

44 Kaminsky and Reasoner, “Israel’s Election,” 435–36.

45 Wright, PFG, 1192; cf. idem, Pauline Perspectives, 503–4.

46 That Jesus’s death is both divinely foreordained and humanly culpable is evident also in Acts 2:23, 31, 36; 4:27–28.

47 Kaminsky and Reasoner, “Israel’s Election,” 435.

48 Ibid., 431–33.

49 N. T. Wright, “The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith,” TynBul 29 (1978) 68.

50 Wright, PFG, 1198 (italics in original); and idem, Climax of the Covenant, 246: “If Israel is the people of the crucified Messiah, she can also be raised to new life.”

51 Wright, “Romans,” 530, 694.

52 J. Louis Martyn, Galatians (AB; New York: Doubleday, 1997) 355. Martyn adds (368–70) reasons for maintaining that charging Paul with being anti-Judaic at this point is inappropriate.

53 Douglas Harink, Paul among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology Beyond Christendom and Modernity (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2003) 151–207; idem, “Paul and Israel: An Apocalyptic Reading,” Pro Ecclesia 16 (2007) 359–80.

54 Harink, “Paul and Israel,” 372 (italics in original).

55 Kaminsky and Reasoner, “Israel’s Election,” 437.

56 Ibid., 436.

57 Quillette Magazine, “PODCAST 54: New York Times Editor Bari Weiss on Her New Book,” 21 September 2019, https://quillette.com/2019/09/21/podcast-54-new-york-times-editor-bari-weiss-on-her-new-book/.

58 John M. G. Barclay, Paul: A Very Brief History (London: SPCK, 2017) 85.

59 Kaminsky and Reasoner, “Israel’s Election,” 422.

60 Kaminsky and Reasoner (“Israel’s Election,” 422 n. 2) rightly note: “Any Christian reading of the Hebrew Scriptures is likely to involve some form of supersessionism, by which we mean that the early Christians came to believe that their reading of Israel’s scriptures superseded other earlier and contemporary readings of these sacred texts by other Jewish readers and that God’s acting through Jesus’s death and resurrection had ushered in the beginning of the eschaton, thus opening a path for gentiles to participate in God’s promises to Israel.”

61 Samford University, “N. T. Wright and Mark Kinzer: A Dialogue on the Meaning of Israel,” 20 September 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIBt64m-Py4&t=1765s.

62 For a critique of the apocalyptic reading of Galatians, see Bird, Anomalous Jew, 108–69; Wright, PFG, 807–8; idem, Paul and His Recent Interpreters: Some Contemporary Debates (London: SPCK, 2015) 135–218.

63 Ernst Käsemann, “Paul and Israel,” in New Testament Questions of Today (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969) 186. See Wright, PFG, 807–8, 1131, 1409, against such a position.

64 Harink, “Paul and Israel,” 366–79.

65 Ibid., 367–68.

66 N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 258.

67 Wright, PFG, 1411.

68 See Scot McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011).

69 John Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015) 428 and 439, 442, 444–45, 539.

70 See esp. Wright, PFG, 1408–17.