The Chosen People: Election, Paul and Second Temple Judaism by A. Chadwick Thornhill

Author:A. Chadwick Thornhill [Thornhill, A. Chadwick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2015-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

Summary

To summarize briefly, in Romans 8:28–11:36, Paul has not argued that God has predetermined certain individuals to eternal life and others to eternal death. Rather God foreknew that he would form a people and determined the goal of their development, which is conformity to Christ. Furthermore, God has not defined inclusion among the elect people of God in terms of ancestry or keeping the law, but has defined the “boundary marker” of God’s people as faith in Jesus the Messiah. Those who obey the gospel are incorporated into the one people of God. The majority of Jews in Paul’s day, however, had rejected Jesus as their Messiah and thus, for Paul, had rejected the covenant and its subsequent blessings. Their unbelief, their rejection of the righteousness of God found through Jesus Christ, meant that they were cut off from the people of God, though if they should cease in their rejection, they would once more receive the blessings found in life in the covenant. Paul thus agrees with his contemporaries that election is primarily corporate (not nationalistic) and includes those who are faithful to the covenant. He has, however, argued that faithfulness to the covenant does not mean, for the Jew, faithfulness to the law apart from Christ. Rather, as it is for the Gentile, Paul’s Jewish brothers and sisters would share in “election,” in identification in God’s people, through obeying the good news and responding in faith(fulness) to God through the faithfulness of Christ. Paul’s redefinition thus does not result in the individualization of election, but rather the conviction that the renewal of the covenant brought a redefinition of the “boundary marker” based on God’s work in the Messiah and the full inclusion of Gentiles.

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