Romans 9:33

Paul combines in this quotation Isa. 27:16 and Isaiah 8:14, and that in such a way that he borrows the first and last words of his quotation from the former of these passages, and those of the middle from the latter. It is hard to conceive how a great number of commentators can apply the saying of Isaiah, Isaiah 28:16: “Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone”...etc., to the theocracy itself (see Meyer). The theocracy is the edifice which is raised in Zion; how should it be its foundation? According to Romans 8:14, the foundation is Jehovah; and it is on this stone that the unbelieving Israel of both kingdoms stumble, while on this rock he that believes takes refuge. In chap. 28 the figure is somewhat modified; for Jehovah is no longer the foundation; it is He who lays it. The foundation here is therefore Jehovah in His final manifestation, the Messiah. We thus understand why Paul has combined the two passages so closely; the one explains the other. It is in the sense which we have just established that the same figure is applied to Christ, Luke 2:34; Luke 20:17-18; 1 Peter 2:4 (comp. Bible annotée on the two passages of Isaiah quoted by the apostle). The terms stone, rock, express the notion of consistency. We break ourselves struggling against the Messiah, rather than break Him.

The two words πρόσκομμα and σκάνδαλον, stumbling and scandal, are not wholly synonymous. The former denotes the shock, the latter the fall resulting from it; and so the former, the moral conflict between Israel and the Messiah, and the latter, the people's unbelief. The first figure applies, therefore, to all the false judgments passed by the Jews on the conduct of Jesus

His healings on the Sabbath, His alleged contempt of the law, His blasphemies, etc.; the second, to the rejection of the Messiah, and, in His person, of Jehovah Himself.

The adj. πᾶς, every one, which the T. R. adds to the word he who believeth, is omitted by the Alexs. and the Greco-Latins, and also by the Peshito. The context also condemns it. The point to be brought out here is not that whosoever believeth is saved, but: that it is enough to believe in order to be so. The word every one (which is not in Isaiah) has been imported from Romans 10:11, where, as we shall see, it is in its place.

The Hebrew verb, which the LXX. have translated by: shall not be confounded, strictly signifies: shall not make haste (flee away), which gives the same meaning. There is no need, therefore, to hold, with several critics, a difference of reading in the Hebrew text (jabisch for jakisch).

General considerations on chap. ix.

Though we have not reached the end of the passage beginning with Romans 9:30, the essential thought being already expressed in Romans 9:30-33, we may from this point cast a glance backward at Romans 9 taken as a whole.

Three principal views as to the meaning of this chapter find expression in the numerous commentaries to which it has given rise:

1. Some think they can carry up the thought of Paul to complete logical unity, by maintaining that it boldly excludes human freedom, and makes all things proceed from one single factor, the sovereign will of God. Some of these are so sure of their view, that one of them, a Strasburg professor, wrote most lately: “As to determinism, it would be to carry water to the Rhine, to seek to prove that this point of view is that of St. Paul.”

2. Others think that the apostle expounds the two points of view side by side with one another that of absolute predestination, to which speculative reflection leads, and that of human freedom, which experience teaches without troubling himself to reconcile them logically. This opinion is perhaps the most widespread among theologians at the present hour.

3. Finally, a third class think that in Paul's view the fact of human freedom harmonizes logically with the principle of divine predestination, and think they can find in his very exposition the elements necessary to harmonize the two points of view. Let us pass under review each of these opinions.

I. In the first, we immediately distinguish three groups. In the first place: the particularistic predestinarians, who, whether in the salvation of some or in the perdition of others, see only the effect of the divine decree. Such, essentially, are St. Augustine, the Reformers, the theologians of Dort, and the churches which have preserved this type of doctrine down to our day, whether pushing the consequence the length of ascribing the fall itself and sin to the divine will (supralapsarians), like Zwingle, who goes so far as to say, in speaking of Esau: “quem divina providentia creavit ut viveret atque impie viveret” (see Th. p. 500); or whether they stop half way, and, while ascribing the fall to human freedom, make the divine decree of human election bear solely on those among lost men whom God is pleased to save (infralapsarians).

But, first, it is forgotten that the apostle does not think for a moment of speculating in a general way on the relation between human freedom and divine sovereignty, and that he is occupied solely with showing the harmony between the particular fact of the rejection of the Jews and the promises relating to their election. Then it would be impossible, if he really held this point of view, to acquit him of the charge of self-contradiction in all those sayings of his which assume 1st. Man's entire freedom in the acceptance or rejection of salvation (Romans 2:4; Romans 2:6-10, Romans 6:12-13); 2d. The possibility of one converted falling from the state of grace through want of vigilance or faithfulness (Romans 8:13; 1 Corinthians 10:1-12; Galatians 5:4; Colossians 1:23, a passage where he says expressly: “ if at least ye persevere”). Comp. also the words of Jesus Himself, John 5:40: “But ye will not come to me;” Matthew 23:37: “How often would I...but ye would not.” Finally, throughout the whole chapter which immediately follows, as well as in the four verses we have just expounded, Romans 9:30-33, the decree of the rejection of the Jews is explained, not by the impenetrable mystery of the divine will, but by the haughty tenacity with which the Jews, notwithstanding all God's warnings, affected to establish their own righteousness and perpetuate their purely temporary prerogative.

In this first class we meet, in the second place, with the group of the latitudinarian determinists, who seek to correct the harshness of the predestinarian point of departure by the width of the point reached; the final goal, indeed, according to them, is universal salvation. The world is a theatre on which there is in reality but one actor, God, who plays the entire piece, but by means of a series of personages who act under his impulse as simple automata. If some have bad parts to play, they have not to blame or complain of themselves for that; for their culpability is only apparent, and...the issue will be happy for them. All's well that ends well. Such is the view of Schleiermacher and his school; it is that to which Farrar has just given his adherence in his great work on St. Paul.

But how are we to reconcile this doctrine of universal salvation, I do not say only with declarations such as those of Jesus, Matthew 12:23 (“neither in this world nor in the world to come”), Matthew 26:24 (“it were better for that man that he had never been born”), Mark 9:43-48, but also with the sayings of Paul himself, 2 Thessalonians 1:9; Romans 8:13 ? These declarations, indeed, seem incompatible with the idea of a universal final salvation. Neither does this idea seem to us to arise from the sayings of the apostle here and there whence it is thought possible to deduce it, such as 1 Corinthians 15:22 (“in Christ all made alive”) and 1 Corinthians 15:28 (“God all in all”); for these passages refer only to the development of the work of salvation in believers. It is impossible to allow that a system according to which sin would be the act of God Himself, remorse an illusion arising from our limited and subjective viewpoint, and the whole conflict, so serious as it is between guilty man and God, a simple apparent embroilment with a view of procuring to us in the end the liveliest sensation of re-established harmony entered for a single moment the mind of the apostle.

We may say as much of the third form in which this determinist point of view presents itself, that of pantheistic absorption. No one will ever succeed in explaining the words of the apostle by such a formula. Paul emphasizes too forcibly the value and permanence of personality, as well as the moral responsibility of man; and it must not be forgotten that if he says: “God shall be all,” he adds: in all.

In none of these three forms, therefore, can the system which makes everything, even evil, proceed from divine causality, be ascribed to Paul.

II. Must we take refuge in the idea of an internal contradiction attaching to the apostle's mode of view, whether this contradiction be regarded as a logical inconsequence attributable to the weakness of his mind (so Reiche and Fritzsche, who go so far as to deplore that the apostle “was not at the school of Aristotle rather than that of Gamaliel”); or with Meyer, Reuss, and a host of others, the problem be regarded as insoluble in its very nature, and in consequence of the limits of the human mind; so that, as Meyer says, whenever we place ourselves at one of the two points of view, it is impossible to expound it without expressing ourselves in such a way as to deny the other, as has happened to Paul in this chapter?

We think that in the former case the most striking character of St. Paul's mind is mistaken, his logical power, which does not allow him to stop short in the study of a question till he has thoroughly completed its elucidation. This characteristic we have seen throughout the whole of our Epistle. As to Meyer's point of view, if Paul had really thought thus, he would not have failed, in view of this insoluble difficulty, to stop at least once in the course of his exposition to exclaim, after the fashion of Calvin: Mysterium horribile!

III. It is therefore certain that the apostle was not without a glimpse of the real solution of the apparent contradiction on which he was bordering throughout this whole passage. Was this solution, then, that which has been proposed by Julius Müller in his Sündenlehre, and which is found in several critics, according to which Paul in chap. 9 explains the conduct of God from a purely abstract point of view, saying what God has the right to do, speaking absolutely, but what He does not do in reality? It is difficult to believe that the apostle would have thus isolated the abstract right from its historical execution, and we have seen in Romans 9:21 et. seq. that Paul directly applies to the concrete case the view of right expounded in the instance of the potter.

Must we prefer the solution defended by Beyschlag in the wake of many other critics, according to which the question here relates solely to groups of men, and to those groups of men solely as to the providential part assigned them in the general course of God's kingdom; but not to the lot of individuals, and much less still as to the matter of their final salvation? That it is so in regard to Esau and Jacob, does not seem to us open to doubt, since in those cases we have to do with national dispensations in the course of the preparatory economy. But it seems to me impossible to apply this solution to the essential point treated in the chapter, the rejection of the Jews and the calling of the Gentiles. For among those rejected Jews, Paul proves an election of redeemed ones, who are certainly so, in virtue of their individual faith; and among those Gentile nations who are called, he is very far from thinking there are none but saved individuals; so that the vessels of wrath are not the Jewish nation as such, but the individual unbelievers in the nation; and the vessels of mercy are not the Gentile peoples as such, but the individual believers among them. The point in question therefore is, the lot of individual Jews or Gentiles. When Paul says: “fitted to destruction” and “prepared unto glory,” he is evidently thinking not only of a momentary rejection or acceptance, but of the final condemnation and salvation of those individuals. What is promised as to the final conversion of Israel has nothing to do with this question.

Neither can we adopt the attempt of Weiss to apply the right of God, expounded in chap. 9, solely to the competency belonging to God of fixing the conditions to which He chooses to attach the gift of His grace. The apostle's view evidently goes further; the cases of Moses and Pharaoh, with the expressions to show grace and to harden, indicate not simple conditions on which the event may take place, but a real action on God's part to produce it.

A multitude of expositors, Origen, Chrysostom, the Arminians, several moderns, such as Tholuck, etc., have endeavored to find a formula whereby to combine the action of man's moral freedom (evidently assumed in Romans 9:30-33) with the divine predestination taught in the rest of the chapter. Without being able to say that they have entirely succeeded in showing the harmony between the two terms, we are convinced that it is only in this way that the true thought of the apostle can be explained; and placing ourselves at this viewpoint, we submit to the reader the following considerations, already partly indicated in the course of the exegesis:

1. And first of all, the problem discussed by the apostle is not the speculative question of the relation between God's sovereign decree and man's free responsibility. This question appears indeed in the background of the discussion, but it is not its theme. This is simply and solely the fact of the rejection of Israel, the elect people; a fact proved in particular by the preamble Romans 9:1-5, and the Romans 9:30-33, introduced as a conclusion from what precedes by the words: “What shall we say then? ” We should not therefore seek here a theory of St. Paul, either regarding the divine decrees or human freedom; he will not touch this great question, except in so far as it enters into the solution of the problem proposed.

2. We must beware of confounding liberty and arbitrariness on the part of God, and aptitude and merit on the part of man. To begin with this second distinction, the free acceptance of any divine favor whatever, and of salvation in general, is an aptitude to receive and possess the gift of God, but does not at all constitute a merit conferring on man the right to claim it. We have already said: How can faith be a merit, that which in its essence is precisely the renunciation of all merit? This distinction once established, the other is easily explained. Face to face with human merit, God would no longer be free, and this is really all that Paul wishes to teach in our chapter. For his one concern is to destroy the false conclusion drawn by Israel from their special election, their law, their circumcision, their ceremonial works, their monotheism, their moral superiority. These were in their eyes so many bonds by which God was pledged to them beyond recall. God had no more the right to free Himself from the union once contracted with them, on any condition whatever. The apostle repels every obligation on God's part, and from this point of view he now vindicates the fulness of divine liberty. But he does not dream of teaching thereby divine arbitrariness. He does not mean for a moment that without rhyme or reason God resolved to divorce Himself from His people, and to contract alliance with the Gentiles. It God breaks with Israel, it is because they have obstinately refused to follow Him in the way which he wished the development of His kingdom henceforth to take (see the demonstration in chap. 10). If He now welcomes the Gentiles, it is because they enter with eagerness and confidence on the way which is opened to them by His mercy. There is thus no caprice on God's part in this double dispensation. God simply uses His liberty, but in accordance with the standard arising from His love, holiness, and wisdom. No anterior election can hinder Him either from showing grace to the man who was not embraced in it at the first, but whom he finds disposed to cast himself humbly on His favor; or to reject and harden the man to whom He was united, but who claims to set himself up proudly in opposition to the progress of His work. A free initiative on God's part in all things, but without a shadow of arbitrariness such is the apostle's view. It is that of true monotheism.

3. As to the speculative question of the relation between God's eternal plan and the freedom of human determinations, it seems to me probable that Paul resolved it, so far as he was himself concerned, by means of the fact affirmed by him, of divine foreknowledge. He himself puts us on this way, Romans 8:29-30, by making foreknowledge the basis of predestination. As a general, who is in full acquaintance with the plans of campaign adopted by the opposing general, would organize his own in keeping with this certain prevision, and would find means of turning all the marches and countermarches of his adversary to the success of his designs; so God, after fixing the supreme end, employs the free human actions, which He contemplates from the depths of His eternity, as factors to which He assigns a part, and which He makes so many means in the realization of His eternal design. Undoubtedly Paul did not think here of resolving the speculative question, for that did not enter into his task as an apostle; but his treatment furnishes us by the way with the necessary elements to convince us that if he had meant to do so, it would have been in this direction he would have guided our thoughts.

What are we to conclude from all this? That the apostle in this chapter, far from vindicating, as is ordinarily thought, the rights of divine election over against human freedom, vindicates, on the contrary, the rights of God's freedom in regard to His own election relating to Israel. His decree does not bind Him, as an external law imposed on His will would. He remains sovereignly free to direct His mode of acting at every moment according to the moral conditions which he meets with in humanity, showing grace when he finds good, even to men who were not in His covenant, rejecting, when He finds good, even men who were embraced in the circle which formed the object of His election. St. Paul did not therefore think of contending in behalf of divine sovereignty against human freedom; he contended for God's freedom in opposition to the chains which men sought to lay on Him in the name of His own election. We have here a treatise not for, but against unconditional election,