An Unjust God?: A Christian Theology of Israel in light of Romans 9–11

By Jacques Ellul and David W. Gill

First-timeTranslation in English
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The relationship between Christians and Jews has often been very tense, with misunderstandings of Paul's teachings contributing to the problem. Jacques Ellul's careful exegesis of Romans 9-11 demonstrates how God has not rejected Israel. The title is taken from the verse, "Is there some injustice in God?" The answer is a clear "no." God's election simply expanded outward beyond Israel to reach all peoples of the earth. In the end, there will be a reconciliation of Jews and Christians within God's plan of salvation.

Written in 1991, three years before Ellul died, An Unjust God? brings a new understanding to a section of Scripture known for its conventional and limited interpretations. One significant feature of the book is Ellul's personal experience of the suffering of Jews under the Nazi regime; and this has direct bearing for the way he links the sufferings of Israel with the sufferings of Jesus. Ellul is then bold enough to say that a major reason why the Jewish people have not accepted Jesus as Messiah is because the Christian Church has not done well to emulate the Jewish Savior of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jun 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781630874346

Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), a French sociologist and lay theologian, was Professor Emeritus of Law and of the History and Sociology of Institutions at the University of Bordeaux. He wrote more than forty books, including The Technological Society, The Humiliation of the Word, and Technological Bluff.

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Foreword

The standard outline of Paul’s great letter to the Romans sees chs. 1–8 as a foundational systematic theology describing God, the problem of human sinfulness, and the solution in Jesus Christ. Then chs. 9–11 constitute a kind of part two, an excursus answering the question: If all this is true, how then does it relate to what God was doing in Israel before Jesus arrived? Part three, then, chs. 12–13, builds a comprehensive account of the ethics and discipleship implications of this grand theology. The first impact of this new work from Jacques Ellul, An Unjust God?, is to elevate the importance of Romans 9–11. They are no minor excursus but a dramatic step beyond part one. Now, the therefore that opens ch. 12 is tightly linked to the message of chs. 9–11, not just to chs. 1–8.

The title of this work, first published in French in 1991, three years before Ellul’s death, comes from Romans 9:14: What shall we say, therefore? Is there some injustice in God? And the emphatic answer: Far from it! Why, we might ask, would this question even come up? Perhaps it is because it appears that God has transferred his promises and affection from Israel to the Church. Perhaps it is because God’s choices sometimes seem arbitrary (e.g., Jacob have I loved; Esau have I hated). Perhaps it is because the evil and faithlessness that take place among people are attributable to God’s action in hardening their hearts.

Jacques Ellul’s careful reading of Romans 9–11 is an astounding exercise in careful listening. Unfazed by the deeply rutted and now predictable interpretive pathways established through this material, Ellul is massively open to a fresh direction in hearing what God might actually be saying. He draws on linguistic studies and on two of his favorite biblical commentators, Wilhelm Vischer (1895–1988) and Alphonse Maillot (1920–2003), along with other classic and contemporary thinkers; but, Ellul is always his own man as he grapples with the text in fresh ways. It is hard not to think that Ellul’s intense relationships with the Jewish people during the Nazi Occupation of France affected his views. Seeing their suffering, living alongside them, and learning from them—the great rabbinic teachers as well as the ordinary people—Ellul has been a staunch, lifelong advocate for the Jewish people and for the state of Israel. Still, this is not an argument based on sentiment or sympathy, but on a careful study of the text of Scripture.

For Ellul, there is no question of Israel and the Jewish people losing their identity, importance, or salvation with the coming of Christ, despite their general failure to recognize and affirm Jesus as the Messiah. What changes is their election to carry the Gospel of redemption and freedom to the pagans, to the ends of the earth. Israel had turned in on itself; the Jews attempted to build their own righteousness by their (mis-)understanding of the law, rather than fulfilling their mission to be a blessing to all the nations. With Jesus Christ, the Church—made up of Jews and pagans—is given that election by God to proclaim and live out God’s freedom, forgiveness, and welcome to the ends of the earth. Few Christian authors have ever captured the anguish over the Jewish people expressed by Paul at the beginning of Romans 9 as Ellul does in this work. And few writers have ever seen the suffering of Israel over the centuries so profoundly linked to the cross and suffering of Jesus in the way that Ellul has.

This side of the New Testament, Ellul sees a sad betrayal by the Church of its own election to be a blessing to the whole earth! Not at all unlike what Israel experienced, the church’s self-justifying doctrinal legalism and exclusionary practices (not the least of which has been its anti-Semitism) replaced their calling to be the heralds of freedom before God. Why haven’t the Jewish people accepted Jesus as the Messiah? For Ellul, the fault lies in large part at the feet of a Christian Church that has failed to be the faithful Body of Christ in continuity with the Jewish Savior of the world, Jesus.

Ellul has powerful insights into Paul’s ongoing Jewishness, into the shifting role of Israel throughout history and its future end in God’s purposes. His views on salvation, predestination, condemnation, and election are challenging and will not always be persuasive to all readers. No matter! In the end, as after reading any biblical meditation by Ellul, we are drawn into the scriptural text anew, with expectation and excitement. Ellul often said, You can ask any question of the biblical text—except for the Serpent’s question ‘Yea, hath God said?’ Ellul also insisted that God’s questions for humanity were far more important than humanity’s questions for God. In Ellul’s An Unjust God? we are treated to a veritable intellectual/spiritual feast of inviting God to question us about Israel and the Church.

May 2012

David W. Gill, PhD

President, International Jacques Ellul Society

Mockler-Phillips Professor of Workplace Ethics

Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

Preface

Labyrinth and Ariadne’s Thread

In order to help the reader understand what follows and what might appear to be a labyrinth—or, depending on one’s mood, a series of sophisms—I will attempt to summarize the argument and show both the contradictions that Paul faces and the way in which he chooses to solve them. It is true that many of these contradictions arise from our own conceptions, our own preconceived ideas, and from the simplification that we have brought to the complex tangle of God’s work, the work that God ties to the work of man. We are too accustomed to our elementary either . . . or, whereas God’s action—when he acts, which is not always, for God is not Providence—is never as simplistic as we imagine it to be.

Here then, first of all, are our contradictions:

1. God decides everything. He is absolutely free in his decision and never has to account for any of it. How could man then be responsible, how could he be condemned, if he has merely followed, as his fate, what God has freely decided?

2. God is merciful to those who believe in Jesus Christ. At the same time, however, God is absolutely faithful and never withdraws his grace from a person on whom he has bestowed it. The people of Israel still benefit from the first promise and from the first covenant. Yes, but . . . the same people of Israel did not acknowledge Jesus as Savior. So then, either man is saved in Jesus Christ and Israel is condemned, or Israel remains the people of God and man is not saved by grace in Jesus Christ.

3. God creates people for various destinies: some to bear witness to his love, others to bear witness to his wrath. Why should the latter be punished since they were made in advance to reveal this wrath?

4. God saves some and rejects others, but what is the purpose of this salvation or rejection given that man cannot do anything about it? How can one accept that those people, while not responsible, should be damned for all eternity? What aim is God pursuing with such arbitrary decisions?

5. If Israel is still God’s people, what then is the use of the church? And, reciprocally, if the church is now God’s new people, then Israel is no longer anything. Is that not obvious?

6. If everything is by grace, if God only saves by grace, what then is the use of the Old Testament, and in particular what is the use of the Law? Conversely, if the Law still applies, if it is still necessary, if one still needs to obey the commandments, then God no longer saves by grace but by the excellence of human obedience.

7. Everything gets even more complicated if we take into account the fact that in this long history of Israel there is always a called one and a rejected one who come in pairs: Isaac and Ishmael, then Jacob and Esau, then Moses and Pharaoh, and so forth. And it is obviously not by accident that we are told these successive stories with these inseparable pairs.

Paul approaches these logical impossibilities by following two rigorous paths: First, while absolutely free, God is also absolutely faithful. He never reneges and will keep his promises regardless of what man does. Secondly, God is the Liberator: he frees man and never forces him, neither through a pre-established destiny for his life nor through any constraint in the moment. Man remains free to choose his path, but in the end, through a meandering and roundabout way, it is always God’s will that is accomplished.

Such then is the simplified course of the theology that we will describe in detail as we go along:

The chosen people remains the chosen people. This choice is a free act of God, but it has no connection (as we too often imagine) with eternal salvation. It is only the choice of a servant destined to carry the witness of God (the covenant) into the world. Given that the chosen people did not completely fulfill this mission, it is replaced, for this mission, by those who are called in Jesus Christ and who will proclaim the love of God to all people. Moreover, the Jews are part of this new witnessing people because some of them (a remnant) have believed and because the remnant includes the whole (pars pro toto). If the majority of the people of Israel made this error, it is in order that all men may know grace and election. Pagans who converted to Christ must be grateful to the Jews. And, to the extent that the church is indeed charged with the same promise for the world, it is not the replacement for the Jewish people but its heir. To the extent that this people still exists as the chosen people—the first one—Christians and the church are a shoot growing out from this root and ancient trunk. Thus the people of Israel become a witness to the faithfulness of God, and to the permanence of the promise. The church, in turn, becomes a witness to its universality and its freedom.

Such is the outline developed by Paul to solve the contradictions mentioned above. We shall now enter into the details of his demonstration without losing the guiding thread I have outlined, which is of course a simplification.

Epistle to the Romans 9–11

The Unique People

9:1–5

¹

1. Through the Christ, I declare that I am speaking the truth, I do not lie; through the Holy Spirit, my conscience renders me this testimony.

2. I have great sorrow and in the deepest part of my being, I feel ceaseless grief.

3. I would even wish to be anathema (cursed), separated from Christ, in favor of my brothers, my relatives in the flesh.

4. They are the Israelites, theirs is the condition of sons, the glory, the covenants, the gift of the Torah, worship and the promises.

5. Theirs are the patriarchs, and it is from them that the Christ came as man. May he, who is God over all be blessed forever, amen!

This Unjust God

9:6–29

6. It is not that the Word of God has failed! But all those who come from Israel do not constitute Israel.

7. Neither are all of Abraham’s descendants members of the family. It was said to Abraham: In Isaac you will called a posterity.

8. Thus, the natural family is not God’s family, only the family of the promise is considered to be Abraham’s descendants.

9. Indeed, here is the word of the promise: At that time I will come and there will be a son for Sarah.

10. And this is not all: it was after one and the same conjugal act of Rebecca and our father Isaac,

11. (As the children had not yet been born, and had done neither good nor evil, so that God’s project might remain free,

12. a project which does not depend on human works but only on the One who calls) that it was said to Rebecca the older will be subject to the younger.

13. As the Scriptures say: I loved Jacob, but I pushed away Esau.

14. What should we then say? Is there not some injustice on the part of God? Impossible!

15. For He said to Moses: I will have pity on whom I want to have pity and I will show mercy to whom I want to show mercy.

16. So there is no question of wanting, or striving, only the mercy of God counts.

17. For Scripture said to Pharaoh: This is why I raised you up, that I might show my power through you, and that my name might be known all over the earth.

18. So then He pities whom He want and He hardens whom He wants.

19. You will object: What is he complaining about? Who can oppose his will?

20. But rather, who are you, a human being to challenge God? Can the work say to the worker: Why did you make me like this?

21. Does not the potter forming the clay have the right to use his clay to make a luxurious vase as well as a worthless vase?

22. And if God wanting to show His anger and reveal (all) that is possible for Him, endured with much patience the vases of burning, ready for destruction

23. and if wanting to make known all the resources of His glory towards the vases of glory, He prepared them ahead of time for glory, what fault would we find with that?

24. We who have been called not only among the Jews but also among pagans?

25. This is indeed what he said in Hosea: "I will call my people, those who were not my people and I will call beloved, she who was not beloved.

26. And in the very same place where they heard: You are not my people! They will be called Sons of the living God.

27. Isaiah for his part, cries about Israel: "Even if the number of the children of Israel is like the sand of the sea, only a remnant will be saved.

28. For the Lord will fully and promptly accomplish His word on the earth."

29. And as Isaiah was saying in advance: "If the Lord Sabbaoth had not left us a few descendants we would all have become like Sodom and we would have resembled Gomorrah.

How Will They Believe?

9:30–33

30. What more can we say? Simply that pagans who did not pursue righteousness have obtained the righteousness that comes from faith.

31. As for Israel, who was pursuing a righteousness that comes from the Torah, did not even attain the Torah!

32. And why? Because it thought that this righteousness did not come from faith but that it could come from works. It stumbled over the stumbling stone.

33 As Scripture says: See I lay in Zion a stumbling block, a rock on which one stumbles: but whoever trusts in him (believes in him) will not be ashamed.

10:1–21

1. Brothers, my dearest wish and my prayer to God for the Jews is that they may follow the road to salvation.

2. I testify that they have zeal for God but this zeal is without discernment.

3. Because they did not know God’s righteousness and were trying to establish their own, they did not submit to the righteousness of God.