Torah, the Guardian of Israel

The nature and extent of Israel’s ongoing relationship with God have been subjects of intense debate in the Christian community since the first century of the common era. From the earliest apostolic declarations to the most recent denominational statements, the Jewish people have been relegated to varying positions in the divine economy, all the way from being “the people of God”[1] to being “a rejected and cursed people.”[2] The questions which still beg to be answered today are these: “Are the Jews still God’s chosen people, and if so, on what basis?”

For Jesus, there was no question about Israel’s continuing relationship with God as his chosen nation: “We know what we worship,” he unequivocally declared, “for salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22). In apostolic times, there still was no question as to the continuing viability of God’s covenant with the Jews. Paul, who has been erroneously styled the “great pathologist of Judaism” by Christian scholars,[3] unhesitatingly declared that the Jews “are Israelites; to whom belongs the adoption as sons and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the law and the temple service and the promises” (Romans 9:4, emphasis added); “. . . from the standpoint of God’s choice they are beloved for the sake of the fathers; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:28–29, emphasis added). Paul encouraged continuing Christian support for Israel: “. . .through your mercy they also may obtain mercy” (Romans 11:31). He also explicitly admonished the Gentiles who were coming to faith in the Jewish Messiah not to “be arrogant,” but to fear, “for if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either” (Romans 11:20, 21). Some sixty years after the birth of Jesus, his younger brother James was still writing “to the twelve tribes in the Diaspora among the nations” (James 1:1), and Paul still spoke of Messianic expectation as being “the promise our twelve tribes are hoping to see fulfilled as they earnestly serve God day and night” (Acts 26:7, emphasis added).

Centuries of Judaeophobia and Antisemitism

By the time Christianity entered its second century, however, the church had begun to ignore Paul’s explicit warnings of the consequences of boasting against Israel, to question Israel’s election, and to view itself as God’s replacement of Israel. Beginning with Justin Martyr’s polite, but firm Dialogue with Trypho (circa ad 140), escalating progressively through the pronouncements of the ante-Nicene and Nicene fathers, and reaching the apex of John Chrysostom’s unrestrained vitriol in his “sermons” of 387 C.E., the church increasingly came to see Israel as rejected and cursed of God. When Augustine solidified the doctrine equating the church with the kingdom of God, there remained no more space in the economy of salvation for the Jews. By the early Middle Ages the church had adopted the position that Israel had been utterly and irrevocably replaced by the church and that Judaism had been superseded wholly and irretrievably by Christianity, ideas that by then had been incorporated into the church’s dogma and liturgy. Jews had been dehumanized, “converted, not into Christians, but into a demonic force . . . bent on the destruction of Christendom.”^[4]

This ecclesiastical supersessionism presented a bifurcated view of Holy Scripture that claimed all of its prophetic blessings for the church and assigned all of its curses to the Jews, making it possible to for Christians to honor dead patriarchs while at the same time hating their grandchildren. In subsequent centuries, church leaders’ verbal and written diatribes that vilified the Jews and relegated them to subhuman status established the foundation upon which an unending succession of xenophobic and megalomaniacal despots, both civil and ecclesiastical, justified their escalation of verbal invective into systematic, unrelenting persecution, torture, and slaughter of millions of Jewish men, women, and children. “In the Imperial Constantinian Church, what had been pre-Christian, pagan anti-Judaism was given a ‘Christian’ stamp,” says Hans Kung.^[5] Perhaps Christian antisemitism’s coming to full flower was best summed up by Erasmus: “Is there anyone among us who does not curse this species of mankind enough? If it is Christian to hate Jews, are we then not all Christian in over abundance?”^[6]

With some variations, the medieval church’s supersessionism was maintained in the Reformation. Despite the fact that from 1500 to 1550 C.E. a phenomenal revival of interest in “Veritas Hebraica” (Hebrew truth) inexplicably developed among Reformation scholars in Italy, France, and Germany (so much so that Roman Catholic polemicists, particularly the Dominican order, characterized all of Protestantism as an exercise in Judaizing),^[7] the national churches that the Reformation produced did not reach out with love to the Jewish people. Unfortunately, as Hans Kung observes, “it was not the Reformation, but humanism (Reuchlin, Scaliger), then pietism (Zinzendorf), and particularly the tolerance of the Enlightenment (with its declarations of human rights in the United States and in the French Revolution) that prepared the way for change and, up to a point, also brought it about.”^[8]

Luther at first had a warm heart toward the Jewish people whom he expected very soon to be converted to Christianity because of his belief in the imminence of the eschaton. Later this hope deferred made Luther heart sick, a fact that manifested itself in violent verbal barrages against the Jews. A window of opportunity in Luther’s soul for the manifestation of  proper, biblical Christian love and respect for the Jewish people was slammed shut and shuttered, leaving only the darkness of  virulent antisemitism. Calvin was less strident in his evaluations of the Jewish people, maintaining the continuity of biblical faith from first to second covenants and even elevating the Hebrew Scriptures and their commandments as models for social interaction; however, the covenant theology to which his teachings gave birth became a bastion of supersessionism.

In the continuing Reformation tradition, eighteenth and nineteenth century dogmaticians, motivated more by devotion to confessional Christianity than by faithfulness to scriptural hermeneutics and exegesis, widened still further the chasm between the concepts of law and grace. These attempts to give an unquestioned foundation for the central and essential theology of justification by grace through faith have continued unabated until today and have had the residual effect of reinforcing supersessionism in many Protestant churches. The result has been that much of the church to this day still questions the ongoing validity of God’s historical covenant with the Jewish people.

Loraine Boettner summarizes supersessionism by saying, “It may seem harsh to say that ‘God is through with the Jews.’ But the fact of the matter is that He is through with them as a unified national group. . . . That mission has been taken from them and given to the Christian Church . . .”^[9] J. Marcellus Kik concurs with this evaluation, believing that “the Kingdom was to be given to believing Gentiles while the Jews were to be cast into outer darkness.”^[10] Boettner even challenges the validity of the restored State of Israel, flatly declaring that there “is no Old Testament prophecy or promise” that remains to be fulfilled “either to a future Jewish nation or to the Jewish people as such,”  and he placed the blame for Jewish problems both in Israel and in the Diaspora on the Jews themselves.^[11] R. J. Rushdoony reports an opinion that is held by much, if not most, of the historical church that the destruction of Jerusalem in ad 70 marked the “public rejection of physical Israel as the chosen people of God.” This catastrophe was the “deliverance of the true people of God, the church of Christ, the elect, out of the bondage to Israel and Jerusalem,” says he.^[12]

At the same time that confessional dogmaticians were making a contradistinction between law and grace, between Judaism and Christianity, between Israel and the church in order to support their teachings, German theologians were at work attempting to “demythologize” the scriptures. One of the features of this work was the desire to detach Christian origins from Judaism and the Old Testament. Julius Wellhausen interpreted Paul’s writings as confirming the destruction of the Torah and of Judaism.”^[13] Teaching of this sort was little more than a revival of second century Marcionism, which asserted that Jesus was the good god who destroyed Judaism, invalidated the Hebrew Scriptures, and cast their creator, Yahweh, into hades.

Using the “criterion of dissimilarity,” theologians of this and other schools asserted that those words attributed to Jesus that showed an obvious connection between his teachings and those of the Torah and of the sages of Second Temple Judaism were fabrications attributed to Jesus by later redactors for their own theological purposes. These theologians drove “the same sort of wedge between the Old and New Testaments by applying [the] ‘criterion of dissimilarity,’ albeit in a more sophisticated way than Marcion ever intimated.”^[14] The criterion of dissimilarity discredits most of the Gospel’s quotations of Jesus as fabrications simply because they can be placed in the context of Judaism. It also ignores the Judaism’s rich mnemonic tradition which cultivated and supported memorization to the degree that many, if not most rabbis could recite the entire Torah verbatim. Could not such Jews have recalled the words of Jesus accurately and have transmitted them as oral tradition to the redactors of the Gospels?

In reality, the criterion of dissimilarity “is a misleading, short cut attempt to identify the teaching of the historical Jesus. . . .The fact that a given saying, in its present context in a given Gospel, offers an account of faith which happens to be unlike what we should expect to find in an early Jewish or Christian source might very well be an indication of nothing other than our own ignorance about early Judaism and Christianity.”^[15] The unfortunate result of this “modern” exegetical device has been the further distortion of the Hebraic teachings of Jesus and the divorcing of earliest Christianity from its true, Judaic context.

Roman Catholicism continued to be a bastion of anti-Jewish teaching. Father Gaston Fessard, S.J., wrote in 1936 that the Jews were a “murderous race . . . eternally riveted at the crossroads where the destinies of mankind meet and intersect, in order to point out to passersby the direction of history.” He continued to assert that because the Jews rejected Christ, they “have been rejected from their land, and their persistent non-assimilation in the midst of other races remains the indelible proof of their providential punishment.”^[16] Gordon Zahn, after careful study of the Roman Catholic leadership in the Nazi era, concluded that “the German Catholic who looked to his religious superiors for spiritual guidance and direction regarding service in Hitler’s wars received virtually the same answers he would have received from the Nazi ruler himself.”^[17]

The Holocaust and the Jewish Question

More than eighteen centuries of such boasting against Israel and the Torah sowed the seeds and created the root that bore fruit in the Holocaust. Franklin Littell has rightly said that “to teach that a people’s mission in God’s providence is finished, that they have been relegated to the limbo of history, has murderous implications which murderers will in time spell out.”^[18] With the attendant silence of the Western world, including most of the Christian church, the Holocaust produced the systematic slaughter of six million Jewish people, taking man’s depravity to new abysmal depths. The church has subsequently sought to absolve itself of responsibility for Hitler’s depraved reign; however, it is a simple fact that centuries-long Christian supersessionism, manifest in Judaeophobia, anti-Judaism, and antisemitism, created the environment in which Hitler’s henchmen flourished. By “demythologizing” the scriptures, German theologians and philosophers of the nineteenth century set the stage for the era’s most “enlightened” secular society. The Third Reich found ready justification for its idolatrous self exaltation as the “master race” and the consequent dehumanization and extermination of the Jews in the writings of saints, of German patriarch Luther, and of then current church leaders who aligned themselves with the Nazi Party’s political and economic purposes. German theologian Gerhard Kittel, advocate of a purified Judenrein (cleansed of Jews) church and society, declared that the Jews were part of an Unheilsgeschichte (“damnation history”) rather than a Heilsgeschicte (“redemptive history”) and challenged the Third Reich’s detractors: “Let others call what we do barbarism . . . we know that it represents obedience to God.”^[19] The horrible fact is that six million, including over one million children, died in hellish concentration camps with names like Auschwitz, Dachau, and Treblinka, more often than not immolated in the Holocaust crematoria in the presence of church-going “Christians.”

While much of the Christian West did not overtly share complicity in the Holocaust, most were guilty of the sin of silence (“Anyone . . . who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins”—James 4:17). The voices of Western nations and of the churches in those nations were hardly raised in protest even in the face of mounting evidence of unmentionable atrocities against the Jewish people. England and the United States carefully managed restrictive immigration quotas even when military intelligence confirmed the fact that Jews were being slaughtered by the thousands and that Jewish lives could have been saved by allowing emigration from Germany and Eastern Europe. The Allied military command refused to bomb concentration camps because they were not considered “military targets.” The Roman Catholic Church and most Protestant churches were silent with only a few isolated Evangelicals lodging protests and encouraging intervention to “save the Jews.” This Western complacency could only be attributed to economic considerations, political expediency, and to ecclesiastical positions that still maintained the supersessionist position that the Jews had been replaced in the economy of salvation, or that they had been cursed for rejecting Christ, or that they deserved whatever fate befell them because of their obduracy and unbelief. The simple truth remains: six million died with little more than a whisper of protest from the Western Christian church.

The Unconscionable Pricks Western Conscience

After World War II, Jewish suffering was discovered to have been far worse than anyone suspected. How could human beings (much less Christians) be guilty of complicity in such conduct? Indeed, how could the church remain silent as atrocities were uncovered and suspicions of greater horrors were advanced? As these and other questions were asked, the entire church began a time of introspection, of soul searching. The horrible, shocking Jewish suffering in the Holocaust pricked the church’s nearly seared corporate conscience and demanded a reevaluation of its historical position with regard to the Jews. Though some isolated segments of the church have persisted in their boasting against Israel, the church’s traditional triumphalism and supersessionism vis-à-vis the Jews and Judaism were finally recognized by most of the church, and it was simply unavoidable that men of conscience should reevaluate their previously held positions. As Franklin Littell said, “For a professing Christian, the red thread that ties a Justin Martyr or a Chrysostom to Auschwitz and Treblinka raises issues far more serious than can be dealt with by conscious avoidance of vulgar anti-Jewish slurs in speech or discrimination in practice. If we are, as we profess, linked in ‘the communion of saints’ across the generations with those who have died in the faith, we are also linked in a solidarity of guilt with those who taught falsely and with those who drew the logical consequences of false teaching.”^[20]

In many circles, a new revisionist theology was adopted instead of traditional supersessionism. In the spirit of the secularized Western world’s new attitude of tolerance, many theologians began to teach that Judaism and Christianity are equally viable religious systems, separate, but equal paths to God. Judaism is for the Jews, and Christianity is for the Gentiles, and neither should seek to convert the other, they declared. Some scholars who advocate the revisionist position have gone so far as to say that in the light of the Holocaust the traditional view of God as a beneficent and providential being must be abandoned.^[21] Others have denied the Messiahship of Jesus, with some abandoning Christology altogether. Many have challenged what they consider anti-Judaism and antisemitism in the texts of the gospels and the apostolic writings. The views of many revisionists are encapsulated in Rosemary Radford Ruether’s dictum that antisemitism is “the left hand of Christology”^[22] and in her rhetorical question, “Is it possible to say ‘Jesus is Messiah’ without, implicitly or explicitly, saying at the same time ‘and the Jews be damned’?”^[23] In spite of the revisionist rush toward a two covenant theology and even to the negation of some concepts that are thoroughly scriptural, much of Judaism has remained unimpressed. Rabbi Jacob Neusner labels the entire revisionist dual covenant idea as a “massive evasion.”^[24]

Still as the world enters another millennium, the wide-ranging debate within the Christian church as to the relationship between God and the physical descendants of the ancient Israelites continues. On the one extreme is the supersessionist position, and the damage that this teaching has done both to Israel and to the church is undeniable. On the other extreme is the revisionist position, and the jury is still out as to its ultimate impact upon both Israel and the church. Where is the answer to the dilemma, a balanced position that is biblical in all respects, not denying the eternal commitment of God to the progeny of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, while at the same time not projecting the one immutable God as fickle at best and schizophrenic at worst? Is it possible to call Christianity to account for its sinful triumphalism vis-à-vis the Jews and Judaism without denying the Christology and soteriology that are essential to its continued existence? Is it possible to find a position of balance between extreme antinomianism on the one hand and dangerous legalism on the other, both of which keep the church from a mature approach to its mission? As is generally the case with most polarized issues, the truth will probably be found somewhere between the two extremes.

A Foundation for Election

What is and has been the basis for Israel’s election as God’s chosen people? Foundationally, it is the Abrahamic covenant established on the free-will exercise of Abraham’s faith to believe and obey God. A seventy-five-year-old Gentile, a Babylonian by birth and an Assyrian by nationality, heard God’s voice and left his own country in search of a city with foundations built by God himself (Hebrews 11:10). As a result, God promised him, “I will make you a great nation . . . and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:2,3). Twenty-five years later, that promise was further detailed, “. . . Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac: and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him” (Genesis 17:19). God’s covenant with Abraham was an unconditional, unilateral covenant guaranteed in perpetuity. Abraham had God’s Word on it!

The fact that the Abrahamic covenant was unilateral and, therefore, not contingent upon Abraham or his descendants’ actions was confirmed in the actual “cutting of the covenant.” In ancient times, men would seal an agreement between themselves by cutting an animal in half, placing the pieces opposite one another, and then walking between the pieces. This action indicated that both parties of the agreement had taken it upon themselves in absolute solemnity. By walking between the pieces of the animal, they declared that if they should break the covenant, what had been done to the animal should be done to them. Covenants of this ancient type were blood covenants to death. In the case of Yahweh’s covenant with Abraham, five different animals were sacrificed and divided (a heifer, a female goat, a ram, a turtledove, and a pigeon). When the time came to pass between the pieces, however, only God himself passed through in the form of the Shekinah, the “smoking furnace and burning lamp” that “passed between those pieces” (Genesis 15:17). God alone obligated himself upon his own immortality, making the following “covenant with Abram” . . .: “Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates. . .” (Genesis 15:18).

Abraham, then, was the first Gentile to be chosen by God for covenantal relationship with the Almighty. He left the land of idolatry and polytheism and embraced monotheism, choosing to believe God and manifesting his faith by his faithfulness to obey El Shaddai’s bidding. Through his lifestyle of faith and obedience, he established the paradigm for acceptance before God: justification by faith. “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness” (Galatians 3:6). God’s sovereign choice of Abraham was not based on Abraham’s worthiness but on God’s graciousness. Abraham was saved from Babylonian idolatry “by grace through faith.” What was later extended to corporate Israel and the strangers among them and to all the believers—Jew and Gentile—who comprised the church was established in God’s covenant with Abraham, a covenant based on faith only. Charles Hodge declared emphatically that the covenant made with Abraham “is the covenant of grace under which we now live, and upon which the Church is now founded.”^[25] Abraham, therefore, became the father “of us all” (Romans 4:16)—everyone of every subsequent generation who has followed God through faith. Even those who came to faith in God through Jesus Christ were reckoned as Abraham’s seed, for “if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29).

“The faith which saved Abraham was, both as to its nature and as its object, that which is the condition of salvation under the Gospel.”^[26] If the promise is the same to the church, including the Gentiles, as it was to Abraham, then the condition is the same: believers are now justified by faith, because Abraham was so justified. “This doctrine, that the Church now rests on the Abrahamic covenant, in other words, that the plan of salvation revealed in the Gospel was revealed to Abraham and to the other Old Testament saints, and that they were saved just as men since the advent of Christ are saved, by faith in the promised seed, is not a matter incidentally revealed. It is wrought into the very substance of the Gospel. It is involved in all the teachings of our Lord, who said that He came not to destroy, but to fulfil; and who commanded inquirers to search the Old Testament Scriptures if they would learn what He taught.”^[27]

Covenant relationship with God, then, is ever founded upon God’s sovereign choice of Abraham and his children, both genetic and spiritual, to be his chosen people. Those who hear God’s summons to faith and obedience are his elect. Every person who has been the object of God’s search for man harks back to that one man who heard God’s voice commanding him, ^l. %l, (Lech L’Chah),” and crossed over the Euphrates into the land promised to him and to his descendants forever. Just as Abraham became the first Hebrew through his act of crossing over (the derivative meaning of the word Hebrew, which comes from the word eber, meaning “to cross over’ or “from the other side”), every believer who hears God’s imploring voice and consciously decides to believe and act upon that word by crossing over from the “power of darkness” into “the kingdom” of God becomes a Hebrew as well.

Afterward, Abraham’s progeny came to dwell in the land of Egypt where in four centuries they developed from a family of seventy to a nation of perhaps two million people. It was necessary, then, for God to extend and establish the covenant which individually elected the children of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob into a constitution of corporate election for this new nation. Through Moses, God delivered them from Egypt’s oppression and brought them to Sinai where they all heard the thundering voice of Yahweh and agreed to submit themselves to his constitutional law, thereby insuring the rights of citizenship in his chosen nation for themselves and their children. This was God’s promise to Israel: “Now then, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, then you shall be my own possession among all the peoples . . .” (Exodus 19:5). While the Sinai covenant was contingent upon Israel’s obedience to the commandments categorized in the Decalogue, it rested entirely upon God’s love and faithfulness to his covenant with Abraham.

The Sinai covenant in no way abrogated the Abrahamic covenant as Galatians 3:17 clearly tells us: “. . . the Law, which came four hundred and thirty years later, does not invalidate a covenant [the Abrahamic covenant] previously ratified by God, so as to nullify the promise . . .” It was merely a more complete delineation of the details of obedience which the faith of Abraham would produce in the hearts of his descendants. Any act of compliance with God’s commandments undertaken willingly was an act of faith in God and in his covenant with his people. Even the sacrifices that were offered for sin were demonstrations of Israel’s faith in God’s provision and the efficacy of the sacrifices under their covenant with him. While many Israelites in subsequent generations observed the law by constraint and/or out of an attempt to prove their status before God and man, there were many more for whom obedience to the law as merely an act faith in the God whom they loved and in whom they had implicit trust. Those who were justified under the economy of the law were justified in the same way in which Abraham was justified—by faith, a faith that led as Abraham’s did to obedience.

Israel’s individual election, then, was contingent upon the Abrahamic covenant. Israel’s corporate election was contingent upon the Sinai covenant and the law which delineated its constitutional requirements. The law was simply another progression in the rectilinear development of God’s plan of individual and corporate salvation that had been devised and set in motion before the creation of the universe.

The Sinai covenant, however, was not merely a covenantal nomism, an agreement founded solely in methodical obedience to commandments and ordinances. The law was not a cold, mechanical device resting in fear of judgment and ritualistic bondage. God himself described his law this way: If you pay attention to these laws and are careful to follow them, then the LORD your God will keep his covenant of lovewith you, as he swore to your forefathers” (Deuteronomy 7:12). The Sinai covenant is not a covenant of law and fear or a covenant of works. It is a covenant of love, a reciprocal love between God who chose Israel not because they were the greatest people, but because they were the least, and Israel who chose God because he is unique, the only God.

The law was not, as some theologians would have it, an alternate plan, or a deviation from the true will of God, or an inferior device foisted upon Israel by angels, perhaps even evil angels. Albert Schweitzer believed that “the Law was given by Angels who desired thereby to make men subservient to themselves.”^[28] Hans Hübner says that since the purpose of the law was to “promote transgressions,” these angels must have been demons.^[29] The truth is, however, that the law was God’s law. Though it came to Moses by the disposition of angels (Galatians 3:19), and was, therefore, called the “law of Moses”(Malachi 4:4), it was, nevertheless, of divine authorship and ownership: “Then said the Lord unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law, or no” (Exodus 16:4, emphasis added). The law (and the covenant upon which it is based) is God’s law! And, all the theological posturing and exegetical gymnastics in the world can never make God’s law illegal!

What Is the Torah?

What is this law that is the fabric of Israel’s election? We should first note that “law” is a poor translation of the Hebrew word Torah. When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into the Greek of the Septuagint Version in the third century bc, the seventy scholars in Alexandria used the Greek word nomos as an approximation for Torah. Though the root of nomos is nemo, which means to parcel out as in feeding animals, nomos came to imply a civil code, a legislative system of both positive and negative precepts which reward acceptable behavior and punish unacceptable behavior, thereby maintaining order in society. This, however, is not the extent of the word Torah’s meaning. Torah is more literally the teaching of God, the instruction of a wise father to his children. Torah is the oracles or sayings of God, the possession of which was the Jewish people’s chief advantage over the rest of the world (Romans 3:1–2). The biblical definition of Torah goes from the narrow to the infinite, from the Decalogue, to the Pentateuch, to the entire Hebrew Scriptures. Rabbinical tradition even extends the term Torah to encompass the writings of the Talmud (Oral Torah) and any subsequent halachic or haggadic interpretation of sacred writings that is exegetically sound from biblical and rabbinic hermeneutics. In reality, Torah could well be the most accurate Hebrew word to express the Greek term Logos, the Word of God, even though the Hebrew word memra literally means the word. If John had been writing his gospel to Hebrews rather than to Greeks, he might well have introduced it with, “In the beginning was Torah, and Torah was with God, and Torah was God. . . . and Torah was made flesh and tabernacled among us . . .”

The etymology of the word torah is helpful in assigning proper meaning to the term. The word torah is from the root yarah which is an archery term, meaning to shoot, throw, or cast as at a target or to point out or show. This same root is seen in the word moreh, which means teacher and in its plural form is used of prophets (Isaiah 30:20). It is also seen in the word horeh, which means parent, a position which in the Hebrew understanding of roles and responsibilities intrinsically involved teaching (Deuteronomy 6:7). The clear intent of the word Torah is to convey the meaning of teaching or instruction. The law, then, is God’s teaching mechanism and not just his juridical system of rules and regulations for human-divine interaction and for interpersonal human relationships. It is intended to help God’s people zero in on the target of what pleases God. When they are grounded in the teaching or instruction of the Torah, they are less likely to “miss the mark,” as sin (the transgression of the law) is often described.

The term law has been used for centuries as a pejorative term towards Judaism and in effect as a negative term of denigration against the Hebrew Scriptures that have come to be called the “Old Testament.” Martin Luther, one of the fathers of this dogmatic device, bifurcated law and grace, setting the two in opposition to one another rather than maintaining their complementary nature in both old and new economies. This position is especially strong among many evangelical denominations today. Because of the emphasis on justification by grace through faith only in Jesus Christ, the law and its requirements are seen an inimical to the grace of the New Covenant. The law becomes a straw man in the face of overpowering grace. Law and grace are seen as antithetical to the extent that one cannot exist in the presence of the other; therefore, grace has utterly and irrevocably destroyed the law and superseded it. Gerard Sloyan rightly observes that for too long law and grace have been historicized as antithetical ages, “as if Paul were primarily interested in an epoch of Judaism succeeded by an epoch of Christianity,” when instead “he is concerned with two diametrically opposed spirits, trust in God and trust in self, reliance on his deed or reliance on our deeds.”^[30] It is not his law that concerns God; it is human frailty. The law of God is “perfect”; its only weakness is the flesh of man (Psalm 19:7; Romans 8:3).

In the rush to validate the theologically nonnegotiable doctrine of justification by faith, well-meaning theologians, pastors, and teachers have run roughshod over the verities of Holy Scripture and over the sensibilities of the Jewish people. Judaism has been characterized as a mechanical, lifeless, ritualistic, burdensome, harsh, unforgiving, unmerciful religion. The law or Torah that undergirds Judaism was viewed as restrictive, vengeful, and legalistic. What is more, its very nature was seen to promote self-righteous and judgmental spirits in the Jews and in any Gentiles who happens to fall prey to its siren song. The church has determined to assign “the law” to Israel and “faith” to the church.  Franklin Littell says, “For centuries Christians have presumed to define the old Israel, the Hebrews, the Jews, Judaism, and so forth in ways generally patronizing, contemptuous, or demeaning. The habit began at the theological level among the gentile church fathers, was reinforced at law during the millennium and a half of ‘Christendom,’ and in the modern period has led directly to genocide.”^[31]

While there are absolute dangers in legalism and particularly in the Galatianism which Paul so adamantly condemned, neither the law nor the Jews who practice it are ipso facto legalists, void of grace and mercy. Christians who are concerned with the legalism of the Jews would do well to consider their own legalisms bred from cultural baggage that has been added to the Word of God in all generations and manifest in the elitism, exclusivity, and judgmentalism of many in virtually all denominations. There is as much Catholic legalism, Presbyterian legalism, Baptist legalism, and Pentecostal legalism as there is Jewish legalism. Adherence to any code of conduct, either written or tacit, as a means of establishing or maintaining status before God or man is legalism. A good example is the condemnation some Christians direct toward the Jews for their strict observance of Sabbath while at the same time their own observance of Sunday is filled with restrictive legalism and accompanying judgmentalism directed toward those who violate Sunday codes. Judaism simply does not have a monopoly on legalism.

Before we Christians try to straighten out the Jews and Judaism, we should first put own house in order. As Littell says, “. . . so far as Christian thinkers are concerned, the words that hit like hammers and burn like fire (Jeremiah 23:29) must be addressed first and singly in this generation to our own condition; our task is not the condition of ‘the Jews,’ but the condition of ‘the Christians.’ “^[32] First, we can eliminate the judgmentalism and fratricidal carnage that have characterized Christianity for too long. We can stop ostracizing one another over some peripheral doctrinal matter. We can learn a valuable lesson from the Jews who recognize every Jew as a Jew regardless as to what he believes. We should accept all Christians as Christian brothers, and leave the judgment in the hands of the only One who is qualified to make it. Holy Scripture has far more condemnation against judgmentalism than it does against most of the doctrinal matters that divide us (Romans 14:4, 10–13).

In order to fulfill the only new commandment of the New Testament, we must learn to love one another as Christ loved us, which, in effect, is to love others more than as we love ourselves (John 13:34). Christ’s love was a self-sacrificing love, and ours can be no less. We must learn to be considerate of the sensibilities and convictions of other people. And, perhaps if we are to find a way to manifest this kind of consideration for fellow Christians, we could start by giving due consideration to the Jewish people by honestly and fairly evaluating their faith. This can begin with a truly biblical evaluation of Torah.

Torah and the Church

Before we can understand the Torah’s ongoing relationship with the Jewish people, we must understand its ongoing relationship with the church.  All Christian understanding of the Torah must begin with Jesus’ unequivocal statement in Matthew 5:17–19, the focal point of the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the Law, until all is accomplished. Whosoever annuls one of the least of these commandments, and so teaches others, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” It is ironic that the very thing that Jesus urged the multitude not to think, Christian theologians have been thinking ever since. With typical Greco-Roman reasoning, they have used every device of logic and mental exercise available to them to circumvent the plain truth of Jesus’ own words: “I have not come to destroy.” While few would say that Jesus destroyed the prophets, most Christians would assert that he abrogated the law.  Jesus, in fact, ties his actions toward the law with his actions toward the prophets, and his warning says, “Do not even begin to think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.”

Jesus knew that the statements which he planned to make in the antitheses that are the centerpiece of the Sermon on the Mount would be misunderstood, perhaps even interpreted as his attempt to destroy the Torah. It is for that reason alone that he prefaced his discourse with the words, “Think not. . .” In reality, the words of Jesus here as well as elsewhere—not to speak of his lifetime of actions—in no way abrogated the law. They rather strengthened and established the law by drawing out and bringing to the fore the true meanings of the commandments rather than leaving them in a strictly juridical construct. His intent was to write the Torah on men’s hearts rather than on tables of stone so that they would maintain the unchanging principles upon which the law is established rather than trivializing the law by legalistic interpretations which often circumvented its true intent. One of his chief complaints against the leaders of Israel in his day was that they “made the word of God of none effect by [their] tradition” (Mark 7:13), when they “[rejected] the commandment of God that [they] might keep [their] own tradition” (Mark 7:9).

Unless we are prepared to challenge the actual words of Jesus, there can be no doubt that the law has never been destroyed. Jesus emphatically stated the eternal nature of the law and its requirements upon men. There is not the slightest hint of abrogation or termination of the Torah. Then, he declared that status in the kingdom of God would be determined by the degree of an individual’s faithfulness to teach and practice the precepts of the law. To accuse Jesus of teaching against the Torah would be to make him “the least in the kingdom of heaven.” To assert that Jesus violated the Torah would be to make him a sinner and, therefore, no Savior, for sin is the violation of the Torah. Any face-value reading of the Gospels will confirm that Jesus lived a Torah-centric lifestyle and encouraged the same for his disciples.

If Jesus did not destroy the law, what then did he do? The answer is found in a simple statement in Hebrews 9:10–12, 15: “. . . since they relate only to food and drink and various washings, regulations for the body imposed until a time of reformation. But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things to come . . . through his own blood he entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption. . . . And for this reason he is the mediator of a new covenant . . .” (emphasis added). The simple fact is that Jesus was a reformer, not an innovator. The faith that Jesus as the Logos theophany authored and gave to the Jewish people at Sinai, he perfected as the Logos incarnate through his sinless life, his passion at Golgotha, and his resurrection. One perfect human life made possible by the condescension of the Son of God to become the Son of man fulfilled all the righteous requirements of the Torah.

Since sin is the transgression of the law (1 John 3:4), Jesus was diligent to observe all 613 mitzvot of the law, including the 248 positive commandments and the 365 negative commandments. If Jesus had violated even one of the 613 commandments, he would have been a sinner and as such he would have been disqualified for bringing redemption to man. Jesus’ complete fulfillment of the entire Torah was a precondition of his prophetic office. He was “made of woman, under the law” (Galatians 4:4), subjected to the same commandments God had given to man. “It is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness,” he told John the Baptist when he submitted himself to the immersion rite which John had borrowed from Judaism’s mikvah tradition (Matthew 3:15).  Then, when he was crucified at Calvary, Jesus offered up a life to God in a death for which there was no just cause because he was without sin (Hebrews 4:15). He was without sin only because he had been fully compliant with the Torah.

The coming of Jesus as Messiah and Savior of the world necessitated changes in the law; however, these changes represented completion or perfection, not abrogation or destruction. Because the law required priesthood to vested in the sons of Aaron, the law of the priesthood was perfected by God’s reverting to the order of Melchizedek so that Jesus of the tribe of Judah could be High Priest and Mediator between God and man (Hebrews 7:12–16). The laws of sacrifice for sin were perfected when God prepared a body of flesh for his only begotten Son (Hebrews 10:5), perfected that body through sufferings (Hebrews 2:10), and offered it without blemish as one eternally efficacious sacrifice for the sins of all mankind (Hebrews 9:26–28).

That the Messiah should change and perfect the Torah was not altogether unexpected in pre-Christian Jewish tradition, even though such expectation was certainly in the minority. As John Fisher has pointed out, in the pseudepigraphic book of 1 Enoch 49:1–3, the Messiah expands the Torah.^[33] W. D. Davies demonstrates that later Rabbinic literature mentions Messiah as bringing Torah Hadashah (a new Torah).^[34] Jakob Jocz interprets Rab Joseph in Niddah 61b as saying that “the ceremonial laws will be abrogated in the world to come,” and he says that in a few cases the rabbis expected an abrogation or alteration of some Mosaic laws.^[35]  Richard Longenecker summarizes those who entertained such expectation: “. . . while Judaism expected the law to continue in the days of the Messiah as the expression of the eternal will of God, it also realized that some abrogation and/or alteration would take place within the law as a result of Messiah’s presence.”^[36] It is not surprising, then, that in the context of their own Judaic tradition the apostles and evangelists should have believed that the time had come for perfecting or completing changes in the law since the Messiah had come. Just as he was Lord of the Sabbath (Matthew 12:8), so he was Lord of the Torah.

The result of this marvelous act of the grace of God is the perfection of the Torah, for what the law could not do because of the weakness of the flesh, Jesus accomplished once and for all time and for all men (Hebrews 9:26). Because his death was not merited by sin, it provided a means of balancing the scales of divine justice that brought judgment upon the human race through the sin of its corporate head, Adam. Christ’s death, therefore, provided a vicarious atonement for the sins of the penitent believer that was both perfect and eternal. At the same time, the righteousness of Christ which was accomplished through his perfect obedience to the law is imputed to the believer instead of his faith (2 Corinthians 5:20; Romans 4:22–25). The believer is also regenerated with new life (Titus 3:5), begotten by the Word of God (1 Peter 1:3), born from above by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (John 3:5,8). The person of the Lawgiver at Sinai indwells the believer, renewing the covenants of promise to him (Ephesians 2:12) while writing the Torah upon his heart (Hebrews 10:16). Whereas God was with man under the first covenant, he now is in man by the Holy Spirit under the second. “He abides with you, and will be in you,” Jesus promised his disciples (John 14:17). The life that the believer now lives, he lives by the faith of the Son of God (Galatians 2:20). This is the new and living way, the new covenant (Hebrews 10:20; 9:15).

Through the new covenant, the believer is empowered to live the righteous principles of the law because he walks in the Holy Spirit, not in the flesh (Romans 8:4). After he is declared positionally righteous or justified by having the righteousness of Christ imputed to him instead of his faith, the believer is then freed from condemnation (Romans 8:1). The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has freed him from the law of sin and death so that the righteousness of the Torah can be completed in him (Romans 8:3, 4). Does the believer’s faith in Christ negate or obviate the law. “May it never be!” Paul exclaims. “On the contrary,” through faith in Christ, “we establish he law,” he concludes (Romans 3:31). Through the completed work of Calvary, the law becomes a perfect law of freedom in which the believer can continue, being not a forgetful hearer, but a “doer of the work” (James 1:25). The Holy Spirit that is imparted to the believer reveals the truth to him in a profound dimension that makes him free (John 8:32). That same Holy Spirit imparts the love of God into the believer’s heart (Romans 5:5) so that he is able to love God and to love man, thereby fulfilling the two royal commandments on which the remaining 611 mitzvot, together with the words of the prophets, are contingent (Matthew 22:40). When the believer through faith shares in the life of Christ, he does not deny or destroy the law, he affirms and upholds it by allowing it to be fulfilled in him by the Holy Spirit. The first half of the Decalogue is fulfilled by an unlimited love for God. The second half is fulfilled by loving one’s fellow man as one’s self.

Brice Martin summarizes this understanding thus: “Paul gives a coherent total view of the law. . . . To those in Christ, the law remains God’s law; consequently, they look to the law for instruction (cf. 2 Corinthians 9:8, 9; 14:21, 34), and empowered by the Spirit they obey it (Romans 8:4–9). They obey the law not to get saved, or to stay saved, but because they [have] been saved.”^[37] This is the difference between righteousness and holiness. Righteousness is God’s juridical proclamation a believer is justified in his sight on the basis of Christ’s atonement for sin and the believer’s faith. Holiness is the condition of being sanctified or being set apart that immediately follows justification and then continues throughout a believer’s life as he is sanctified by the washing of water by the Word of God (Ephesians 5:26). One can never be more righteous than he is at the moment of his rebirth through confession of faith in Jesus’ atonement and resurrection. That state of righteousness, however, is followed and evidenced by the holiness of a set-apart life of obedience to God’s commandments. Jesus said, “If you love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15), and “his commandments are not grievous” (1 John 5:3).

The knowledge of a new and living way of fulfilling the Torah in the life of the believer clarifies Jesus’ reply to the rich young ruler’s question about what was required to inherit eternal life. When Jesus said, “. . . if you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments,” he knew that he would soon provide the means by which man could accomplish that end (Matthew 19:16–19). Understanding that a new motive and method for Torah observance had been introduced also elucidates Jesus’ statement in Matthew 5:20: “For I say to you, that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus himself would soon complete and seal forever the perfect righteousness that does exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees and then make provision to impute that righteousness to believers instead of their faith. With this knowledge, we can see the clear intent of Paul’s declaration in 2 Timothy 3:15–17, “. . . that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for . . . training in righteousness; that the man of God may be mature, completely equipped for every good work.” If the law had been destroyed, how could Paul tell us that it is profitable for instruction in righteousness so that a man of God may be mature, completely equipped for all good works? The “all scripture” which Paul was describing did not include the gospels or the epistles of the Apostolic Writings, for they either had not yet been written or were in the process of being written, and none of them had been canonized as Holy Scripture. The entire Tanakh, composed of Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim (law, prophets, and writings), then, is profitable for instruction in righteousness and for equipping believers for good works.

This is the thrust of the decision rendered in the yeshiva of the apostles and elders in Acts 15. When the question of imposing circumcision upon the Gentiles who were coming to faith in Jesus was deliberated “with much disputation,” it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to the assembly of the nascent church’s leaders to single out four of the Torah’s negative commandments to be imposed on the Gentiles. They would be required to abstain from idolatry, fornication, strangled meat, and blood. Did this decision, however, exempt Gentiles from negative commandments forbidding murder, prevarication, or theft or from positive commandments enjoining honor for parents, remembrance for Sabbath, or love of neighbor? The answer is seen in the second sentence of the decree: “For Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath” (Acts 15:21).  Barely twenty years after the ascension of Jesus, the church was still actively involved in the synagogues. Most of the earliest Gentile believers were most likely “God-fearers” who participated in synagogues and were taught the Torah, but who did not wish to submit to the rite of circumcision. Since the Torah (Moses) was read and expounded in the synagogues of the Holy Land and the Diaspora each Sabbath, there was ample opportunity for Gentiles to learn the Word of God there as well as from the apostles and elders. They would not, however, be required to submit to the position of the believing Pharisees that they should be circumcised and keep the entire law. They were not, however, exempted from functioning under the law of Christ, the new covenant that engraved upon their hearts the principles of the Torah (Hebrews 8:10, 11) so that they could fulfill the will of God.

Could it be that if Christians were better informed about the Torah’s 365 negative commandments (“Thou shalt not steal . . .”) they would be better equipped to recognize Satan’s devices (2 Corinthians 2:11) and better able to discern between the good and the evil (Hebrews 5:14). Could it be that if believers were more informed concerning the 248 positive mitzvot of the Torah, they would be better equipped to understand and manifest the good works which cause men to see God’s light and glorify him (Matthew 5:16)? Indeed, Jesus declared that our good works or orthopraxy—not our faith or orthodoxy—would enlighten men. Could it be that the maturity that the body of Christ lacks could be achieved by instruction in righteousness from the God-breathed Torah? Could it be that more Christians would not fall prey to sins of omission (James 4:17) if from a child they had been taught the Holy Scriptures, including the law, the prophets, and the writings of the Tenach, and thereby had been equipped unto good works (2 Timothy 3:15)?

Paul and “The End of the Law”

The discussions about Torah in the Apostolic Writings are never arguments for abrogation or destruction of God’s law. Paul’s statements that the law is aligned with sin and death (Romans 7:7–25) and that the believer has died to the law (Romans 7:1–4) only mean that the believer has been freed from the enslaving and condemning effects produced by violation of the law. They are also freed from the pervasive tendency toward self-righteousness that is manifest when men improperly apply God’s laws and seek to fulfill them in their own strength so that they may boast of their accomplishment rather than trust in God’s grace. And, there is as much—perhaps more—self-righteousness in Christianity as there is in Judaism! This is also the meaning of Paul’s declaration that believers have been freed from the “curse of the law” (Galatians 3:13). On the basis of this passage of scripture, some have asserted that the law is a curse. The context of the statement makes its intent clear: Christ has delivered believers from the curses that were pronounced by the law upon those who violated its precepts (Deuteronomy 27:15–26). He himself “became a curse” by hanging on a tree (Deuteronomy 21:23), thereby reversing the curse and making sure the blessings of the law to those who believe, even life and that eternal (Deuteronomy 30:29).

Bryce Martin states it succinctly: “. . . the law as an expression of the will of God is not ended, nor is its obligation on the Christian ended, since love is the fulfilling of the law, and the Christian is commanded to love.”^[38] Paul’s contention is that those who have been made free from sin through faith in Christ and have taken his easy yoke upon them need not undertake to prove their worth by keeping the law and becoming entangled in its more restrictive and burdensome yoke (Galatians 5:1; Acts 15:10). It is true that the believer is “dead to the law by the body of Christ” (Romans 7:4; Galatians 3:19) and is, therefore, not “under the law, but under grace” (Romans 6:14); however, the believer remains under the authority of the law of Christ (I Corinthians 9:21) and serves “in the newness of the Spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter” (Romans 7:6). If God has set aside the first Torah he has done so only to establish the second, and by that will “we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:9, 10). God’s new Torah manifest in the person of Jesus Christ, the Word incarnate, is so glorious that the old Torah simply does not compare; however, the principles upon which the old Torah was established remain eternally true in the economy of God’s salvation. The Torah was incomplete without Jesus, for it spoke of him and pointed to his coming. In Jesus the Torah finds its perfect fulfillment, its ultimate completion.

The new covenant is not new in the sense that it is an innovation. It is new in the sense of renewal or reformation. The old covenant is not old in the sense that it is flawed and of diminished worth. It is old in the sense of time. The old covenant is not bad and the new covenant good. The old covenant is good, and the new covenant is better. In Paul’s time, long after Golgotha, the Torah was still “holy,” and the mitzvah “holy and righteous and good” (Romans 7:12).  For Paul, the law was God’s good gift to man, but it paled in significance when compared with God’s greatest gift to man: Jesus, the Messiah. In the words of W. D. Davies,  “the acceptance of the Gospel was not [for Paul] . . . the rejection of the old Judaism and the discovery of a new religion . . . but the recognition of the advent of the true and final form of Judaism, in other words, the advent of the Messianic Age of Jewish expectation.”^[39] Still, the Torah is not something to be relegated to the rubbish heap of God’s failure to accomplish his designed ends. It was not as some have suggested a departure from God’s primary will for Israel. Israel did not as Lewis Sperry Chafer suggested fall from the grace of the Abrahamic covenant when it chose to accept God’s law.^[40] For Paul, the law was a major step in the linear progression of salvation history which received the means of its completion in the Calvary experience but which is still being “worked out” and will not be finally completed until death itself is destroyed and there are new heavens and a new earth in which dwells righteousness (II Peter 3:13). This is the essence of Paul’s analysis of the law and its continuing effect on the believer.

Beginning with the reformation and culminating in the past two centuries, however, some Christian theologians have taken Paul’s arguments about faith and the law to create a complete negation of Jesus’ proclamation in the Sermon on the Mount, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law.” Though it is inconceivable that the devoted pupil should completely countermand the teaching of his Master, this is just what many Protestant theologians have ascribed to Paul. At the very least, they have tried to interpret Jesus in the light of what Paul said, when, in fact, all scriptural exegesis must find the fulcrum of balanced interpretation in the words of the Word himself.

This attempt to teach the abrogation of the law through the words of Paul is especially true in the antinomian interpretation of Romans 10:4, “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” Countless teachers have used this passage to proclaim that Christ destroyed the law and replaced it once and for all with grace through faith. The phrase Christ is the end of the law is lifted out of its context and out of the scope of the entire book of Romans.

There are two keys to understanding this statement: the word end and the phrase for righteousness. Tevlo” (telos), the Greek word translated “end,” can be interpreted in three ways: (1) teleologically, (2) temporally, and (3) complementarily. The teleological and complementary interpretations of telos have been by far the most commonly accepted positions in church history. Robert Badenas gives a thorough documentation of the history of interpretation of this passage.^[41] The following are some of the examples which he cites.  Most of the early Greek fathers interpreted telos as the goal, object, or fulfillment. Even John Chrysostom, whose golden mouth was often filled with pyrite when it came to discourses about Jews and Judaism, emphatically rejected the idea that the law had been abrogated. Tertullian in his Adversus Marcionem, quoted Romans 10:4 to support the unity of the Bible and the continuity between Christ and the Old Testament. Clement saw Romans 10:4 to mean fulfillment or culmination. Origen interpreted it to mean perfection, a clearly complementary view. Athanasius emphasized that this passageconfirms the prophetic nature of the law as pointing to Christ. Jerome always interpreted it prophetically. Thomas Aquinas understood it to mean the ultimate end, the final cause, or the goal. Erasmus viewed it as perfective in the sense that Christ does not cut away what existed before so much as he fills up what was partial and brings it to perfection.  Martin Luther interpreted Romans 10:4 teleologically, saying that “everything points to Christ.” John Calvin interpreted it as meaning Christ is the purpose of the law. John Wesley explained telos as scope and aim. Each of these positions is either teleological or complementary or both.

Following the Council of Trent’s reaffirmation of the traditional teleological and complementary interpretations of Romans 10:4, Protestant dogmaticians of the seventeenth century looked for ways to set in clear contradistinction the “legalism” of Catholicism and the “grace” of Protestantism.^[42] The law and Judaism became foils and straw men for their attacks against Catholicism. Protestantism’s break with Catholicism was viewed as parallel with Christianity’s break with Judaism or more specifically with the New Testament’s abrogation of the law in favor of justification by faith. The early Anabaptists tended to see the New Testament as superseding the Old Testament and to see Romans 10:4 in terms of abrogation.^[43] This is when the shift began from the historical interpretation of Romans 10:4 in a teleological or complementary sense to a temporal/terminal sense. The interpretation of the reformers, themselves, gave way to theological positions of confessional Protestantism. Calvinist tradition developed covenant theology according to which the law of Moses, the covenant of works, was terminated to be replaced by the covenant of grace through faith in Christ.^[44] This and other traditions began strongly to emphasize supersessionism in relationship both to Israel and to the law. Christianity had utterly and irrevocably replaced Judaism as grace had replaced law. In many communions, this overly-simplistic contrast of law and grace that projects law as the antithesis of grace and the bane of faith has promoted what Deitrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace,” which is really no grace at all but the license to sin which Paul condemned in Romans 6:1, 2. This attempt to elevate the love of God (grace) above and in opposition to his justice (law) has resulted in a “sloppy agape” which is really no love at all but antipathy toward the demanding holiness of a wholly other God.

The temporal/terminal interpretation of Romans 10:4 as a reinforcement for the doctrine of justification by faith continued in a progression until the liberal school and historicism of the nineteenth century refined it to new heights (or depths, depending upon one’s perspective).^[45] Adolf von Harnack said that Romans 10:4 meant that the coming of Christ revealed “the merely temporary validity of the Law and therewith the abrogation of the Old Testament religion.”^[46] This terminal interpretation of telos began to prevail by the middle of the nineteenth century and has continued into the present. It has led to an almost Marcionic denigration of the law, and indeed in some circles of the entire Old Testament, with some denominations hardly recognizing the authority of the Old Testament at all.  Harnack championed this cause, saying, “The rejection of the Old Testament in the second century [by Marcion] was a mistake which the great church refused to commit; its retention in the sixteenth century was due to the power of a fateful heritage from which the Reformers were not yet able to withdraw; but its conservation as a canonical book in modern Protestantism is the result of paralysis of religion and of the church.”^[47] With this school of thought leading the way in theological development in the late nineteenth century, is it any wonder that much of the church today continues to be supersessionist? The question that begs to be asked, however, is this: Are these positions based sound exegesis or on polemic pyrotechnics.

A comparison of the phrase telos nomou with similar expressions in classical Greek will help clarify the meaning of Romans 10:4. Z. P. Ambrose cites several parallels, including telos gamou (“the end of marriage”), which never means divorce but always means the consummation of marriage, and andros telos (“the end of man”), which in Plato never means man’s death but the attainment of maturity. He also refers to Plutarch’s statement in Amatorius 750 E, telos gar epithumías edone, which is exactly parallel grammatically with Paul’s statement in Romans 10:4, telos gar nomou Christos.  Since Plutarch’s statement clearly means “the object of desire is pleasure,” not, “the termination of desire is pleasure,” Romans 10:4 must mean that the “object, aim, or goal of the law is Christ,” not that the “termination of the law is Christ.”^[48]

The teleological meaning of Romans 10:4 is both historically and philologically preferred. There is simply no reason on the basis of Romans 10:4 to assert that Christ terminated the law. There is great reason, however, to claim that Christ is the goal, aim, or completion of the law—indeed, the fulfillment of the law, as he himself declared. It was to Messiah that all the Torah pointed. It was Messiah who was the reality of all that was adumbrated in the Torah. It was Messiah who was the lens that brought the shadowy figures of the Torah into picture-perfect focus (Colossians 2:17). It was Messiah who was Torah fulfilled.

Is it not time that the church accepted Jesus’ clear and apparent teaching regarding the Torah? If the universal body of Messiah would do so, greater maturity would come to this many-membered body, for “the law of God is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes” (Psalm 19:7,8). When Jesus said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” he was not speaking of a new set of ten or a new 613; he was affirming the fact that those who love God make his wishes their command and delight in fulfilling them. Remembering God’s commandments and the instructions set forth in the Torah are the foundation of bringing the people of God to maturity.

Torah and Righteousness

The second key to interpreting Romans 10:4 is the phrase for righteousness. Since the incarnational manifestation of Christ was for the express purpose of establishing perfect righteousness through complete obedience to the 613 mitzvot of the law, Jesus was the fulfillment of all the righteous requirements of the law. In him the Torah was fully realized, and perfect righteousness was established once and for all. The righteousness which can be manifest from the law is this: “The man who does those things shall live by them” (Romans 10:5), and this Jesus did, without the slightest failure or shortcoming, thereby becoming the first human being to live above sin (I Peter 2:22). The majority of the Jewish people, however, continued to look at the Torah to see possibilities for man to achieve righteousness before God; therefore, they failed to recognize what God had already done that exceeded human expectations, namely the life and passion of Jesus (Romans 10:3).^[49]

For the believer who is not ignorant of God’s righteousness in Christ, there is no need to go about seeking to establish his own righteousness (Romans 10:3), for he has partaken of the perfect righteousness of Christ through faith. The Eternal Father “made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” when he “laid on him the iniquity of us all’ (Isaiah 53:6b). All the sins of all mankind of all history and the future were expiated in one sinless life and unwarranted death. Christ, therefore, is the completion of the law as a means of righteousness to everyone who believes, for with the heart man believes unto righteousness (Romans 10:10). The imperfection of man-made perfect obedience to the law impossible until God became man to accomplish the impossible. God’s Messiah was “wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). “Once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26).

The works of the law are no longer a means of attaining righteousness for the believer but are now the result or product of his having been imputed or credited with the personal  righteousness of Jesus Christ for his faith. Faith and works, then, are two complementing parts of one continuum, with the latter serving as evidence of the existence of the former (James 2:17,18). This is what Richard Longenecker observed in Jewish tradition at the time of Paul and called “reacting nomism,” the “molding [of] one’s life in all its varying relations according to the Law in response to the love and grace of God.”^[50] In the great incarnational kenosis that paralleled the kenosis of eternity past when the Logos proceeded from the Father (Philippians 2:7) and became the “first cause” of creation, Jesus fulfilled the perfect intent of the Torah within the limitations of humanity, thereby perfecting his humanity through his suffering (Hebrews 2:10). This Jesus did by perfect faith in the Father and in the Torah so that even God’s own fulfillment of the righteousness of the law was “by faith.” Now, believers do not seek to be justified before God by what they do in obedience to the law. They are justified freely by God’s grace through their faith (Romans 10:9, 10), liberated by God’s righteousness in Christ so that they may establish the law (Romans 3:31) by observing its precepts. Works are the evidence, not the means of righteousness; therefore, faith is, indeed, manifest by works (James 2:18) when one looks into “the perfect law of liberty,” is “a doer of the work,” and is blessed in his deed (James 1:25).

Torah—Israel’s Divine Guardian

Romans 10:4’s statement that Christ is the goal or fulfillment of the law is confirmed in Galatians 3:23, 24: “But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed. Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we may be justified by faith.” The word translated “schoolmaster” is paidagogos, which in the Hellenic culture of the first century designated a slave who was assigned as a guardian or protector of the children of a household. The paidagogos was charged with the responsibility for teaching the children proper etiquette and social graces and for escorting them to the teacher. The children of wealthy families remained under the supervision of the pedagogue and were not permitted so much as to step out of the house without his company until the time of puberty.^[51] This is exactly the correct translation of the Greek of Galatians 3:23, “But before faith came, under law we were guarded, being shut up to the faith about to be revealed.” The Greek word translated “guarded” (“kept” in the A.V.) is ephrourouetha and means “to keep in a state of security” as “under military guard,” not in the sense of being incarcerated but in the sense of having one’s safety ensured.^[52] The Torah was, and continues to be, a guardian to Israel, not a curse. It was for this reason that David could say with millions of Jews before and after him, “I long for your salvation, O Lord; and your Torah is my delight” (Psalm 119:174).

The law revealed sin in no uncertain terms to Israel and to all mankind, giving humanity the alternative of striving for acceptance before God by being obedient to his commandments through faith in his Word and its provisions. It stood (and stands) like a beacon on a rocky coast warning of impending danger, like a barricade at the brink of a chasm stretching out its arms to shield the unsuspecting from the yawning abyss. Like the cherubim with flaming swords at Eden’s gate, the Torah was an agent of mercy, not judgment, keeping its charge rom rushing headlong into eternal damnation. The law gave to man insight to perceive the will of God. Without this prophetic vision, men cast off restraint and earning for themselves judgment; therefore, “happy is he . . . who keeps the law” (Proverbs 29:18)

While the law was given specifically to Israel, it also applies to all men. When Yahweh thundered his commandments from Sinai, the whole world heard his voice. A rabbinic midrash says that on the very first Pentecost the Decalogue was announced in seventy languages, an event paralleled in the first new covenant Pentecost when “devout men, out of every nation under heaven [heard] the wonderful works of God” (Acts 2:5, 11). Though only Israel agreed to accept God’s commandments and became covenantally related to him in that event, nevertheless, the categories of the commandments of God (the Decalogue) were impressed upon the consciences of all human beings and their progeny. Paul declared that at least to some degree the law of God was written on the hearts of the Gentiles so that they were a law unto themselves, with their consciences and their thoughts either condemning or excusing them (Romans 2:14, 15). It was no doubt in this sense that Paul was able to write to the Gentiles at Galatia that the law was a schoolmaster to bring “us,” both Jew and Gentile, to Messiah. The laws of God are the fundamental protectors of all societies. They are the elements which cause men to rise above barbaric animalism and to mold themselves into beneficent societies. Without law there is no freedom, a truth that James encapsulated when he declared God’s law to be a “perfect law of liberty” (James 1:25). When men listen to the laws of God in their hearts, there is freedom, safety, security, and peace. When they do not, fear, depravity, violence, and war are predominant. The objective of the laws of God for all people, then, are to serve as a protector or guardian, a paidagogos, to bring them to Messiah so that they may become “Christ’s” and “Abraham’s seed” and “heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29). Christ as Torah fulfilled is the ultimate guardian, for he brings men not only to life but also to eternal life. He is the goal, the end of the law.

The full significance of Romans 10:4 is clear when we recognize its strategic placement in the center of Romans 9–11.  Some interpreters have considered these three chapters to be a parenthetical passage inserted, for no logical reason, in the middle of Paul’s theology of justification by faith. Anders Nygren called them “a long parenthesis.”^[53]  The truth is that they are the focal point for the scope of the all of Romans, the keystone of Paul’s theology,^[54] what Krister Stendahl has called “the real center of gravity in Romans.”^[55]  It may well even be the key to understanding the new covenant, as K. H. Rengstorf suggests.^[56]  Showing the continuity between Israel and the church, these three chapters reveal the mystery of God’s dealings with both to Jew and Gentile. There is not the slightest hint of any discontinuity, of any abrogation of the law, or of any supersession of Israel by the church. Both have their distinct places in the continuing economy of salvation. The issue of Romans 9–11 is one of election, not merely of individuals to eternal salvation, but of corporate communities to be God’s chosen people on earth. This election according to God’s wisdom (Romans 9:16–24) uses Israel’s unbelief to bring faith to the Gentiles so that Gentile faith may effect the return of God’s blessing to Israel. It is a statement that God’s intentions are always accomplished though he may use what appears to man as unorthodox means of accomplishing them. 

All Israel Shall Be Saved

Even official Israel’s rejection of Christ is a mystery of which Paul has a clear revelation: “For I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery, lest you be wise in your own estimation, that a partial hardness has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in; and thus all Israel will be saved: just as it is written, The deliverer will come from Zion, He will remove ungodliness from Jacob” (Romans 11:25, 26). Understanding this mystery is as important to the Gentile church today as it was in the first century. With such insight the church will not remain inflated in its own estimation and will cease to boast against the natural branches of God’s olive tree.

There are several important points in this short passage. First, it should be noted that both the hardness of Israel and its eventual salvation are dealt with in a corporate sense. John Murray says that “the future restoration of Israel is certified by nothing less than the certainty belonging to covenantal institution.”^[57] Though individual branches of the tree of Israel were broken off because of their unbelief, corporate Israel was still the olive tree, and the Gentiles were grafted into Israel, not vice versa. Corporate Israel was judged according to the actions of its leadership, the vast majority of whom rejected Jesus’ Messiahship. This is true in spite of the fact that most of the Jewish people in the first century had no knowledge of Jesus’ existence. In fact, at that time the vast majority of the world’s Jews lived in the Diaspora, where they were scattered from Western Europe to Eastern Asia. Not only did “the Jews” not crucify Jesus; most of them never even heard of him. To ascribe rejection of Jesus to all Jews who ever lived because Israel’s leadership in the first century rejected his Messiahship is a profound non sequitur. And, to say that “the Jews” have rejected Christ when in history the vast majority have never heard the true gospel or have had someone’s version of it extended to them on the point of a sword is a totally unfair indictment. As Murray says, “God has not suspended or rescinded his relation to Israel as his chosen people in terms of the covenants made with their fathers.”^[58]

Second, Israel is said to be hardened only in part. This is easy to understand when one realizes that the advantage of the Jews was their understanding of the oracles of God, that they shared in the commonwealth of Israel, and that to them belonged the covenants and the promises, the law and the service of God (Romans 9:4; Ephesians 2:12). The only thing to which corporate Israel was hardened was the understanding of the suffering Messiah. Martin Hengel made this observation of Israel’s corporate psyche in the time of Jesus: “The confession ‘the Messiah died . . .’ must have been an unprecedented novelty, indeed a scandal which . . . contradicted the prevailing popular messianic expectation.”^[59] The theology of the day emphasized those Messianic prophecies that spoke of deliverance and the establishment of the Davidic kingdom. This understanding was, no doubt, reinforced a persecuted, dominated people’s hope for physical deliverance.

Israel’s hardness and rejection of the Messiahship of Jesus, however, did not take God by surprise, for it was a part his plan and was divinely imposed: “. . . just as it is written, God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes to see not and ears to hear not, down to this very day. And David says, Let their table become a snare and a trap, and a stumbling block and a retribution to them. Let their eyes be darkened to see not, and bend their backs forever” (Romans 11:8–10). “[Jesus] was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross” (Acts 2:23). Paul understood that it was God’s design to use the sin of unbelief on the part of national Israel in order to extend salvation to the Gentiles, thereby fulfilling his plan. “For Paul, who calls himself a ‘Hebrew of the Hebrews,’ Jesus signifies that the God who created the world, who called Sarah and Abraham, who gave humankind the Law at Sinai, and who spoke through the prophets had now taken another decisive step. This time, the same God was inviting the gentiles into the Covenant, thus reconciling alienated peoples to each other.”^[60] If the God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart has also partially hardened Israel, then God himself—not just obdurate Jews—is responsible for this condition of unbelief. If God is responsible, Christians are best served by leaving the matter in his hand and trusting the ultimate outcome to his sovereignty and grace. God’s is neither capricious nor vindictive. He is full of grace and mercy and will ever extend to his people “peace like a river,” ever reaching out to them despite their sin and unbelief.

The fact that God could use the sin of one of his people to effect the salvation of another was in keeping with a long-standing Jewish conviction that though sin was a violation of God’s will, nevertheless, God used sin in order to accomplish his purposes and goals (e.g., the sin of Joseph’s brothers was a part of God’s plan to position Joseph in Egypt so that he could save Israel from famine). Christians have made the mistake dwelling on what they understand to be Israel’s sin of unbelief rather than focusing on God’s sovereignty. Paul confirms the fact that Jewish unbelief resulted from God’s allowing them to stumble so that salvation could come to the Gentiles (Romans 11:11). Arrogant Christian finger-pointing at the Jews has made the church liable to Paul’s indictment: “Who are you to judge someone else’s servant” (Romans 14:14) and has placed it under Jesus’ injunction: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged” (Matthew 7:1).

Third, the hardness of Israel was only temporary, for in God’s time, it would be lifted. It would be just as if a veil had been taken away from their eyes. Isaiah predicted it: “For the Lord has poured over you a spirit of deep sleep, he has shut your eyes, the prophets; and he has covered your heads, the seers. And the entire vision shall be to you like the words of a sealed book . . . And on that day the deaf shall hear words of a book, and out of their gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind shall see” (Isaiah 29:10,11,18). Paul confirmed it: “But their minds were hardened; for until this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil remains unlifted, because it is removed in Christ. But to this day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart; but whenever it turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away” (II Corinthians 3:14–16). It is God who will remove the veil that is upon Israel’s eyes—and upon the whole world, for that matter (Isaiah 25:7)—when Israel turns to the Lord.

The hardness and blindness of corporate Israel are neither total nor permanent. In the sovereignty of his providence, God was creating a new people of God, the church, one which had no distinction between Jew and Gentile (Romans 10:8–12; Galatians 3:27, 28). On the other hand, he was manifesting his immutability by maintaining a righteous remnant in Israel (Romans 9:27–29). God maintains fidelity to his word. His elections are not reversed or abandoned because of human infidelity. Since salvation was from the Jews, the only way in which God could effect the salvation of the Gentiles was to bring partial blindness or hardness to Israel. His doing so, however, was not a rejection of his law or of Judaism’s observance of his law. Instead, the gospel reveals God’s fulfillment of his promises to Israel that one day he would include all people in his salvific plans (Romans 9:25, 26). The corporate failure to believe in Jesus was Israel’s responsibility that was manifest through the majority of its leaders; however, that failure did not represent a change in the economy of salvation, nor is it an obstacle to the completion of God’s plan. “For what if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect? May it never be! Rather, let God be found true, though every man be found a liar . . .” (Romans 3:3, 4). The past, the present, and the future all lie within the province of God’s determinate counsel and foreknowledge (Acts 2:23).

Those in Israel who believed and received Jesus entered into a new mature sonship relationship with God which freed them from the protectorate of the paidagogos and placed them under the care of the indwelling Paraclete. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he shall give you another Helper, that he may be with you forever. . . . But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you” (John 14:15, 16, 26).  Believers were no longer under the paidagogos but were children of God by faith in Christ Jesus who had come to maturity and were free to inherit the promise of God in Messiah (Galatians 4:7). The rest of Israel chose to remain under the paidagogos when they did not have faith in Jesus as Messiah. Paul allegorizes this fact of history in the two sons of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, declaring that the church, represented by Isaac, is free in Christ, while Israel, the “now Jerusalem,” represented by Ishmael, is under bondage to the law.

The proclamation of the gospel continued to be to the Jew first and also to the Gentile (Romans 1:16), and individual Jews have continued to believe upon Jesus all through the ages; however, corporate Israel has continued not to accept Messianic claims for Jesus. Even in their unbelief, however, Israel is still the election of God, beloved for the fathers’ sakes (Romans 11:28). How can this be? If Israel is concluded in unbelief, how can it still be elected? The answer is that Israel’s election is not contingent upon human action. “The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). Israel does not remain elected of God because of its own merit, but because of God’s immutability: “For I Yahweh do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed” (Malachi 3:6). God’s covenant with Israel is unilateral, based on the Abrahamic covenant and not predicated on their faithfulness.  Israel’s disobedience has never voided God’s faithfulness, nor will it ever do so. Despite the fact that for two thousand years the nations and even the church, itself, have sought the genocide of the Jews, God’s commitment to the immutability of the promises that he made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has maintained Israel’s corporate identity. Indeed, “except the Lord of Sabaoth had left [Israel] a posterity, [they] would have become as Sodom, and would have resembled Gomorrah” (Romans 9:29).

Preserved Unto Salvation

It was necessary that some mechanism be present among the Jewish people that would maintain their faith in God’s promises through centuries of horrible and methodical persecution and torment. That mechanism was the Torah, the covenant that God had made with their forefathers at Sinai. While the church rushed headlong into apostasy, compromising the Word of God with the philosophy and traditions of the nations into which it carried the banner of Christendom, most of the Jewish people narrowed their focus with total devotion to the Torah as their sages understood and interpreted it. While the church denied its inherent Jewishness in favor of a Hellenized, Latinized gospel, corporate Israel maintained its belief in Yahweh and in Judaism, the religion which God authored at Sinai. The church failed to fulfill Paul’s mandate that it bring mercy to Israel (Romans 11:31, 32) and instead boasted against the natural branches, thinking that it had become the olive tree and the exclusive repository of the elections and gifts of God. While everything in the church’s theology has pointed to and even demanded the demise and nonexistence of Israel as a just judgment from God for its supposed crime of deicide, still Am Yisrael Chai, the people of Israel live! And, they live as a testimony to God’s faithfulness to his promises, not the church’s faithfulness to its mission to the Jew first and also to the Gentile.

If Israel were ever under the loving care of the guardian Torah, its protectorate paidagogos, it is still under that same guardian. If the law were not destroyed for the church, it was not destroyed for Israel. If the law was reformed for the church so that it ceased to be a means of salvation but remained as a guide for moral conduct that points to Christ, it also was reformed for Israel, ceasing to be a means of salvation but maintaining its role as a guardian of Israel that ever points them to Messiah. Though some have abused the Torah, its function as a guardian is still the same–to bring Israel to Messiah, that they may all be justified by faith. The Torah and its covenant with Israel remain God’s means of maintaining the corporate identity of his chosen people, of keeping them in check against infidelity, of maintaining their faith in him until the time of his salvation history is completed. The Torah is eternal and can never be destroyed, for it is the Word of God. The manifestation of its righteous principles has changed in the church to accommodate the completed work of Christ, but its principles have also been maintained toward Israel as its corporate guardian to bring it to Messiah.

Though our western mind set demands that everything theological be fitted into neat, systematic packages, God simply does not always accommodate us. While the “logical” thing for God to have done in response to Israel’s unbelief would have been to have rejected Israel,  to have insured their corporate demise through assimilation, and to have replaced them utterly with the church so that there would be no more remembrance of them, that is simply not the reality of history. In the words of Isaac Rottenberg, “Israel’s covenant history has not come to an end, nor has God’s gift of Torah been declared null and void. Hence, Judaism lives on, not as a fossil religion, but as a faith that continues to confront the world with the message of ‘Moses and the prophets.’ “^[61] Still, there is no indication that Jesus or the apostles considered a “two-track soteriology,” one way of salvation for Jews and another for Gentiles; however, it is “reasonable to assume that [Paul] did indeed foresee a history under divine providence during which Israel and the Church would coexist.”^[62] At the same time as the church, including the Gentiles, was a “chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9), “even so at [that] present time [there was] a remnant according to the God’s gracious choice” (Romans 11:5), and “though the number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea, it is the remnant that will be saved” (Romans 9:27).  God has insured and will continue to insure the survival of the remnant of Israel, for as Markus Barth has said, “with the complete physical extinction of all Jews from the face of the earth the demonstration and proof of God’s existence would collapse and the church would lose its raison d’être: the church would fall.”^[63] The church has not been able to accept the plain truth of Holy Scripture that Israel remains chosen. Unfortunately, the church has not been the only entity that has denied this truth.  Hitler told Rauschming, “There is no room for two chosen peoples.”^[64]

Both the extent and the timing of Israel’s corporate unbelief are divinely appointed: “. . .until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in,” Paul says (Romans 11:25). Could it be that there is sufficient rebellion against the grace and will of God among the Gentile communities that when the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled, God can turn again to Israel with complete justification? And, is that not a massive understatement? Has the church not prostituted the truth adequately to justify God’s returning “the Deliverer . . . [to] turn away ungodliness from Jacob” (Romans 11:26). Has the church’s infidelity not superseded that of ancient Israel, providing more than adequate grounds for God’s writing a bill of divorcement if he so chose? The church has had no monopoly on virtue and certainly has not been pure from vice.

Is it not time for the church awaken and realize that if much of Israel is in unbelief, Christian scriptures declare that their unbelief is only in part and that their faith in God and in the Torah which he gave their fathers is to be commended, not excoriated? Unfortunately some within the evangelical movement continue to teach that Judaism and Islam are the two most prominent anti-Christ religions in the world today. Surely those who know the blessings and promises of God cannot think of Judaism as an anti-Christ religion, much less equate it with Islam. Indeed, most of Judaism is Messianic, for most Jews believe in and anticipate the coming of God’s Mashiach. Martin Buber declared that the things which Christians and Jews have in common are “a book and an expectation.”^[65] Jews believe that the Messiah is coming, while Christians believe that he is returning. Can Christians not at least respect the fact that Jews look for, yea pray for, the coming of the Messiah and the kingdom of God, and are not Christians mature enough to have total confidence that the Messiah whom the Jews expect is the returning Jesus? Millions of Jews have died with the same expectation of Messiah in their hearts that was a song on the lips of the martyrs in the Warsaw ghetto:

I believe, I believe, I believe
Sincerely, firmly, and devoutly
In the coming of the Messiah.
I believe in the Messiah,
And, though he tarry,
No less firmly I believe.
And though he tarry longer still,
Nevertheless, I believe in the Messiah,
I believe, I believe, I believe.[66]

Can there be any doubt that this is a prophetic time for rapprochement between the church and Israel, a time for the church to repent of its historical Judaeophobia, anti-Judaism, and antisemitism? Is it not time for the church to reclaim its Judaic heritage and seek normalization of relations with Israel and the Jewish people? Is it not time that the church at least try to position itself to fulfill its mandate of being the instrument in God’s hand for provocation of Israel (Romans 11:11)? While the church’s two millennia of adversarial relationship toward Israel have accentuated differences and even produced caricatures of Jewish beliefs, sometimes to the point of defamation, is it not time to give consideration toward the beliefs that the Jews hold in all piety toward God? Have we not had enough attacks upon Judaism’s legalism in order to extol the virtues of Christian grace? Can we not be mature enough to step beyond the oversimplification of such complex issues that has caused us to distort Jewish faith traditions? Can we look for a middle ground between the callous triumphalism of supersessionism and the capitulatory self-flagellation of revisionism? Can we continue to believe that there is one Lord, one faith, and one baptism while at the same time making provision in God’s salvation economy for the continuing election of Israel? Can we once and for all affirm our Lord’s simple statement that he did not come to destroy the Torah and agree that as a part of the eternal Word of God it has a continuing influence both in the life of the church and in the life of Israel? Is it not possible that the church’s reaffirmation of its own inherent Jewishness and its reexamination of the Torah as a part of God-breathed Scripture will help bring the church to maturity and equip it for all good works, including mercy to Israel? Are we mature Christians not ready to abandon reactive theology for what Isaac Rottenberg calls “comparative theology which, through dialogue, seeks to (re)discover common roots with Judaism . . . not for the sake of compromise, and certainly not for the sake of camaraderie, but rather in order to come to a deeper understanding of the gospel of the Kingdom of God as it has been revealed in the Jew Jesus”?^[67] Perhaps our conclusion could be the same as Rottenberg’s, “Our search should lead to new insights about the Johannine statement that salvation is from the Jews (John 4:22).” ^[68]

But, the reeducation of the church cannot stop with mere theory. Marvin Wilson states it very succinctly in this manner: “The process of restoring the withered Jewish roots of the Christian faith involves far more than learning about Jewish values, history, and culture in the abstract. Rather, at  its core, it involves the restoring of relationships. . . Knowledge must also be transmuted into concrete action through personal contact with the Jewish community.”^[69] The best witness that Christians can give to Jews is concrete action that manifests the core of Christ’s teachings: “Love God, and love man.” In reclaiming its Jewish roots, the church must not be enraptured in externals and soulish ego gratification by adopting cultural Jewish appearance and practices, adding a new thirteenth tribe of Wannabe’s. It must restore the foundational principles of the Hebraic faith upon which Christianity was founded and live out those principles in biblical lifestyles that build relationship and manifest the love of God to all men, including Jesus’ blood brethren, the Jews.

For anyone who takes the words of Jesus himself seriously, there can be no question of the centrality of the imperative to be witnesses of the gospel of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. This call to be sent as a witness to the world is not, however, an original Christian idea: it is solidly rooted in the soil of biblical Judaism (Isaiah 43:10), Second Temple Judaism’s proselyte ministry, and beyond. Paul was not the first missionary. He was merely continuing a generations-long tradition of the Pharisees when he took the good news to Asia Minor and Southern Europe. And, according to the rabbi/apostle from Tarsus, the proclamation of this invitation to eternal life is to be advanced to the Jew as well as the Gentile. To ask a Christian not to witness “to every creature” (Mark 16:15) is equivalent to asking a Jew not to remember Shabbat or to forsake Brit Millah. 1 Peter 3:15 instructs every believer: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” But, the apostle to the Jews also admonishes us to “do this with gentleness and respect.” Christians must remember that witness is a state of being, not an act or part of a church growth program. “You will be witnesses unto me in Jerusalem, Judaea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth,” Jesus said (Acts 1:8).  We must always remember, in the words of Marvin Wilson, that “conversion is the work of God, not of human beings.”^[70] And, we must recognize that Israel will never be provoked to anything but anger and disdain by a Christian church that seeks to “convert” Jews to a Christianity that voids the Torah and replaces the Judaic concepts and practices of biblical faith with Greco-Roman philosophy and pagan traditions.

Christian Return for Healing

In reality, “conversion” is a term better applied to Gentiles than to Jews. It is Gentiles who have been “converted” to the God of the Jews by the word of faith in the Jewish Messiah that came from a Jewish Book. Christianity does maintain that Jews should come to faith in Messiah; however, it is not a “conversion” from Judaism to a Hellenized and Latinized Christianity, but rather a fulfillment or completion of the promise that was made secure to each Jewish person as a descendant of Abraham. Harvey Cox has observed that “Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus was not a ‘conversion,’ and must not be understood as his ‘becoming a Christian.’ Paul did not become a member of another religious community. Rather, what came to him in that blinding light was a new conviction about the way he should fulfill his vocation as a Hebrew. He was not converted but ‘called’ to a prophetic vocation both to his own people and to the gentiles.”^[71]

The majority of Gentile Christians today need to be “converted,” turned from Neoplatonic and pagan Christian traditions and redirected toward the church’s Hebraic foundations. A church that has been torn from its biblical moorings and, as a result, is being drawn further and further into the maelstrom of demonic teachings, heresies, and human traditions must turn to the Holy Spirit to lead and guide it into truth so it can reclaim the safe harbor of the Hebraic understanding of Jesus and the apostles. To do so, it must repent and be converted, renewing its corporate mind, no longer being conformed to the traditions of this age but being transformed by a clear understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures of both Testaments.

The church should not be so preoccupied with the “conversion” of the Jews that it fails to examine itself “to see if [it] be in the faith” of Jesus and the apostles (2 Corinthians 13:5). “So far as Christian thinkers are concerned, the words that hit like hammers and burn like fire (Jeremiah 23:29) must be addressed first and singly in this generation to our own condition; our task is not the condition of ‘the Jews,’ but the condition of ‘the Christians.’”^[72] While it is urging Jews to repent and receive the gospel, should the church not also repent for its historical sins of violence against the Jews and for its still latent sins of anti-Judaism and antisemitism? Christians should recognize the gravity of this sin from Karl Barth’s warning to the church that “antisemitism is sin against the Holy Ghost.”^[73]  In the spirit of Ezra and Daniel, who repented on behalf of all of their people, Christians should acknowledge, confess, and renounce the individual and corporate sins of the Christian church against the Jewish people, sins that have been manifest in (1) Judaeophobia—the fear of Jews and things Jewish that has been ingrained into the corporate consciousness of the church, (2) anti-Judaism—the church’s sin of supersessionism in teaching that God rejected Judaism and Israel and replaced them with Christianity and the church, (3) antisemitism—attempts to disparage, debase, dehumanize, and destroy the Jewish people and their faith, and (4) silence and absence of protest against others who have so abused the Jewish people. If Paul were living today, perhaps he would challenge the church with words similar to these: “I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers: blindness (hardness) in part has happened to the church,” and, no doubt, he would enjoin Christian repentance and again warn the church, “Do not be arrogant, but be afraid. For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either” (Romans 11:20, 21).

The purposes of God in Jewish/Christian relations would make great strides toward the consummation of the age if Christians would remove the leaven of sin from their own houses and return to a biblically mandated loving support for the international Jewish community. Both individuals and corporate worshipping communities should resolve to support in word and in deed the right of all Jewish peoples to exist as Jews with complete self-determination, free from political, economic, social, or religious coercion, intimidation, or persecution and they should profess an irrevocable determination to stand with the international Jewish community against any individual or corporate threat. This resolution is possible only when Christians fully affirm their identity with the corporate body of world Jewry by virtue of their personal faith in the God of Israel and their ingrafting into Israel, the Jewish people, and when they attest that they have been adopted into the family of Abraham by virtue of their personal faith in Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham, who caused Israel’s light to come to the nations. As Franklin Littell has said, “If our modern, enlightened ‘Christians’ were more certain of their own calling, they would have less difficulty in comprehending God’s continuing call to the Jewish people.”^[74] Cox recognizes that this is the reason Christians need Jews. “Without them in our past, we would have had no Bible, no Jesus, no knowledge of God. Without them in our present, we cannot understand God, the world, or ourselves.”^[75]

The church needs a massive reeducation, taking time to unlearn its Neoplatonic traditions and then to learn the truth about the Hebrew foundations of Christian faith. As Edward Flannery says, an “over-Hellenized, over-Latinized Christianity” needs a “re-Judaizing process” to return it to its inherent ideals. Believers in every communion of the body of Messiah must be reawakened to their Judaic heritage and their rightful place with and among the Jewish people and their faith. Christianity needs to reenter the Hebraic matrix from which it was birthed to be born again unto a new life of rich inheritance in the commonwealth of Israel. While most Christians could never become Israelites “as pertaining to the flesh” (simply because they are Gentiles), they must recognize the fact that by spiritual rebirth and adoption, they have been grafted into Israel’s tree of salvation to partake of the rich and nourishing Hebraic heritage that has flowed for millennia from the roots of prophets, sages, and apostles.

Christians must wake up and realize, “We’ve been robbed!” The rich legacy bequeathed to the church by its Jewish forebears has been stolen away by the ravages of time and the incursions of human and demonic traditions into the fabric of Christian faith. It is now time that we apprehend the thief and reclaim our heritage. We must acknowledge one simple truth: the “one faith” of the immutable God must ever be some form of the Judaism that he authored at Sinai and perfected at Calvary.

Christianity’s reclamation of its Hebraic heritage will of necessity result in a diminishing of Christian Judaeophobia and antisemitism. One of the greatest measures that could be established for the security of the international Jewish community would be the entire church’s reestablishment of its Judaic heritage. How can Christians hate Jews when they come to understand that their faith is inherently Jewish, a religion founded by a Jewish Messiah, based on a Jewish Book, believing in the God of the Jews, and teaching a salvation  that is “from the Jews”?  If they were restored to their Hebraic heritage, Christians who have loved Israel because of its importance in their eschatological scenario would love and support the international Jewish community without ulterior motives. Christians who have been reattached to their Jewish roots might actually provoke Israel to something more than anger and consternation. We might also begin to heal the breach of the great protoschism, the parting of the ways between Christianity and Judaism. While there are and will remain differences between these two great faith traditions, dialogue will come to emphasize similarities and continuity, not differences and discontinuity.

The Climax of the Age

As the days pass, we are certainly drawn near to the time of the fullness of the Gentiles and the return of Jesus. When God’s prophetic timetable crosses the threshold of Gentile fullness, God will once again turn to Israel with mercy and everlasting salvation in this great denouement of the matter: “. . . and thus all Israel will be saved, just as it is written, the Deliverer will come from Zion, he will remove ungodliness from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them, when I take away their sins” (Romans 11:26, 27). The Greek of this passage confirms the fact that God’s action in taking away Israel’s sins is an outgrowth of his immutability, of his eternal faithfulness. The verb ajfevwmai (aphelomai) is in the middle voice, indicating that the Deliverer removes impiety from Israel when Yahweh takes away for himself (or for his purposes) their sins. It affirms the fact that no one else—no prophet, no sage, no ecclesiastical program—will remove his people’s sin. God alone will bring salvation to Israel, and he will do so in order to fulfill his purposes, for “the free gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable (Romans 11:29), and “For my own name’s sake I delay my wrath; for the sake of my praise I hold it back from you, so as not to cut you off. See, I have refined you, though not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction. For my own sake, for my own sake, I do this. How can I let myself be defamed? I will not yield my glory to another” (Isaiah 48:9–1, emphasis added).

God’s return to Israel will bring about the fulfillment of Zechariah’s vision: “And I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on me whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for him, as one mourns for an only son . . . In that day a fountain will be opened for the house of David and for the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for impurity. . . . Then the Lord will go forth . . . And in that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives . . .” (Zechariah 12:10; 13:1; 14:3, 4). Israel that has remained under the firm, but loving hand of its guardian Torah will be brought by that firm protective hand to a face-to-face encounter with its Messiah, the Moses-like teacher, the Rabbi of rabbis, to whom they will listen and of whom they will learn the fulness of God’s free salvation. And, “when the Messiah comes to consummate the longings and hopes of all mankind, he will be of the lineage of Abraham and David, not a timeless and faceless wraith, his head wreathed in abstractions”^[76]

The fulfillment of Zechariah’s prophecy can be expected only in the time frame of the coming (or return) of Messiah and the establishment of God’s dominion over the whole earth. During that time, the fountain that was first opened for sin and uncleanness at Calvary and has remained open to individual Jews and Gentiles for two thousand years will again be opened to the corporate house of Israel in one great climactic prophetic exercise, and “all Israel shall be saved.” God himself will provoke Israel to jealousy (Deuteronomy 32:21; Romans 11:11) with a nation of Gentile nobodies (I Peter 2:10) who, after nearly two millennia of estrangement, have been reattached to the Hebraic roots of their faith and have come to understand the dynamics of their irrevocable interconnection with God’s ancient people, the Jews. When Messiah comes, he will stand in that Holy Place with all the righteous ones—both Jew and Gentile—who have believed God and observed his Torah. Together they will sing both “the Song of Moses . . . and the Song of the Lamb” in perfect harmony, affirming both God’s Torah and his Mashiach: “Great and marvelous are thy works, O Lord God, the Almighty; righteous and true are thy ways, thou King of the ages. Who shall not fear, O Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou only art holy; for all the nations shall come and worship before thee; for thy righteous acts have been made manifest” (Revelation 15:3, 4).

“God has not rejected His people, has He?” With Paul we exclaim, “May it never be!” (Romans 11:1). The God who has concluded them in unbelief so that his salvific purposes might be fulfilled toward the Gentiles has done so in order that he might have mercy upon all (Romans 11:32). Could it be that the “all” that he has concluded in unbelief is the same “all” upon whom he will show mercy? If so, we can understand Paul’s exclamatory hymn: “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and unfathomable his ways!” As we humbly witness such profound and mysterious wisdom, we can only repeat Paul’s doxology: “For from him and through him and to him, are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen.” (Romans 11:36).

About the Author

John D. Garr, Ph.D.

President & CEO