# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1859_S322
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

322 Is a Still-Awaited Solemn Conversion of the Jews Taught in Rom. 11:25, 26, 27, etc.?

...conversion of the Jews usually think, by saying so, to meet certain objections which their own Christian consciousness raises against them, and which they suppose others to raise, saying: We do not, of course, hope that all Jews without exception, down to the last man, but only that a very great number will be converted, so that one could then say, by synecdoche, that all Israel has been converted. — Far from this concession making the popular interpretation of the passage probable, it rather follows plainly from it that our text must contain something other than what those suppose who, on its basis, wish to hope for a still-impending solemn conversion of the Jews. For our text does not, in fact, say: a very great number of Jews, but rather: "all Israel!"*) — The evasion, namely, that here the whole is put by synecdoche for a great part, is not possible here. It is indeed true that the figure of synecdoche, by which the whole is named while only a great part is meant by it, occurs in Scripture. Thus, for example, the words (besides a metonymy, that is, the figure by which the container is named and the thing contained is meant) obviously contain a synecdoche: "Then went out to him Jerusalem, and all the land of Judea," Matt. 3:5. In our passage, however, "Israel in part" is plainly set in opposition to "all Israel." But in such a case the assumption of a synecdoche is altogether inadmissible. To set a part in opposition to a part would be an absurdity. Those who wish to prove a still-impending solemn conversion of the Jews from our passage therefore find themselves in a dilemma: either they must assume that one must here depart from the clear words, because the holy apostle has made himself guilty of an absurdity of expression, or they must assume that a time is to be expected in which all Jews, without exception, man for man, will be saved — that is, not merely brought outwardly to a confession of the Christian religion, but brought to true faith and kept in it to the end. But the former assumption is against the divine dignity and objective clarity of Scripture, and the latter assumption quite undeniably runs counter to the analogy of faith, especially to the doctrine of election by grace (ἐκλογή = election). Alas! we ourselves have experienced that the hope of the conversion of the Jews had become so indispensable to an otherwise honest, learned, and perceptive theologian that, when we pointed out that dilemma to him, he indeed — in order to have the comfort of not departing from the literal sense of Scripture — rejected the first assumption, but fled into the other, and thereby surrendered the supreme hermeneutical canon: "If any man have prophecy, let it be according to the proportion of faith," Rom. 12:6-7. So far can preconceived opinions and pet ideas lead! —

*) That an interpretation must be false which has to weaken the inspired words in order to maintain itself surely needs no proof.