# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1859_S325
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Whether Rom. 11:25, 26, 27 [teaches] a solemn [conversion of the Jews] still to be expected, etc. 325

behind; God will not annul, by any absolute rejection now, the promise he gave to this people, but will fulfill it punctually — his whole chosen Israel shall be saved. — On this interpretation, every word of our text is taken in its full precision. "Israel" is taken to mean, in fact, the natural Israel; "all Israel" is taken to mean, in fact, a definite whole, namely the whole "election" (v. 7), hence for "in this way"; "shall be saved" is taken to mean "shall attain eternal life"; "the fullness of the Gentiles" is taken to mean the full number of the Gentiles, namely those ordained to eternal life. The particle ἄχρις οὗ (until) also retains its natural meaning, marking the endpoint of a fact; for the endpoint of the merely partial hardening, and hence also of the partial conversion, of Israel occurs, on our understanding of the apostle's words, only with the endpoint of the conversion of the Gentiles. According to the mystery disclosed by the apostle, Jews are to be converted for exactly as long as Gentiles are converting. The door of grace shall not merely stand open to both until the end, but from both a number shall also always actually enter the kingdom of God. When Philippi writes: "ἄχρις οὗ with the aorist subjunctive (donec, usque dum intraverit) always introduces a future event, with whose occurrence a fact holding true until then is to cease; hence, after the entrance of the fullness of the Gentiles, Israel's hardening is to cease" — this is not against our interpretation, since indeed, after the entrance of the fullness of the Gentiles, that is, after the Last Day, a further partial hardening of Israel can as little still be spoken of as a proclaiming of the Lord's death after his coming, cf. 1 Cor. 11:26. Those, on the other hand, who wait for a solemn conversion of the Jews take, with intolerable arbitrariness, the words "all Israel" to mean very many Israelites*); the particle "so" to mean "thereafter"; the words "shall be saved" to mean "shall become confessors of the Christian religion"**); "the fullness of the Gentiles" to mean a great part of the Gentile world†); or, as

*) So Spener ("a noticeably great part," see Spener's Pia Desideria) and many others.

**) So already Calixtus: "And so all Israel shall be saved, and it will come about that, just as all Germany, for instance, is called Christian, so too it will be said of all Israel that it has received Christ." See his writing on the Last Judgment. Similarly Philippi: "Readmission of the people of Israel into the theocracy" (!), just as one might still say today "that all Christian Europe has become partaker of σωτηρία [salvation]."

†) So Balduin. But by πλήρωμα τῶν ἐθνῶν nothing else can possibly be understood than the whole Gentile world, just as in v. 12, by τὸ πλ. τοῦ Ἰσραήλ, the full number of Israel [is meant]. Harleß writes on Eph. 1:23: "I regard it as an unquestionable result of the inquiry conducted into πλήρωμα that it is used in the N. T. only in the active sense, so that the genitive joined with it denotes the object [that is] filled; hence Rom. 11:25, τὸ πλ. τῶν ἐθνῶν: that which fills up the numerical concept of ἔθνη (Gentiles), the totality of the Gentiles." So too Meyer on this passage. Our own symbolical books likewise explain πλ. as tota congregatio [the whole congregation], see the Latin Apology, De Ecclesia, p. 145. Now it can by no means be meant that all Gentiles without exception, man for man, are to be converted — one would have to side with the Apocatastasians against