# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1859_S326
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

Philippi wants [it] as a supplement [supplying "very many Israelites," i.e., of those Jews who have been lost). By following the first impression one gets from a superficial view of our text's content, one supposes that one need only hold to its literal sense, and then accuses those who cannot find that sense in it of departing from the plain meaning, of artificiality, of preconceived opinions carried into the text, and of a dogmatic prejudice that will not let the true sense of the passage be recognized.*) But, as we have seen, exactly the opposite is the case. To be sure, sound interpreters let themselves be guided, in the interpretation of our text as of all passages of Scripture, by the clear doctrines of Scripture or by the analogy of faith; indeed they are convinced that without such a "dogmatic interest" there is no true exegesis. But it is a plain untruth to assert that those who declare that they can find in our text no prior announcement of a still-to-be-expected mass conversion of the Jews are, for that very reason, not also guided by exegetical grounds and opposed to the "literal reading." This charge rather falls back upon those who raise it. They confirm by their own exegesis what Winer writes in his Grammar of New Testament Greek: "If one reads certain commentaries still current from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (for the older ones from the Reformation period are almost entirely free of such perverse habits), one must abstract, as the supposedly essential characteristic of the language of the New Testament, that it lacks all precision and regularity. For everywhere the interpreters demonstrated how here a wrong tense, there a wrong case, here the comparative in place of the positive, there ὁ for τις, now aber ['but'] for denn ['for'], now folglich ['consequently'] for weil ['because'], now jenseits ['beyond'] for diesseits ['on this side']" (we add: now also also ['so'] for darnach ['thereafter']) "was supposedly used. Were one to accept all the quid pro quo's

that the analogy of Scripture allows, [one might suppose] that such a conversion could also take place after death. Nothing else then remains but to understand, by the fullness or full number of the Gentiles, the totality or full number of the elect from among the Gentiles, just as, by "all Israel," the totality or full number of the elect from among the Jews. And this latter is so far from being an arbitrary assumption that this very understanding is, rather, imperatively required by what precedes in our text-chapter, where salvation is repeatedly ascribed only to those who remain (cf. 9:29) according to the election of grace (the λεῖμμα κατ᾽ ἐκλογὴν χάριτος, "remnant according to the election of grace"), or, in short, to the election (ἐκλογή) — v. 5, 7. This latter point Olshausen too has recognized, following Calov and Bengel.

*) Olshausen writes, among other things: "It was only a false opposition to the Jews, and misgivings about fanatical misuse of this passage, that led Chrysostom, Theodoret, Jerome, and later especially the Reformers, to explain the apostle's words as referring to spiritual Israel. It is remarkable how decisively Luther maintains the impossibility of the conversion of the Jews. From this it is clear how, for the great Reformer, eschatology was a closed field." (!) Meyer: "The Reformers were moved to abandon the literal sense — which is, after all, Paul's own sense — not by exegetical but by dogmatic interest, and also by their poor opinion of Jewish depravity. Yet among the Reformed, through Beza, the literal reading remained predominant; and through Calixtus and Spener it became so again in the Lutheran Church."