# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1859_S328
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

keep, and I had to compel them, says the LORD. But this shall be the covenant: I will forgive them their iniquity and remember their sins no more." Whoever does not see in these words a general promise of the New Testament covenant of grace sees nothing. As excellently as this citation, together with the former, confirms that, just as surely as God's gifts and calling are not to be repented of by him (to which the apostle points immediately after our passage, v. 29), just as surely Israel must have a holy remnant of the elect throughout all ages — just so absurd is it to try to prove from these passages the mystery that in the last days, in the narrower sense of the word, all Israel will be converted. All this is so plain as day that one can well notice it even in almost all our opposing interpreters, how the alleged confirmation, from the prophets, of the mystery they have assumed stands in the apostle's way. Rationalists such as a Meyer and a Rückert, to be sure, know how to help themselves. Without racking their brains any further, they shift the blame for the ill-fitting prophetic proof-text onto the holy writer himself. The former ventures, indeed, to write outright: "For the [words] 'all Israel shall be saved,' Paul finds an oracular warrant in Isa. 59:20. Not, however, as if Paul had derived his prophecy from that passage in Isaiah, for that he could not have derived from it. Rather, having recognized in [a] revelation the mystery [there] expressed, he has now also discovered, for the component contained in 'all Israel shall be saved,' an oracle in the Old Testament — a discovery, therefore, to be ascribed solely to his own rabbinic individuality. The original text prophesies messianic deliverance only for those Israelites who turn back from apostasy, hence precisely not a general deliverance of Israel." Rückert writes: "That this passage does not prove for us what it is supposed to prove is plain to see; even in the form in which it is given here, it cannot do so. But the apostle's manner of citation is too well known for us to be permitted to dwell on it." These blasphemies are, in good part, a sad consequence of the false interpretation of our very passage on the part of the orthodox themselves. Unbelievers gladly seize the occasion to accuse of perversity the holy men of God who wrote as they were moved by the Holy Spirit, when the orthodox, by force and artifice, seek to bring to light out of a passage of Scripture a sense that is not in it. Scripture itself never contradicts itself and contains nothing absurd; but every alien human notion that is to be grafted onto Scripture at once comes into contradiction with divine truth and appears, within Scripture, as an absurdity. Quenstedt therefore writes: "The testimonies cited by the apostle to prove his thesis can by no means be understood of a conversion of the Israelites in the very last time of the world, but plainly speak of the first coming of Christ, Isa. 59:20, and of the times of the New Testament, Jer. 31:34 — a ground which by itself alone establishes our opinion unassailably." (Theologia didactico-polemica, Part IV, ch. 19, f. 1817.)