Brian Hamilton-Vise

Salvation is from the Jews

The question of salvation in Christian theology has usually been framed as a question about how the work of God in Christ rescues us from sin and death for eternal life with God, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that question in itself. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,” Paul says (2 Cor 5:19); the incarnation is the capstone of God’s work to redeem all creation. But as I sit, preparing a lecture on soteriology for the morning, I’m struck by the frequency with which the whole story of Israel is just left out of the Christian “explanation” of salvation. The fathers appealed over and over again to Israel’s history, to be sure, but in almost every instance their appeal to was an image that foreshadowed the reality of redemption in Christ. So for many of them, the salvation being worked by God in and through Israel just wasn’t real yet. It was all preparation.

In Dante’s Inferno, even the patriarchs and matriarchs and other Old Testament saints remain in Limbo. Even for Irenaeus, who takes Israel’s actual history with such surprising theological seriousness, the “slavery unto God” granted to Israel in the law–though he gives it a positive description–paves the way for freedom in Christ, which is real salvation. And it’s not clear (to me anyway) what immediate value Israel’s slavery has for preparing me for freedom in Christ, as one born after the age of Israel.

Not to mention that most “models of atonement” or explanations of how it was that God reconciled the world to himself in Christ–from Athanasius to Anselm to Calvin–could proceed without any reference to Israel at all.

For St. Paul, of course, Christian salvation can legitimately be construed, for Gentiles, as being grafted into “the rich root of the olive tree” which is precisely God’s promise to Abraham. So the redemption offered in and by Christ completes the redemption in and by to Israel, instead of replacing it. That sounds almost like a truism of “post-supersessionist theology,” but I’m still unaware of many theological attempts to make sense of that at any length. (Robert Jenson to the rescue here? But I’ve never read him. Oops.) I do think the idea that Israel prepared the way for Christ is quite right, in its own way, but it doesn’t seem to me to tell the whole story of Christian salvation. That story needs to explain not only how Israel’s history is summed up in Christ, but also how being saved in Christ is about inheriting God’s promise to Israel, by God’s grace. “Remember that it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you.”

23 September 2008 | Comments (0)
Tags: Judaism, Soteriology