Beloved Enemies

Israel’s Irrevocable Calling between Dispensationalism and Progressive Covenantalism

J. Neil Daniels

Abstract

Romans 11:28 predicates enmity and belovedness of the same people at the same moment, and the correlative μέν … δέ makes that simultaneity a grammatical datum rather than a theological inference. This essay builds the case for a future for national Israel on that verse and on its ground in 11:29, then locates the resulting position between revised dispensationalism and progressive covenantalism. It concedes that ὁ Ἰσραὴλ τοῦ θεοῦ in Galatians 6:16 most probably denotes the church, argues that the concession costs the position nothing, and declines the dispensational sine qua non that treats the Israel-church distinction as a premise rather than a consequence. The christological grounding is developed from the union of Davidic and divine sonship in the incarnate Son: promise escalates in Christ without evaporating. Objections drawn from Romans 9:6, from the diachronic remnant reading of 11:26, from the “no distinction” texts, from the charge of ethnic favoritism, and from the political entanglements of the question are stated at their strongest and answered.

Keywords: Israel; supersessionism; Romans 9–11; Romans 11:28; Galatians 6:16; corporate election; progressive covenantalism; dispensationalism; new creation eschatology

I. Beloved While Hostile

Paul wrote Romans 11:28 about people who were at that moment refusing his gospel, and he called them beloved. Both predicates stand in one sentence, distributed by κατὰ μέν and κατὰ δέ, and both hold at once. The verse has had a strange career in the commentaries. It gets quoted at the end of expositions as a devotional flourish, and it gets left out of the argument two verses earlier where the identity of “all Israel” is actually settled. Matt Waymeyer’s study is the exception, and it is the hinge of what follows.[1]

For most of the church’s history the question had a settled answer, and the answer was no. Blaising states the traditional position without softening it:

they do not have a future except to linger on earth like refugees until the end of time as a witness to divine judgment. Why? Because God has disinherited them as a punishment for their rejection of Jesus, and he has replaced them with a new Israel, the Gentile Church. [2]

Following R. Kendall Soulen, Blaising sorts this into three forms. Punitive supersessionism reads the catastrophes of 70 and 135 as divine abandonment. Economic supersessionism makes the whole economy from Sinai to Christ a transitory symbol designed to pass away once the spiritual antitype arrived. Structural supersessionism is not a thesis anyone defends; it is a habit of reading in which Israel drops out of the story, so that the narrative runs from universal creation through universal sin to universal redemption with the Israelite material serving as background.[3] The third resists refutation because it operates below the level of argument. A man can affirm Romans 11:29 in a footnote and still preach through the prophets for thirty years as though the nation were a visual aid.

Vlach traces the formation. Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, around 160, contains the first explicit identification of the church as Israel, though the identification had been forming for decades before Justin gave it words.[4] The catalysts he names are the shrinking Jewish proportion of the congregations after the apostolic generation and the two destructions of Jerusalem. Thomas Ice’s definition, which Vlach adopts, is serviceable: the church has permanently replaced Israel as the instrument through which God works, and national Israel has no future in the plan of God.[5] Waltke supplies the modern version, that national Israel and its law have been permanently replaced by the church and the new covenant.[6]

What follows argues that this is wrong, that Romans 11:28–29 is where it breaks, and that the position which results belongs to neither of the two systems now contending for the question.[7] I hold with the progressive covenantalists that Christ is the interpretive center, that there is one people of God, and that typology escalates. I hold with the dispensationalists that “Israel” keeps its referent, that the national promises await fulfillment, and that the church has not absorbed the nation. The two sets of commitments are compatible. They are treated as rivals because each system has made a secondary claim load-bearing.

II. The Sentence That Will Not Move

Waymeyer’s argument runs through the pronouns before it runs through the theology. Verse 28 opens with asyndeton and no expressed subject, so the “they” has to be supplied from the αὐτοῖς of verse 27, which reaches back to Ἰακώβ in 26b, which reaches back to πᾶς Ἰσραήλ in 26a. Whoever is described in verse 28 is the “all Israel” of verse 26.[8]

The second person is the control. Across 11:11–32 every second-person form Paul uses addresses Gentiles, and every third-person form refers to Jews; Waymeyer catalogues all of them.[9] So δι’ ὑμᾶς in verse 28 fixes the ἐχθροί as ethnic Jews, and the reading that makes “all Israel” the church has failed before the systematic question is posed. A body composed largely of Gentile believers cannot be the group set over against Gentile believers in the same clause.

The remnant reading takes longer to fail and fails more interestingly. Lenski and Hendriksen read verse 28 sequentially: these were enemies before conversion and are beloved after it. The correlative conjunctions forbid it. Paul had a construction for “once … now” and used it constantly, ποτέ … νῦν δέ in Ephesians 2:11–13, in Colossians 1:21–22 and 3:7–8, in Philemon 10–11, and three verses later in Romans 11:30, where the Gentiles were once disobedient and have now received mercy. In verse 28 he reached for μέν … δέ, which means on the one hand and on the other.[10] The same people, in the same instant, are hostile as measured by the gospel and loved as measured by the election.

Verse 29 grounds the second half with a causal γάρ and fronts ἀμεταμέλητα for emphasis. The gifts and the calling of God are not taken back. Moo hears in this the return of the thesis of 9:6, that the word of God has not failed, and that is right; chapters nine through eleven are a theodicy of divine fidelity, and 11:29 is where the defense lands.[11] Waymeyer’s conclusion follows: verse 28 shows both that the unbelieving nation as a whole is in view and that the nation will be restored.[12]

One line of recent support I take more cautiously than its author does. Sibley argues that ἡ ἀποβολὴ αὐτῶν in 11:15 is a subjective genitive, Israel’s rejection of the gospel rather than God’s rejection of Israel, which would remove the last textual foothold for saying the nation has been set aside even temporarily.[13] Fitzmyer’s judgment that a temporary divine rejection is read into the text and not out of it has real force against the way the verse is usually deployed.[14] But ἡ πρόσλημψις in the same sentence is most naturally God’s acceptance of them, and a subjective genitive in the first half leaves the parallel limping. Sibley’s target, the position that Israel has been shelved for the present while remaining beloved for the future, does not need an objective genitive in 11:15 anyway.[15] It needs 11:25, which supplies the hardening in so many words. The dual status of verse 28 already says what has to be said, and says it without a contested case ending.

III. What the Argument Does Not Need

Ryrie’s threefold sine qua non is a distinction between Israel and the church, a consistently literal hermeneutic, and the glory of God as the purpose of history; Toussaint calls the first of these the touchstone and the most important of the three.[16] He also names the stakes with unusual candor: if the line between church and Israel blurs, dispensationalism will go the way of the dodo.[17] The older form of the distinction was territorial. Chafer taught that every covenant and provision for Israel is earthly and every promise to the church heavenly, so that two peoples continue in separate spheres into the new creation.[18] Blaising’s observation, which Toussaint accepts, is that by the 1950s the heavenly-earthly language had quietly disappeared from Walvoord, Pentecost, Ryrie, and McClain while the structures of distinction remained standing.[19]

Olander’s 2021 essay is the hard edge of what survives. His stated aim is to show that Israel and the church are completely distinct, not merely distinct, and he anchors it in the Dallas doctrinal statement and in a set of titular observations: Christ is King of Israel by covenant and Head of the church by decree, and he is never called King of the church.[20] The church, therefore, has no king as its head.[21]

The observation about the titles is correct and the inference built on it is oversized. That the risen Christ is not styled King of his body tells us how the church is constituted, since a body is not a polity. It tells us nothing about whether the nation and the church share one city, one new covenant, one resurrection, one inheritance. Complete distinction has to be argued from what the two entities are, and this argument establishes only that they are not the same thing, which nobody in the discussion denies. The heavier problem is procedural. If the distinction is a premise, every text about Israel’s future has been decided before it is read, and the dispensationalist has done to Romans 11 what he accuses the covenant theologian of doing to Genesis 15.

Take the distinction as a consequence instead. Paul addresses Gentile believers as ἔθνη in 11:13 and tells them in the same breath that they are grafted into a cultivated olive tree whose root is not theirs. A Gentile in Christ receives everything and does not thereby become a descendant of Jacob. The distinction survives, and it survives because the promise was particular before it was universal, not because a system requires two peoples with two destinies. Ryrie’s third element is worth keeping for a related reason: God is glorified in bringing each thing he made to the end he made it for, and Israel was made to be a nation wise and near to God, obedient in the land, a blessing to the nations, an end it has not reached.[22] Stallard’s way of framing it, that God has purposes for the world, the nations, Israel, the church, humanity, and the angels, and is glorified in fulfilling each, does more work than the soteriological-versus-doxological quarrel it usually gets recruited for.[23]

IV. Conceding Galatians 6:16

A single verse has been made to carry the weight of two systems. Fruchtenbaum states the situation from the dispensational side: Galatians 6:16 is the one verse on which all covenant theologians are unanimous.[24] That framing turns an ambiguous benediction into a proxy war, and it has produced a literature in which everyone knows the verdict before the syntax is examined.

Köstenberger concludes that the Israel of God consists of all believers, of whatever ethnic provenance, who follow the new rule of a Spirit-led life by faith in the crucified Christ.[25] Cowan lands in the same place, taking the phrase as the unified people of God made up of Jews and Gentiles who have faith in Jesus.[26] Pratt insists at the outset that the question is exegetical rather than dogmatic, which ought to be uncontroversial and is not.[27] I think they are right, and the reasons are contextual before they are syntactical. The κανών of verse 16 is the new creation of verse 15, before which circumcision and uncircumcision are alike nothing; a benediction on ethnic Israel as such, pronounced at the end of four chapters of anti-Judaizing polemic, would undo the letter in its final paragraph. Burton’s counterargument from word order, that mercy precedes peace in the other New Testament benedictions and so the sequence here signals two groups, is a slender thread for a redemptive-historical program.[28]

Scarborough’s reply is instructive as a good instinct badly executed. She classifies the epistles as occasional documents and task theology, and concludes that Galatians cannot bear systematic weight on the Israel question.[29] The category is sound and the application is self-defeating, since Romans is occasional too, and if occasionality disqualifies Galatians from contributing to the doctrine it disqualifies the chapters her own case depends on. Pratt’s more modest observation does more work: there were Jewish believers in the Galatian congregations, Paul distinguishes himself and them from his wider audience by first-person plurals in 2:15 and 3:13, and the letter never severs those churches from their Jewish origins.[30] That leaves the ethnic reading possible. It does not make it probable.

Here is the point of the concession. If ὁ Ἰσραὴλ τοῦ θεοῦ in Galatians 6:16 is the church, Romans 11:28 still says what it says, and the Israel of Romans 9–11 is still, on Merkle’s own accounting, never the church. A position that must win Galatians 6:16 to survive has a structural weakness, and the dispensational literature has spent decades defending a verse it does not need. The ecclesial reading of the phrase and the future of national Israel are compatible claims. Holding both is a consequence of reading each passage inside its own argument.

V. Sonship, Not System

Why does the nation have a future? Not because Jewishness confers a claim. Cranfield’s warning is aimed at exactly this point, that a church which secretly believes its own existence rests on achievement will be unable to believe in mercy for unbelieving Israel. Piper puts the same thing positively: God’s election of Israel was free of human constraint at the beginning and remains free at the end, so that saving the whole people at the last is no more a concession to ethnicity than choosing Abraham was.[31] Israel is beloved because God is faithful to a love that had no cause outside itself.

The christological ground is stronger than the covenantal one, and this is where I part from the standard dispensational presentation. Blaising’s treatment of Romans 1:3 and 2 Timothy 2:8 is the best short statement I know: the incarnation is the incarnation of the Son of God in the house of David as the Son of covenant promise.[32] Sonship in the Davidic sense is covenantal language reaching back to 2 Samuel 7:14, and through that sonship a greater sonship is revealed, so that the “in him” of the Abrahamic and Davidic promises becomes the “in him” of Colossians 1:16, in whom all things were created and for whom they were made. Israel’s promises are guaranteed now by more than word and oath. They are guaranteed by the union of Davidic and divine sonship in one person.[33] This is why the promises are yes and amen in Christ, and why the yes is not a quiet no.

Progressive covenantalism is right that Christ is the true Israel, the seed, the Servant, the temple, and that the types find their reality in him. What does not follow is that the corporate body summarized in the individual disappears into him. Vanlaningham makes the negative case against Wright with precision: grant that Christ supersedes Israel, that the covenant blessings belong to him and derivatively to his church, and that Israel has no independent prominence in blessing the world, and none of it rules out a special future for the ethnic nation.[34] The positive case is Saucy’s appeal to corporate personality, where a representative individual and the group he represents both keep their identities while functioning together. The Son of Man receives the kingdom in Daniel 7 and so do the saints. The Servant of Isaiah is charged with restoring Israel, which means he cannot simply be Israel, and is addressed as Israel in 49:3.[35] Escalation in the antitype is not evaporation of the type.

This is the seam I work. With progressive covenantalism: one people of God, one new covenant, Christ as the hermeneutical center, typology that escalates. With dispensationalism: “Israel” means the descendants of Jacob wherever Paul uses it in Romans 9–11, the national promises are unfulfilled, and the church has not inherited them by substitution. What I decline is the sine qua non on the one side and the dissolution of Israel into the body of Christ without remainder on the other. The differentiation is inside the one people, not between two peoples with two destinies.

VI. The Fourth Stage

Himes has found something in Romans 11 that the standard treatments miss. Most readers describe three stages in verses 11–15: Israel stumbles, the Gentiles are enriched, Israel is accepted. Himes argues for four, on the strength of two phrases the three-stage scheme leaves without work to do, πόσῳ μᾶλλον in verse 12 and ζωὴ ἐκ νεκρῶν in verse 15.[36] The argument from lesser to greater requires a fourth term. If Israel’s trespass produced riches for the Gentiles, how much more her fullness, and the “how much more” has to land somewhere.

Where it lands, on this reading, is Israel’s recovery of a vocation she never lost. Vlach’s formulation is the compact one: Israel is not an end but a means, a means of worldwide blessing.[37] Windsor’s work on Jewish vocation supplies the mechanism, that the jealousy of 11:11–14 is provoked by watching Gentiles carry out what was Israel’s own commission.[38] Stage four is then a Gentile harvest mediated through a restored Israel, which is what the prophets were describing in the first place.

The argument is not airtight, and the weak joint should be named. Himes answers Moo’s case for reading ζωὴ ἐκ νεκρῶν as the general resurrection with three replies, one lexical, one structural, one about apocalyptic.[39] The lexical reply rests on a database search showing that the collocation of ζωή with ἐκ νεκρῶν is unique in Paul, and it proves less than it appears to; a unique construction can carry a common referent. The structural reply is the one that holds. If stage two benefits Gentiles, and stages one-to-two parallel stages three-to-four, then stage four benefits Gentiles, and a general resurrection is no benefit to unconverted Gentiles at all. Saucy’s point about πλήρωμα follows the same logic: reading “the fullness of the Gentiles” as the last elect Gentile ever saved leaves no interval in which the prophetic picture of blessing mediated through a restored Israel could occur.[40]

Himes then suggests, tentatively, that the fullness of the Gentiles may mark the close of the church age at a pretribulational rapture, and that the rapture itself might be what provokes Israel to jealousy.[41] He concedes that his thesis does not require it, and the concession should be pressed. The pretribulational case stands on the church’s union with Christ and on the promises of 1 Thessalonians 1:10 and 5:9. It is weakened, not strengthened, by being hung on a phrase in Romans 11:25 whose sense is contested. Consonance is not evidence. A doctrine grounded christologically needs no second grounding in a disputed genitive, and the eschatological arguments that reach for every available text are the ones that age worst.

VII. Objections

Romans 9:6 has already redefined Israel. The verse narrows the term; it does not widen it. Not all who are of Israel are Israel means that physical descent never secured the promise, and the second “Israel” denotes the elect within the nation rather than a body including Gentiles. Merkle, who has every reason to want the wider reading, concedes the point and supplies the list of occurrences, all of them ethnic, adding Moo’s judgment that calling the church “Israel” in this context would have fed the very Gentile arrogance Paul was writing to check.[42] His further argument, that Paul can shift referents inside two verses because he does it in 9:6, is legitimate and I grant it. What it establishes is that the dispute concerns the scope of the term, not the race of its referent.

The remnant reading of 11:26. Merkle’s version is the strongest and deserves to be stated at full strength. He argues that the chapter asks whether God has cast Israel off altogether, not whether Israel has a distinct future, and that reading the second question into the first prejudices everything downstream.[43] He notes the insistent present tense: Paul offers himself as evidence in verse 1, points to a remnant at this present time in verse 5, hopes to save some of his kinsmen through his own ministry in verses 13–14, and uses νῦν three times in verses 30–31.[44] He takes ἄχρι οὗ as terminative in the eschatological sense it carries in 1 Corinthians 11:26 and 15:25, where the point is that a state continues to the end rather than that it reverses afterward.[45] He cites Horne’s charge that a future mass conversion destroys the argument of chapters nine and ten, whose whole burden is that the promise is fulfilled in the remnant according to the election of grace.[46] His conclusion is a believing remnant until the end of time and no more.[47]

Four replies. First, οὕτως is modal, which Merkle establishes, and the manner is drawn from verses 11–24; but that manner is itself a sequence of hardening, Gentile ingathering, jealousy, and regrafting, so a modal reading with sequential content still yields a future.[48] Second, 11:28 blocks the remnant identification for the reason given above, since the remnant cannot be enemies κατὰ τὸ εὐαγγέλιον while believing it. Third, the mystery objection has not been answered. That the elect will be saved is no mystery requiring revelation, as Murray and Vanlaningham both observe.[49] Merkle’s reply, taken from Ridderbos, locates the mystery in the interdependence, God granting no mercy to Israel without the Gentiles and none to the Gentiles without Israel.[50] That is the best answer available and it still presupposes the reversal it was offered to avoid, since interdependence in this sense means the hardening ends when the ingathering completes. Fourth, on the remnant reading the doxology of 11:33–36 has nothing to be about. Himes puts it sharply: verse 26 would be a tautology in which nothing has changed since Paul began his agony at 9:1.[51] The apostle who wished himself accursed for his kinsmen does not break into praise because the status quo will hold.

Merkle’s appeal to 1 Thessalonians 2:16, that wrath has come upon them εἰς τέλος, should be answered rather than ignored.[52] The phrase more plausibly means fully, or at last; and if it carries a temporal terminus, the judgment of 70 supplies one. Building a doctrine of Israel’s permanent status out of a polemical aside, against the settled argument of three chapters written to answer that very question, inverts the order of evidence.

There is neither Jew nor Greek. Galatians 3:28 and Romans 10:12 speak of access, guilt, and the gift of the Spirit, where distinction is abolished absolutely. Blaising’s answer is the one I would give, and better phrased than I could manage it: soteriological equality does not lead to androgyny.[53] Men and women are saved identically and do not thereby become indistinguishable. Ephesians 2:14 tears down a wall of enmity; it does not dissolve ethnicity, and the apostle who wrote it went on writing about his kinsmen according to the flesh.

This amounts to a second track of salvation. It does not, and the danger is real enough to name. Post-Holocaust two-covenant theology proposes that Jews stand in covenant with God through Torah while Gentiles come through Christ, and draws the conclusion that evangelizing Jews is a violation rather than a kindness.[54] Blaising’s refutation is decisive: both Testaments know one covenantal line running from Abraham, both are exclusive of rival religions while inclusive of all peoples, and to relate Israel to God apart from Christ repudiates the New Testament outright.[55] The nation will be saved the way everyone is saved, by calling on the name of the Lord, and the only difference the future holds is that a great many will do it at once. Gromacki ties the two securities together: the believer’s perseverance and Israel’s restoration rest on the same divine constancy, and to deny one is to deny the other.[56]

This is dispensationalism wearing a different hat. Systems are identified by their premises rather than their conclusions. I do not hold the Israel-church distinction as a controlling axiom, I do not hold a heavenly destiny for the church against an earthly one for the nation, I do not treat consistent literalism as a hermeneutic so much as a slogan that hides where the work is being done, and I hold one people of God under one new covenant in one new creation. Cranfield, Moo, Schreiner, Dunn, and Bruce all read Romans 11 as teaching a future for ethnic Israel, and not one of them is a dispensationalist.[57] The exegesis is not the property of a system.

The political question. Blaising brackets it at the opening of his address, and the bracket is worth keeping: whether the descendants of Jacob have a theological future is a different question from what anyone thinks of a modern state or of any policy it adopts.[58] House is right that the survival of the state founded in 1948 is remarkable, and it does not follow that any present arrangement fulfills anything.[59] A conviction about Israel’s future licenses no political program, and Christians who share the conviction will differ about the politics. What it forbids is contempt. Stallard’s conclusion is the one the church has needed for eighteen centuries and mostly refused: there is no place among Bible-believing Christians for anti-Semitic attitudes or actions.[60] Structural supersessionism did not cause Christendom’s treatment of the Jews, but it removed the theological restraint that might have checked it.

VIII. What Changes

Blaising closes his address by asking what a non-supersessionist theology would look like across the loci, and the answer is that more moves than one expects. The doctrine of God gains a specific fidelity, the God of Israel abounding in lovingkindness and truth, who can be relied on to keep his word. Anthropology loses the myth of an undifferentiated humanity. Christology recovers which Jew Jesus is, and not merely that he was one. Ecclesiology becomes a table fellowship of Jewish and Gentile believers anticipating a kingdom, rather than a Gentile institution that replaced a nation. Eschatology becomes new creation instead of a timeless vision of God enjoyed by disembodied souls, since a future for Israel requires a world with land and cities and fruitfulness in it.[61]

That last one is where the argument finally rests. A future for the nation cannot be fitted into a spiritual-vision eschatology; there is nowhere to put it. Once the eschaton is a renewed creation with resurrected people in it, differentiated as they were made, Israel among the nations stops being an embarrassment to be allegorized and becomes the shape the promise always had. Paul saw the enmity and the love in one glance and wrote them into one sentence. Everything above is an attempt to keep both halves of that sentence in the present tense, where he put them.

[1]Matt Waymeyer, “The Dual Status of Israel in Romans 11:28,” The Master’s Seminary Journal 16, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 57–71.

[2]Craig A. Blaising, “The Future of Israel as a Theological Question,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 44, no. 3 (September 2001): 435.

[3]Ibid., 436, summarizing R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 12–56.

[4]Michael J. Vlach, “Has the Church Replaced Israel in God’s Plan? A Historical and Theological Survey of Replacement Theology,” Conservative Theological Journal 4, no. 11 (April 2000): 7–8. Vlach follows Peter Richardson in locating the first explicit identification in the Dialogue with Trypho.

[5]Thomas Ice, quoted in Vlach, “Has the Church Replaced Israel,” 6.

[6]Bruce K. Waltke, “Kingdom Promises as Spiritual,” quoted in Waymeyer, “Dual Status,” 57–58. Herman Ridderbos supplies the same judgment in a harsher image, the empty shell from which the pearl has been removed (ibid., 57).

[7]Scripture citations follow the Legacy Standard Bible unless otherwise noted.

[8]Waymeyer, “Dual Status,” 61–62.

[9]Ibid., 63 n. 17, cataloguing every second- and third-person form in 11:11–32.

[10]Ibid., 65–66.

[11]Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 732, quoted in Waymeyer, “Dual Status,” 70.

[12]Waymeyer, “Dual Status,” 71.

[13]Jim R. Sibley, “Has the Church Put Israel on the Shelf? The Evidence from Romans 11:15,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 58, no. 3 (September 2015): 571–72.

[14]Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, quoted in Sibley, “Israel on the Shelf,” 573.

[15]Darrell L. Bock, quoted in Sibley, “Israel on the Shelf,” 571.

[16]Stanley D. Toussaint, “The Church and Israel,” Conservative Theological Journal 2, no. 7 (December 1998): 350, citing Charles C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism Today.

[17]Toussaint, “Church and Israel,” 350.

[18]Lewis Sperry Chafer, quoted in Toussaint, “Church and Israel,” 351.

[19]Craig A. Blaising, quoted in Toussaint, “Church and Israel,” 352.

[20]David E. Olander, “The Complete Distinction of Israel and the Church,” Journal of Dispensational Theology 25, no. 71 (Autumn 2021): 177–78.

[21]Ibid., 178.

[22]Charles C. Ryrie, quoted in Joseph Parle, “Evaluation of Perspectives on Israel and the Church: 4 Views,” Journal of Ministry and Theology 20, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 49–50.

[23]Parle, “Evaluation,” 51–52, reproducing a chart by Mike Stallard.

[24]Arnold Fruchtenbaum, quoted in Cyndi Scarborough, “Israel: The Chosen Nation of God,” Christian Apologetics Journal 11, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 86.

[25]Andreas J. Köstenberger, “The Identity of the ΙΣΡΑΗΛ ΤΟΥ ΘΕΟΥ (Israel of God) in Galatians 6:16,” Faith and Mission 19, no. 1 (Fall 2001): 4.

[26]Christopher W. Cowan, “Context Is Everything: ‘The Israel of God’ in Galatians 6:16,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 14, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 79.

[27]Jonathan R. Pratt, “The ‘Israel of God’ in Galatians 6:16,” Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 23 (2018): 59.

[28]Ernest de Witt Burton, summarized in Cowan, “Context Is Everything,” 79–80.

[29]Scarborough, “Israel: The Chosen Nation,” 86–87, borrowing the category from Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart.

[30]Pratt, “Israel of God,” 62–63, citing Bachmann on the Galatian churches’ Jewish origins.

[31]John Piper, The Justification of God, 27, and Thomas R. Schreiner, Romans, 627, both quoted in Waymeyer, “Dual Status,” 69 n. 47. For Cranfield’s warning see C. E. B. Cranfield, Romans, 2:448, quoted in Paul A. Himes, “Israel and Her Vocation: The Fourth Stage of Romans 11,” Bibliotheca Sacra 176, no. 701 (January–March 2019): 47–48.

[32]Blaising, “Future of Israel,” 445.

[33]Ibid., 445–46.

[34]Michael G. Vanlaningham, “An Evaluation of N. T. Wright’s View of Israel in Romans 11,” Bibliotheca Sacra 170, no. 678 (April–June 2013): 180–81.

[35]Robert L. Saucy, summarized in Vanlaningham, “Evaluation of N. T. Wright’s View,” 181.

[36]Himes, “Israel and Her Vocation,” 35–36.

[37]Michael J. Vlach, quoted in Himes, “Israel and Her Vocation,” 36.

[38]Himes, “Israel and Her Vocation,” 41–42, drawing on Lionel J. Windsor, Paul and the Vocation of Israel.

[39]Moo’s three arguments are stated and answered in ibid., 43–44.

[40]Ibid., 45–47, following Robert L. Saucy, The Case for Progressive Dispensationalism, 259, 261.

[41]Ibid., 48 and 48 n. 58.

[42]Benjamin L. Merkle, “Romans 11 and the Future of Ethnic Israel,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 43, no. 4 (December 2000): 720 n. 48. The note lists 9:4, 6, 27, 31; 10:19, 21; 11:1, 2, 7, 25, and cites Moo’s judgment that calling the church “Israel” in this context would have fed the very Gentile arrogance Paul was writing to check.

[43]Merkle, “Romans 11,” 713, following O. Palmer Robertson.

[44]Ibid., 713–14.

[45]Ibid., 715–16.

[46]Charles M. Horne, “The Meaning of the Phrase ‘And Thus All Israel Will Be Saved’ (Romans 11:26),” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 21, no. 4 (December 1978): 333, quoted in Merkle, “Romans 11,” 712.

[47]Merkle, “Romans 11,” 716–17, 722.

[48]Steve Lewis, “‘Some’ vs. ‘All’—The Doctrine of the Remnant and the Salvation of Israel in Romans 9–11,” Conservative Theological Journal 9, no. 26 (March 2005): 9–10; David Q. Santos, “Israel and Her Future: An Exegesis of Romans 11:19–24,” Journal of Dispensational Theology 19, no. 56 (Spring 2015): 69–71.

[49]John Murray and Michael G. Vanlaningham, cited in Merkle, “Romans 11,” 719. The fuller argument is in Michael G. Vanlaningham, “Romans 11:25–27 and the Future of Israel in Paul’s Thought,” The Master’s Seminary Journal 3, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 141–43.

[50]Herman Ridderbos, quoted in Merkle, “Romans 11,” 720.

[51]Himes, “Israel and Her Vocation,” 40.

[52]Merkle, “Romans 11,” 717–18.

[53]Blaising, “Future of Israel,” 448.

[54]John J. Johnson, “A New Testament Understanding of the Jewish Rejection of Jesus: Four Theologians on the Salvation of Israel,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 43, no. 2 (June 2000): 229–30.

[55]Blaising, “Future of Israel,” 441–42.

[56]Robert G. Gromacki, “Israel: Her Past, Present, and Future in Romans 9–11,” Journal of Ministry and Theology 18, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 48.

[57]Waymeyer, “Dual Status,” 60 n. 11, listing Bruce, Cranfield, Moo, Morris, Dunn, Schreiner, Sanday and Headlam, Hodge, and Mounce among proponents of the national reading.

[58]Blaising, “Future of Israel,” 435.

[59]H. Wayne House, “The Future of National Israel,” Bibliotheca Sacra 166, no. 664 (October–December 2009): 463–64.

[60]Michael D. Stallard, “Why the World Hates the Jews,” Journal of Dispensational Theology 23, no. 67 (Autumn 2019): 128.

[61]Blaising, “Future of Israel,” 443–50.