A. Chadwick Thornhill. The Chosen People: Election, Paul and Second Temple Judaism. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2015. See here to purchase the book.
In the New Testament, there is talk about election and God choosing
people before the foundation of the world. Romans 9 and Ephesians 1:4
come to mind. For many Calvinists, these passages teach that God,
before creating the world, predestined the specific individuals who
would be saved and damned. A. Chadwick Thornhill, a scholar and
professor of apologetics and biblical studies at Liberty University,
disagrees with such interpretations.
For Thornhill, in order to understand what Paul means by election,
one should know how Second Temple Judaism conceptualized it. Thornhill
investigates pseudepigraphical literature, deuterocanonical literature,
and the Dead Sea Scrolls to shed light on that subject. What he finds
is that, in much of the Second Temple Jewish literature that he surveys
and explores, God elected Israel, but the true Israelites are those who
are faithful and obedient to God; Israelites could disqualify themselves
from their elect-status by not adhering to the stipulations of the
covenant.
This differs from Calvinist views of election in at least two ways.
First, in the Second Temple Jewish literature that Thornhill surveys,
God elected a group, Israel, rather than specific individuals unto
salvation. (Thornhill acknowledges, however, that Second Temple
literature may refer to an individual as elect to highlight his
righteousness; Thornhill also states that Second Temple Judaism often
conceived of election in terms of the mission of Israel or a person
within Israel, not necessarily in terms of salvation in an afterlife.)
Similarly, according to Thornhill, Paul in Ephesians 1:4 is saying that
God chose the church before the foundation of the world. For Thornhill,
Paul’s point there is not that God chose before the foundation of the
world the specific individuals who would be saved, but rather that God
was choosing the church, and those who chose to become part of the
church would be saved. Second, much of the Second Temple Jewish
literature that Thornhill surveys acknowledges free will: an Israelite
can remain a part of God’s elect people Israel by obeying God, and can
disqualify oneself from the elect through disobedience. That differs
from certain Calvinist views: that being part of the elect is God’s
choice and not the choice of the individual; that a person is unable to
come to God solely through free-will because he or she has a sinful
nature; and that a person God elects will always be elect and cannot
fall away from election.
Thornhill looks at Pauline passages that pertain to election (and he
believes that the deutero-Pauline letters in the New Testament are
actually Pauline), and his conclusion is that many Calvinists are
misinterpreting those passages. Romans 9 says that God will have mercy
on whom God will have mercy, presents God as choosing Jacob rather than
Esau before they did anything good or bad, and refers to God hardening
Pharaoh’s heart. Understandably, many Calvinists maintain that Romans 9
supports their position: that God by grace chose some individuals to be
saved before they were even born, while rejecting others, and that God
hardened some people for God’s purposes and glory, without any injustice
on God’s part.
Thornhill, however, interprets Romans 9 differently. For Thornhill,
Romans 9 is about Jews and Gentiles within God’s people, the church.
According to Thornhill, Paul held that belief in Christ was what made a
person (Jew or Gentile) a part of God’s people, in contrast to Jews who
believed that the criterion was Jewish adherence to the Mosaic law, and
who placed Gentiles outside of the covenant. That meant that, for Paul,
non-believing Jews were (at least temporarily) not a part of God’s
people, whereas believing Gentiles were. For Thornhill, Paul in Romans 9
is attempting to justify this controversial position. Paul in Romans 9
says that physical descent from Israel does not make one a part of
Israel, which overlaps with what much of Second Temple Judaism
affirmed. (Second Temple Judaism would say that physical descent by
itself did not make an Israelite a part of Israel, for the Israelite had
to fulfill the covenantal requirements.) Paul’s point is that the
non-believing Jews are not entitled to be called Israelites, whereas
Gentiles, who do fulfill God’s requirements, can be part of God’s
people. Thornhill interprets the parts in Romans 9 about God having
mercy on whom God will have mercy, and God being able to do what God
wants as a potter with the clay, as a justification of God’s decision to
have mercy on the Gentiles and to include them in God’s people.
Regarding the theme of hardening in Romans 9, Thornhill interprets that
in light of Second Temple Jewish literature, some of which presents
God’s hardening of a person’s heart as God’s response to a person’s
defiant sinfulness. For Thornhill, Paul’s view in Romans 9-11 is not
that God decided to harden most Jews against believing in Jesus, as if
God caused their unbelief; rather, the hardening was a response to their
unbelief in Jesus, and the hardening could be reversed once they
decided to believe.
There are many assets to this book. First of all, from a scholarly
perspective, Thornhill’s project is understandable, logical, and even
necessary. If one is to understand Paul’s view of election, should one
not investigate how Second Temple Judaism conceptualized it? Second
Temple Judaism formed part of (or at least influenced) Paul’s historical
context, after all. Plus, Paul himself refers to the election of
Israel in Romans 11:28, which may indicate that the election of Israel
plays some role in Paul’s understanding of election, making Second
Temple Judaism’s view on the election of Israel relevant to Paul’s
view. Second, Thornhill tries to interpret Romans 9 in light of his
conclusions about Second Temple Judaism, and that may benefit those who
are interested in a fresh look at Romans 9, or who at least want to
explore other views than what Calvinists have offered. Thornhill raises
interesting considerations: I think of his point that Romans 9:21-23
does not necessarily mean that God made people to receive his wrath and
precluded them from ever receiving God’s mercy, for Paul says in
Ephesians 2:3-4 that God had mercy on people who were, by nature,
children of wrath. Third, while many Calvinists focus on how Romans 9
may relate to individual election unto salvation, Thornhill does well to
concentrate on the actual subject of Romans 9-11: Jews and Gentiles in
the people of God. Fourth, I found Thornhill’s summary of Paul’s Gospel
interesting, albeit not particularly comforting. Thornhill states on
page 215 that “God pronounces right-standing, grounded in the
faithfulness of Jesus (see Rom 3), over those in Christ who keep the law
by the empowerment of the Spirit.” On the one hand, that sounds
somewhat like salvation by works, and it may not comfort those who look
at their lives and feel that they fall short of God’s standards. On the
other hand, Paul in Romans 8:1 affirms that there is no condemnation
for those who walk in the Spirit and not after the flesh, so Thornhill
is not getting his view of Paul’s soteriology from nowhere.
I have some critiques of the book. First of all, I did not find
Thornhill’s interpretation of Romans 9 to be ultimately convincing.
Paul in Romans 9 does seem to suggest that God unilaterally hardens some
people, for Paul addresses the question of how, assuming this is the
case, God could find fault with anyone, for who could resist God’s
will. That question would only make sense if Paul were saying that God
unilaterally hardens people: Paul realizes that what he is saying sounds
unfair, as Calvinism looks unfair to a lot of people. I do not
conclude from this that God chooses people to be damned and hardens them
so that they cannot believe and thus get a one-way ticket to hell,
however, for I place Romans 9 in the context of Romans 9-11: God is
hardening many Jewish people temporarily, but the hardening will go away
once the fullness of Gentiles has entered God’s people; then, all
Israel will be saved.
Second, Thornhill’s evaluation of Second Temple Judaism struck me as
one-sided. Thornhill seems to portray Second Temple Judaism as
embracing libertarian free-will, but there are elements of Second Temple
Judaism that believe that God needs to transform a person’s heart for
the person to yield to God. Thornhill is aware of scholarship about
this, for he refers to it (i.e., Preston Sprinkle’s Paul and Judaism Revisited: A Study of Divine and Human Agency in Salvation; Jason Maston’s Divine and Human Agency in Second Temple Judaism and Paul),
but he does not really wrestle with it. The reason this is significant
is that it could mean that Paul believing that God enabled some people
to believe (as Calvinists say) would not historically be an implausible
position for him to take, against the backdrop of Second Temple
Judaism. This is not to suggest that belief in divine grace or
transformation of the heart is only consistent with Calvinism; Kyle
Wells, after all, says that, for Philo of Alexandria (first century
C.E.), God’s transformation of the heart occurs in response to a person
desiring such transformation and turning to God, so Philo believed in
free will and God transforming the heart. I am suggesting, however,
that Thornhill should have wrestled more with divine grace and
transformation of the heart, since they are concepts in Second Temple
Judaism that are relevant to Calvinist interpretations of Paul.
Thornhill does wrestle with passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls that
some scholars interpret as deterministic, and readers can form their own
judgments about whether they find Thornhill’s arguments convincing.
Thornhill concludes that they are not deterministic, that they do not
relate to God deciding beforehand who would be righteous and who would
be wicked. Thornhill should have interacted in more detail, however,
with Josephus’ statements about the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the
Essenes on the issue of determinism (Jewish Wars 2:162-164; Antiquities
13:171-173). Whether Josephus is correct in his characterization of the
groups’ beliefs, he does show that determinism was on the radar of a
first-century Jew, namely, himself. That being the case, would Paul
embracing determinism be so unusual, against the backdrop of Second
Temple Judaism? (By the way, Philo and Josephus rarely appear in this
book, and they should be considered more, since they were first century
C.E. Jewish thinkers.)
I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review.