The concept of election and second Isaiah: recent literature

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Winter, 2001 by Joel S. Kaminsky

The Problem of Election in More Recent Scholarship

While most contemporary scholars of the Hebrew Bible have managed to avoid Rowley's explicit supersessionism many actually end up embracing various forms of Enlightenment universalism even more fully than Rowley did and by doing so endorse an implicit supersessionism. I say most because one still finds statements such as the following from a work published in 1983 and still in print today: "This task of uniting `election' with `universal salvation' required the entire length of the Old Testament as a preparatory stage, the struggles of Jesus and the New Testament writers as a firm base for theological expression, and the missionary endeavors of the church for the last two millennia as only partial fulfillment" (Senior: 94). Interestingly, among those who strive to avoid explicit supersessionism even those who appear to be making radically different arguments often flatten the theological landscape of the text and not infrequently reach similar conclusions. While it is not possible to survey the field in an essay of this length, I will briefly comment on what I believe are the two most common contemporary approaches for dealing with the problem of election and try to uncover their underlying logic.

One strategy, represented by Rolf Knierim's theological program, recognizes the anti-Judaic bias in much biblical theology, but sees the root of the problem in biblical particularism itself. Knierim argues that passages "found in both the Old and the New Testaments, that [claim] all humanity is elected into the blessing of God's universal justice and salvation" (Knierim: 135) authorize one to dissolve the Bible's particularistic concept of election. Knierim must be complimented for not simply replacing Jewish exclusivist claims with Christian supersessionist ones that are equally exclusivist, as Rowley ends up doing. Rather he wishes to eliminate all such exclusivism. In this, Knierim is simply carrying out the Enlightenment embrace of universalism to its natural conclusion and by doing so he overcomes a serious flaw in Rowley's work. However, he can only accomplish this feat by giving no voice to the Bible's deep and pervasive particularism. While his goal is to be sensitive to issues of cultural diversity and pluralism, his solution ends up requiring Jews and Christians to give up one of their most cherished and central theological beliefs (see Kaminsky for fuller argumentation).

On the other end of the spectrum, one thinks of a recent essay by Jorge Pixley in which he apparently advocates a new found appreciation for biblical particularism. He sees God's election of the Jewish people as a biblical endorsement of the modern ethic "that the survival of peoples with their own particularities is a human value" and that we must build "societies in which `all can find a place'" (Pixley: 235-36.) While such a view seems to celebrate particularity, it does so only in name and not in substance. Thus Pixley seems to think positively about tampering with cultures which resist modernity, such as ones where "kings have absolute rights" because they might benefit from being liberated from their own intolerable customs (Pixley: 235). Furthermore, as Levenson notes, Pixley is only able to use the biblical idea of chosenness as a support for the continuance of other ethnicities and cultures today, by ignoring one of its most distinctive dimensions: "In short, though the Hebrew Bible conceives of Israel as an ethnic group, its very existence is a standing reproach to ethnicity" (Levenson 2000: 243). This is because Israel owes its importance "to the universal God, who rules over nations, brooks no rivals, and demands submission of everyone" (Levenson 2000: 243). Thus once again while Pixley is to be commended for his sensitivity to issues of cultural diversity, in the end one senses that he cannot tolerate aspects of ancient Israelite or certain less than progressive modern cultures which embrace norms that run counter to the type of universalism that he ultimately endorses.