The Great Tradition
THE GREAT TRADITION
ROMANS 11:22-24
Paul continues his incisive message to the Gentiles.
Paul has felt deeply constrained to frame a warning to the Gentile Christians. The Jews, throughout the world, had many enemies. Thirty years before Christ was born, Horace, the Roman poet and satirist, had a word of contempt for them. The book of Esther tells of a threatened pogrom. Alexandria was bitterly divided between Jews and Gentiles. There was a real danger, now that Jewry had put its Messiah to death, that Christians would be tempted to channel society’s dislike of the dispersed race into its own form of hostility and contempt.
Look then, Paul says, at both the kindness and severity of God. The second word picks up the metaphor of 11:17—the broken off branches. It is a word found nowhere else in the New Testament, though, in a couple of contexts, secular Greek writers similarly use it in contrast with “kindness.” It is apotomia, which basically means “cutting off.” Compare Proverbs 29:1 where the metaphor is as violent: “will suddenly be broken …”
How complete is the coverage of the Bible! Paul warned the Gentiles out of his love and agony of mind for his own erring race. And if the Gentiles had remembered, the antisemitism which has too often in history found a root in organized Christianity would have been cut at the root. Hatred for Jews, which marred the medieval church, would have been replaced by Paul’s own yearning and pity, with incalculable results in Jewish evangelism.
There is another aspect of this theme as relevant to the problems of today. The debt of Christianity to the Judaism from which it sprang is part of the figure of the olive tree and the branches, both natural and ingrafted. Nowhere in the New Testament is the Old Testament dismissed as irrelevant or disregarded. It is quoted innumerable times, and it is only a loose attitude towards the authority of the documents of Christianity itself which is prepared to diminish the authority of the Jewish Scriptures. The Testaments go together and Judaism cannot but be regarded by Christians as the seed-bed of their own faith. No book in the New Testament better illustrates this than the letter to the Romans.