I have heard recently in a David Bentley Hart discussion that Romans 9:22 through 24 are intended to be read as a wrong argument that Paul then disproves. This seems to be an interesting way to talk about it without having to encourage Jeremiah 18. But is this a satisfying reading? Yeah, and I should say that in general, people have tried this strategy with Paul in a number of locations in his corpus.
So the basic strategy for those who may not be familiar with it is you take a section that is difficult to to believe or maybe not in line with your system. And you put it in quotes and you attribute that section to kind of a foreign voice that Paul is rebutting.
And so it's this tactic where you're creating an interlocutor and an interlocutor for those who remember in the course is this sparring partner that you have in a letter where you've created a figure who's articulating a position and then you're then rebutting that position. And so in this discipline, one of the things that we have to ask then is it valid to put quotes around any block of text that we don't like or that we may not like. And I'll tell you people have done that to ridiculous extremes with Paul.
So anything controversial about women has often been, oh, that must be somebody that Paul is rebutting and we don't agree with any of that. And to the point where there are certain positions and pieces that I've read where people will argue for these huge blocks. I mean, almost half chapters or full chapters of text and say, " Oh, that's not Paul, that's all in quotes and that's some mysterious interlocutor that we're rebutting.
" But the problem is, is that, you know, you've got to stand on good ground in order to do that because it's a bold move. It's a daring move to claim that we know who the interlocutor is when it's not especially fitting the normal conventions of what we see in places like Romans. And one of the best places to know if we're on good ground is simply to go to the early church and ask, did they read an interlocutor into it? Did that follow the normal course of how they could tell a different voice in that?
And when you look at people like John Chrysostom and Origen and others, they do not read an interlocutor. And I would also say that I actually like the Jeremiah passage. I think the Jeremiah passage is our friend and glimpse to it. Yeah. And so this is why, so for example, James White, who's a very strong Calvinist. He doesn't like that and he doesn't believe that in Romans 9, there's an allusion to that Jeremiah passage. Really? Yeah.
And so here's a very strong Calvinist who debates on behalf of Calvinism who says no, no, no, don't want that. And I think there's a couple of reasons why we want to affirm that. I mean, one is it seems like it's obvious. But if you go back and actually read that passage in Jeremiah, you'll see that he's talking about the nation of Judah, Judah slash Israel. And he's saying to them that if you relent, if you change, then you can be refashioned. And so there's a conditionality in it.
And there's a corporate aspect to it. Yeah. And both of those elements are vital to understand Romans 9 accurately. So those who remember from the course, one of the main thesis that we made in it was that Jacob I've loved, Esau I've hated is not about individual Jacob or individual Esau. They support each other's, yeah, go ahead. Right, it's about the nation of Israel and the nation of Edom. Yeah And so we generally take Romans 9 as being a book about these larger corporate entities.
And that's exactly what the allusion from Jeremiah supports. And so, hey, we like that. And then, as I said, this conditionality that's clearly there if you look up that passage in Jeremiah. It makes sense why a Calvinist would want that to not be there. Exactly. It's very clear that there's some conditional aspects to God's decision making, how he's going to treat. In that case, a nation. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
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