Allen: Liberating Romans...

09/16/25 09:01 PM Filed in: Christianity | Calvinism
[Updated 10/10/25]

LiberatingRomans
In "Liberating Romans From Reformed Captivity", Dr. Allen presents his thesis that "the theological framework that Calvin and his Reformed successors employed owes much to Augustine, who himself imposed a foreign philosophical lens upon Scripture. Though the Reformers believed they were recovering biblical truth, scholasticism effectively codified and absolutized Augustinian theology."1

Romans 9-11, particularly chapter 9, is where Calvinists and Arminians find their largest areas of disagreement. We could begin by comparing interpretations, but that is too late. The differences between the two sides exists much earlier in Scripture - almost at the beginning. The differentiation into Calvinist, Arminian, and Dispensationalist camps has its roots in how each group views God's promise to Abraham. While there are multiple promises to Abraham (Gal. 3:16), Paul asserts that all of them stem from the singular promise (Gal 3:18) that God ratified with Abraham in Genesis 15:18. For ease of exposition, that promise is stated as follows:


You and your promised children will inherit the promised land.

The differences between the three schools are:
  1. Who the promised children are,
  2. Whether the inheritance is conditional or unconditional, and
  3. What the promised land is.
To the first point, the Calvinist says that the promised children are exemplified by Isaac and Jacob. They stand out for these reasons:
  1. Their births were foretold. Isaac directly in Genesis 17:15-19, and Jacob indirectly in Genesis 17:19.
  2. Their inheritance was foretold before they were born. Isaac in Genesis 17:19 and Jacob in Genesis 25:23.
  3. They were born through divine intervention, both Sara and Rebecca being barren.
  4. They are the only children in the Old Testament with whom God directly established the covenant. Isaac in Genesis 26:2-5 and Jacob in Genesis 28:13-15.
The ultimate example of a promised child is Jesus, for the same reasons:
  1. His birth was foretold, e.g. Genesis 3:15, Micah 5:2, Galatians 3:16, et. al.
  2. His inheritance was foretold in Galatians. 3:16.
  3. He was born through divine intervention, Luke 1:26-34.
To the second point, the Calvinist says that the inheritance is unconditional, because the inheritance was promised to the individual before they were born.

To the third point, the Calvinist observes that the promised land is more than just a piece of real estate in the Middle East. It is the kingdom of heaven on earth.The book of Hebrews is instructive here. It says that neither Abraham, Isaac, nor Jacob received the land they were promised (Hebrews 11:39) but that they will (Hebrews 11:40) and that they and all of the rest of the saints will receive it at the same time (Hebrews 11:40). And Jesus tells us, in Matthew 8:11, that many will "eat with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the kingdom of heaven." This aligns with Paul's statement in Romans 4:13 that the land Abraham was promised was the world/cosmos.

The covenant with Abraham, then, was more than just a covenant of vocation, lineage, or national identity.2 It was a covenant of salvation.

This position comes from reading Genesis, Hebrews, and Matthew under Paul's tutelage in Galatians (Christ being the singular seed) and Romans (Isaac and Jacob being the children of promise). This reading of Scripture makes no appeal to intuition; relies on no philosophical argument, and Augustine is not involved. But the connection to the Calvinist doctrines of "unconditional election", "irresistible grace", and "perseverance of the saints" is obvious. God chose Isaac, not Ishmael; Jacob, not Esau; they will receive the land because God promised that they would (and the world of God cannot fail), and they will believe because that's what the promised children do.

With this reading of the Abrahamic covenant, understanding Paul in Romans 9-11 becomes easier. To be sure, Paul makes following him difficult because he uses one word, "Israel" in different ways: "Israel" and "not Israel", and he also overloads "Israel" to mean "a nation", "physical descendants of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob", "the people of God" (which, for Paul, are the promised children among the Jews and the Gentiles), and even Jesus himself.3

With this understanding of how Paul uses "Israel", in Romans 9 he laments that many of his kinsmen do not believe the gospel and he wants to explain why. Those who do not believe do not believe because they aren't children of the promise. But one does not choose whether one is a child of the promise - that choice is up to God. Is God unjust? "No," says Paul, because God "has mercy on whom He has mercy and compassion on whom He has compassion." The human response to this is, "that's not fair!" but Paul says that God is the judge of what is fair - not man. Note that Paul does not give a philosophical argument as to why this is so. But is has been this way since the garden of Eden for Eve surely thought, "It isn't fair that God would withhold from me that which I see is good to look at, good for eating, and good for acquiring wisdom. A good God wouldn't do that."

Paul then brings in the Gentiles. And Paul's radical insight, received through revelation unknown to mankind until the time of Christ (Ephesians 3:3-6), was that there are promised children among the Gentiles as well as the Jews.

Why is this interpretation of Romans 9 more likely to be correct? There is no appeal to intuition, there is no reliance on philosophy, there is no external hermeneutical principle imposed on Scripture.

Update 10/10/25

There is a simpler way to show that the covenant with Abraham was a covenant of salvation. Consider the question, "when will the promised children inherit the land? Before, or after, Jesus returns?" Hebrews 11:39-40 says it will be after Jesus returns. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have not yet received what was promised, but they will when all of the saints receive it together. Since this is the case, at Jesus' return He will separate the wheat from the chaff. The wicked will not enter the land - only the saved. So the promise to Isaac and Jacob, given to them before they were born, was that they would inherit this land, where the wicked do not dwell, and that this promise was to be upheld by God, who swore by Himself to bring it about.


[1] Post on X.
[2] "This election was not about salvation but about the physical lineage through which God’s plan would unfold. ... this divine choice does not imply a salvific election for individuals, but rather a corporate selection of Israel to fulfill God’s purpose." (p. 92).
[3] Isaiah 49:1-6. For Paul, if zeraߴ in Genesis 15:18 is the collective noun that is singular, then Jesus is the "singular seed" who is collectively Israel.

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