How Antisemites Hijacked Romans 9:6

Few verses in Paul’s letters get hijacked more often than Romans 9:6: “For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel.”

Replacement theologians love this one. To them, it's the smoking gun — proof that Paul quietly redefined “Israel” to mean the Church. The Jewish people, they argue, forfeited their place; the “New Israel” is now anyone who believes in Yeshua, regardless of bloodline. Case closed.

The most sophisticated version of the argument comes from N.T. Wright, who has spent thousands of pages — most fully in Paul and the Faithfulness of God — insisting that Paul has “redefined” Israel “around the Messiah.” On Wright’s reading, the true Israel is now the Messianic family of Jew and Gentile together, while ethnic Israel, apart from faith, no longer carries the covenantal weight it once did. Wright resists the label “replacement theology,” and to his credit he is more careful than most. But the destination is functionally the same: Israel as a people, in any meaningful covenantal sense, has been absorbed. 

It’s a clean argument. It’s also wrong.

Let me show you why — and to do that, we just need to do something that’s apparently radical in certain theological circles: read the chapter Paul actually wrote.

Start where Paul starts

You cannot understand Romans 9:6 without Romans 9:1-5. And what does Paul say there? He tells us he has “great sorrow and unceasing anguish” in his heart. For whom? For his “kinsmen according to the flesh” — Israel. He is so grieved over their unbelief that he says he could wish himself “accursed and cut off from Messiah” for their sake.

Then he lists what still belongs to them: “the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the Law, the worship, and the promises… the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, is the Messiah.”

Stop and think about that for a second. If Paul believed ethnic Israel had been replaced by the Church: 

• Why is he weeping? 

• Why the anguish? 

• Why list — in the present tense, “to them belong,” not belonged— covenants and promises that supposedly no longer belong to them?

  
  

You don't grieve over a people God has cast off. You grieve over a people God still loves.

What 9:6 Actually Says

Now we are ready for verse 6: “For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel, and not all are children because they are Abraham’s offspring.”

Paul is making a distinction within the Jewish people, not replacing them with someone else. He is saying what every Hebrew prophet said before him: physical descent from Abraham does not automatically make you faithful. Throughout the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), God always preserved a believing remnant inside the larger nation — Elijah’s seven thousand who had not bowed to Baal, Isaiah’s faithful few. Paul is standing squarely in that prophetic tradition.

There is “Israel” — the entire physical nation descended from Jacob. And there is the believing remnant within Israel — Jews who trust the God of their fathers. Both are Israel. The remnant does not replace the rest; it lives inside the rest as a sign of God’s continued faithfulness to His covenant people. In fact, Romans 11 suggests that the faithful remnant intercedes for the unfaithful whole. (see Romans 11:5-6, 16).

Now notice what Paul does not say. He does not say, “And so the Gentiles are now the true Israel.” He does not even hint at it here. That reading has to be smuggled into the text from outside, which is why it was over 100 years before anyone began to preach such a thing. 

Pineapple

If I fly to Hawaii, eat a pineapple, and taste flavors I have never experienced in any pineapple anywhere else, I might turn to my wife and say, “I don't think I have ever had pineapple before!” Of course, I have had pineapple. Plenty of times. Nobody listening would accuse me of lying. They would hear the rhetoric. What I am actually saying is: yes, I have had pineapple, but the pineapple here is so much better that it is as if I have never tasted pineapple in my life.

That is exactly what Paul is doing in Romans 9:6. He is saying that the truest, deepest, most realized sense of belonging to Israel is having a living relationship with the God of Israel through Yeshua. It is a rhetorical move, not a redefinition. Paul is not erasing ethnic Israel; he is emphasizing what covenantal Israel looks like at its fullest.

The trouble is that we tend to flatten the Bible. Taking the biblical narrative literally is good. Treating every single word as literal — and refusing to make room for rhetoric, hyperbole, and literary devices — is not. Everyone uses these tools. Including Yeshua Himself. Do you really think He wants you to poke out your eye? To hate your father and mother? Of course not. That is hyperbole, not instruction. And it is exactly the kind of language Paul is reaching for in Romans 9:6.

Romans 11 slams the door

If there were any lingering doubt, Paul shuts it down two chapters later: “I ask, then, has God rejected His people? By no means!” (Romans 11:1). And then he says it again, just to make sure no one missed it: “God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew” (11:2). This is two chapters after romans 9:6, so either Paul is contradicting himself or those who are using Romans 9:6 to demonize Israel do not understand Paul.

Then comes the olive tree. Gentile believers, Paul says, are wild branches grafted into a cultivated tree whose root is Jewish. The natural branches that were broken off can be — and will be — grafted back in. “And in this way all Israel will be saved” (11:26).

That is not replacement. That is not even within shouting distance of replacement. That is restoration.

Why This is Important Today

This is exactly the point R. Kendall Soulen made so forcefully in The God of Israel and Christian Theology. Soulen showed that even Christian theologies that claim to honor Israel often quietly assume God’s covenant with the Jewish people was merely the prologue to a universal Church that would eventually render it obsolete. He gave that quiet assumption a name — “structural supersessionism” — and argued, rightly, that it cannot survive a serious reading of Paul. The election of Israel, for Soulen, is not a discarded first chapter. It is permanent, irrevocable, and the very framework within which the gospel itself unfolds.

Once you see that, the stakes of Romans 9:6 become obvious.

If Romans 9:6 means the Church has replaced Israel, then the modern State of Israel is a theological accident. The return of millions of Jews to the land, the rebirth of Hebrew as a living language, the regathering Ezekiel and Isaiah described in detail — all of it would be meaningless, or worse, a deception. Some replacement theologians have actually said exactly that. They interpret the promises of the restoration of Israel, spiritually, so the actual restoration of Israel was just a massive coincidence that God somehow didn’t notice happening. 

To be clear: this is not about the theology itself being argued. Theologians have wrestled with Romans 9 for two thousand years. That is what theologians do, and there is nothing wrong with the academic debate. What changed after October 7 is that this verse stopped being a seminary discussion point and became a slogan in the mouths of people who do not study Paul, do not love the Bible, and do not care what Soulen or Wright or anyone else thinks. They are quoting Romans 9:6 — six words from a Jewish apostle weeping over his own people — as proof that God has finally rejected the Jews, and that whatever happens to them now is therefore justified. They are not making a theological argument. They are using a Bible verse, out of context, to baptize their antisemitism. And that is exactly why this is so important today.

But if Paul means what he says — that God still has a people, that the natural branches will be regrafted, that “all Israel will be saved” — then what we are watching unfold today is precisely what the prophets promised. 

• The Jewish people are returning. 

• The land is bearing fruit. 

• A growing remnant of Israel is recognizing Yeshua as Messiah. 

The trajectory is unmistakable to anyone willing to see it.

Romans 9:6 is not the death certificate of the Jewish people. It is a quiet reminder that even in Israel’s deepest unbelief, God has always preserved a remnant — and through that remnant, He is keeping every single promise He ever made, not the least of which is Romans 11:26, “and in this way all Israel should be saved.”

He has not replaced Israel.

He is restoring her.