Will “the children of the kingdom” be cast out, or will “all Israel” be saved?

Neither passage speaks of every Jew without exception, and neither speaks of anyone being saved or lost apart from faith. In Matthew 8 Jesus has just praised a Gentile soldier: “I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel” (8:10). The “children of the kingdom” are those who by birth had every privilege of the kingdom but would not believe. The warning cannot mean that all Jews are lost, because in the same sentence the kingdom’s guests sit “with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob”, and Jesus’ own disciples, who were Jews, were with him.

Romans 11 makes the same distinction. Paul says that even now “there is a remnant according to the election of grace” (11:5), himself among them. Those who were broken off “if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be graffed in” (11:23). When he says “so all Israel shall be saved” (11:26), he quotes the promise that the Deliverer “shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob”, and he names God’s covenant “when I shall take away their sins” (11:27). That salvation comes by Christ, through faith, as it does for Gentiles.

In Jewish usage ‘all Israel’ normally meant the nation as a whole, not every single member of it. The Mishnah says ‘all Israel’ have a share in the world to come, and in the next breath lists those who do not (Sanhedrin 10:1). So Jesus warns that unbelieving Israelites will be shut out, and Paul foresees that Israel as a people will yet turn to Christ and be saved. Both can be true.

A future turning of the nation

Many interpreters, Albert Barnes among them, read Romans 11:26 as a promise that the Jewish people as a whole will turn to Christ in the future, after “the fulness of the Gentiles be come in” (11:25). They do not take it to mean that every individual Jew will be saved.

The whole people of God

John Calvin took ‘Israel’ here to mean the whole people of God, Jews and Gentiles together, as in “the Israel of God” (Galatians 6:16), though with the Jews in the first place. On this view Paul describes the completion of the church.

The elect of Israel through the ages

Others take ‘all Israel’ to be the full number of believing Jews whom God gathers throughout this age, alongside the full number of the Gentiles, rather than a final mass conversion.

Scholars remain divided over what ‘all Israel’ means in Romans 11:26 and when it will happen. A few modern writers have suggested that Israel will be saved by its own covenant, apart from faith in Christ. Most Christian scholars reject this, because Paul ties Israel’s salvation to faith and to the Deliverer’s taking away their sins (11:23, 26-27).