A Recommended Article

Namely, Christopher Zoccali's "'And So All Israel Will be Saved': Competing Interpretations of Romans 11.26 in Pauline Scholarship." JSNT 30, no. 3 (2008): 289–318.

It presents a strong, lucidly argued and extremely well conceived case that the 'all Israel' in Romans 11:26 refers to the total elect from the nation. It may well have me convinced, actually.

I decided to drop Wright's 'ecclesiological' approach because I couldn't believe 'Israel' was meant to be read in light of redefinitions in previous chapters (Rom. 2, 9 etc.), as Wright urges. Instead, the context of Romans 11 seemed to make clear 'Israel' meant ethnic Israel in this case. I thus adopted the most popular scholarly approach to this question, that the salvation of 'all Israel' indicates an eschatological miracle (though I was unsure whether 'all Israel' was to be taken diachronically or synchronically). This approach has many supporters, e.g. Bruce, Cranfield, Käsemann, Sanders, Dunn, Hofius, Barrett, Moo, Stuhlacher, Esler, Witherington etc. (cf. Zoccali, p. 290 n.2 for more).

However, I couldn't shake the feeling that the 'eschatological miracle' answer raised more problems that it solved, and that it was asking the wrong sort of questions necessary to understand Paul. But I didn't want to allow a wider context of Paul's argument to blind me to the content of specific passages, to I took a deep breath, signed my name to 'eschatological miracle' reading, and hoped things would make sense later.

They didn't. So I was thrilled by Zoccali's lucid argument, and it makes sense of almost everything associated with the passage. Of course, it stumbles over the 'all' in Romans 11:26 a little, which consequently gives me pause for thought still, but it does not make me stumble so as to fall.