A grafted-in branch has no reason to look down on the branches on which it has become dependent.
That is the pastoral force with which Brakel reads Romans 11.
The tree stays one
Brakel sees the olive tree as an image of the covenant community that is bound to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Gentiles are not planted in a second, competing tree. They are grafted in as wild branches.
That is why he stresses Paul's warning: "Thou bearest not the root, but the root thee." The movement of grace gives the Gentile no new superiority. It makes him a receiver.
Natural branches
The broken-off Jewish branches are in Romans 11 still called "natural" branches. That is important for Brakel. Their unbelief is real and serious; they are broken off. But their relation to the tree is not rewritten as if they had never been natural branches.
Paul's argument goes further: God is able to graft them again into their own olive tree. Brakel reads that as a future expectation for the Jewish nation.
Grace breaks pride
The doctrine of Israel is here at once a doctrine of the church. If we think that our place rests on something we carry ourselves, Paul turns the image around. We do not carry the root.
That fits strikingly with Brakel's broader theology of grace. The confederate lives not by self-preservation but by a received promise. That is why boasting against the broken-off branches is an inner contradiction: one exalts oneself precisely on the ground of grace.
The question of the root
What or who precisely is meant by "root" can be discussed further exegetically: the patriarchal promises, Abraham, or the bearing ground of salvation in God's promise. For Brakel's argument it is above all important that the Gentile Christian is not the historical starting point.
"All Israel"
Then comes the best-known sentence: "And so all Israel shall be saved." Brakel understands this as national conversion. But he does not mean by it that every individual Jew without faith is saved. That distinction stands central in the next article.