Supersessionism [also known as “replacement theology” – ed.] is deeply rooted in Christian thinking and tradition. This is the notion that because the Jewish people “rejected Christ” God rejected them as His chosen people and replaced Israel with the Church in His redemptive purposes in the earth. As the “New Israel” Christians supersede Jews as God’s elect, covenant people.
This widely held view is not found in the New Testament itself but is an interpretive paradigm imposed on Scripture by Church leaders at least since the time of Justin Martyr and Augustine (2nd-4th centuries). The New Testament in fact is silent about supersessionism, with the salient exception of Romans 9-11, where St. Paul chastens boastful Gentiles for thinking that God has rejected Israel.
What about Israel’s stumbling over the Messiah?
Notwithstanding Israel’s stumbling over the Messiah, the Jewish Apostle to the Roman world assures his readers that God’s covenant remains irrevocable – i.e., not contingent upon repentance. Though they may be fickle, God remains faithful to His sovereign election and covenant commitments to the Jewish people as a nation. To assert otherwise is to impugn the integrity and discredit the character of the God of Israel who abounds in hesed (steadfast love and covenant faithfulness).
Israel is the Jewish people
Fortunately not all Christians through the centuries have held to a “replacement” theological worldview. For them, when the New Testament speaks of “Israel” it refers to the Jewish people as a nation and not the Church as the “New Israel”. Unlike in the Patristic tradition, Israel is more than mere preparation for the Gospel or a prefigurement of the Church.
Sovereign election
A nonsupersessionist view takes seriously the Scriptures that speak of God’s love for Abraham’s progeny, of His sovereign and unconditional election of corporate Israel, of His irrevocable covenant with the Jewish people as a people, and the attendant promises to them as a nation that He continues to keep, even unto the Last Days. In this view, a blessing yet awaits all nations through a spiritually renewed national Israel, the apple of the Lord’s eye.
Such a “pro-Zion” stance, by the way, does not require a Dispensational reading of Scripture, which many anti-Zionists delight in denigrating. (In fact the history of “Christian Zionism” well predates the 19th-century development of Dispensationalism.) Nor is a prophecy-driven biblical paradigm (so popular in recent generations) a sine qua non for standing with Israel.
God’s irresistible love
In fact there is a firmer footing, a more sure foundation on which to stand. The witness of Scripture testifies to it: God’s immutable and irresistible love of the Jewish people. Notwithstanding their (mysteriously ordained) opposition to the Gospel, Israel remains “beloved for the sake of the Patriarchs” (Romans 11:28). Indeed the covenant faithfulness of the Fathers – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – is the very root into which Gentile believers in the “Righteous Branch” (Jeremiah 33:15) are engrafted, and Israel’s spiritual legacy is the “fatness of the olive tree” that is meant to nurture us (Romans 11:17).
The Jewish people are important to Christians, therefore, not because of their projected place in some future biblical dispensation, nor as a prophetic timepiece for an end-time apocalypse. The irreducible truth is this: they are important because of their place in the Father’s heart.
Do not idealize the Jews
What shall we say then? If God be for Israel shall we oppose Him? In view of the Almighty’s great love and unbounded mercies, renewed each morning, surely Christians should at the very least stand with and pray for the Jewish people. This may be an anguished prayer at times, as it was for the Apostle Paul. But our concerns, like his, should spring from an abiding affection and unconditional affirmation of Israel’s irrevocable covenant, involving Scriptures, Land and Peoplehood. This is not to idealize Jews or exempt the modern State of Israel from biblical standards of justice and righteousness. Nor is it to assay the place in the world to come of any particular individual, whether Jew or non-Jew. But it is to remind us as followers of Jesus of Nazareth that we are perpetual debtors to Israel – for our Messiah, our Scriptures, even our God!
Sure foundation
Christian history, sadly, attests to the fact that when the universal Christ is removed from the Jewish matrix of his incarnate existence and the historical particularity of God’s irrevocable covenant with the Jewish nation, the results are supersessionism, an adversarial relationship with Judaism, and even anti-Semitism toward Jews. Surely the time has come to move beyond this history of contempt and humbly and gratefully acknowledge the indissoluble bond we Christians share with the Jewish people. To do so is to stand on the sure foundation of the love of God.
© 2009 Dwight A. Pryor and The Center for Judaic-Christian Studies.
All rights reserved.
Tags: Replacement theology
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Everyone of us is a iSRAEL SPIRITUALLY SPEAKING. God picks one nation to teach us that God is LOVE. The ancient Israelites rebelled against God. Yet God forgave them and promised to gather them back to their promised land. In the same way, we as individuals have in our past rebelled against God’s teachings, yet He is gracious and merciful to us. God gives each and everyone of us a second chance. Like the Jews returning to their promised land, we become God’s children in the spiritual sense.
It was God’s Divine Plan to have His Only Son die for the sins of the world and He chose His Own people the Jews to facilitate that Plan. Christians crucify Jesus daily by their sins and not supporting His children Israel as God instructs them to do.
God purposely blinded His people so the Gospel can come to the Gentiles…after all, Jesus said, “Salvation is of the Jews!!” If this was not the case, all Gentiles would still be pagans today because the Jews would keep their religion and not share it.
I’m the way, the truth and the life nobody comes to the Father than through me.Jew or no Jew, if you don’t accept Jesus, it’s payback time.
As a jewish believer in Yeshua, I do not believe in replacement theology, although I am not really sure exactly what is means that God’s calling is irrevocable.The writer says God’s covenant with the Jews is not dependent on repentance…I am sure that is not right. The epistle to the Hebrews clearly states there is a NEW covenant…and Romans 11 goes on to say that the Jews/we will be grafted back in to the olive tree if we believe…I don’t think there is a different standard for jews…
I think it is a problem if Jews are allowed to think they do not need to repent…
Repentance is necessary for the Jews as well as for all who seek salvation in the name of Yahushua. Repentance and baptism. This is what John the Baptist preached and Yahushua, although needing no repentance, was baptized in the Jordan. A full immersion to signify death to the old self and rising to a new life. The Jews, of course, fully rejected their Messiah at the stoning of Stephen in AD 34. The Gospel was then preached to the Gentiles. The thing is Yahuwah does not forget His people, His children. Even if a mother forgets her child, Yahuwah never will. The time is upon us that all Jews will accept Yahushua, the Son of the living God, and be what their were meant to be: a light for the darkness of this world. As Paul warns, the Gentiles better not be so proud as to think they are above the Jews. They are a wild olive grafted onto the pure olive tree. Yahuwah can cut them off just as He did the Jews. Yahushua, when he walked the earth, told the Jews of His time not to think they saved just because they had Abraham for their father. Yahuwah can raise Jews from the stones on the ground. The bottom line is all must repent and be baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Spirit of them both.