Supersessionism

Or Replacement Theology

In our coexistence over the centuries, Christians have invalidated Judaism by portraying it as inferior to our faith. In many cases, this invalidation was intentional and malicious; we tried to distinguish our faith from Judaism by deriding the religion. We claimed we had replaced Judaism with the development of a better religion and an improved way of faith. We claimed that the Church had replaced or superseded the Jewish people as God’s people. This train of thought harkens to the second century CE with Justin Martyr (Dialogue with Trypho, 119.1-5.), who falsely claimed God rejected Israel as the chosen people, replacing them with the Christian church. This sentiment, and others like it, continued unabated into the twentieth century. One can see such Christian disregard for the Jewish people as a contributing factor to the Holocaust.

Fortunately, we are learning—slowly—a new way forward.

In light of horrific past events such as the Holocaust and more frequent day-to-day interactions with Jews in our religiously diverse world, we see the mistakes of an exclusive faith, a faith that claims to be the true replacement of another religion. Many denominations have issued statements in recent decades, renewing their commitments to Jewish-Christian dialogue, interfaith work, and mutual learning and understanding. Within the larger picture of religious pluralism, Christians have increasingly begun to identify as pluralists.

Documents & Statements

Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations

Christian invalidation of Judaism is often unintentional and unplanned, as it has remained embedded and unexplored in our theologies and liturgies. Although we no longer seek to portray Christianity as a replacement for Judaism, nor do we honestly believe such a notion, we still unknowingly or inadvertently proclaim that message through the ways we talk about Christianity. We admire Judaism, but then turn to proclaim a supersessionist vision of Christianity.

We have participated too often in supersessionism. We share many theological values and ideas with Judaism, but supersessionism goes beyond our commonly held beliefs. Susannah Heschel defines supersessionism as follows:

The appropriation by the New Testament and the early church of Judaism’s central theological teachings, including messiah, eschatology, apocalypticism, election, and Israel, as well as its scriptures, its prophets, and even its God, while denying the continued validity of those teachings and texts within Judaism as an independent path to salvation. (Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and The Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 26.)

This definition emphasizes both how Christianity shares various theological concepts with Judaism—in fact, Heschel uses the stronger language of appropriation—yet denies Judaism the ability to use those same concepts.

This appropriation and denial, while certainly having its origins in the New Testament and early church, continues today. The early church was not the only offender. Christians have adopted many theological themes and Scripture passages without acknowledging their validity and importance in Judaism. The borrowing and adapting of certain teachings are acceptable. Religious reformers continually adapt traditions and create new ones. Furthermore, Judaism and Christianity emerged from the same cultural context.

They are siblings. Supersessionism occurs when one religious tradition, in this case, Christianity, begins to view itself as having replaced another tradition, Judaism. To supersede is to supplant.

To move away from supersessionist thinking, we need to develop reading strategies that align with theological statements such as these:

For centuries Christians claimed that their covenant with God replaced or superseded the Jewish covenant. We renounce this claim. We believe that God does not revoke divine promises. We affirm that God is in covenant with both Jews and Christians. … Our recognition of the abiding validity of Judaism has implications for all aspects of Christian life.
(Mary C. Boys, Seeing Judaism Anew: Christianity’s Sacred Obligation (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005), xiv. This quotation is taken from a larger statement by the Christian Scholars Group on Christian-Jewish Relations.)

Such statements can help us read anew and share our Scriptures. They help us frame discussions of covenant differently and give us the courage to state forthrightly that God is indeed in a covenant with the Jewish people.

God is a promise keeper! Jews are a part of the covenant.

Our newer understandings of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, including the vital notion that Judaism remains a vibrant and living religion, have not yet wholly affected the way we read and interpret biblical texts. The tendency is to think of our spiritual history as developing through Abraham and Sarah, Moses and his sister Miriam, and David straight into the New Testament of Jesus, Paul, and Peter without realizing we share much of that history with contemporary Judaism.

Theological and ethical dangers arise when one selects a piece of sacred literature shared by more than one religious tradition and interprets it through the lens of a single tradition. Christian readings, standing firmly and faithfully within their tradition, may produce helpful interpretations for that tradition while doing no harm to Judaism. However, if the tradition is not diligent, some readings may ignore the presence of Judaism or assume that it is the only tradition reading these particular books. Judaism, as a vibrant tradition, can be a force to help us overcome our parochialism and provincialism.

In the previous chapter, we discussed the unhelpful prophecy–fulfillment paradigm. At this point, we can see how such a paradigm can lead to supersessionism. When Christians view the stories from the Old Testament as issuing a promise that requires the New Testament, especially the words and actions of Jesus, to fulfill the promise, it becomes difficult for the Old Testament to speak to Christians as their authoritative text for the life of the faith community. It assumes the Old Testament is incomplete and needs something else to become whole. It assumes the words of the Old Testament cannot stand alone as a witness to God's actions and ways, when in fact, this canon does stand without the New Testament for our Jewish neighbors.

For example, in a book about preaching the Old Testament, I recently read the following assertion:

“the Old Testament is incomplete without the New, a single redemptive history is the river that holds the Old and New Testament together, the person of Jesus Christ unites the two Testaments.” (Sidney Greidanus, Preaching Christ From the Old Testament: A Contemporary Hermeneutical Method (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 51.)

All three of these thoughts are problematic insofar as they overlook the existence and continued validity of contemporary Judaism. First, for Jews, the Old Testament, which they refer to as the Tanakh, is considered complete. Even for Christians, the Old Testament can stand alone as a faithful witness to God. Second, the author’s assertion of a single redemptive history blatantly ignores the redemptive history of ancient Israel, which is also claimed by rabbinic Judaism, resulting in our modern denominations of Judaism. Third, the claim that Jesus unites the testaments imposes a single hermeneutic for a large and diverse collection of books. Finally, the Hebrew Scriptures contain several stories in which God has redeemed the people (for example, the Exodus from Egypt). Thus, the Old Testament is not the story of a people who merely waited for redemption; instead, it is a story of a people who were redeemed again and again.

Another example comes from a prominent early twentieth-century Old Testament scholar, Martin Noth, who observed,

“Jesus himself, with his words and his work, no longer formed part of the history of Israel. In him the history of Israel had come, rather, to its real end.”
(Martin Noth, The History of Israel (2^nd edition; New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 432.)

In other words, according to Noth, Jesus marks the end of Israel and the beginning of Christianity; Jesus’s life stands so outside the boundaries of Judaism (or to use Noth’s terminology, “the history of Israel”) that he already transcends it. Noth pays no attention to Second Temple Judaism, nascent rabbinic Judaism, or his contemporary Jewish neighbors. They are ignored because Jesus is not a part of Israel, no matter how we define it.

We affirm with the United Church of Christ:

“God’s covenant with the Jewish people has not been rescinded or abrogated by God, but remains in full force.”

(“Relationship between the UCC and the Jewish Community” resolution adopted by the 16^th synod of the UCC in 1987. See also this thoughtful response to this resolution: Denise Dombkowski Hopkins, “God’s Continuing Covenant with the Jews and the Christian Reading of the Bible,” Prism 3.2 (1988): 6-75.)

[This post is adapted from my book, Unto Us A Child Is Born.]

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