Supersessionism
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Supersessionism, referred to as replacement theology by its critics, is a belief that the Christian New Covenant supersedes the covenant of Exodus-Sinai given to the Jews.
In the early Church, the New Covenant presented by the New Testament was either in addition to the Old Covenant (the religion of the Torah and the Jewish Pharisaic tradition), or it was to be taken as a replacement for the old one.[1] Despite the differences in these views, both could be called supersessionist.[1] Jewish theologian and scholar David Novak suggests designating the first as soft supersessionism and the second as hard supersessionism.[1]
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[edit] Soft supersessionism
Soft supersessionism does not assert that God terminated the covenant of Exodus-Sinai.[1] Rather it asserts that Jesus came to fullfill the old covenant for Jews already part of the covenant, who then accepted him as the Jewish Messiah, as well as to initiate and fullfill the covenant for gentiles whose sole connection to the covenant is through him.[1] Jews who do not accept Jesus as Messiah are still part of the covenant in the sense that "what God has put together let no man put asunder."[1]
[edit] Hard supersessionism
For hard supersessionism, the old covenant is dead.[1] Jews by their sin of rejecting Jesus as the Messiah have forfeited any covenantal status.[1]
[edit] Variation among Christians
[edit] Catholicism
The Roman Catholic Church proclaims extra Ecclesiam nulla salus — outside of the Church there is no salvation,[2] meaning that there must be either formal sacramental baptism or at least "baptism of desire", by which one's sins are forgiven by the desire to be in union with God.[citation needed] Judaism of the Old Testament, in the Church's teaching, had been replaced by or rather transferred to the New Testament with its own law and sacred rites. In the 5th century, Pope Saint Leo the Great, speaking of Jesus's crucifixion pointed to Mark 15:38 to support the teaching: "To such an extent, then, was there effected a transfer from the Law to the Gospel, from the Synagogue to the Church, from the many sacrifices to one Victim, that, as Our Lord expired, that mystical veil which shut off the innermost part of the temple and its sacred secret was rent violently from top to bottom."[3] In the 15th century during the Council of Florence, Pope Eugene IV wrote in his Bull of Union with the Copts that "[The holy Roman church] firmly believes, professes and preaches that all those who are outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans but also Jews or heretics and schismatics, cannot share in eternal life and will go into the everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels, unless they are joined to the Catholic Church before the end of their lives."[4] Pope Pius XII in his 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis wrote that "the New Testament took the place of the Old Law which had been abolished" and that "on the gibbet of His death Jesus made void the Law with its decrees fastened the handwriting of the Old Testament to the Cross, establishing the New Testament in His blood shed for the whole human race."[3]
Pope Pius XII condemned the two-path approach to salvation when he taught that "Christ, by His blood, made the Jews and Gentiles one 'breaking down the middle wall of partition...in His flesh' by which the two peoples were divided; and that He made the Old Law void 'that He might make the two in Himself into one new man,' that is, the Church, and might reconcile both to God in one Body by the Cross."[3] Pope Pius XII affirmed that the Church was established for the salvation of all people, both Jews and gentiles, thereby excluding a continued validity to the covenant of Exodus-Sinai.[3]
The Vatican II document Lumen Gentium explains that, although salvation comes from Christ, those "who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience" may still attain salvation. The Catholic Church affirmed the necessity of Jesus and membership in the Church for salvation in the declaration Dominus Iesus published in the year 2000.
[edit] Covenant Theology
Covenant theology is theological framework within the Reformed churches which has as one of its core teachings the idea that God's original purpose was to create for himself one covenant people, which was to be found in the people of Israel in the years before Christ, and expanded to the international church in the years after Christ (Romans 9:6ff and 11:1-7). Jesus Christ, not Israel or Jerusalem, and Immanuel not the people of Israel is the focal point of covenant theology.
[edit] Restorationism
Jewish Restorationism is the belief of some Christians concerning the end times when they believe that certain Old Testament prophecies concerning Israel will be fulfilled in their return to their ancestral home, and ultimately in a large-scale conversion of the Jews to Christianity. Many conservative Christian groups anticipate a future time, when God will return his focus to the Jewish nation, whence a national conversion will take place where all or almost all Jews will miraculously convert to Christianity, citing the book of Romans 11:26a: "And so all Israel will be saved."[5]
Usually those who hold this view note that it does not say every individual Jew will be saved but that the nation as a whole will be saved, just like the nation as a whole supposedly committed the unpardonable sin. It will still be up to individuals to accept the Gospel of the Kingdom or reject it, but the nation as a whole will be blessed, perhaps in the sense that its representative leadership is blessed.
[edit] Dispensational Restorationism
In the context of Christianity, dispensationalism is an interpretive or narrative framework for understanding the overall flow of the Bible and is frequently contrasted with an opposing interpretation: supersessionism (also referred to as Covenant Theology, see also New Covenant (theology)). Dispensationalism teaches that the Church is distinct from Israel.
This hope of a Jewish restoration has an especially prominent place within dispensationalism. The distinctive dispensationalist scheme conceives of the Christian church and the church age as primarily an arrangement through which God gathers in the Gentiles, a parenthesis in God's dealing with the Jews, which has been instituted because the Jewish people rejected the Messiah. Dispensationalists classically believe that the acceptance of Christ by the Jews will come about as a distinct group, after the age of the Christian church. In other words, they believe that Jews are a permanent feature of God's plan, apart from the Christian church; and it is in this sense that they deny supersessionism. They nevertheless believe that the Jews are in need of salvation, and this conversion will signal their restoration - unlike others who would use the language, to reject supersessionism.
Like the dispensationalists, certain supersessionists anticipate a momentous future conversion to the church of the Jews on the basis of Romans 11, especially verse 26.[citation needed] Dispensationalism's distinctive difference from the common view of this "mystery" (as St. Paul calls it) is in its idea that the church is primarily intended for the salvation of the Gentiles, and that the Jews have a separate destiny that cannot be fulfilled in the church age. In the dispensationalist scheme, the Jewish restoration and acceptance of the Messiah will be as a people distinct from the Christian Church (which by that time will have ceased to exist on the earth, having been removed by a miracle called the rapture). Most dispensationalists believe that 144,000 from the tribes of Israel, spoken of in the Book of Revelation, are either the literal or symbolic number of ethnic Jews who will be followers of the Messiah during the Great Tribulation. In the meantime, dispensationalists typically hold that the promise "I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse" (Genesis 12:3) has abiding reference to the Jewish people and the modern, political state of Israel. Such ideas are often used in support of Christian Zionism. Yet most non-Dispensationalists have held throughout church history, that the salvation of Israel is not postponed until the Second Coming of Christ as Dispensationalists speculate, but rather, as the Apostle Peter stated in Acts 2:36-39, the salvation of Israel has been occurring, and continues to occur throughout the New Testament harvest period, and will be complete at the second coming.
[edit] Other views
Several liberal Protestant groups have formally renounced hard supersessionism, and affirm that Jews, and perhaps other non-Christians, have a valid way to find God within their own faith. The doctrine has also lost strength among twentieth century Protestant evangelicals, especially in the U.S., through the influence of dispensationalism, which posits that the Jews will inherit the promises concerning the Messiah in a future restoration (see "Restorationism" above) and in the meantime are the subject of God's favor as a people under the same terms that applied to them prior to the coming of the Messiah.
A few groups assert that their group is the chosen people rather than those who are called Jews, and in so doing adopt the identity of true Israel so that the Jewish people are regarded as false Israel (see, for example, Anglo-Israelism and Christian Identity).
Supersessionists see their view as a theology of fulfillment, but from the standpoint of Judaism and other critics, it is a theology of replacement. Yet according to supersessionism, no Jew who truly believes the Gospel is ever replaced, any unbelieving Jew (like Judas Iscariot or Ahab) was never truly part of God's chosen people because he or she had never followed God.
[edit] Relevant New Testament passages
- Matthew 5:17-20 "Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."
- Romans 1:16-17: I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith."[Habakkuk 2:4]
- Romans 2:28-29: "For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God."
- Romans 3:29-31: "Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law."
- Romans 9:6-8: "But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but 'Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.' This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring."
- Romans 10:12-13: For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."[Joel 2:32]
- Romans 11:1-6: "I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! For I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. Do you not know what the Scripture says of Elijah, how he appeals to God against Israel? 'Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life.' But what is God's reply to him? 'I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.' So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace."
- Romans 11:26: "So all Israel will be saved."
- Galatians 2:14-16: When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, "You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? "We who are Jews by birth and not 'Gentile sinners' know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified."
- Galatians 3:29: "And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise".
[edit] Trivia
- The 2006 novel The Righteous Men by Jonathan Freedland, writing as Sam Bourne, makes supersessionism central to the plot.
[edit] See also
- Christian Zionism
- Judaism and Christianity
- New Covenant
- anti-Judaism
- Old Testament#Christian view of the Law
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b c d e f g h Novak, David (2004). "5: The Covenant in Rabbinic Thought", in Eugene B. Korn: Two Faiths, One Covenant?: Jewish And Christian Identity In The Presence Of The Other. Rowman & Littlefield, 66f.
- ^ Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 846
- ^ a b c d Pope Pius XII (1943-06-29). Mystici Corporis Christi paragraphs 25-33.
- ^ Pope Eugene IV (1442-02-04). Bull of Union with the Copts. Retrieved on 2006-04-22.
- ^
[edit] External links
- The Jewish Christian Relations center for religious dialogue
- The Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies
- Against Christian Zionism, restorationism and prononents of supersessionism
- International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (Dispensational)
- America-Israel Public Affairs Committee
- The Attacks of Replacement Theology
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