Replacement theology

Replacement theology, doctrine holding that Christians have replaced the Jewish people as the chosen people of God or as the heirs of the divine-human covenant described in the Hebrew Bible. The theology is also referred to as supersessionism, in which Christianity is thought to have superseded Judaism. It is closely related to fulfillment theology, which holds that Christianity has fulfilled the divine promises signaled in the Hebrew Bible. These ideas appear to be suggested in some of the earliest Christian texts, such as writings of St. Paul the Apostle, and subsequent Christian theologians have strengthened the opposition of Judaism and Christianity in ways that have informed relations between Christians and Jews. In the 20th century many Christian theologians and even church doctrines replaced replacement theology with more-nuanced or inclusive models that support more-amicable interreligious relations.

Early history and theological basis

In the New Testament various passages point to the notion that Jesus not only is the Messiah predicted earlier in Hebrew prophetic literature but that the new religion of Christianity fulfills, supersedes, and expands upon God’s covenant while denying the claim of Jews to be the sole inheritors of the divine contract.

Hints of a new covenant can be found in pre-Christian Hebrew literature, such as in Jeremiah 31:31–32:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord.

In the Letter to the Hebrews (attributed to St. Paul) the author quotes these lines from Jeremiah. However, a significant difference—one that can suggest a supersessionist reading of the text—arises in the translation from Hebrew to Greek (which also occurs in the Septuagint translation): the Hebrew verb baʿalti (“I was their husband”) at the end of the passage is transformed in the Greek into “ēmelēsa” (“I ignored or abandoned”). This change could have arisen from a misreading of the Hebrew baʿalti as gaʿalti (“despise or abandon”), although it could also be an alternative reading within the developing textual tradition. Misreading or not, the phrasing of the last sentence of the passage above in Hebrews 8:9 becomes, “For they did not continue in my covenant, and so I had no concern for them, says the Lord.” This translation then makes possible an interpretation of Christians as replacing Jews as those for whom God is most concerned. The English Puritan minister John Owen (1616–83) cited this verse specifically in his analysis of the text as evidence of the destruction of Judaism as a legitimate religion and Jews as recipients of the covenant.

Many theologians in Christian history have cited the Letter to the Hebrews to make similar supersessionist arguments, including St. John Chrysostom (347–407), St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–74), and John Calvin (1509–64). The Letter to the Hebrews potentially supports this concept of Christian covenantal superiority when it asserts that Jesus has “obtained a more excellent ministry, and to that degree he is the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on the basis of better promises” (Hebrews 8:6). In the same chapter, God expresses displeasure with the Hebrews and plans a new covenant, superseding the Sinai covenant, and the author declares, “In speaking of a new covenant, he has made the first one obsolete, and what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear” (Hebrews 8:13).

Despite apparent suggestions of supersessionism in these sources, some New Testament scholars contend that these early Christian texts would not have been understood by their original audiences as arguments for what would later be identified as replacement theology. In their view, these passages do not suggest that Jews were excluded from the new religion; St. Paul himself was identified as a Jew. His Letter to the Romans explicitly denies that Christianity replaces Judaism when he states, “I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! 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” (Romans 11:1). St. Paul includes himself and all those who are ethnically Jewish in the possibility of the new covenant.

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Instead of excluding the Jews, St. Paul offers the new faith in Jesus Christ as a revision of the covenant that expands the body of those who can participate. In Letter to the Galatians, St. Paul redefines the descendants of Abraham as those who have faith, particularly in God and Jesus Christ. Thus, the heirs of the covenant between God and Abraham are not exclusively Jews, who claim ancestry from Abraham, but also all non-Jews (Gentiles) who have faith. By emphasizing Abraham’s belief in God, St. Paul shifts the understanding of the divine covenant to establish religious identity on doctrine and belief rather than limiting religious identity to ancestry and ethnicity:

Just as Abraham “believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” [Genesis 15:6], so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would reckon as righteous the gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “All the gentiles shall be blessed in you” [Genesis 22:18]. For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed. (Galatians 3:6–9)

Despite the inclusivity in St. Paul’s early writings, the idea that the Jewish people were excluded from a new covenant became more prominent in the 2nd century ce. It was given full expression in St. Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (c. 160), which attempts to demonstrate that a new covenant has superseded the old covenant of God with the Jewish people; that Jesus is both the Messiah announced by the Old Testament prophets and the preexisting Logos, through whom God has revealed himself in the Scriptures; and that the Gentiles have been chosen to replace Israel as God’s chosen people. Several other early Christian writings affirm the same idea and make the case for Christianity as establishing a “New Israel” or “True Israel,” particularly the text known as the Letter of Barnabas, St. Melito of Sardis’s Homily on the Passover, and Tertullian’s Against the Jews.

Replacement theology came to dominate Christian thought for more than a millennium, including in major strains of Protestantism. In his 1543 tract On the Jews and Their Lies, for instance, Martin Luther claimed that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the 1st century ce was “proof that the Jews, surely rejected by God, are no longer his people, and neither is he any longer their God.”

Modern developments and political dimensions

Shifts away from a strong perspective of replacement theology’s inherent antisemitism began particularly in Anglophone quarters of the Protestant world in the 17th century, often because of a belief that Jews were still important to divine plans.In 1656 English statesman Oliver Cromwell, in partnership with Portuguese Jewish scholar Manasseh ben Israel, opened England to the return of Jews, who had been expelled in 1290. Cromwell was inspired in part by a belief that conversion of Jews to Christianity would expedite the Second Coming. Puritans in New England in the mid-17th century believed not only that but also that Jews would eventually return to a homeland in Palestine as part of the end-time.

In the 19th century the concept of dispensationalism, a reading of the Bible popularized in the United States by Anglo-Irish minister John Nelson Darby, further shifted Christian perspectives on Jews away from a hard replacement theology. Dispensationalists believe that there has been a succession of different eras of God’s interactions with humanity and that the final dispensation, the end-time, is nigh. They hold that the return of the Jews to Palestine is one of the prophecies that needs to be fulfilled in order for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to occur. Rather than favoring the conversion of Jews, dispensationalists view support of Jews (and their return) as pertinent for Christian doctrine and practice. Dispensationalism was particularly influential in the rise, among Evangelical Christians in the 20th century, of Christian Zionism—a theological and political Christian movement that has actively supported the return of the Jewish Diaspora to a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

In the second half of the 20th century, following the Holocaust and rising awareness of antisemitism, many Christians of different persuasions began reconsidering their stances toward the Jewish people, sometimes rooting out what they saw as antisemitic strains within their own traditions. During the Second Vatican Council, for instance, the Roman Catholic Church issued a declaration—Nostra aetate (“In Our Time”), or the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions—meant to clarify and revise the church’s theological position toward the Jewish people. “Although the Church is the new people of God,” the document states, “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God”; rather, “God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers.” As part of the attempt to move away from exclusionary perspectives on religions in favor of more-ecumenical approaches, there was also a push in the 20th century for inclusive categories, such as the term Judeo-Christian, which was supplanted in the late 20th century by Abrahamic religions.

The term supersessionism itself was coined in a 1972 article “Christian Perspectives on Israel,” by Protestant theologian and scholar of Jewish-Christian relations A. Roy Eckardt. The article was published in Midstream, an avowedly Zionist publication issued by the Theodore Herzl Foundation. Eckardt and his wife, Alice L. Eckhardt, were stalwart supporters of the Israeli government, and they blamed antisemitism for what they saw as Christians’ deficient support of Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967. In the years that followed, official rejections of replacement theology, by denominational leaders, were often accompanied by statements of support for Israel.

In the 1980s some Christian groups disavowed replacement theology and publicly announced a belief in Judaism’s coequal status among religions. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) issued a statement on June 23, 1987, declaring that Christianity had not replaced Judaism and that both Jews and Christians were “elected by God for witness to the world.” Two weeks later the United Church of Christ also put out a resolution, this one stating that “Judaism has not been superseded by Christianity.” The Episcopal Church released a similar statement in 1988. In the early 21st century some of these same groups distanced themselves from Christian Zionist thinking and condemned, often in the name of human rights, Israeli treatment of Palestinians. In 2004 the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) distanced itself explicitly from Christian Zionism and spoke out against the oppression faced by Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government. The United Church of Christ in 2021 also issued a declaration condemning the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians, calling it a “sin” and likening it to apartheid. Some Jewish groups and pro-Israel writers have accused these progressive Christians who critique the actions of the state of Israel of echoing Christian discourses of antisemitism and supersessionism.

Varieties of replacement theology

Modern scholars, following the lead of theologian R. Kendall Soulen, have delineated and named varieties of replacement theology that have appeared in different works over the centuries. Some scholars prefer supersessionism or fulfillment theology as positive terms of theological advancement rather than the more common but, to their ears, dismissive-toned replacement theology. A common form of this theology is what some scholars term punitive supersessionism, which focuses on Judaism’s supposed disobedience to God, resulting in God’s rejection of his covenant with the Jews. However, the variety called economic supersessionism emphasizes Christianity as a tradition that eschews ethnicity and nationhood in favor of spirituality and faith in Jesus Christ as markers of religious identity. Furthermore, structural supersessionism regards the major narrative trends in the Bible in a way that bypasses all but the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, jumping from the Fall to Jesus and holding God as the redeemer and consummator of humankind without the intervening biblical narratives about Israel; since the people of Israel (the Jews) no longer matter for theological purposes, their history and relation to God as recorded in the Bible are deemed obsolete. Jewish theologian David Novak, in a 2019 article in the religion and culture magazine First Things, proposed a distinction between “hard” supersessionism, which dismisses the theological validity of Judaism altogether, and “soft” supersessionism, which holds that Christianity builds upon Judaism but has not replaced it, thus leaving room for productive interreligious dialogue.