Evaluating Replacement Theology Through History, Present & Future
Replacement Theology has pressure on all sides as it attempts to negate both the promises of God and dislocate the God of Israel from the people of Israel. We will examine the four dimensions in which Replacement Theology fails concerning its reworking of covenantal history. We will look at the past, the present, the future, and finally, the fruit that this theological position has produced. The fruit is one of the ultimate tests of whether a theology or a belief about God is worthy of real consideration.
The Past - A Firm Foundation
The claims of Replacement Theology must first be examined at ground zero: God's promise to Abraham. The covenants are the foundation on which God's history with all humanity flows. I examine this covenant more deeply in this article, but I want to highlight a few pivotal aspects of this covenant made with Abraham. This covenant has two attributes that are worth calling out. First, it was unconditional and unilateral, as in there was nothing that Abraham had to do to keep this covenant in effect. This covenant was never based on Abraham or his descendant's righteousness but on God's promise to Abraham. (Gal 3: 18). Second, it is a permanent covenant, or as our English translation reads, an everlasting covenant. This second feature creates a real problem for those who try to disengage the Abrahamic covenant through some aspect of the New Testament. If one is to claim that some work of the New Covenant displaces God's promises to Abraham, one must contend with the core feature of the everlasting nature of the covenant. To put this into proper context, the everlasting God is making an everlasting covenant with Abraham and his physical descendants with no contingency on the opposite party.
To oppose this covenant in the way Replacement Theology does, one must grapple with the sustained statements confirming their promise through biblical history. Psalms 105 sums it up beautifully when the psalmist says:
He is the Lord our God;
his judgments are in all the earth.
He is mindful of his covenant forever,
of the word that he commanded, for a thousand generations,
the covenant that he made with Abraham,
his sworn promise to Isaac,
which he confirmed to Jacob as a statute,
to Israel as an everlasting covenant,
saying, "To you I will give the land of Canaan
as your portion for an inheritance." (Ps 105:7-12)
This is one of the countless areas in scripture that maintains the seriousness and permanence of God's promise to Abraham and his carnal descendants. Another beautiful section of scripture due to its poetic nature is Jeremiah 33:
“The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: Thus says the Lord: If any of you could break my covenant with the day and my covenant with the night, so that day and night would not come at their appointed time, only then could my covenant with my servant David be broken, so that he would not have a son to reign on his throne, and my covenant with my ministers the Levites. Just as the host of heaven cannot be numbered and the sands of the sea cannot be measured, so I will increase the offspring of my servant David, and the Levites who minister to me. The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: Have you not observed how these people say, "The two families that the Lord chose have been rejected by him," and how they hold my people in such contempt that they no longer regard them as a nation? Thus says the Lord: Only if I had not established my covenant with day and night and the ordinances of heaven and earth, would I reject the offspring of Jacob and of my servant David and not choose any of his descendants as rulers over the offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For I will restore their fortunes, and will have mercy upon them.” (Je. 33:20-26)
The covenantal nature of God's promise to Abraham and his physical descendants is the single firm foundation against Replacement Theology. Hebrews 6:13-20 even uses the sureness of God's promises to Abraham as an argument to reassure believers that Jesus can be trusted in His promise to us. My study in this area has led me to see one of three directions Replacement Theology takes when it comes up against the Abrahamic covenant. The three primary responses are as follows:
While the covenant says everlasting, it does not mean everlasting; this is a figure of speech. It just means until the new covenant comes and replaces the "old ways." I consider this argument the weakest, and I make a sustained argument against the covenants replacing each other in this article. One of the most significant gaps in this argument is that there is no biblical basis to believe this. To believe this, one would have to change the meaning of covenants, promises, and even the definition of these words. There is no biblical evidence to support this idea. Jesus never says this, nor does any writer in the NT make this connection between the Abrahamic Covenant and any replacement or fulfillment.
God's promises in the OT are a type and shadow of something in the NT. This argument typically states that everything in the OT physically represents a New Testament spiritual reality. Physical locations like Jerusalem and Israel are now the whole earth. The temple system where the spirit dwelled is now the regenerated body of believers. The church has created a third race that transcends Jewish and gentile distinctions, thus replacing Israel's existence. Typology is a complicated area of study in theology. There are many different ways to approach it. Most scholars recognize that typological connections are a genuine and legitimate way of understanding scripture. The problem with the typological argument in this case is that the NT never makes a typological connection in which Israel is permanently replaced or that replaces the Abrahamic Covenant. Meaning scripture never makes any typological connection between the Abrahamic covenant being replaced by some work in the New Testament. Through the work of Jesus, the New Testament has every right to make whatever adjustments it sees fit to make through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but if it is to do so, it must explicitly make these statements. We cannot assume or read a typological connection that does not exist in the text. Many people get hung up on this idea because of Hebrews 8-10. They assume, I would argue inaccurately, that Hebrews is making a case against all the Old Testament covenants when it only deals with the Mosiac covenant, the sacrificial system and the works of the law. This line of thinking crudely lumps all of God's covenants into one covenant, which is an obvious error. The NT has a right to make typological connections, additions, and replacements, but it must explicitly do so.
The common final argument against the covenantal history of the Bible is that the church has assumed the role of the promisee. That is, the church is now spiritual Israel. This argument believes Gentiles are now spiritual Jews. Thus, they inherit all of the promises made to Abraham since they are the "spiritual" seeds of Abraham. Out of the three arguments, this is the strongest argument for Replacement Theology. It is the strongest argument for two reasons. First, this argument recognizes the permanence of the Abrahamic covenant. It also recognizes the unique call of the people of God and chosen people. Secondly, the New Testament language expands the definition of people of God, and much confusion is created around this language. This third argument correctly recognizes the covenantal features as the permanent medium of God's interaction with humanity. It knows it cannot dissolve the actual promises themselves, so it makes itself the sole heir of these promises. Due to the nuance in responding to this argument, I will do an extended response in a different article. A simple response is this: the Abrahamic covenant was made with Abraham and his physical descendants; these are the permanent heirs of the Abrahamic covenant. When it comes to the people of God terminology and chosen people, believing Gentiles should see themselves as grafted into the spiritual tree of Israel. The covenant has expanded to include us but also includes believing in Jews. We are grafted on branches, not the life-giving root system, and as such, we should not boast against the branches that have been temporarily cut off. The literal definition of the New Testament for grafted in Gentiles is the Commonwealth of Israel. We should see ourselves as partakers in the spiritual promises of Israel but not as ones that have replaced the physical seed. God has expanded His Kingdom to include us, but this should not be seen as a replacement.
At a core level, we must deal with the covenants of God in a permanent way unless told not to by the New Testament. We must honor the text itself. We cannot separate God from the convents that He made. We cannot separate God from the people to whom He made His covenants. As Christians, we are not gnostics. We cannot think like gnostics. Nor are we Hindus, where we spiritualize or allegorize the meanings of explicitly specific and concrete covenants.
The Present - A Permanent Reality
A common way of propping up the Replacement Theology argument is to lean on the Church Fathers. The Church Fathers would be guys like Justin Martyr, John Chrysostom, and Jerome, and Augustine to name a few. Justin Martyr was the first one to call the church Spiritual Israel. This fact should be noted because this is a term the Bible never uses, yet it is frequently used in popular language around Israel and The Church. The reason that proponents of Replacement Theology use the church fathers (and guys like Luther and Calvin) is that they all saw the Jews as being replaced by the church. The evidence was that the temple had been destroyed, the Jews had been scattered, and the Messiah had come. If one puts oneself in the shoes of the church fathers, one can almost see the reasoning behind it.
What is more difficult to see is all of the obvious anti-semitic things the church fathers said about the Jews. If one is going to look at what the church fathers said, one should evaluate their words with equal weights and measures, meaning one cannot cherry-pick what they said; one has to read their thoughts about the Jews in their totality. History tells us that the totality is not pretty, and it is hard to conceive anyone thinking it reflects the heart of God for anyone, much less the God of Israel.
I bring the church fathers up because a common argument for replacement theology is to reference the destruction of the temple and the scattering of the Jewish people in 70 AD and 135 AD as a proof argument. I would argue that, far from being proof, it is just another cycle in a pattern throughout the scriptures. Namely, that Israel rebels, God judges them, Israel repents, God brings them back to their land - and in all of it, God does it for His name's sake. Does the coming of Jesus change all of that? For almost 1800 years, no one had an answer to this question. The Jews believed no, some theologians thought maybe, but most said yes - the coming of Jesus does in fact render all the previous covenants as finished.
One of the most significant arguments for God's permanent covenant to Abraham happened in 1948 when the state of Israel was re-established. Anyone could speculate about the future of the Jewish people, but to see the Jews connected back to their land is a seemingly undeniable reality. I say seemingly because people still argue against this being any kind of proof. Arguing for this is like seeing a dead person walking and saying the dead cannot be raised. It defies all reason. If God was going to permanently destroy the Jewish people and expel them from the land, He has made a real mess of it. The Jewish people remained unassimilated and are back in the land. What I find hard about the disbelief in the Jewish people being back in the land as a sovereign choice of God is the logical inconsistency. It is illogical to assume that 70 AD and 135 AD were the hand of God, but 1948 was not. Replacement Theology cannot have it both ways. It cannot pick and choose how it sees the hand of God. If God's dislocation from the people of God and their covenants is permanent, then we would have never seen 1948 happen. The physical witness that God's covenant with Abraham lives on is proof in the Jews being back in the land of Israel. A more accurate way to see history in a non-historically gnostic way is to see all 70, 135 AD, and 1948 as the hand of God. God brought judgment on the Jewish people, as He said He would. He has now shown them mercy and remembered his promises to Abraham, like He said He would. It is logically inconsistent to assume otherwise. So much so that the Catholic Church at Vatican II recognized the enduring call on the Jewish people as the people of God. This adjustment by the Catholic church was a huge milestone. It recognized the error in its history of teaching something different and corrected it. The Jewish people being back in the land of Israel stands in sharp opposition to the claims of Replacement Theology.
The great theologian, Charles Spurgeon had this to say about the coming nation of Israel. He said this in 1864, almost 90 years before the establishment of the nation of Israel.
There will be a native government again; there will again be the form of a body politic; a state shall be incorporated, and a king shall reign. Israel has now become alienated from her own land. Her sons, though they can never forget the sacred dust of Palestine, yet die at a hopeless distance from her consecrated shores. But it shall not be so for ever, for her sons shall again rejoice in her: her land shall be called Beulah, for as a young man marrieth a virgin so shall her sons marry her. "I will place you in your own land," is God's promise to them . . . They are to have a national prosperity which shall make them famous; nay, so glorious shall they be that Egypt, and Tyre, and Greece, and Rome, shall all forget their glory in the greater splendour of the throne of David . . . If there be anything clear and plain, the literal sense and meaning of this passage [Ezekiel 37:1-10]—a meaning not to be spirited or spiritualized away—must be evident that both the two and the ten tribes of Israel are to be restored to their own land, and that a king is to rule over them (Spurgeon, 1864)
The Future: A Coming Kingdom
There are a few points about the future where Replacement Theology also fails. The three main areas are as follows:
There are unfulfilled promises that still exist for the Jewish people. Mainly promises like Ezekiel 36,37 that speak of not only a physical restoration of Israel to their land but also a spiritual restoration. I am referring to a period when there will be a mass Jewish salvation event, and the blindness mentioned in Romans 11 is lifted. I have been unable to find a single church father who disagreed with this, so on this point I agree with the Church Fathers. St. Thomas Aquinas (not technically a church father, but he represents the general consensus well) in his Commentary on Epistle to the Romans: "The blindness of the Jews will endure until the fullness of the gentiles have accepted the faith. And this is in accord with what the Apostle says below about the salvation of the Jews, namely, that after the fullness of the nations have entered, 'all Israel will be saved', not individually as at present, but universally."... "What, I say, will such an admission effectuate, if not that it bring the Gentiles back to life? The Gentiles would be the believers whose faith has grown cold, or even that the totality, deceived by the Antichrist, fall and are restored to their pristine fervor by the admission of the Jews." (Larcher 2020, #178) This belief in a future salvatory experience by the Jews has been carried throughout Church History.
Many promises in the OT and the NT speak of Jesus's coming rule. It will be a theocratic monarchy if we can trust the scripture. Jesus states that He will return to the Mt. of Olives and rule from a throne in Jerusalem. The Bible speaks of a time when the nations will flow to Jerusalem, and the 12 apostles will judge the 12 tribes. Replacement Theology's response to this is to spiritualize the meaning of these verses or allegorize the ideas within them. Jerusalem is now the nations, the 12 tribes are the church, and so on. This perspective creates a few challenges for the supersessionist camp. Mainly because, in the 1st coming of Christ, all of the promises took place literally. Jesus came in the flesh, was born in Bethlehem, came to a specific land, died and was resurrected from this specific land, and finally ascended from the Mt. of Olives in Jerusalem while also saying that the Mt. of Olives is where He would return. All of this was based on promises that it would happen this way. If we witnessed a literal fulfillment of God's coming the first time, I see no reason we should not expect the same thing on His return. In Acts 1: 3-7, we see a robust exchange between Jesus and his disciples. The context of this conversation is that the disciples had just spent 40 days with Jesus. The Bible tells us that this conversation focused on the Kingdom. Here is the section in total: “After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the Kingdom of God. On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: "Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit." Then they gathered around him and asked him, "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?" He said to them: "It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.” What is interesting about this conversation is that the disciples had just spent forty days with Jesus discussing the Kingdom. After all of this, they asked Him, is now the time when you will restore the Kingdom to Israel?” There can be no question that these Jewish disciples meant the physical Kingdom of Israel. At this point, Gentile inclusion within the gospel had not even started to occur. Acts 1 is long before Paul receives his ministry to the Gentiles or Peter has his vision concerning the Gentiles. These Jewish men are referring to the countless promises in the scriptures that reference the King ruling from His Kingdom in Jerusalem. Jesus' response was to tell them that they did not need to know when this would happen; Jesus did not say that this Kingdom would not happen. If there were ever a time to correct their thinking on a future kingdom of Israel, this would have been that time. Jesus did not do this; He just reorganized their thinking around when this would happen, not that it would not happen.
In my final point, I will borrow heavily from Michael Vlach. He has presented an excellent argument on the future hope of Israel and the why behind it. Historically, the view of the church starting around Augustine's time in 400 AD had to compete with something that CA Blassing has called “The Spiritual Vision Model.” (Blaising 1999, 161) This model was a dualistic model that viewed a spiritual and physical distinction in terms of importance. On the one hand exists the higher dimension, the spiritual things (soul and salvation), and on the other hand exists the base dimension (governments, culture, economies), which constitutes the lower things. The higher dimension lives at odds with the lower dimension. Plato suggested this model in his division of the spirit and material realm. “The long-term practice of reading Scriptures in this way so conditioned the Christian mind that by the late Middle Ages, the spiritual vision model had become an accepted fact of the Christian worldview.” (Blaising 1999, #165) In this way of seeing scripture, it is easy to spiritualize literal promises because the only important thing is the spiritual plane of being. In this case, what is essential about a strip of land in the Middle East? What is significant about a physical reign in Israel? These are base-level matters and not spiritual issues, or so the argument goes. In contrast, the New Creation Model is a more harmonious way of considering God's regenerative plan on the earth. As Vlad says, "This model emphasizes the physical, social, political, and geographical aspects of eternal life more so than does the Spiritual Vision Model." (Vlach 2010, #167) Leaning on scriptures like Isaiah 25:65-66, Revelation 21, and Romans 8, Vlad makes a case for "a regenerated earth that includes matters like nations, kings, economies, culture and other matters linked to a physical planet." (Vlach 2010, 167) The New Creation Model appears to be the primary approach of the church in the early first and second centuries. As Moore states about the New Creation Model, "The picture then is not of an eschatological flight from creation but the restoration and redemption of creation with all that entails: table fellowship, community, culture, economics, agriculture and animal husbandry, art, architecture, worship - in short, life and that abundantly." (Vlach 2010, #168) This way of seeing God's ongoing regenerative plan breaks the spiritual vs material divide. It sees every action and dimension of life as spiritual. God's rescue plan for humanity involves everything that concerns humanity. Rather than dividing life between spiritual and physical, this model sees everything as a spiritual act. As Vlad says, the implications for Israel are: "When we come across passages where God promises physical blessings and a land for Israel, we should not assume that these things are somehow inferior or that they were solely intended as shadows of spiritual blessings to come. Physical blessings are not necessarily antithetical to spiritual blessings. Nor is it true that physical blessings promised in the OT cannot be harmonized with spiritual blessings in the NT. This is not an either-or situation but is often a both-and. Both physical and spiritual blessings can work together in harmony." (Vlach 2010, #169) This way of viewing the world also includes much hope for all nations. Paul recognizes God's plan with nations when he says in Acts 17:26: From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live." Distinct nations are God's idea, and they are included and made a focus from Gen 11 - Rev 22 as something that God is in the process of healing and restoring, primarily through God's promise to Abraham to be a blessing to all nations. Is it too much to think that God will claim and redeem the people of Israel, its land, and everything that this entails? If the nations are jewels in God's crown, is there any question that Israel will be the crown jewel? Replacement theology inherently comes from a dualistic way of thinking by separating literal and concrete promises as inherently less spiritual than the gospel. This forces an unneeded separation. A more unified view is to see God's redemptive plan within the gospel, is to see that cultures, lands, kingdoms, economies, arts, and ways of worship are all things that are being restored to the King. There can be no doubt that the land of Israel and the people of Israel are included in this regenerative plan.
The Quality of The Tree is Evident By Its FruiT
A final way to evaluate Replacement Theology is through the fruit it produces. Church history is rife with countless examples of what feels like church father arrogance or possibly ignorance, church anti-semitism, and church statements used to justify things like the crusades, inquisitions, and the Holocaust. This unfortunate fruit only touches on some of the significant consequences of our collective church history. Even in our modern day, social media is awash with the evidence of harmful and dehumanizing commentary about the Jews that flows out of Christian Replacement Theology. Not every person who believes in Replacement Theology allows it to take them to this position. However, all church-related anti-Semitism finds its source in Replacement Theology. This rotten fruit should tell us something of the tree that is producing it.
A systems theory created by Stafford Beer states, "The Purpose of the System is What It Does." (Beer, n.d.) In layman's terms, what this means is there is no use claiming a system does what it claims to do if it constantly fails to do so. IE, there is no use claiming that the fruit of Replacement Theology is not an arrogant church and a triumphalist attitude if what it generally produces is this exact thing. Paul's extortion to the grafted-on branches to not boast is the exact opposite fruit that Replacement Theology produces. At its worst, it produced demonic statements that many of the church fathers made, which crescendoed in theologians like Luther and Calvin losing their minds with their hatred against the Jews. This attitude is not a random bug in the system of Replacement Theology but its core feature. If we knew nothing more about the theological realities, we need only to judge a tree by its fruit.
In Conclusion
We have looked at four perspectives concerning Replacement Theology. I make the case that, at a historical level, Replacement Theology fails when viewed through a covenantal lens. The covenants are the firm foundation of the permanence of God's commitments to Abraham and his descendants. I continue to make the case that the Jewish people being back in the land of Israel creates a distinct problem for Replacement Theology. If God's judgment against Israel was permanent, He has done a poor job of permanently destroying the people of Israel and separating them from the land of Israel. Finally, we can see many unfilled promises for Israel when we turn toward the future. By adopting a more cohesive view of God's redemptive plan for all nations, we can see that God cares about things like land, governments, economies, and kingships, and these are not base-level concerns but spiritual trophies that God will claim and has secured through Jesus. Finally, we can look at the fruit of Replacement Theology in the church. It has produced the opposite fruit of what Paul exhorted the grafted-on branches to produce. The best scenario is that it produces a triumphalist attitude and pride within the church. The worst case is that church statements are used as justification for the outright murder and slaughter of Jewish people, and this historical specter has the potential to rear its head in the future. The church has a distinct call to show love and mercy to the temporarily blinded branches of Israel. It should be our hope to see God's grace in our own lives and thus see God's grace and plans for Israel and the Jewish people.
As Paul so eloquently says in Romans 11:29-32, “for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy. For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.”
References
Spurgeon, Charles. 2000. “Charles H. Spurgeon and the Nation of Israel A Non-Dispensational Perspective on a Literal National Restoration.” Website. http://www.romans45.org/spurgeon/misc/eschat2.htm#note47.
Larcher, Fabian R., trans. 2020. Commentary on Romans. N.p.: Emmaus Road Publishing.
Blaising, Craig A. 1999. Three Views on the Millennium and Beyond. Edited by Darrell L. Bock. N.p.: Zondervan.
Vlach, Michael J. 2010. Has the Church Replaced Israel? A Theological Evaluation. N.p.: B&H Publishing Group.
Beer, Stafford. n.d. Wikipedia. Accessed June 1, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does.