At the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, Rabbi Pesach Wolicki sat down with one of America’s most prominent pastors to discuss a shift in Christian support for Israel that neither man is willing to accept.

Allen Jackson has been going to Israel since 1970.

He was a student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem when he first encountered the country that would shape the rest of his ministry. He has watched it transform from the young, struggling state of that era into the military and economic power it is today. He has walked the streets of Jerusalem, stood at the Sea of Galilee, and built a theology of Jewish-Christian relations that now reaches more than three million people each week through Allen Jackson Ministries — in addition to the 15,000 congregants he has led at World Outreach Church in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, since 1989.

So when Jackson says he is more alarmed by the fracturing of Christian support for Israel than at any point in his career, it is worth taking seriously.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen it this bold on the right side of the ideological spectrum,” Jackson told Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, Executive Director of Israel365 Action, in an interview at last week’s National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville. “And they’re beginning to manipulate language.”

The manipulation Jackson has in mind is precise. Replacement theology — the doctrine that the Church has superseded the Jewish people as God’s chosen community — has accumulated enough negative associations that its modern proponents have largely abandoned the term. What has taken its place, Jackson observed, is “fulfillment theology,” packaged with the claim that the Church is “Israel 2.0.”

The theology is the same. The branding is new. “To the casual observer or the casual reader,” Jackson said, “it’s very deceptive and they don’t understand the historical context of that.”

Wolicki, who regularly speaks in Christian seminaries, pointed to Augustine as the intellectual architect of this worldview — the fifth-century theologian who argued that the Jewish people would remain forever exiled and persecuted as living testimony to the consequences of rejecting Jesus. That framework shaped Christian thinking for over a millennium, and it also provided the ideological foundation for centuries of persecution of Jews in Europe.

Then came 1948. Then came the Israel of today — a nation of millions, gathered from around the world, more prosperous than at any previous point in its history. “He obviously wouldn’t have said that,” Wolicki said of Augustine, “if there was a State of Israel.” Jackson’s response was direct: “It’s bad theology and it’s bad history.”

The question is how this theology gains traction in the first place. Jackson pointed to a collapse in biblical literacy that he believes has been building for decades. “We’ve been training now for quite some time leadership that’s unprepared,” he said, “and we’re kind of reaping the harvest of that.” Theological seminaries, in his view, bear primary responsibility: “I think theological education in the United States has been failing us for decades.”

The remedy he advocates requires no institutional reform — just discipline. Systematic, daily reading of scripture across both Testaments. “I don’t know of any single thing that bears as great a fruit,” Jackson said, “because in doing that they get their own personal exposure to the character of God and the activity of God through both New Testament and Hebrew Bible.” When people read the Bible themselves, rather than receiving filtered versions of it from pulpits shaped by Augustinian assumptions, the encounter tends to produce different conclusions.

Wolicki offered the Jewish framing for this: in Jewish tradition, the study of Torah is not merely an intellectual exercise — it is a form of worship. Reading scripture, he told Jackson, is like reading a letter written directly to you, where every word repays close attention. “Each and every individual will notice things that no one else on earth has ever noticed,” he said, “because that book was given to each and every one of us individually.”

Jackson does see reasons for optimism. A movement to restore daily systematic scripture reading has been gaining momentum across denominational lines. He also sees something shifting among younger Christians. “I do think there is a breeze of hope that’s blowing through some of the younger generations,” he said. Awakening movements, he noted, have rarely emerged from within established institutions — in his reading of the Hebrew Bible as much as in church history. “Those of us that have a bit of gray in our beard,” he said, “maybe we’ll have the flexibility to cooperate and be a part of what God is doing in this season.”

The personal history Jackson brought to this conversation gave it weight. He has watched Israel fulfill the prophecy in Deuteronomy 30, where Moses foretells that after a long exile the Jewish people would return to the land and become more numerous and more prosperous than their ancestors. Jackson first visited in 1970, when that prophecy was still mostly unfulfilled. “When I see the nation today,” he said, “it shouts at us of the faithfulness of God.” He was careful to add what is easy to miss in that observation: “The sacrifice it is for the people to be in the land. There are easier places to live.”

He goes home from every visit to Israel with a renewed sense of his own assignment. “If they can live and hold their assignment, then I have to come home and hold mine.”

For a pastor whose voice reaches three million people every week, the implications of that commitment are not small.