The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann once wrote, “Israel’s promises remain Israel’s promises. They have not been transferred to the church.” Many Christians would be happy to affirm Moltmann’s statement here, and in fact, after the Holocaust, many Christian denominations officially repudiated supersessionism. To such an extent that the theologian Kendall Soulen felt he could write in 1996, “that significant parts of the Christian church today reject supersessionism and affirm God’s fidelity to the Jewish people.” Yet despite this optimism and the many claims of having rejected supersessionism, I suspect many of those same people would become uncomfortable and perhaps retract their affirmation of Moltmann’s statement if they realized this statement logically included God’s promises of the land of Israel. In other words, Zionism, defined here as the God of Israel’s promise of the land of Israel to the people of Israel, becomes the acid test of one’s rejection of supersessionism.
The question then is: Has God’s covenantal promise of the land of Israel to the people of Israel been superseded and transferred to another, whether to the Church or someone else? Given the reaction many Christians have had towards Zionism in the 20th and 21st century, even from churches that have officially reputed supersessionism, it would seem the answer to this question for many is at least, an implicit yes, and this I believe shows that supersessionism is still deeply rooted in their bones. Furthermore given the support many of these Christians have had for “Palestinian” Arabs over and against Jews it’s unlikely supersessionism has really been rejected. For it seems here in this support, God’s covenantal promise of the land of Israel to the people of Israel has been superseded and transferred to the “Palestinian” Arabs. Christian response towards the conflict and Zionism then serves as the acid test for their supposed rejection of supersessionism.
To this point, people are happy to say supersessionism is bad for Jews as long as they can also say supersessionism is good for “Palestinians.” In other words, supersessionism or replacement theology is only bad for Jews to the extent that it’s not good for “Palestinian” Arabs. To the degree that replacement theology is good for Palestinian Arabs is the degree to which concern for it being bad for Jews goes out the window. This is particularly true when it comes to the heartland of Israel, namely Judea and Samaria, an issue where many Christian’s disregard God’s land promise to the Jewish people and in effect “transfer” the rights of this land to Arabs, claiming their rights for a “Palestinian” state. But this can only be theologically true if we affirm supersessionism, believing that God’s promises to Israel no longer remain Israel’s promises and in fact have been transferred to the church or some other entity. This is even more true for Christians who don’t believe in a two-state solution but fully reject any Jewish state.
In the abstract people find rejecting supersessionism acceptable, but in concrete embodied-landed reality, rejecting supersessionism becomes untenable. Such statements are similar to American White progressives making land acknowledgements for Native Americans but not actually in practice embodying any sort of real actions of atonement. For a mere verbal or written acknowledgement of land ownership is no real acknowledgment as long as it remains abstract with no concrete actions behind it. If they really acknowledged their land rights, they would give land back. If I stole your house, and say “I’m sorry I stole your house,” but then I don’t give back your house, then I’m not really sorry. Only when land is returned is its rightful ownership truly acknowledged. Otherwise there is still an assertion that the stolen land belongs to the thief.
Likewise, as long as Jewish sovereignty over the land is not actualized, and people continue calling for “Palestinian” sovereignty, there is no true acknowledgment that God’s gift of the whole Land of Israel to the people of Israel still stands and has not been superseded or revoked.
As to why such a real rejection of supersessionism is so hard for many Christians in the Western world, I suspect it’s because of its supersessionist anti-Jewish structure. In other words, because as David Nirenberg argues, the edifice of Western thought was built with anti-Judaism, Western society needs a new Israel that can replace the old Israel in order to ensure the superior status of Western Culture/Western Christianity over and against that of “the Jews.” The “Palestinian” Arabs thus have become the new Israel replacing the Old Israel, wherein Jews no longer have a right to all of the land of Israel or even part of it, but that right and promise to the land has been transferred and superseded to the “Palestinians.”
Luther once stated that if the Jews ever came back to the land of Israel, he would go to Jerusalem to get circumcised and convert because for him, Jews living in perpetual exile from their land was proof of Christianity being correct over and against Judaism and proof that Christianity had superseded Israel as the covenant people of God.
This idea is still prevalent in the psyche of Christianity today, and that’s why Zionism is an affront to many Westerners both in the past and today. And although secularized in contemporary Western culture, this notion is still rooted in the broader Western Conscience and that’s why many secular Western thinkers are also horrified by Zionism because it disrupts a centuries old hierarchy rooted in supersessionism which became the framework for Western society.
All of this prevents people from actually being able to reject supersessionism, and thus why, when it comes to the land of Israel, the Jews no longer have a full right to the land, because their right to it has been transferred to the new Israel (in this case the “Palestinians”), thus allowing the maintaining of the social hierarchy of Western and Islamic culture that has existed for centuries by keeping Jews in their “God-ordained” place as perpetual wanderers barred from their homeland. This demonstrates that those who have supposedly rejected supersessionism have indeed not done so and that supersessionism runs much deeper than they themselves are aware of.
When Zionism can be fully theologically affirmed, and not the reservation form of Zionism that relegates Jews to a piece of their historic homeland but gives part of it to a foreign invader, but full Zionism, namely, the right of the entire ancestral homeland free of foreign occupation, only then can replacement theology be fully rejected, not in an abstract ethereal sense but in a concrete embodied-landed reality. Then Western culture can begin to stop using this paradigmatic replacement framework, which was first developed using the Jews, towards other indigenous peoples that it has colonized. For Western colonialism is but a downstream development of the replacement theology of the Jewish people.
Saying you reject supersessionism, and affirm that the people of Israel are still full recipients of God’s promises and covenant with Israel, only to state that the central promise of land to Israel isn’t valid anymore, is like saying to a Native American that you affirm them as the indigenous people, reject that horrible things were done to them, and uphold them as continually affirmed by God but don’t believe they should have their land back as an independent sovereign state. In what world is that a real affirmation of that people?
To borrow the apt words of the African American novelist James Baldwin, “Liberals…have all the proper attitudes. But they have no real convictions, and when the chips are down and you expect them to deliver on what you thought they felt, they somehow are not there.” A similar thing could be said about Christians who supposedly reject supersessionism but then at one level or another reject Zionism. When rejecting supersessionism becomes something more than mere words, they’re not really interested in doing so. Support of “Palestinian” Arabs and anti-Zionism itself is nothing less than age old supersessionism updated to accommodate the contemporary reality of Jews returning in mass to their ancestral homeland. Thus Zionism becomes the ultimate test of whether or not one is a supersessionist. It’s where the rubber hits the road, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
Gabriel Gordon is a researcher at the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel Program and the Economic Reform Program. His research focuses on demographics and trends within the Israeli labor force.
