Christian Western Civilization Should Have Never Happened

Christian Western Civilization Should Have Never Happened

Jul 8, 2025 | Western Civilization

From a merely human perspective Christian Western civilization shouldn’t have happened. The odds of a ragtag crew of manual laborers in a small corner of the Roman Empire eventually turning the world upside down, or should we say right side up, were as close to zero as it possibly gets. From God’s perspective, it was inevitable, baked into the salvific cake. The entire life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God was the inflection point in human history. Literally everything changed, only it didn’t look like it, at all. We can see the beginning point of Christian civilization in a confrontation Jesus had with his enemies (Mark 12, Matt. 22).

They ask Jesus a question that would land him in hot water with the Jews and Romans; there should have been no third option. Jesus’ reply was completely unexpected, as was much of what he said and did. They asked if the Jews should pay tax to Caesar knowing if he said yes, he would be condemned by Jews, and if no, by Roman authorities. It was one or the other, they thought. But Jesus surprised them by asking whose likeness and inscription was on the coin, which he obviously knew. When they told him Caesar’s, he replied: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Thus, political reality changed forever in the Western world. Yes, it took the slow outworking of this principle for almost 1,800 years to finally see what the full fruition of this principle would look like in America’s founding, but it started that day.

God and Caesar
At the time there was no and, only Caesar—all things belonged to Caesar. This was true in the Roman Empire, as well as in every other empire on earth whatever the ruler was called. Power ruled, might made right; everyone else would either submit or die. Now Jesus comes along and has the temerity to suggest the ruler must share his rule with God. This was radical, world changing radical, if Jesus was in fact who he claimed to be—he was and is, and thus Christian Western Civilization.

First, Jesus is saying we have certain obligations to temporal authorities, be they Caesars, kings, presidents, or those in any position of civil authority. However, he is also saying something nobody prior had ever said: there are limits to rulers’ power, and the things of God do not belong to them. In effect, Jesus was putting strict limits on political power by limiting the sphere of political sovereignty. Such an idea was inconceivable in the ancient pagan world. After all, Alexander the Great’s teacher, Aristotle, didn’t exactly turn him into a Democrat. Yes, Aristotle thought despotism was bad, whether it was the rule of one (monarchy turns into tyranny), a small number of rulers (aristocracy turns into oligarchy), or rule by the many, democracy (a polity turns into the tyranny of 51%). What he didn’t have was a transcendent authority in which to ground his arguments for the just state of limited powers. Human reason alone, and Aristotle was one of the most brilliant men ever to live, can only get us so far. Revelation was required to tell Caesar, hands off! The seed of this principle was planted by Jesus, and we’ll see how the tree of liberty coming from it grew very slowly, but surely, as the story progresses.

Without the God of Judaism and Christianity, Israel’s covenant God Yahweh revealed in Christ, tyranny is inevitable. Without God, if all we are is lucky dirt, then might makes right; morality is preference like preferring chocolate over vanilla ice cream. The logic of the “will to power” in a merely material world is irrefutable and inevitable. Why shouldn’t the one with the biggest gun, or the biggest army, determine what is right and wrong? The pagan gods offered no defense against this logic because they were basically human beings with more power, which is an especially toxic brew. Ultimately, politics is religious, and history has been a war between two mutually exclusive worldview systems, paganism (its current iteration is secularism) versus Christianity.

Christianity Verses Paganism
The war against paganism in redemptive history also goes back a very long way. This is the same worldview war we fight today, it only looks more sophisticated.

In the first verse of Genesis 12, the Lord says to Abram: “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you,” and “all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” In the ensuing 2000 years, God’s plans didn’t appear to be progressing much. The entire history of Israel is the story of one battle after another in this religious i.e., worldview, war. From the beginning of Israel’s identity as a people, they vacillate between embracing the idolatry and paganism of the surrounding nations, or Yahweh and the true worship of God. The story seems to end without an ending in the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, but it points forward to the messenger of the one who would bring ultimate victory over the enemies of God’s people. Four hundred years later John the Baptist turned out to be the messenger.

At the time Jesus appeared on the scene, victory over God’s enemies certainly didn’t appear immanent. Israel was a small backwater province in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire, the Romans being only their latest oppressors. They certainly didn’t resemble the stars in the sky or the sand on the seashore promised Abraham two thousand years previously. That would come through Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension. After Jesus rose from the dead he explained to his disciples how the entire Old Testament is about him (Luke 24), which would include the promise to multiply Abraham’s seed beyond human ability to count. The geopolitical and cultural implications would take time to become apparent as God’s kingdom advanced, and the church grew like leaven in a very large batch of dough (Matt. 13:31-35).

The Apostles and the New Testament Church also didn’t have geopolitics and culture on their minds because they expected Jesus to come back within their lifetimes, this became imperative when, against all expectations, Constantine converted to Christianity in the early fourth century. Emperor Theodosius I declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 AD. The implications for Christianity on society became even more imperative when in the early fifth century the Goths sacked Rome and overran the Roman Empire. The pagans blamed the Christians and their strange religion for angering the gods and bringing the downfall of the Empire. A robust defense of Christianity was required, and Augustine, the great Bishop of Hippo (northern Africa), mounted one in his erudite tome, The City of God. This influential work would reverberate down through the ages as Christians realized there were no easy answers to the questions posed by those who inhabited a heavenly city and how they would engage with the earthly city. It seemed the pagans, though, would again be the dominant force in Europe, and God’s promise to Abraham delayed yet again.

How the Irish Saved Christian Western Civilization
Each year on March 17th the Western world celebrates St. Patrick’s Day, and maybe one in a million people know why. I didn’t fully know the story of Patrick and his true significance until I read Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. His life was the domino God used to begin the process of growing Christian influence in the West, and eventually the world. Patrick lived during the 5th century and was born in modern England at the end of Roman Rule in Britain. At sixteen he was captured by Irish pirates and brought to Ireland where he spent six years in captivity as a shepherd and converted to Christianity. He escaped, made it back to Britain, and eventually reunited with his family. There he grew in the knowledge of his faith, and had a vision in a dream where he believed God was calling him to return to Ireland as what today we would call a missionary, probably the first since the Apostles. Before he left, he was ordained as a priest and bishop so his ministry would be sanctioned by the church. According to Cahill, Patrick

In his last years could probably look out over an Ireland transformed by his teaching. According to tradition, at least, he established bishops throughout northern, central, and eastern Ireland . . . With the Irish—even with the kings—he succeeded beyond measure. Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased.

In other words, God’s promises to Abraham are starting not only to be fulfilled in the souls of people, but in how they lived in society.

Learning and the spread of knowledge reflected a significant contrast between pagan and Christian civilization after Rome. When the heathen hoards poured in from the north, they not only brought with them violence, but ignorance, and the destruction of learning, libraries burned, and books turned to dust. These were not your learned classical pagans of Rome and Greece, a world destroyed with Rome. The elite leisured learned class which made learning possible would soon cease to exist, and the books they once paid to have copied by scribes began to disappear. Over time, Patrick’s influence would also bring the light of learning into a Europe enveloped in pagan darkness. For the next two hundred years people from all over Ireland, soon England, and then from Europe came to learn from the monks inspired by Patrick. As monasteries developed into little university towns, scribes took up the great labor of copying all of western literature—everything they could lay their hands on. According to Cahill, “Without the service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable.”

Except it wasn’t “unthinkable” to Almighty God! This knowledge will in due course bring us to our next glimpse of the inexorable spread of Christendom, and a story of God’s providence every bit as seemingly against the odds as Patrick’s.

How King Alfred the Great Saved what Patrick Started
Though Patrick’s influence was felt far and wide, the heathen barbarians were relentless, which moves us forward to the 9th century and the reign of King Alfred the Great of England (Wessex) from 871-899. Alfred aspired to establish a Christian united England under one king. He’s the only king in English history with the appellation Great attached to his name because he started the process to a united England under the law of God. As I learned about Alfred, I was amazed to learn that Christian Western civilization as we know it hung by a thread during Alfred’s reign, and from a human perspective, a thread might be overestimating the odds.

In Winston Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples, The Birth of Britain, he calls the period from the late 800s to 1050, the Viking Age, referring to it as a “murderous struggle.” There was no such thing as Viking people. The reference is something like calling them pirates. The Danes were representative and were Alfred’s primary adversaries, but Vikings were Scandinavian seafaring warriors who left their homelands during these years in search of a better life on an Island seeming to promise it. Since the time of Patrick, the Christian church had become the sole haven of learning and knowledge, something that seemed to amuse and perplex the Vikings.

We see in the English-Viking encounters two mutually exclusive forces, two worldviews that had been at war for almost 3,000 years, and only one could be victorious. Christianity would bring learning and peace, the rule of law, and the advance of God’s kingdom in the world, or the pagans would bring a bloody world of arbitrary power none of us would want to live in. Tom Holland in his book Dominion reminds us, “So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view.” Because of secular progressive education, the influence of Christianity to most people is invisible. Without the eyes of faith, which Alfred had in abundance, England could very easily have become Daneland, and heathen, paganism the dominant religion. It was as close, as I said, as a thread.

Wessex was the last Anglo-Saxon kingdom not to fall to the Vikings. By 875, they decided Alfred and Wessex would be next, the last kingdom in Britain yielding to the inevitable onslaught to come. Unlike the Scandinavians, Alfred didn’t have a large professional standing army to call on, but mostly depended on militias called fyrds, farmers who fought, then went back to their farms. Danish leader Guthrum looked to have the advantage, Wessex would fall, and Christian England lost to history. Prepared to deliver the final blow to Alfred, Ubba, another Scandinavian warlord king, sailed south with many Viking ships and many thousands of warriors to join Guthrum west of Wessex.

In one of the great “coincidences” of Christian Western history, a freak storm destroyed the fleet and Guthrum retreated back north. According to Churchill, “A hundred and twenty ships were sunk, and upwards of five thousand of these perjured marauders perished as they deserved. Thus the whole careful plan fell to pieces . . .” Alfred believed the storm was divine judgment on the heathens, but they were not done. In early 878, Wessex, during a surprise attack, suffered a defeat at the hand of Guthrum and the Danes. Alfred fled hiding for several months as a fugitive in marshlands with just a few hundred followers, hardly anyone in Wessex even knowing if he was still alive. The marshlands ended up not only saving Alfred, but Christian England from paganism.

When news went out in Wessex Alfred was indeed still alive, all his fighting men came back for what turned out to be a culminating battle for Alfred and Christian England at Ethandun (now Edington). We might say this was Alfred’s last stand. If the heathens had won, Christian England would likely never have existed and arguably neither would Christian Western civilization. There would have been no Magna Carta, no Glorious Revolution, no Pilgrims or Puritans, or America. It was Alfred who conceived and accomplished the beginnings of a united Christian England. His grandson, Athelstan, finished the work and would be known as “King of the English.”

Magna Carta to the Glorious Revolution and the Rule of Law
The next period in English history on the way to America in the never-ending war against the centralizing spirit of Babel is Magna Carta (1215) to the Glorious Revolution (1688).  Alfred was given the appellation Great for many reasons. Not only was he a warrior king who saved Christian England from the heathen hordes, but he was also a scholar king in ways almost unimaginable after the fall of Rome. In addition to promoting scholarship and general learning among the people, he was committed to the reign of Christ and the rule of God’s law over England. His vision was to establish a Christian England. His most important accomplishment to this end was building on previous kings to establish his Law Code built on the foundation of the Ten Commandments, and thus beginning the slow growth of English common law, and how law is practiced in America today. Understanding this development is crucial in the war against Babel because the only thing keeping power from absolutizing is the rule of law, something nonexistent anywhere in the world until its development in England. Magna Carta, also called the Great Charter, is a milestone in Christian Western civilization and English constitutional history.

Prior to this time there were no legal limits on the authority of the sovereign. What the king decreed was law. By declaring the sovereign to be subject to the rule of law and documenting the liberties held by “free men,” Magna Carta provided the foundation for individual rights in English law. This is remarkable when you realize in the thousands of years of recorded history previous to this fulcrum moment, the will to power of one man, or a small group of men, was law. Might made right. Outside of England, the Holy Roman Empire (basically greater Germany) and France were governed by Roman law, and therefore by the maxim that “what pleases the prince has the force of law,” thus allowing absolute government. Nonetheless, English kings would not give up their power easily.

When Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, the era of the Tudor monarchy ended, and the tumultuous reign of the Stuarts began. This eventually leads to the English Civil Wars in mid-century, to the reign of parliament under Puritan Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) called the government of the Commonwealth which lasted until 1660. Another Catholic king instigated the events leading to the Glorious Revolution and the end of the reign of the Stuarts. In February 1689, Parliament offered the crown jointly to William and Mary, provided they accept the Bill of Rights, which “placed the royal prerogative and the monarchs themselves unambiguously under the law.” The change of dynasty creating a constitutional monarchy is what is known as the Glorious Revolution partly because it was bloodless.

This period of English history had a significant influence on America’s Founders, leading to the most enduring constitutional republic in history. That day in ancient Israel when Jesus answered his enemies’ question.  then through God’s providential sovereign ordaining of history, the blessings of limited government made their way into the founding of America. The tyranny of Caesar was effectively ended, and a self-governing people, a representative Republic was made possible. From a human perspective the odds against this happening were enormous, but in God’s eternal plans it was inevitable.

 

 

What Exactly is Replacement Theology? And Is It Biblical?

What Exactly is Replacement Theology? And Is It Biblical?

Jul 2, 2025 | Theology

Back when we lived in the Chicago area my wife listened to Moody Radio, and she told me how they often spoke disparagingly of something called Replacement Theology. I’ll never forget one time hearing Janet Parshall sneeringly say those words as if she was spitting out some horrible tasting medicine. Knowing Moody, both evangelist DL in the 19th century and the empire he built in Chicago today, are committed to dispensationalism this didn’t surprise me. What did was the vitriol, as if the very idea was an insult to any right thinking Christian. Having gotten active on Twitter early last year, the eschatology wars are a common occurrence. A dispensationalist and I started a conversation, mostly respectful, and he suggested I read this book, Has the Church Replaced Israel? By Michael J. Vlach.

The question of the title is something I couldn’t really answer because I’d never studied the relationship of Israel and the church in any real depth. I’m reading slowly through John Calvin’s commentary on Isaiah, and he always calls Old Testament Israel the church. This isn’t common in Evangelicalism, but most Evangelical Christians who are not committed dispensationalists tend to believe the church is the fulfillment of Israel, even if they couldn’t articulate exactly what that means. Historically as Vlach acknowledges, so called “replacement theology” was the default position of the church. I’ll explain what exactly this means below because it’s a new theological category that only developed in the last two hundred years. It would not exist if not for the also new eschatology of dispensationalism.

When I first heard this phrase I intuitively didn’t like it. Ever since I embraced covenant theology as part of Reformed theology in my 20s, I never saw the church as “replacing” Israel, as if we were throwing them out like unwanted trash. In my mind, the church doesn’t “replace” Israel, but is the fulfillment of Israel, of God’s redeemed people. Those two concepts, replace and fulfill, have completely different meanings. To re-place means to “put in place of,” so Israel no longer exists because the church has been put in her place. It’s kind of like replacing a struggling pitcher. The starter is not getting the job done, and the coach replaces him with a pitcher from the bullpen, a reliever, who saves the day and the team wins the game. There are two different people, two different pitchers, and the only thing they have in common is throwing a baseball to batters. In the minds of dispensationalists, that is “replacement theology.” To fulfill, on the other hand means “to bring to completion.” God’s promise to Abram that through his seed all nations on earth would be blessed through him meant God’s covenant promises were starting with Abraham and Israel, and would ultimately be fulfilled in Christ and his body, the church.

Eschatology and the Importance of Assumptions
A favorite theme of mine is the importance of assumptions, mainly because we tend to be unaware of how they affect our thinking. Everyone assumes (there I go again!) they’re objective and don’t assume anything at all! We all do, all the time, or we couldn’t think anything at all. It’s part of the deal of being a finite creature with limited knowledge. I was happy to see Professor Vlach admit that up front. On the very first page of the introduction he states an indisputable fact:

As will be shown, one’s hermeneutical assumptions will largely determine where one lands on the relationship between Israel and the church.

I would say totally determines. The assumptions we bring to the interpretation of Scripture, our hermeneutics, determine our interpretation. For example, in the 19th century as skeptical German higher criticism developed, biblical scholars came to the text with an anti-supernatural bias. They rejected the supernatural because they embraced Enlightenment naturalism. So, whenever the Bible mentions miracles, those miracles couldn’t have happened, so they searched for other “scientific” explanations. This is an obvious example of how assumptions affect our conclusions about Scripture, but everyone brings certain assumptions to their reading and study of the Bible, some more obvious than others. Our eschatological assumptions will determine how we think of Israel and the church.

The first thing I noticed about Vlach is that he assumes the burden of proof is on those who, according to dispensationalists, believe the church replaced Israel. These are called supersessionists. It seems to me the newer position, dispensationalism, should have burden of proof, but he believes his position is so biblically obvious the bigger burden is on those he disagrees with.

Then of Israel he assumes they are an entity God will continue to deal with in the same way throughout history. He refers to “the nation Israel,” Israel as “the group,” and Israel as a “people.” Isarel as a nation, a distinct people with a distinct geographic boundary, is fundamental to the dispensational paradigm because they assume God’s promises in the Old Testament to Israel necessitate a literal one-to-one correspondence in the New Testament church age. Based on his assumptions, he states the fundamental issue clearly in this passage:

I have no trouble with the designation replacement theology because with the supersessionist view there is a taking away or transferring of what national Israel was promised to another group. One can use fulfillment terminology as some prefer, but in the end the result is the same—promises and covenants that were made with the nation Israel are no longer the possession of national Israel. Israel’s promises and covenants now allegedly belong to another group that is not national Israel. This other group may be called the “new” or “true” Israel, but this does not change the fact that what was promised to one people group—national Israel—is now the possession of another group to the exclusion of national Israel.

As you can see clearly here, his assumptions determine his position. For his position to be true, or truly biblical, God needs to have intended all his “promises and covenants” to be specifically, literally, for the entity of the nation-state of Israel and its people, which will always be a distinct, independent, and self-contained object of God’s plan. There is no way for him to prove God’s intentions, or at least in any persuasive way, which is why supersessionism has been the predominant position in the history of the church.

The History of Supersessionism
First let’s clarify that word. It originated from the Latin term supersedere, meaning “to sit above” or “to take the place of.” It is formed from super- (“above” or “over”) and sedere (“to sit”). It emerged in the theological scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries specifically to indicate “replacement theology” as a system of thought or doctrine. Once dispensationalism got its start with J.N. Darby in the 1830s, and Israel as a nation-state entity became theologically relevant again, there needed to be a descriptive way to refer to what had been until then the historical position of the church. Vlach quotes theologian Lorraine Boettner:

It may seem harsh to say that “God is done with the Jews.” But the fact of the matter is that He is through with them as a unified national group having anything more to do with the evangelization of the world. That mission has been taken from them and given to the Christian Church (Matt. 21:43). (Italics added.)

The phrase, “unified national group” is an apt description of the heart of the matter. For all of church history until Darby, the position of the church was that God was no longer dealing with Israel as a “unified national group.” God’s covenant and promises that came through Israel were now fulfilled in the church consisting of both Jews and Gentiles.

According to Vlach there are three variations of supersessionism in the history of the church.

  1. Punitive Supersessionism – In this perspective, because of Israel’s disobedience and God’s punishment, He is displacing Israel as the people of God with the church because they have forfeited that right. Vlach says this was common in the Patristic era, and Luther with his anti-Jewish views held it as well.
  2. Economic Supersessionism – This is where I and most non-dispensationalists fit. As Vlach explains, “it focuses on God’s plan in history for the people of God to transfer from an ethnic group (Israel) to a universal group not based on ethnicity (the church). In other words, economic supersessionism asserts that God planned from the beginning for Israel’s role as a people of God to expire with the coming of Christ and the establishment of the church.” I have a saying I heard somewhere and have used over the years: God’s covenant promises are about more than a plot of land in the Middle East. Vlach argues that it is exactly what they are about.
  3. Structural Supersessionism – Simply, this is an interpretive approach to the Bible that discounts the Old Testament history of Israel, and skips right to the New Testament age and focuses upon the church. He is right in that most modern Evangelical Christians ignore the history of Old Testament Israel, and use it primarily for moral lessons. Even as well-read as I am, and a seminary graduate at that, I still didn’t have a solid and detailed grasp of Israel’s history until the last handful of years.

This doesn’t mean we supersessionists don’t hold that there is a future for Isreal and the Jews as a people. Vlach calls this moderate supersessionism, and most Christians have held this position in the history of the church. He distinguishes between salvation and restoration. Moderates do not believe the nation-state of Israel as a “unified national group” will be restored, but we do believe per Paul’s argument in Romans 9-11 that God is not done with the Jews, and that many Jews will come to believe in their Messiah and be saved. We call those today Messianic Jews. The church is the new Israel made up of saved Jews and Gentiles, and supersessionists do not see “any special role for Israel apart from the church.”

Vlach then does a deep dive into the history of supersessionism in the church from the church fathers through the Middle Ages, the Reformation and Enlightenment eras, into modern times. He rightly points out that it is no longer the dominant view, but doesn’t tell us why. He wants us to believe it’s because the biblical case for God restoring national Israel is so obvious, even though it’s not as church history indicates. Supersessionism is no longer dominant because of the rise of dispensationalism in the last two hundred years, and it having completely taken over the Evangelical church. That goes back not only to the Plymouth Brethren and Darby, but to the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening and the rise of fundamentalism against the liberal modernism of the early 20th century. Once Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth hit the bookstores in 1970, it was all over but the shoutin’! Then to put the dispensational icing on the cake, the Left Behind novels (16 of them!) exploded in the 90s, and the movies only added to the dominance of Evangelicals seeing national Israel continuing as part of God’s plan. Not to mention the unlikely event of Israel becoming a nation in 1948.

Hermeneutical Assumptions Determine Our Perspective on Israel and the Church
Having started the book admitting the importance of our interpretive assumptions regarding the Bible, he spends several chapters explaining what those are. This is the heart of the matter, more than the theological justifications he explains later, which we will not have space or time to get into. There are three primary assumptions:

The doctrine of supersessionism is largely controlled by three interrelated beliefs: (1) belief in the interpretive priority of the NT of the OT. (2) belief in the nonliteral fulfillments of OT texts regarding Israel, and (3) belief that national Israel is a type of the NT church.

He then implies that there are two mutually exclusive approaches to interpreting the redemptive history we find in our Bibles. For him these are either/or:

Can one rightly use a grammatical-historical-literary approach to OT passages? Or should the student interpret the OT primarily through the lens of the NT?

The answer to these questions is yes. If you’re not familiar with what a grammatical-historical approach is, simply, it looks to interpret biblical texts by focusing on their original context, language, and literary features. The first thing it asks is what is the author’s intended meaning for the original audience, which can only be understood in the context of the historical and cultural setting.

I was born-again at 18 years old, and I would not learn of this approach to biblical interpretation for over five years. Prior to that it was either implied or expressly taught that the Bible was written to me not for me, that it was God speaking directly to me. When He wanted me to understand something, God would zap! a metaphorical little wire coming down out of heaven into my brain, and I would understand the text for me. That was the primary interpretive grid of the kind of Pietistic Christianity I encountered as a new Christian and a recipe for interpretive distortion. I’m not saying by the power of the Holy Spirit God doesn’t use specific texts to us in unique ways, only that the text has one objective meaning in its historical context, and our objective is to understand that meaning. The phrase I learned that helped me quickly understand all this was “authorial intent,” or what did the author intend as he was writing the text, and related to this is what his readers would have been expected to understand.

The other question he raises is how we use the lens of the NT to interpret the OT. For me the ultimate hermeneutical principle is found in Luke 24 after Jesus is risen from the dead. He makes it clear that he himself is that principle. To the two disciples on the road to Emmaus:

25 He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

According to the risen Jesus, God himself in human flesh, all the OT Scriptures, from Genesis to Malachi, is about him. In the following quote we get to the heart of the issue for dispensationalists, literalism:

Closely related to the supersessionist view of NT priority over the OT is the belief that the NT indicates that there are nonliteral fulfillments of OT promises, prophecies, and covenants related to Israel.

For Vlach and all dispensationalists there are OT texts that “appear to predict a time when Israel will fully possess its land and have a special place of service among the nations.”

The crux of the issue between dispensationalists and supersessionists is literalism, a basic assumption of the former is that certain texts must be interpreted literally. The problem with literalism is that it is impossible to apply consistently. Even in the book giving examples, Vlach doesn’t apply it consistently himself. He agrees that some texts merit typological interpretation, which means there are patterns or “types” in the OT seen as foreshadowing or prefiguring events or themes fulfilled in the NT. So who determines which are literal and which are types? In fact, something can be literal in one context, and a type in the ultimate fulfillment in Christ in another context.

Because of this, his critiques of these three hermeneutical principles of supersessionism (NT priority over the OT, nonliteral fulfillment of texts, and typological understanding of the OT story), is not persuasive; it’s his dispensational assumptions verses supersessionist assumptions. Neither of these approaches can technically be proved, and he admits “the hermeneutical issue of how the NT uses the OT is a difficult and complex topic.” Ultimately, as I said above, your hermeneutical approach and understanding of Israel and the church will be determined by your eschatology. The new eschatological kid on the block, dispensationalism, has gotten a very lot wrong in its less than 200 years, so they shouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt regarding the status of national Israel in God’s redemptive plan. I’ll be sticking with supersessionism, the historically solid position in the history of the church.