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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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