The Evils of "Replacement Theology"

From a blog located at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com came a recent item titled, “Erasing Israel: The Quiet Rewrite That Reshaped Christianity.” The author (Tim Orr) is identified as a “religious studies scholar.” Let’s review some important truths in light of Tim Orr’s published work.

Orr’s thesis is that while the church has been “preaching grace,” it has also often been busy “erasing Israel.” What he is talking about is the idea—a completely biblical idea—that the church is now the Israel of God. He (and others) call this “replacement theology” or “supersessionism.” Orr says he “never bought this.” He even thinks his world of “old-school dispensationalism” was guilty of pushing Israel out of the present into the distant future.

He claims this all began when the Jewish revolts against Rome made the early church begin to fear an association with Judaism. Early on, Justin Martyr said Christians were now the true Israel, and faith, not lineage, was important. Orr says Irenaeus picked up this theme, Origen spiritualized Israel, and as church history rolled on, this approach infected Christianity. Christianity, says Orr, kept a “supersessionist reflex.”

It could be the case that early Christians took up this view because of fear, but it is at least as likely that they noticed it in the Apostolic teaching and repeated it when appropriate.

This theological debate is just background for the main point Orr wants to make. He says, “Ideas don’t stay tucked inside academic books. They seep outward, shaping what people feel.” What did the idea that the church replaced Israel do? In his words, “No serious historian argues that Christian theology caused the Holocaust. But centuries of Christian suspicion of Jews—centuries of shrinking Israel’s place in the story—helped form the cultural soil where that evil could grow.”

There we have it. If you don’t agree that physical Israel has a continuing place in God’s salvation plan, you support an idea that contributed to the holocaust! This is a good example of the logical fallacy called “poisoning the well.” If you disagree with Orr, you are affirming a horrible idea, so there is no need to consider what you might have to say about the matter. You are just a corrupted source.

Orr now elaborates on this matter of the holocaust and “replacement theology” in some detail. While he sometimes alludes to the Bible, he never examines it directly. This makes it very difficult to see where he gets his ideas, but let’s look at what we can find.

For example, he says that after the holocaust, “Christian thinkers tried to repair some of the damage. Many now affirm that God’s covenant with the Jewish people was never revoked.” This, of course, is loaded terminology. God’s covenant with physical Israel was not “revoked.” Rather, it was fulfilled with the coming of Christ. Nothing about that should make anyone want to murder ethnically Jewish people, but Orr seems to think it could.

With this, Orr also thinks that God’s covenant with physical Israel continues in a way that makes the continued possession of the land important. As he says, “Scripture never treats the land like a decorative detail or a throwaway footnote. It fastens a people to a place with a weight that makes modern readers squirm.” Regrettably, he never explains exactly what the purpose of a physical Israel continuing to possess certain land would be for Christianity.

Orr says:

A Christianity without Israel isn’t Christianity at all. It turns into a gentile story draped in someone else’s garments. And the parallel truth cuts just as sharply: Christianity didn’t grow beyond Israel—it grew out of her. It depended on her. It still does, far more than most believers realize.

Christianity certainly does have a dependence on Israel in some sense. Again, Israel was the ancestry of Christ. That was and remains exceedingly important. Notice how Orr assumes that the crucial role of Israel as the lineage of the Messiah is not significant. Orr thinks physical Israel still has some additional place in God’s plan, but as we said before, he never spells out just what the place is.

This is what is called in logic “creating a straw man.” It is a faulty version of reasoning that creates a caricature of a position you want to attack, and attacking that instead of the real position. In our case, I’m not sure who thinks there is a “Christianity without Israel.” There, of course, is not and could not be, but understanding that physical Israel’s role in Christianity ended with the coming of Christ does not take physical Israel out of Christianity.

Orr finally gets to some reference to Scripture. He says:

If the Church wants theological honesty and moral clarity, it must recover what Paul assumed everyone already knew. The wild branches are alive only because a living root keeps feeding them. And that root is Israel—not an idea, not a metaphor, but an actual people still bound to the God who hasn’t backed out of His promises. Affirming Israel’s enduring covenant does not negate the Christian confession that salvation comes through Jesus the Messiah; it simply insists that this confession must not erase the people or the promises through whom He came.

Notice how Orr claims Israel’s covenant is “enduring.” There is a whole debate about the meaning of the word sometimes translated “forever” in the Old Testament. Without going into it in detail, it is not difficult to discover in standard reference works that the word does not always mean “time without end.”

In talking about branches and roots, Orr is referring to Romans 11:17-21. That is worth a look. What does Paul really assume everyone already knew?

Here, Paul uses an olive tree to represent the relationship between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. Paul is talking to the “you” in verse 17, who are clearly Gentile Christians. They are “a wild olive shoot.” Gentiles are “grafted in among the others.” Who do these “others” have to be? Clearly, Jewish Christians. Most of all, notice this: when Paul talks about “the root” in verse 18, he is clearly NOT talking about either Jewish or Gentile Christians. They are both distinguished from this “root.” Paul does not specify exactly what it is, but since it supports both kinds of branches, it can’t be identical with either one of them. While Paul may well be saying that Old Testament Israel is in some sense involved in the “root” of this tree, the purpose of that root was to be the lineage of the Messiah. As Paul puts it in Romans 9:5, the climax of physical Israel was reached in Christ, “from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen.”

Orr is twisting things in a way that seems designed to confuse when he says, “that root is Israel.” It is in the sense of being the people from whom Christ came.

Nothing about that implies a continuing significant status for ethnic Jews who do not receive Christ. They are among the “broken off branches.” They are in the same category as Gentiles who do not receive Christ. They are people who need faith—faith in Christ!

Orr claims that “the real embarrassment of Christian history isn’t God’s election of Israel at all, but the Church’s long, stubborn effort to revise His choice. We quote Paul while pushing against the very stream he’s swimming in. We preach grace while quietly deleting the people through whom grace first broke into the world.”

Let’s get to the key point of how grace came into the world. Yes, grace came into the world through Jesus Christ from God’s physical, Old Testament Israel, but to get back to Paul, revisit the very important point he makes in Romans 11:23. Here, he is referring to “my own people.” Paul’s crucial point about them is that “if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in,” back into the root of God’s gracious salvation, we might say. That is the whole story now about all of God’s people. They are defined by faith in Christ, not physical lineage.

We keep hoping Orr would explain just what he is talking about as this continuing role for physical Israel, but he does not. Is it somehow connected to his background of old-school dispensationalism? That view definitely has a big, continuing place for physical Israel. Who knows?

Orr, in conclusion, simply declares, “It’s time to return to the story we received from a people who never stopped carrying it. The root still stands. The root still feeds.” All true, Mr. Orr, but none of that conflicts with the identity of God’s people. God’s people are those who are in Christ. If you are not in Christ, you are not part of God’s people. Ethnicity is insignificant. Faith in Jesus Christ is all-significant.

* Kent B. True is the alter ego of Harold N. Orndorff, Jr., a retired campus minister who has taught college and seminary courses in the fields of apologetics, philosophy, ethics, and logic. Lately, he enjoys studying his grandchildren, who are very interesting ones and all. Contact him, if you must, at hnoii@hotmail.com.