Israel Matters

Why Christians Must Think Differently about the People and the Land

McDermott, Gerald R.

• Publisher: Brazos Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781493406760
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Widely respected theologian Gerald McDermott has spent two decades investigating the meaning of Israel and Judaism. What he has learned has required him to rethink many of his previous assumptions. Israel Matters addresses the perennially important issue of the relationship between Christianity and the people and land of Israel, offering a unique and compelling "third way" between typical approaches and correcting common misunderstandings along the way. This book challenges the widespread Christian assumption that since Jesus came to earth, Jews are no longer special to God as a people, and the land of Israel is no longer theologically significant. It traces the author's journey from thinking those things to discovering that the New Testament authors believed the opposite of both. It also shows that contrary to what many Christians believe, the church is not the new Israel, and both the people and the land of Israel are important to God and the future of redemption. McDermott offers an accessible but robust defense of a "New Christian Zionism" for pastors and laypeople interested in Israel and Christian-Jewish relations. His approach will also spark a conversation among theologians and biblical scholars.

1
Getting the Big Story Wrong

Most Christians for most of Christian history have been wrong about Israel. They have believed in what scholars call “supersessionism.” This is the view that the Church has superseded Israel. According to this view, after most of Israel rejected Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah, God revoked his covenant with biblical Israel and transferred the covenant to those who believed in Jesus. The Church thus became the New Israel.

As I said in the introduction, it seemed quite logical to me that the Church would be the New Israel. After all, Jesus opened the kingdom to all the world, after Israel had been restricted to the Jews. If Israel had anything to do with God’s kingdom—and I believed that it did—it seemed plausible that Jesus was simply extending the kingdom’s boundaries. It was now enlarged to include the whole world.

But then I met a learned Christian named Baruch who had lived in Israel for many years. He pointed out to me that God’s intention from the beginning was to use Israel to reach the world. When God first came to Abraham, the father of Israel, God said, “Through your seed, all the peoples of the earth will be blessed” (Gen. 22:18 AT). Then throughout the history of Israel, Baruch told me, people from outside Israel came to join the Jewish people. Ruth was one example of many who made this move. “But even with these foreigners joining Israel,” he explained, “Israel was still Israel—a Jewish people. They included foreigners, sometimes as Jews and sometimes not, but it was still a Jewish people.”

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me unpack the logic of supersessionism a bit more.

Supersessionism, or Replacement Theology

Supersessionism holds that all the promises that God made to Old Testament Israel are now (since the resurrection of Jesus) applied to the Christian Church. The promises were contingent on obedience to the covenant. Biblical Jews broke the terms of that covenant—both before Jesus came, by breaking God’s laws, and then after Jesus came, by refusing to accept him as their messiah. But since Jesus obeyed all of God’s law, and all believers in him are joined to him, his obedience is credited to them. So by virtue of his obedience and their inclusion in him, Christians receive the blessings of the covenant. They are members of the New Israel, which is his body, the Church.

This is also called “replacement theology.” The Church replaced biblical Israel as the apple of God’s eye. God’s covenant with ancient Israel was replaced by Jesus’ new covenant, which is made with all those who believe in him. The Church has replaced the Jews as the inheritors of all the biblical promises concerning Israel. When Christians read the Old Testament prophecies about the restoration of the people of Israel to the land of Israel, they should interpret those prophecies as referring to the Christian Church. The true meaning, according to this view, is that the Church will inherit the whole world in the age to come. All of those in the Church will be blessed, not just Jews. There will no longer be a distinction between Jews and gentiles among those who believe in Jesus, and there will be no land of Israel separate from the rest of the world. For the Church has replaced the ethnic people of Israel. And the little land of Israel has been replaced by a whole world. The Jews are no longer God’s people in any special way, and the land of Israel is like the land of any other country in the world—say, Uganda or Thailand.

These are the views of supersessionism. This has been the belief of most Christians ever since the second century AD. As we will see in the next chapter and the rest of this book, Christians had a very different view during the first century in the New Testament churches. But after AD 135, when Jews revolted for a second time against Rome and were driven out of Jerusalem completely, things changed. More than ever before in the history of the Roman Empire, it became dangerous to be a Jew. Since Christians until this time had been thought by the Romans—for good reason—to be Jews, many Christians believed it was time to change that perception. They started to dissociate themselves and their reputation from all things Jewish.1

Justin Martyr: The “New Israel”

Justin Martyr (100–ca. 165) was one of the first prominent Christian thinkers to say publicly that Christianity was fundamentally different from Judaism. He suggested that Jesus was starting a new religion, breaking decisively with his Jewish past. To be sure, Justin was not the first to suggest this break. The Epistle of Barnabas (written at some point between 70 and 131) had argued in detail that all the ceremonial laws of the Pentateuch were simply pointers to Christ and that Jewish sins disqualified them from possessing the covenant any longer. But most historians agree that Justin was the first to say that the Church was the “true Israel.”2 His explanation of this new term became popular and became the new Big Story.

The old Big Story was narrated principally by the apostle Paul. He had told gentile believers that their union with Messiah Jesus by faith enabled them to become “fellow citizens” in the “commonwealth of Israel” (Eph. 2:12, 19). By “Israel” Paul meant the family of Abraham, who was the first Jew: “If you belong to Messiah [both “Messiah” and “Christ” mean “Anointed One”], then you are Abraham’s offspring” (Gal. 3:29 AT). Paul said this because, as he explained it, the offspring or “seed” was Christ (Gal. 3:16). By becoming one with Christ through faith, gentiles could become the offspring or seed of Abraham. Therefore the gospel was the good news that gentiles could now become part of Israel: it was “the blessing of Abraham . . . com[ing] to the Gentiles” because of “the promises . . . made to Abraham and to his offspring” (Gal. 3:14, 16). So the good news was that gentiles could now, through faith in Jesus, become members of Abraham’s family. This was great news because all of God’s promises had been made to this man and his family—the father of Jews and all of his Jewish descendants. Gentiles could become sons or daughters of Abraham by faith (Rom. 4:11), and this meant connecting to Jewish Israel, not getting away from it.

Paul’s Commonwealth of Israel Made Up of Jews and “Associates”

For Paul, then, Israel meant the family of (Jewish) Abraham and all of his Jewish descendants, plus those gentiles who had joined this family by marriage or faith. This had happened many times in Old Testament history when gentile people like Ruth and Rahab and the Gibeonites became part of Israel and were accepted. They and their children eventually became Jews, members of Israel. God told Isaiah that these gentile foreigners were to be fully accepted by God and Jewish Israel if they came with faith in the God of Israel:

Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the LORD say,

“The LORD will surely separate me from his people.”

……………………………………………………

“The foreigners who join themselves to the LORD,

to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD,

and to be his servants,

everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it,

and holds fast my covenant—

these I will bring to my holy mountain,

and make them joyful in my house of prayer;

their burnt offerings and their sacrifices

will be accepted on my altar;

for my house shall be called a house of prayer

for all peoples.” (Isa. 56:3, 6–7)

For both Paul and Isaiah, Israel was the commonwealth of Israel, which non-Jews could join. Though gentile, they could become members of the Jewish family if they put their trust in the God of Israel—even if they did not actually become Jews. The rabbis in the first centuries BC and AD taught that if gentiles chose not to convert to Judaism but nevertheless believed in the God of Israel, attended synagogue worship where Moses “is read every Sabbath” (Acts 15:21), and obeyed the Noachian commandments (similar to the Ten Commandments), they would be “righteous gentiles” who would have a share in the world to come. They would be associated with Israel (associate members, if you will) even if they were not Jews, and so would enjoy the blessings of the new world that would come to all those in or associated with Israel. The key point here is that Israel still meant the family of Jews descended from biblical Abraham. Israel included both Jews and those who believed in the Jewish God but did not formally convert to Judaism. These latter “associates” of Israel did not get circumcised, which was required of men for conversion, but nevertheless considered themselves part of the Jewish people called Israel. To use a term that became important for Paul, they were “adopted” members of the Jewish family.

But for Justin, Israel was the Church, disconnected from Jews and biblical Israel. Theoretically, it was possible for Justin’s New Israel to have few Jews or even no Jews, with no real connection to Jews or Judaism and thus to Abraham’s family. Thus Justin’s New Israel was very different from what Paul had meant by Israel.

Justin could think this way because, for him, the gentiles were more important than the Jews. The story of salvation was not about Jesus’ fulfilling the promises made to the Jewish patriarchs, as Mary had exclaimed in her Magnificat and Paul had told the church at Rome,3 but about the different ways the eternal Word—the Logos—speaks to different cultures. The Logos spoke one way to the Jews but in other ways to other peoples, especially the Greeks. The Jews had their prophets, but so did the Greeks: Socrates and Plato. The important thing was that Christ “was and is the Logos who is in every man” and inspires whatever truth we find in the world.4 The Old Testament was important not because it revealed the God of Israel as the true God but because it predicted the true Logos.

According to Justin, the law given at Sinai was already “old” and belonged to Jews alone. The new law from Christ had made the old one cease, and now the new one belonged to everyone. God’s relationship to Israel therefore was physical and temporary, but his new relationship to the Church was spiritual and permanent. The old Israel of Jews was no longer Israel in any permanent sense. Now the Church, which in Justin’s day was being filled with more and more gentiles, had taken over the term “Israel.” Israel was no longer something that was essentially Jewish. It had become a people that was more gentile than Jewish, and one day would become overwhelmingly gentile. Since this was a new thing that God was doing, and God had left behind the old Israel, the New Israel was good and the old Israel bad.

Boasting over the Branches

As Oskar Skarsaune observes, Justin fell prey to exactly what Paul had warned his gentile readers against: “Do not boast over the branches” (Rom. 11:18 NRSV).5 In Romans 11 Paul said the gentiles were like “a wild olive shoot” that was grafted onto the olive tree of Israel, some of whose “natural branches” (Jews) were broken off “because of their unbelief” (vv. 17, 20, 21). He cautioned the gentile followers of Jesus against the arrogance that forgets that “it is not you who support the root [Jewish Israel], but the root that supports you” (v. 18). Justin seems to have forgotten.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that everything that Justin said and stood for was mistaken. Not at all. Justin was a brave and brilliant Father of the Church in most ways.6 He helped the early Church understand how to relate Jesus to the non-Christian religions of their day, especially Greek and Roman philosophies. (In the ancient world, philosophy was about God and ultimate reality, and hence was religious, not merely what we call “philosophy” today.) He provided deep insight into how God works in people who have not heard the gospel. And he courageously gave his life for the faith—that’s why he is called Justin Martyr. But regarding Israel and Jesus’ Jewishness, he set the Church on the wrong path.

Irenaeus: Unnecessary Israel

Another Father who steered the Church astray on Israel was Irenaeus (ca. 145–202). He was an excellent teacher in other ways. His book Against Heresies was a powerful response to the heresy of Christian gnosticism, which talked about a Jesus who did not have real flesh and did not suffer. Gnostics were persuaded by Greek philosophy that God is perfect and therefore never changes, and so could never become a real man with flesh that changes in the vicissitudes of history. Some gnostics held that since suffering involves change, Jesus must have been adopted as the Christ at his baptism since he could not have gone through the suffering of being born and growing into adulthood. And, they reasoned, God must have lifted his Christhood from him before the crucifixion because God would never have endured such horrible suffering.

Irenaeus argued eloquently that Jesus was the Christ at birth and to his death, and that he had real human flesh and really suffered. In fact, he had to suffer because it was prophesied that the Messiah’s sufferings would save human beings from their sins. And more importantly, Jesus’ role was to undo the damage that Adam had done to humanity by his sin. Jesus had to “recapitulate” all of human life by living through every stage, so that the human nature that had been fata...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Getting the Big Story Wrong
• 2. Does the New Testament Teach That the Church Is the New Israel?
• 3. Those Who Got It Right
• 4. Looking More Closely at the Old Testament
• 5. Looking More Closely at the New Testament
• 6. Political Objections
• 7. Theological Objections
• 8. If All This Is True, Then What?
• 9. Six Proposals
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix
• Notes
• Ancient Sources Index
• Subject and Name Index
• Back Cover