It’s impossible to understand antisemitism without understanding the driving force that replacement theology had been for the persecution of Jews throughout history. The idea that the Church has replaced the Jewish people as God’s covenant people took root early in the Roman Empire, despite Paul’s warning to the congregation in Rome in Romans 9–11.
It is impossible to understand antisemitism without understanding the driving force that replacement theology has been for the persecution of Jews throughout history. The idea that the Church has replaced the Jewish people as God’s covenant people took root early in the Roman Empire, despite Paul’s warning to the congregation in Rome in Romans 9–11.
“If the root is holy, so are the branches… if you boast, remember that it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you.” (Rom. 11:16, 18)
The Judeo–Roman wars nearly 2,000 years ago reinforced a development in which Christians early on began to distance themselves from their Jewish origins to avoid being associated with the Roman–Jewish conflict.
The first disciples who believed in Jesus were initially an entirely intra-Jewish group. When Jerusalem was destroyed during the First Jewish–Roman War, the Jews were expelled from the area and about 1.1 million Jews were killed, according to the historian Josephus. When the Jewish Bar Kokhba revolt was crushed a few decades later, another approximately 580,000 Jews were killed, according to the historian Cassius Dio.
Anti-Jewish arguments formulated in the early years of the Church—that the Church had taken over the role of the Jewish people—later evolved into their full horror when Jews became a minority in a Christian society. The theological reasoning that developed from the Church’s alliance with power was later used to justify persecution of Jews during the Inquisition, the Crusades, the pogroms in Eastern Europe, and during the Holocaust.
The variations of this replacement theology are many. The famous German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, using an anti-Jewish interpretation of the Bible, removed Jesus’ statement in John 4:22 from the German Bible: “Salvation comes from the Jews.” The year was 1939, and Bultmann’s action legitimized the Nazi Bible, providing ideological support to the Holocaust in a situation where Hitler problematized the Jewish presence in Europe.
Even in the Muslim world, where increasing Islamism is forcing historic churches out of their original regions, those church leaders who have dared to remain in the region—due to the area’s hostility toward Jews—have been forced to develop criticism of Israel as a survival strategy.
The Christian population in Syria and Iraq has decreased by over 80 percent due to war, persecution, and emigration over just more than 20 years. Iraq’s Christian population fell from over about 1.5 million in 2003 to roughly 150,000–300,000, while the number of Christians in neighbouring Syria has declined from 2 million in 2011 to just under 500,000.
The Kairo document from 2009, written by representatives of the historic churches in Gaza and the West Bank, reflects this very perspective.
In his books “Holy Root” and “God’s Israel?”, Peter Halldorf makes the mistake that Paul warns the congregation in Rome about. In these books, the Church Fathers of the early Church are elevated to a “holy root,” while Israel’s ‘chosenness’ is questioned, as indicated by the question mark in the title “God’s Israel?”
Halldorf argues that just as the prophetic spotlight was directed by the prophet Jeremiah toward the corrupt leadership of Israel in his time, it should also be able to be directed at today’s political leaders in the country.
The question, rather, is what the prophet Jeremiah—and Paul—would have to say today to theologians and church leaders in Sweden who criticize the Middle East’s only democracy, where a Jewish population lives that has not forgotten nearly two thousand years of replacement theology in the church, its arrogance — and its antisemitism.
Peter Halldorf himself offers good guidance toward clarity in the foreword of his book “Holy Root”: “Roots are the most important prerequisite for the delicate task of discerning between spirits.”
