Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: The end of baseless hatred. The conclusion. I need you to buckle your seatbelts and get ready. But in order to get to the end, we have to go back to the beginning to once again meet our friend Marcion.
Can we ever get rid of Marcion? Can we ever stop talking about Marcion? I know, but I want to touch on one last lasting influe of Marcionite heresy. And it may sound possibly a bit shocking to some. That's okay. But he had something very important to do with the formation of the New Testament. We're going to use that language, specifically the New Testament, and ultimately, even in the idea that this amazing book of Scripture, the New Testament, has been corrupted into a replacement theology framework. Even today, there's subtleties of that. But we'll recall Marcion, right? Who remembers Marcion?
Good. If you don't, you got to go way back to the beginning of this series, and you need to learn about him, because it's very important. Second century, he taught some version of replacement theology, but not really that, because the Jews weren't replaced. They were just absolutely eradicated. They didn't matter. The Jewish God did.
That was a different God. The Jewish scriptures didn't matter. That was a Jewish. That was a different God. That was a different. He took out the Gospels, he kept some of Luke, he took only Paul's writings, removed all the references to Israel, basically erased and eradicated them. And we've talked about how central, how influential Marcionites heretical teachings were in history because they required a Church response. They required a condemnation of the Marcionite heresy. Why? Because Israel was still around. And Israel had to be in the story. And the Old Testament, it had to be in the story. And the Gospels and the letters circulating, they needed to be included in telling this story about the Jews, the Old Testament, and ultimately the Church. But in the Church's necessity to counteract Marcion's teaching, the Church had to clarify its own canon. You know what canon is, right? The collection of authorized writings.
So first thing, Marcion required the Church to do that.
He didn't say that it was a required response on behalf of the Church. And they said, no, no, the Old Testament is still there. It's ours. But we will interpret it only in the light of Jesus.
That's how we're gonna use that. Secondly, they had to decide which of the many writings that were circulating were going to be a part of the authoritative Scriptures about Jesus and the apostles. So through the second and third centuries, that's what was happening. The New Testament was being formulated.
And by the 4th century, the church had basically finalized the 27 books of the New Testament, okay, to go along with, by the way, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which was called for bonus points, the Septuagint. This was now the Christian Bible. Septuagint and the New Testament.
But it wasn't that simple. Because while this may seem like a victory, a victory for Marcion, I mean, a victory for the Church over Marcion, we have a difficulty. The Old Testament was kept right. We kept it around.
But in practice, even in that name, which by the second century it was referred to as the Old Covenant, right, The Old Testament, the very act of labeling the two parts of the Bible as old and new, that way of theology was taught and ended up solidifying a sense of division between these communities. And it was in essence a subordination.
The Old Testament sort of, you know, it's important, but it's not equally valued. Revelation really. I mean, let's be serious. It's preliminary. It's something that needed to be transcended. The New Testament, on the other hand, now that's the Church's book, right? That's the one, that's the document of the new people of God, the final word in many interpretations that superseded the Old Word. And an interesting development then in the idea of supersessionism. Because now not only is it a collection of ideas, the very texts that are being read are solidified into this replacement theology framework. Old, new. And as we discussed, these early church figures, influenced by the earliest ones, Justin Martyrs Martyr and others, they had already proposed this idea that the Old Testament and all of the things there about the Jews and all this, they were figures and shadows, right? Figures and shadows, allegory illustrations of what would actually be the types and shadows later fulfilled in Christ, in the Church and in the New Testament.
And so once those things were fulfilled, their connection to the Jewish people, that doesn't matter anymore. For instance, the temple sacrifices, we have Jesus sacrifice.
That supersedes. That's obsolete, this Jewish temple, the Sabbath rest.
No, that's done by Jesus. We come now into this.
Salvation is rest. So the literal Sabbath keeping, that's unnecessary for Christians, we don't do that.
The land of Israel, even it might be seen as a symbol now of heaven Israel. So the Jewish tie to the physical land, that's irrelevant. And so we've discussed extensively already that the interpreters increasingly read the Old Testament as a Christian book. Now, it was their book aimed at primarily revealing who Jesus and what the Church that it's all over the New Testament or over the Old Testament if you just read it, right. So no, it's not really. It's not a statement of God's ongoing covenant with Israel. That's something else that's gone. We now have this new pointer. Now there's an obvious, dangerous danger, very obvious.
If the New Testament was the final word on truth.
What we find there are some very unseemly comments about Jews, don't we?
You know the ones that I'm talking about? They're used by every anti Semite on the face of the earth. His blood be upon us and our children.
We have the passages in the New Testament that could be seen as criticizing Jews.
We have, you know, the Gospels where Jewish leaders oppose Jesus and of course our dear brother Paul and his letters where he mentions Jewish unbelief. What happens is these texts now in this authoritative text become used as weapons against the Jews.
The New Testament as weapons against the Jews.
And we've talked about what was actually going on, that it was Jews arguing with Jews and intra family dispute and all that other kind of stuff. But these were heavily emphasized now these texts to characterize Jews as Christ rejecters and ultimately as Christ killers.
All Jews though, all Jews forever.
Not just those Jews, all Jews. And so with the canon fixed and the church now firmly gentile, the Bible was presented, the Bible was presented as if it taught that the church is the rightful heir to all of God's promises. And the Jews, they are just the stubborn losers of history.
That's just that. And in a tragic way, that New Testament interpretation, seeing the Old Testament as foil. You know what a foil is? It's the ultimate other. It's we're not that an outdated book. It only has value insofar as it points to the New Testament. And even the adjectives, even the modifiers, old and new, they suggest that old is inferior, new is superior. And here's the point. If the old book and the stories it tells are inferior, then clearly the people in the book are also inferior.
So supersessionism by this point, replacement theology, Supersessionism is superset, okay? It is the way. It is the way of thinking. And we've seen how the church and I use that. I know that term today has a very different. You can't say the church today. There are so many denominations, so many different things. We're talking about the earliest form here.
But we talked about already how a few kinds of supersessionism, right? Punitive supersessionism, where the church saw that the Jews were lower than common and they deserved every punishment we got. They talked. That they received.
We talked about economic supersessionism, how Israel's role, it was temporary, by design, in the economy of salvation, they're supposed to go away. But there's an even more subtle form that shapes today's church.
And that's what we need to finish up with today. And I'm gonna tell you in advance, it is a lot to digest.
So you're gonna have to pinch yourself when you fall asleep, because I want this going into your brain and down into your heart so that it can come out of your mouth when it's needed.
It's the last one. Gotta make it count, right?
Scholars call this last kind of supersessionism structural supersessionism. You are currently in seminary class. Just think of it that way.
A seminary that teaches actual truth.
Not all of them do.
But this structural supersessionism, this is. This is it, man.
Punitive supersessionism, this punishment thing, it's so easy to identify.
It's not consistent with the words of Jesus.
It's not consistent. And I firmly believe that most Christians would want nothing to do with that, to distance themselves from the idea and the horrors of antisemitism and all that. But here's the crucial point. Just because you renounce that part of replacement theology, it does not mean that we've rooted out the other forms. They are deeper. They are more subtle. The theology of displacement, we can call this.
I am thankful to many scholars, above all, R. Kendall Solon, who wrote the God of Israel and Christian Theology. I can't remember. I think that's the title. Anyway, they're the ones who have done this work. They're Christians, Gentiles.
And they describe these forms of replacement theology that are really. They're not about hatred.
That's not it. That's not what replacement theology has to be. And we've already introduced this economic thing. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go back and listen to it. The quick summary, of course, is that this was all planned. God's economy changed. And so, you know, it was always his plan. Once Christ came, once the church was established, that prior economy expired. Jews put it this way.
Economic supersessionism says the Jews were the prepare the way people. Now they're the get out of the way people.
Someone recently told me at their church that growing up, the pastor told them, okay, listen, here's the simple thing. When you see Israel in your Bible, replace It with the church.
Has anyone ever been taught that only spiritual Israel matters, only the church matters? It's an obvious form of replacement theology. But I want you to meet this structural superstitionism, okay? It means you might be able to determine that this has something to do with the structure of how the entire Bible is read.
And this is it.
The overarching story that is told primarily by Christians about God and salvation. It effectively ignores all of the existing promises to the Jewish people. And I'll put this in plain terms. Pull that up for me, that first slide. I don't know how much of it you'll be able to see, but I want you to think about the typical way that the story of the Bible is summarized. It often goes like this. God created the world.
There was a big problem that happened right away. There was a falling, and then later there was an incarnation where Jesus came and he saved those who would be saved. And then the fourth part is, he's coming back and we're all going to go to heaven. It is creation, fall, incarnation, consummation. That is the narrative. Now, that probably sounds familiar and true, right?
And it is true in a cosmic framework.
In the big, big picture thing, this can work. But do you notice anything that might be missing from that narrative?
Go to the next slide.
Where.
Where is Israel's story in that structural reading? In that narrative, it is not there. Where is the calling of Abraham, the Exodus, the Sinai, the Mount Sinai, the kings, exile, the prophets of Israel, the return, the Messiah of Israel, the nations coming alongside the Messiah of Israel, and even the specific role of Israel in the future? The entire storyline just falls away from this structural reading of the Bible.
A large portion of the Bible after fall just falls into. And after many ages of dealing with sinful people, bam, got that done. Jesus showed up.
That's a lot to exclude.
God sent Jesus, and so we're going home one day. The entire narrative, from Genesis 12 to Malachi, it's not part of the story. There is a big cosmic story.
There is. It has to do with salvation and redemption and creation and all those things. But listen, if your story, if the way you frames it, disregards or ignores a very real and relevant people who lived on earth and were part of the story and their journeys, both good and bad, and the ongoing validity of the Torah, which is God's instruction, if it's cast aside as something that, oh yeah, somewhere in the midst of that go, God said a bunch of things that we could never do so we don't have to pay Attention to any of that.
It's a narrative structure. And in it, Israel serves one purpose. What is their purpose? To bring the Messiah.
Once that's done, Israel no longer figures into the plots. The story just zooms out onto the universal scale. It's all humanity and all future hope. It's just in a big picture of universal terms. There's no role for the Jewish people. Now, think of it this way. Imagine you're watching a play, and in the scenery, the detailed backdrop, there's this village, a Jewish village. It's got a synagogue and shops and marketplaces and study halls and all these things. And you see all these people going about their daily lives and they're interacting and they're talking. But as the main story is unfolding on the stage, the actors never interact at all with the backdrop. They have no connection. They just perform their own story in front of it. And it's a different story.
It's not even related to the story that's happening behind.
And so what does the audience do?
The audience completely disregards the entire backdrop of the story.
This is what Kendall Soley noticed about how many Christians. Keep in mind he is a Christian theologian.
How many Christians tell the Bible story. God creates, humans fall, Jesus saves, heaven awaits.
God's covenant people, their journey of faith, that role, it's just.
It's just the backdrop.
And no one even interacts with it.
It's just scenery. It's scenery for Jesus to arrive on a stage. And guess what?
That different story, it's a very different story. And you know what the story's about?
Me, me, me, me, me. Individual salvation. Jesus came to save me, Me, I'm going to heaven. Individual me. That's not the story of the Bible.
As Solon puts it, the history of Israel becomes a prefiguring of redemption. And that's it. And listen to this.
This encapsulates 10 minutes of what I just said.
He says the outline of one could tell the whole outline of Christian salvation history without ever mentioning Israel in any substantive way. And it would not change a thing. It would not change anything about the outcome of the story.
There's another slide.
This idea, this structural supersessionism. Israel has been subsumed, absorbed, erased into the amorphous. One new man, the most misunderstood concept maybe in all of the Bible.
One new man that has no distinction.
And yes. Okay, all right, back up. We got a genealogy.
There's a genealogy of presenting Jesus. It has something to do with Abraham and David's in there, but beyond that, not needed.
The structural narrative created this disconnected second story, when really, really, if you read the Bible, it is one consecutive story of God, but it includes everything in the Bible and especially the people of the book.
Why does this matter?
This is part two.
Because many sincere Christians fall into this structural supersessionism without even realizing it. And here's what I mean.
As I've thought through this series, the ideas that the church fathers presented of Israel being replaced and economic and structural, the story is really about Jesus coming to save me. I've thought about it, I've considered it. I've realized that many disciples of Jesus who hear this would say, and so what? Yeah, that's the story. That's right.
What of it?
That is to say, the inherited theology.
It just sounds right. You know why? Because that's what you've been taught since Sunday school.
The Old Testament is old. It's essentially replaced by Jesus New Revelation. Christianity is about a personal relationship with Jesus and going to heaven. It's not about nations. It's not about national salvation. It's not about a kingdom to come to earth. It's certainly not about a temple or a land or anything earthly.
And none of that may come with hatred toward Jews as people, but it carries the assumption that Judaism and Israel's continuity are spiritually irrelevant or a regression. Actually, what worse thing can you do than to consider putting yourself under the law?
Irrelevant.
And this is why we say that even if someone rejects punitive supersessionism, the way that they read the Bible and its overarching story can still absolutely be captive to this idea of structural supersession. When I use the term baked in, when I say replacement theology is baked into Christian theology, this is what I mean. Someone asks me sometimes, what does that mean, this displacement theology? It's hidden in there. And the problem is, as you study, as you truly read, this is why so many of you are here. This is why people listen to this stuff online.
Because as you truly read, you find that none of that is true. In the Scriptures.
God's promises to Israel are repeatedly affirmed. Paul passionately rejects it. In Romans 11, he says the promises are what, irrevocable. He foresees it a mysterious inclusion later, when all Jews will be saved. There's all kinds of interpretations of that. The story Paul tells in Romans with this slide, this is the Bible story. Paul is a masterful capturer of the narrative of the Bible.
You have the story of humanity in 1 through 8. You have this central component of Israel in Romans 9, 11. And then we See at the end that it actually can be all of us together. This is New Testament theology. And what's in the center of that, whatever that is.
Israel and the nations, not the nations alone.
This is preaching to the choir, I know, but it's part of a series, and it's got to be in here.
I know you're learning some things you didn't know, but this, you know, many, many Christians just gloss over all of it.
They affirm love for the Jewish people. They reject the idea that God hates them.
They support the existence of Israel as a modern state. They recognize the evil of antisemitism. They perhaps even repented of past Christian antisemitism. And yet, when it comes to their actual theology, how they understand salvation and the future, what they think happened, and what happened to Israel before Jesus, it produced Jesus.
That's it.
We have unknowing perpetuations of the old replacement theology, which are very common to all of us. The law was bad. Grace is good. The letter is associated with the Jews. It kills. The Spirit is associated with the church. It gives life. The Old Covenant was fleshly. The New Covenant is spiritual. Christianity versus Judaism. And Christianity won, of course.
End of story.
That's not what the Bible teaches.
Nowhere does the Bible teach that God annulled covenants. He says the opposite over and over and over and over again.
The New Covenant is about. What's the primary recipient of the New Covenant?
Israel.
Read it again. Jeremiah 31. Yeshua didn't come to abolish anything. The apostles continued to go to the synagogue, and they saw inclusion of Gentiles as an addition to Israel's fold, not a replacement. The New Testament ends in revelation with imagery drawn from Israel's tribes and fulfilled prophecies about Israel's Messiah. And so the notion, this notion we have, that the coming of Jesus meant God changed his mind about Israel. Do you realize we've talked about this before? Do you realize how incredibly dangerous that is?
Here's why.
Because God's covenant with the patriarchs and Israel were described as everlasting. If we were to say that God reneged on those, we face a serious theological problem. Because here is the challenge. If he can break his word to Israel, who else can he break his word to?
Everyone, including all those who follow Jesus.
I mean, it's if, then no way. God would never break his promises to the church because of Jesus. I want you to think about something for a minute. God appeared to Israel on Mount Sinai in cloud and glory. He traveled through the desert with them he chose them. He brought them into the land. He blessed them immeasurably in so many ways. He called them his segulot, his beloved, his.
His sons.
And you're telling me that if he will abandon them, he won't abandon you because you said one sentence about believing in Jesus? Give me a break, man.
The point is not that God's going to turn his back on you. The point is that he didn't turn his back on Israel. That's the point.
Not trying to scare you about losing your salvation.
Okay, all right.
I just want you to do this. I just want you to re examine the frame.
To all of my Christian friends, brothers and sisters who perhaps have unconsciously accepted a structural supersessionist narrative, I would just want you to re examine the frame.
That the Bible doesn't support that idea anywhere. That the Jews are irrelevant and most importantly does not say also that the Jews must abandon their old dead ways and become Christians. Hear me loud and clear on that.
It's the opposite.
Okay, let me get where we're going.
It's the opposite of that story.
Israel's story is integral, integrated fully into.
It's woven into God's plan of redemption from beginning to the end for Jews. Next slide.
And Gentiles.
And I want you to understand, I know how small that is, but this is the structure.
This is the structure that is missed in structural supersessionism. This all has to be in those four, four little pretty arrows about creation, fall, incarnation, consummation. This has to be in there. And you see what's. Toward the end, the nations are grafted in Romans 11 into the tree of the people of God and we become one. And so it's not a Christian story or a Jewish story. It's our story, ours. And there's a kingdom where Jews and Gentiles reign under the Messiah of Israel. And ultimately then there's an olam haba, a world to come where we return to the beginning, to creation, to Gan, Eden, to the perfect and beautiful world that God intended. Okay, fine.
Here is the end.
There is a legacy that must be acknowledged and overcome.
From the 2nd through the 5th century.
This is where it all got going. That's why we call this the roots of Christian antisemitism, anti Judaism. That became anti Semitism.
And it became a system, a fully developed system that harmed Jewish people and distorted Christian theology. Now, listen, I've decided to end the series here. We've got to get into Elul. We got to start correcting our souls. There is so Much more obviously that I could say. But you know it, you know what happened, we've seen it. How the parting of the ways led to this mutual estrangement. But especially how the church is increasingly negative view of Jews once it gained that imperial power.
How it became such a hateful rhetoric to Jews.
And most of all, I want you to hear this term. It's very controversial. All of it is theological mythology.
It's not real.
It's not real theological myth.
That's what was created by the end of the patristic era.
Supersessionism was in there, man.
The Jewish people were relegated to despised status in Christian land, sometime physically attacked, almost always socially and legally disadvantaged.
There's so much I want to say, but you want to understand some of the stereotypes of Jews about their money and how they. It's because they didn't have any other options for work. That's all that they could do was lend money. And it made people hate them.
If you know the history, you can understand so many things, but the idea that Jews were Christ killers. This is a bunch of what I just have not gone on to maybe another series, another time, but their continued resistance to conversion, this was a sign of their utter hardness.
And the stage was set then for what would come in the Middle Ages, which was a God forsaken idea called the Crusades and pogroms and everything else, the tragedies, the Crusades, the expulsions, the ghettos and worse.
That it is an emotional image and anyone can say, well, there he goes again, there they go again. It's always going to the Holocaust. Always got to do that thing.
I want you to understand though, even in these dark times, God was not without a witness.
You know who his witness was?
The Jewish people.
The enduring presence of the Jewish people and the nations that stand with us. And if I'm not careful, I'll lose it and slobber, blubbering, tears all over. So I want to hold it together here.
Through all of it we persist.
And people call us cockroaches and swine and vermin and parasites. Somebody wrote on one of our YouTube videos, swine, we sing it every week, Am Yisrael Chai.
The people of Israel live not because of us, it's because of what God said.
It's because of God.
It's no special claim about being Jewish. It's because of God and what he said and the promises he made because he's trustworthy and he will not turn his back or abandon his people and that faithfulness. It's his faithfulness that makes the entire world able to hold fast to a story that includes us all.
As I was writing this concluding section, Darren sent me.
He sent me the screenshots from YouTube of the people saying the things that they say about our videos that are just trying, trying to make an impact, trying to correct, trying to redirect, saying things like swine and I can't wait till you get what's coming to you. And we will withhold mercy. We will show you no mercy like you have shown us none. I don't even know what that means.
When have Jews ever, ever?
Well, it's because you run banking and Hollywood and every other thing I want to tell you last night at my Shabbat table, my son and my daughter in law and my two little grandkids are there.
And now I can't do it, forget it.
You know what our Shabbat conversation was like after we got into the meal? You know what we talked about?
My son, who's a law enforcement officer, saying, dad, you really need to carry your gun at the synagogue.
Dad, I'm on TikTok.
I'm not on TikTok. TikTok is the most influential young people social platform that's out there. Do you want to know what my son told me?
He said, dad, they're translating Hitler's speeches into English and everyone loves him.
And the comments are saying things like, he was right, we should have listened to him.
Hitler.
Can you even believe it?
Can you even believe it?
Photos of the concentration camps and how everything was staged by the Jews, all of the conspiracies. Can you comprehend it? Why do we need a series like this? What are we supposed to do about it?
This slide on the left is the picture of pure hatred.
On the right is a statue called Liberation that's found at a Holocaust museum, which is an American GI going in and carrying out a survivor from a concentration camp. Kelly's grandfather was at Dachau.
He saw it.
He liberated it.
Why do we have this? Why do I have an emotional image? Why do I have this? Because we need it.
It's important.
Hatred on the left, the nations coming to the aid of the Jews on the right. We don't like it. We don't want to have to admit it. We want to be proud.
But that happened.
Why?
Because of this.
Had it not been for the nations coming in, how many more would have been slaughtered?
So listen, here's why.
Here's why I did it, because I never imagined I'd live in a time like this. I really didn't. When we said never again after the Holocaust, I believed it. I never imagined society could become this. But we are once again at a place where we need the nations to carry a Jewish truth, to carry a responsibility to actively reject and undo this legacy.
Please.
It's not just obvious hate, but its deep theological roots. And as I said from the beginning, you need to know this. You, we, we are called to bear witness. And when you historically witness this, these seeds planted, watered, nurtured to full blossom. You get it. You get it. The long term consequences, they've been horrendous rivers of tears and blood in Jewish history. A church impoverished, separated from its Judaism. But we have the opportunity in our generation right now to do something. I don't know how it will present. I just want you ready when it does.
That's why the sign that Constantine saw in the sky at the battle was a big cross. And it said in hope, signo Vinces.
In this sign you will conquer.
Can you imagine for a moment if Constantine had instead seen a Star of David in the sky?
How would history have changed?
That's not what happened. I'm not suggesting that the Church never should have been. I'm just saying it could have been different.
It could have been different.
But it's a way to imagine a world where the Christian empire might have honored the Jewish people instead of hating them. Where perhaps even Easter and Passover were still linked. Where Gentile Christians continued to celebrate the Sabbath alongside their Jewish neighbors. Where Old and New Testaments were read as the one story without disparagement. Imagine a different history, a church and Jewish history. How might it have been different?
But listen, I want to close with this last thing. I promise you, we are not the guardians of all truth. I do not suggest that.
I am not saying that I am incapable. I am highly emotionally tied to the subject for obvious reasons. Russ Resnik, a messianic Jewish pioneer, wrote about the Church fathers and this is hard. But he wrote, if men of such deep conviction and commitment as the church fathers could have such a profound blind spot, so can we? How do we guard against it?
Ron Cantor, writing in the Kesher Journal. We must continue to do theology with humility. And while we deal honestly with the mistakes of the Church fathers, we can appreciate their contributions in other areas. I'm fine with it.
Romans 11. Paul points out that pride and conceit leads to spiritual blindness. So we have to offer correction and humility, grace, gratitude for what we've learned. All of this, as Paul says, above all things.
As much as it depends on me, I will be at peace with all men.
I've just absolutely blasted you with information for six sessions.
I appreciate you dialing into it. I appreciate you listening to it. I want you to share it. I hope that it can get in and stay there. And as I've said, when it's ready, I pray you'll use it for good. May the Lord continue to enlighten us.
May he continue to give us hearts that reflect his faithful love, his baseless love, the kind of love that never replaces or forsakes. It makes a way to include new guests at the table that we might all share together in the goodness of our God, the God of Israel.
[00:47:12] Speaker B: Shabbat Shalom I'm Darren with Shalom Macon. If you enjoyed this teaching, I want to ask you to take the next step. Start by making sure you're subscribed to our channel. Next, make sure you hit the like button on this video so that others know it's worth their time to watch.
Last, head over to our website to learn more about Shalom Macon, explore other teachings and events, and if you're so inclined, contribute to the work that we're doing to further the kingdom. Thanks for watching and connecting with Shalom Macon.
