Christianity’s Jewish Roots

Tooley: Hello this is Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion & Democracy, with the pleasure of conversing with Dr. Gerald McDermott, recently retired if I’m correct, from Beeson Divinity School in Alabama at Samford University and is a prolific author on many, many topics. His most recent book is on the Jewish roots of Christianity, about which I’m going to talk to him. So, Gerry, thank you for joining.

McDermott: Thank you, Mark, it is my privilege to be here.

Tooley: And before we forget, please hold up a copy of your book.

McDermott: Sure.

Tooley: Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity. So, Gerry, why is such a book needed right now? Why do Christianity’s Jewish roots matter? And please outline the basic themes of your book.

McDermott: Well, it matters because so many Christians for much of the last 2,000 years have thought that the Jewish roots of Christianity don’t really matter. Evangelicalism particularly at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century have been told that the basic outline of the gospel story is creation, fall, and Jesus, skipping over the vast majority of the Bible, 77% of the Protestant Bible and 80% of the Catholic Bible, the Old Testament, skipping over the history of Israel as if the history of Israel is irrelevant to the Christian story. So, thismyth, this really heresy, is called supersessionism, that the Christian church, the Christian gospel, supersedes Judaism and replaces Judaism.

It’s really called replacement theology, and this matters because it gets Jesus wrong. Jesus said, “I came not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfill them.” And every last stroke of the pen, every last jot of the Old Testament actually, he meant Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, will be fulfilled. And so, he meant every last stroke of the pen in a book like Leviticus, a book that most persons would say really should have been left out and we really don’t understand it and don’t need it. Well, for Jesus every last stroke of the pen even in the book of Leviticus is critical to what he was doing. Paul is typically understood by so many Christians, and particularly by evangelicalism and many mainline Protestants nd many Catholics, as having come to do away with Jewish law. And, for that matter, that Jesus himself came to do away with Jewish law. And the contributors, who are top scholars in this book, except for me, the contributors in this book all say no, no, no, Paul himself in Romans 7, which was his most mature theological reflection, says that the law is holy, righteous, and good.

And at the end of Chapter 3 he asked the question, “Are we doing away with the law?” And he answered himself right there. It says, “By no means.” And in Chapter 8 of Romans, he says that Jesus the Messiah came so that we might fulfill the righteous requirements of the law, and by that he meant Torah. So, we get Jesus wrong and we get Paul wrong if we leave out or misunderstand the Jewish roots of Christianity, and we get the Gospel wrong. The Gospel is typically understood as simply the good news that our sins are forgiven.Well, according to the writers of scripture, according to Jesus, according to Paul, according to Peter, according to John, the writers of the New Testament, the gospel is far more than just forgiveness.

Yes, it includes forgiveness, but it also is about freedom and power to live the kind of life that God wants us to live. So, that’s very Jewish, and that’s what Jesus’s message was.He came that we might live holy lives. And you can’t understand what it meant for Jesus to say that we should be holy and for Paul to say that we should be holy if you don’t understand the Jewish idea of holiness which the Old Testament is all about. So,I’ll just tell you briefly, Mark, about this book. These are top scholars, each one with a cutting-edge essay, each one contributing new knowledge to our understanding of Jesus and the gospel and Christianity. Mark Gignilliat, in the first chapter, talks about how the New Testament presupposes the Old Testament and the New Testament cannot be understood without thorough knowledge of the Old Testament.

Then Matthew Thiessen in the next chapter makes the argument that Jesus did not come to start a new religion called Christianity, which would be very different from, and in fact opposed, to the Judaism of the first century. Then David Rudolph in the next chapter makes a careful argument from Paul’s writings that Paul was not proclaiming a new freedom from Jewish law or an end to Jewish law. Then David Moffitt, who’s probably the world’s foremost expert of the book of Hebrews, which often is used by Christians to point to the end of the Old Testament or the claim that we don’t need the Old Testament, that Jesus was departing from Judaism and departing from the Old Testament, David Moffitt, a Baptist scholar, makes the argument that Hebrews proclaims continuity with and development of the Old Testament.

And then the Jewish scholar Isaac Oliver makes the historical argument on the parting of the ways, when the synagogue separated from the early church and scholars used to say it was in the second century, some settings of the third century, he says they really didn’t begin until the fourth century with Constantine. And Eugene Korn, the great Jewish scholar, in the next chapter tells the very sad story of the history of Christianity and the Jews, which particularly after the fourth century the church often institutionally persecuted Jews and might have killed before the Holocaust hundreds of thousands of Jews in its history before the Holocaust. Then Jen Rosner, who’s a messianic Jewish scholar, writes a chapter on post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian relations, in which she focuses on Karl Barthand Franz Rosenzweig, the great Jewish scholar of the twentieth century, and Karl Barth probably the most influential theologian of the twentieth century. And she talks about how they both argue that we need to rethink theology now that the Holocaust has shown that somehow we got things wrong in understanding Jesus’s relationship to Judaism. And Sarah Lebhar Hall makes an argument in the next chapter that the rise of modern Israelwas integrally helped by Anglicans.

This is the largely untold story of Anglicans in Israel. Then Mark Kinzer, who’s probably the foremost theologian of messianic Jews in the world, writes a chapter about messianic Judaism, this astonishing new movement that’s all over the world now that really arose in the 1960s. It’s the same time that the Jews, for the first time after 2,000 years, came into full control of Jerusalem under the nation Israel after the Six Day War, which could be a fulfillment of Jesus’s prophecy 2,000 years ago that, one day, the gentiles will stop trampling on Jerusalem, meaning controlling Jerusalem, and that happened in 1967.

And Archbishop Foley Beach, the Archbishop of the Anglican Church of North America, has a chapter that answers the question what difference does the Jewishness of Jesus make. So, as a church leader, how does this affect churches? And basically, his answer is much in every way, as Paul says in another context. And then I write the last chapter what difference does this make for Christian theology, and I also say much in every way. This really changes the way we think of theology and what Christian theology is.

Tooley: And who are those who diminish or minimize the importance of the Jewish story within Christianity, and what do you think their motivations are philosophically, theologically, culturally, and politically?

McDermott: Well, they are supersessionists. And I just define supersessionism as the idea that the Lord, that the gentile church, supersedes Jewish Israel in God’s affections. So, that after say 30 AD, if that’s the year that Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead, some scholars say 33, so then after that year, God broke his covenant with Jewish Israel. Now, this is the account of supersessionism which has been the mainline Christian account since at least the fourth century AD, or mainstream Christian account that God broke the covenant he made with Abraham and his progeny, in which he said, according to Jeremiah 31, that he would keep his covenant as long as the sun is in the sky and the stars can be seen at night. But then he broke this covenant and transferred his love and covenant affections and promises to the gentile church because Jewish Israel failed, or the majority of Jewish Israel failed, to trust in its Messiah Jesus. So, these are the supersessionists.

Now, I’ll name three of these who are influential today in this country, and some of them abroad. The first is Andy Stanley, he’s the pastor of a megachurch down in Atlanta who’s a New Marcionite. Now, Marcion was a prominent person in the early church who said we don’t need the Old Testament, the Old Testament God is a fundamentally different God from the New Testament God, and we should throw out even parts of the New Testament that are Jewish, like the Book of Matthew. Well, Andy Stanley in last few years has been saying publicly, quite notoriously, that we need to be unhitched from the Old Testament and that Jesus did end the old covenant once and for all, so God’s covenant with Jewish Israel is finally over.

Greg Boyd is another supersessionist, prominent supersessionist, he’s a megachurch pastor up in Minneapolis, and Boyd published in 2017 a book titled The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, in which he argued, like Andy Stanley but in much more sophisticated and scarily ways, that the God of the Old Testament is quite different from the God of the New Testament, that the God of the Old Testament is a violent God. Now, Greg Boyd has become something of an Anabaptist, where there’s no such thing as a just war, God could never endorse any sort of controlled state sanctioned violence. And so, the Old Testament God who truly does sanction violence, according to the historic church to protect his people and justice, but that this God of the Old Testament is a false God, and it’s only the New Testament God who renounces violence. I mean, despite the fact, I would add that Jesus himself in the book of Revelation presides over much, much violence and bloodshed.

So, Andy Stanley and Greg Boyd, and then there’s the former influential theologian, and probably the most influential biblical scholar in the world today, my friend Tom Wright. Now, he is known as N.T. Wright, and he is a friend of mine and he’s a great man and he’s a holy man, but I disagree with him on his treatment of Israel after 30 AD. Tom Wright is a classic supersessionist, in which he argues thatthe Jewish people of Israel mean nothing to God in any special way after 30 AD and neither does the land of Israel. It’s no more different than the land of New Jersey. So, Jews today who have not accepted Jesus, according to Tom Wright, are no more special, they are no more chosen in his eyes than the people of Zimbabwe.

And yet I would argue that is not biblical, because Paul in Romans 11:29, referring to the chosenness of the Jewish people, and referring to the Jews who have not accepted Jesus yet, and this is at the end of Paul’s career, his most mature reflection on Jews and gentiles, Romans 9 through 11, and he says that God’s promises, and he’s referring specifically to God’s promise to his Jewish people to be their God forever and for the Jewish people to be his people, his chosen people, forever, he says God’s promises are irrevocable. They cannot be revoked. And he says in the verse before that, verse 28, referring specifically to Jews who had not accepted Jesus, he says they’re still beloved because of their fathers, the Patriarchs. God still loves them. And on the land of Israel, the New Testament is Zionist.

Paul himself says, in Acts 13, when he’s speaking inAntioch, a city in what’s now Turkey, speaking in a synagogue,he says specifically that God gave the land of Israel to our fathers. So, these are some of the biggest names of supersessionists today who claim to teach and preach and write that Christianity is fundamentally disconnected from its Jewish roots, that Jesus and Paul were making a fundamental break with the Judaism of their day, and the Jews today and Israel today has no real link to biblical Israel.

Tooley: As we run out of time, I’ll ask a broad question, but if you could offer a brief synopsis, what are the direct contemporary political implications of understanding Judaism’s central role in Christianity?

McDermott: Well, if supersessionism is right, and I don’t think it is, and this whole book makes the argument that supersessionism is wrong, then it says God rejected the Jews. The Jews as a people, and he threw out the land of Israel as any more significant to his history of redemption and his end time purposes. And it’s easy to believe, that if we believe that that God has rejected the Jews, it’s easy to believe that the Jewish people are cursed and, in fact, that they are a curse to the world. And that’s why it was very easy for the German people in the 1930s, because they had been taught this mainline, mainstream supersessionism by their theological predecessors, particularly Schleiermacher beginning in the nineteenth century.

It was very easy for them to accept the ruling of their leaders, of the German churches in the 1930s, to throw out the Old Testament and not permit any Old Testament readings in Sunday morning worship. And that was true all through the ‘30s in Germany, in German churches. And thus, it was easy, it was much easier for them and almost logical, to accept the teaching of their political leader that the Jews are a curse to the world and the world would be much better off if we can get rid of the Jews. So, supersessionism has eerie and frightening political consequences, and it’s no surprise that supersessionism is on the rise in Christian churches, that we have increased attacks on Jews all over the world. In fact, in the United States, the FBI says that the number one victims of hate crimes are not blacks and they’re not Muslims, they’re Jews. This is no surprise.

Tooley: Gerald McDermott, recently retired from Beeson Divinity School, prolific author and scholar, with special expertise on Zionism and the role of Judaism in Christianity, perhaps this book is certainly not your last book, but certainly it is the culmination of many decades of focus and scholarship in this area. So, thank you so much for this conversation.

McDermott: Well, you’re welcome, Mark. My pleasure.