World
The Reverend Michael Coren
30 November 2025
5:30 PM
30 November 2025
5:30 PM
Last year I visited Lincoln for the first time. It’s difficult to resist the elevated beauty and dominant cathedral, but also hard to avoid the plaque inside, full of contrition, explaining the 13th-century blood libel, where local Jews were accused of murdering a child so as to use his blood during their rituals. The result, predictably, was yet another wave of anti-Semitism, and Jews tortured and murdered.
Such obscenities would be repeated about Jews throughout mediaeval England until their eventual expulsion in 1290. Yet even after England forcibly removed the Jewish population, the Christian idea of the Jew as an outsider, whose only role in the Biblical story was a stubborn refusal to listen to God – then to reject and crucify Jesus the messiah – remained paramount within popular consciousness, both here and throughout Europe. The notion that the people of the Old Testament had been replaced by the church in God’s covenant may not always have been official church teaching but was taken as self-evident.
It’s far easier to roar against the Jewish state if the Jewish state has no Biblical case for existence
In a more formal and ideological sense this is known as replacement theology or supersessionism: the conviction that the church instead of the Jews was now God’s chosen. Theologian and scholar Origen of Alexandria wrote in the early 3rd century, ‘And we say with confidence that they will never be restored to their former condition. For they committed a crime of the most unhallowed kind.’ Hippolytus of Rome wrote that they ‘have been darkened in the eyes of your soul with a darkness utter and everlasting’ and would endure eternal slavery.
St. Augustine was less grim and more nuanced, viewing the Jews as examples from which Christians could learn. They were to live ‘scattered’ and ‘subjugated’ but allowed to practise their faith. Other non-Christians were to be converted but Jews were treated with relative tolerance. ‘But the Jews who slew Him are thus by their own Scriptures a testimony to us that we have not forged the prophecies about Christ.’
It took centuries for any substantive change to come about, and the Holocaust demanded some form of theological response. The Second Vatican Council produced Nostra aetate, ‘In our time’, revising the Roman Catholic church’s attitude towards other faiths. Jews were not to be ‘presented as rejected or accursed by God’, it must never be forgotten that Jesus was a Jew and that Christianity’s roots were in Judaism.
Catholicism teaches fulfilment theology, that while the church is ‘grafted into’ Christ’s fulfilment of the covenant, the Jews and their own covenant remain vital to God. Anglicanism and other mainline churches teach something similar. Evangelicals are often even more philo-Semitic, seeing the Jewish people, and their restoration to Israel, as crucial to Christianity – understandably problematic to critics as well as supporters of Israel and the Jewish people.
Since 7 October and the war in Gaza, however, a new analysis has developed. Included in the usual stew of attacks on Israel is the fundamental questioning of the country’s right to exist. Such extremism isn’t especially surprising in itself. What is jarring is the place it has found in the church, mainly on the Christian left. The mantra is simple. Israel is oppressive; God is on the side of the oppressed; therefore, God cannot still regard the Jews as having a claim to an eternal covenant and thus any historic right to a homeland. It often comes from a place of aching naivety, and an ignorance of the Christian role in anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, secular polemics regarding colonialism, race and land ownership give it a religious gloss. It’s far easier to roar against the Jewish state if the Jewish state has no Biblical case for existence.
But the argument can be more sophisticated than that. Many Palestinian Christians, who often host and tour visiting Christian leaders, argue that Jesus redefined and universalised not only the land of Israel but also the people of God. Many of St. Paul’s letters, they say, and his overriding philosophy, negate any claims by one person or group of people to a covenant with God or to a specific land. It doesn’t matter, apparently, that Jesus and Paul were Jews and often speaking specifically to a Jewish audience. Those ideas, once considered controversial, are then taken back by these leaders to churches in the west.
Such a critique from a Palestinian Christian is understandable if worrying but there’s no justification when it comes from conservative commentators in the US, who may be politically eccentric but have enormous audiences. Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson for example, both ostentatiously Christian, have directly or indirectly pushed this agenda, with accusations of anti-Semitism made against both. As for Britain, replacement theology is rare among conservative thinkers and activists but complacency would be incredibly foolish.
I was reminded of that when, last month, I added York to my Lincoln visit. It’s just as inspiring as Lincoln, with its cathedral, mediaeval streets and Clifford’s Tower. It was in this spot in 1190 that members of the Jewish community, who considered themselves safe and even respected, were slaughtered, just as they were in London, Colchester, Canterbury, Norwich, Stamford, Bury St Edmunds, King’s Lynn, Worcester, and Thetford. Or perhaps ‘replaced’ would be another way of putting it?
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