“Supersessionism”: The Political Origin of a Theological Neologism

Michael G. Azar

doi:10.6017/scjr.v16i1.14685

Abstract

This article proceeds along three primary lines. First, through an examination of the writings of Roy and Alice Eckardt and Franklin Littell, it demonstrates that the categorizing of ancient and modern Christian thinkers under the umbrella of “supersessionism” (along with the label for its proponent, the “supersessionist”) originated not in scholarly works of theological history or systematic theology, where the concepts now most frequently appear, but in the political environment of burgeoning American Christian support for the State of Israel’s military superiority. Second, this article foregrounds the way that these writings opposed themselves to Eastern Christians, Arabs, and church fathers. Third, it shows that, in light of their approach to both “traditional” theology and Christian (especially Orthodox) and non-Christian Arabs, the Eckardts, Littell, and other likeminded pioneers of American Christian-Jewish relations did not so much overcome the “supersessionism” myth that they identified and rejected as much as they redirected its principal elements toward a new cast of characters. The article concludes by briefly considering the common role played by “supersessionism” as a sort of “gateway” into Jewish-Christian relations for non-Western theologians, with the hope of reshaping a historically problematic aspect of Jewish-Christian relations that has tended to hinder, rather than facilitate, more frequent Orthodox and other Arab Christian participation in Jewish-Christian dialogue.

Highlights

In 1972, George Khodr, a prominent Orthodox metropolitan in Lebanon, wrote a report for the World Council of Churches on Eastern Christian “feelings and reactions” to the “Palestine problem.”[1]
Despite the fact that his works generally reveal an unfamiliarity with late-antique Christian thought—he claims for example that Nicea “set off the ‘Old Testament,’” as opposed to the “New Testament,” and thereby set “in place” the “superseding myth, which already carries the genocidal undertone,”[79] when Nicea did not at all deal with the issue of canonicity, never mind the other inaccuracies implicit in this statement—Littell regularly totalizes and blames the patristic period for offering to Christianity an antisemitic, “superseding” view of Jews to which Nazis, Arabs, and their Christian sympathizers would eventually hold.[80]. As he shows in his most well-known work, The Crucifixion of the Jews (1975), there are few reasons for Christian “anti-Zionism”—the “new code word for Antisemitism”81—beyond this ancient “superseding or displacement myth,” which had for millennia declared that “the mission of the Jewish people was finished with the coming of Jesus Christ, that ‘the old Israel’ was written off with the appearance of ‘the new Israel.’”82. In his 1982 “Christian Antisemitism and the Holocaust”, Littell provides, akin to the Eckardts, a groundbreaking way to label and reify the notion that Christian resistance to Israel was a misguided enterprise, rooted in both an unfortunate adherence to church fathers and misdirected sympathies with Arabs, with no legitimate political or ethical basis.[83]
In the shadow of the Shoah and amid concerns for Israel’s survival and superiority during its tumultuous beginnings, the Eckardts and Littell—alongside several others—dedicated much of their lives toward the unprecedented work of revising a history of theological degradation of Jews and Jewish practice. They coined the new umbrella category of “supersessionism” under which to group historic and contemporary Christian views they felt unworthy of the name of Christ

Summary

Introduction

In 1972, George Khodr, a prominent Orthodox metropolitan in Lebanon, wrote a report for the World Council of Churches on Eastern Christian “feelings and reactions” to the “Palestine problem.”[1]. Examining the “more conservative” expressions of those who openly resisted Israel’s post1967 policies, Eckardt draws his readers’ attention away from the social, political, legal, or moral objections that these detractors had voiced Instead, he tells the Zionist publication’s readers: these Christians’ true “ground for political opposition to Israel” was their adherence to a “traditional” theological predisposition, in which “the church, the ‘new Israel’” had “taken the place” of “the ‘old Israel,’ the Jewish people.”[6] In other words, Christians who resisted Israel’s policies did so, to use Khodr’s words, not because of “a simple political feud,” but, in Eckardt’s characterization, because of their adherence to “traditional” theology. Aside from one partial exception,[9] the actual origins of this way of categorizing, this way of reading, have never entered into the discussion, and that is what we choose to explore here, while considering some of the effects of the political perspectives in which this theological neologism was forged

A Few Clarifications at the Outset

Conclusion