Conservative commentator Ann Coulter has stirred up the debate on what Christians believe regarding the place of Judaism. In an October 8 appearance on CNBC’s “The Big Idea” Coulter said that what Christians ultimately want is for Jews to be “perfected” into Christians.
Gabriel Sanders in The Jewish Daily Forward writes:
The notion that God’s covenant with Christians came to replace his covenant with Jews — a concept known as supersessionism, or replacement theology — informed centuries of Christian thought. It was a central idea for both the early church fathers and the leaders of the Reformation. It was also embraced, and expanded upon, by the German Idealist philosophers of the late-18th and early-19th centuries.
In the decades after the Holocaust, however, as Christian denominations were forced to rethink the nature of Christian-Jewish ties, many reconsidered, and ultimately repudiated, the concept. In 1988, the Episcopal Church endorsed a new set of guidelines governing Christian-Jewish relations. Supersessionism’s repercussions, the guidelines read, had been “fateful.” Rather than being a “fossilized religion of legalism,” as the Judaism of Jesus’ time was long thought to be, the church’s revised position held that “Judaism in the time of Jesus was in but an early stage of its long life.”
But not all Christian denominations have followed the Episcopal Church’s lead.
Read it all here.
Thanks to epiScope.