The endangered and reaffirmed promises of God: a fruitful framework for biblical theology

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall, 2000 by James Hanson

Problems with the Traditional View

Recent work in history, theology, and biblical studies has been helpful in pointing out the flaws in this traditional reading of the canon. I will only touch on a few key points. Historically, of course, the supersessionist logic of the standard canonical narrative has contributed mightily to the coarse relations between Christians and Jews, characterized perhaps most perversely by the notion that the Jews, because of their rejection and murder of the Messiah, were to survive as a "witness people"--witnessing to the truth of the gospel by their suffering (Flannery).

Christian theologians have been moved to reexamine the theological roots of supersessionism, not only by this history, but also, and just as importantly, for reasons internal to the Christian confession. The "flaw in the heart of the crystal," in Soulen's phrase (25), is that supersessionism undercuts the coherence of the Christian gospel in a number of fundamental ways. Most obvious is what it does to the character of the God Christians confess; as Bruce Marshall puts it, "If Christians suppose that this God has revoked his promise to Israel, then we suppose that when this God declares a promise permanent and irrevocable, he may be lying" (88-89). Soulen also exposes this doctrinal problem, but focuses more on the concomitant, and in some ways more fundamental structural problem: namely, that the standard canonical narrative renders the First Testament "largely indecisive for shaping conclusions about how God's purposes engage creation in universal and enduring ways" (31). God's dealings with Israel become the limited, carnal background to the cosmic, spiritual foreground of the four-part drama of salvation (creation-fall-redemption-final consummation). Finally, theologians have called attention to the failure of the triumphalistic tones of supersessionism to ring true for a world that has just come through its bloodiest and most destructive century--one in which the church has had to take its humble place alongside the many other claims to truth, religious and otherwise, that our context makes it impossible to ignore (see, e.g., Hall).

Biblical studies has a curious and paradoxical relationship to our question. On the one hand, historical-critical work on the Bible has been able to contextualize the writings of the Second Testament in such a way that its "anti-Jewish" aspects can be accounted for by the rivalry between the early church and the synagogue; this work has supported some of the theological reflection on the question (Gager, Ruether, Cook). The conflict between Jesus and the Jewish leaders, for example, when seen from this perspective, was essentially an intra-familial matter that only later, from the perspective of the largely Gentile church, rejected by the synagogue, was shaped into an attack on Judaism as a religious system. Moreover, historical--critical exegesis of the First Testament has at least seemed to hold out the possibility of giving voice to the distinctiveness of the "Hebrew Bible" apart from its connection to the Second Testament.