20 / Replacement Theology: The Doctrine That Made All of This Possible

After a pause, I'm sending out Story 20 today (I mean, it is Messianic Monday!) — and I wanted to share some news along with it: these stories are becoming a book.

They Took His Name in Vain: 22 Stories of How the Name of Jesus

Was Weaponized Against the Jewish People.

This one isn't a story in the same sense as the others — it's the theological foundation that ties every one of them together. Once you see it, you'll understand why the blood libel, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and even Luther's own writings all rest on the same underlying error.

As you read this, would you keep me and Lisa, my assistant — a published author in her own right — in your prayers? We're working hard to get this book ready for publication.

My prayer is that this will be an eye-opening experience, especially at a moment when so many believers are being inundated with bad theology and false stories about the Jewish people. For such a time as this, I wrote this book — one that, three years ago, I never would have felt was necessary.

Nineteen stories into this book, a question has probably been forming in your mind, whether or not you have named it yet: why? Why did Chrysostom preach hatred as a Christian duty? Why did Constantine sever the Church from its own Jewish roots at Nicaea? Why did Luther, the father of the Reformation, write words the Nazis would later quote as scripture? Why did Church-taught contempt keep resurfacing, century after century, continent after continent, as though it were following a script?

It was following a script. This story names it directly: Replacement Theology, also called supersessionism. Nearly every atrocity this book has documented rests on this single theological foundation. If you understand this doctrine, you understand the engine room of everything else in this book.

What the Doctrine Actually Claims

Replacement theology is the doctrine that the Christian Church has replaced the Jewish people as God’s covenant people — that the promises, the calling, and the chosen status once given to Israel have been transferred, permanently and completely, to the Church.[1]

Notice exactly what this claims. Not merely that Gentiles have been welcomed into God’s family — this book has celebrated that truth throughout, following Paul’s own image of Gentiles grafted into Israel’s olive tree (Romans 11:17–18). Replacement theology claims something categorically different: that ethnic, historical Israel has been permanently set aside, and that the Church now stands alone as the sole recipient of every promise God ever made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Where the Doctrine Was Born

This book has already introduced the man most historians credit as the doctrine’s first systematic architect: Justin Martyr, writing his Dialogue with Trypho around 150–160 AD. Justin explicitly called the Church “the true Israel” — he was among the first prominent Christian leaders to make that claim in so many words.[2][3]

Justin was not alone for long. In the third century, Hippolytus of Rome went further, writing that the Jewish people had been “darkened in the eyes of your soul with a darkness utter and everlasting” — language that treats Jewish spiritual condition not as a temporary hardening, as Paul describes it in Romans 11:25, but as a fixed, permanent state.[4]

By the time of Augustine of Hippo in the fourth and fifth centuries, the doctrine had a powerful new engine: allegorical interpretation, a method of reading Scripture that treated Israel’s specific promises — the land, the covenant, the future national restoration — as symbols to be reassigned to the Church rather than promises to be kept to the people to whom they were made. This interpretive method became so embedded in Western Christianity that, as one historian notes, the Roman Catholic Church relied on Augustine’s authority for a thousand years afterward, and the Reformers who broke from Rome on so many other points inherited this one largely intact.[5][6]

This is the thread connecting every story in this book. Constantine’s Nicaea, Chrysostom’s pulpit, the forced conversion oaths, the Crusaders’ logic, Luther’s pamphlet — every one of them assumed, as settled fact, that God was finished with the Jewish people specifically because the Church had replaced them. Remove that assumption, and none of these stories make theological sense. Every one of them depends on it. Without Replacement Theology, the tragic stories chronicled in this book would not have had a theological foundation. Think about that.

What Scripture Actually Says

Paul anticipated this doctrine directly — and rejected it in the plainest possible terms, using a question he clearly expected some readers to be tempted to answer wrongly: “I ask then: Did God reject his people? By no means!” (Romans 11:1). He goes on: “God did not reject his people, whom he foreknew” (Romans 11:2). And he closes his argument by making it incredibly clear that God’s calling is still upon the people of Israel, making the idea of being replaced impossible: “for God’s gifts and his call (to Israel!) are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29).

He wants the Romans to understand that while it may look to them as if God has rejected Israel, it will become clear in the long run that he has not.

The word Paul chose — irrevocable — is not a hedge or a qualification. It means exactly what it says: incapable of being taken back. Whatever else Romans 9–11 is doing theologically, it is doing this: closing the door, in advance, on the very doctrine that would go on to justify the blood libel, the Rhineland massacres, the Inquisition, and the theological groundwork for the Holocaust.

The prophet Jeremiah makes a similar case from a different angle entirely — not the New Testament looking forward, but the Hebrew Scriptures themselves establishing the permanence of the promise. God tells Jeremiah, in the middle of pronouncing devastating judgment on Israel for her unfaithfulness: “Only if the heavens above can be measured and the foundations of the earth below be searched out will I reject all the descendants of Israel because of all they have done” (Jeremiah 31:37). Jeremiah does not deny Israel’s sin, but speaks of God’s faithfulness. People seem to think that in order for God to be faithful to his promise to Abraham, Israel must attain perfection—a standard that no other nation meets (not modern-day China, Russia, America, and certainly not Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Syria). The comparison is not accidental. God is saying that Israel’s rejection is as impossible as measuring the sky or plumbing the depths of the earth — which is to say, not possible at all.

But we now have the theologians who simply want to cut these verses out of the Bible. Or say it refers to the Church. And the reason it cannot be referring to the Church is that it is referring to Israel’s sin just before the Babylonian exile, when there was no Church. Furthermore, if God is saying that He will not judge the Church for all she has done sinfully, then why can’t He be as merciful to the people of Israel?

What This Means for Us

This is the theological center of this entire book, and I want to state it as plainly as possible: every atrocity documented in these pages required a Christian to believe, at some level, that God had permanently finished with the Jewish people. Remove that belief, and the doctrine that fueled Chrysostom’s sermons, Constantine’s councils, the Crusaders’ swords, and Luther’s pamphlet has no foundation left to stand on.

Now imagine if these people, instead of persecuting the Jewish people, took on Paul’s burden in Romans 9, where he is so broken for Israel’s lost state that he is willing to trade his own salvation for theirs. Or if they had understood what Paul says two chapters later, “salvation has come to the nations to provoke Israel to jealousy,” and made it their ambition to be a witness to the Jewish people with love and compassion. Oh, how history would have been different.

This does not mean every Christian who has ever held some form of Covenant or Fulfillment theology is guilty of what this book has documented — many sincere believers hold nuanced versions of these views without a trace of animus toward Jewish people, and this book has no interest in accusing them of secretly wishing harm on anyone. But it does mean that wherever Replacement Theology has been taught without careful qualification — wherever “the Church has replaced Israel” has been allowed to slide into “God is finished with the Jewish people” — the theological conditions for contempt have been present, waiting only for a Chrysostom, a Constantine, or a Luther to act on them.

Paul warned Gentile believers about exactly this danger, using the sharpest language in the whole passage—maybe even the whole New Testament: “Do not be arrogant, but tremble... For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either” (Romans 11:20-21). Tremble is a strong word to choose for a warning about theological pride. Paul chose it anyway, as though he could already see, two thousand years in advance, exactly where confidence without trembling would eventually lead.

Erling Haaland

This is why believers need to base their opinions on the Jewish people on Scripture, and not on conspiracy theories online. Right now, the most interesting footballer in the world is the Thor-like Erling Haaland from Norway. Believe it or not, there is an Internet story claiming that he called up a soldier in Israel to congratulate him on killing Palestinians. People believe this stuff. They share it as fact, without searching out the facts.

Here’s the truth, and it’s why you cannot believe every accusation that you hear online against Israel or the IDF. Erling Haaland, who is very active and engaging with his fans, called up a former Israeli hostage of Hamas, Omer Shem Tov.[7]

Omer Shem Tov is an Israeli survivor who endured 505 days of captivity in Gaza. Abducted by Hamas on October 7, 2023, from the Nova music festival, he survived brutal conditions, starvation, and isolation before his release.

Omer spent 50 days in complete darkness, surviving at times on only a biscuit a day. That is torture.

So no, the most recognizable face in the World Cup did not call a brutal IDF soldier to congratulate him on killing Palestinians. He called a former hostage who survived for more than a year and a half in the most brutal conditions to encourage him.

This is why people need to do their homework before they believe the lies. You have Tucker Carlson and Candace Owen with massive influence on the right. You have hordes of Islamic fundamentalists, who in their own theology, believe that it is OK to lie about things if it is in the furtherance of Islam (see Takiyah). And then you have left-wing activists who believe the narrative that anybody who is weak must be innocent, and therefore have taken up the cause of some of the most ruthless murderers in the world. We’re talking about millions of people working day and night propagandizing against one tiny people—the Jewish people—in particular.

And yet, God will not reject his people whom he foreknew. Eventually, all Israel will be saved.

[1]Replacement Theology, Encyclopaedia Britannica, britannica.com/topic/Replacement-theology. “Replacement theology, also known as supersessionism or fulfillment theology, is the doctrine that Christians have replaced the Jewish people as the chosen people of God and as the heirs of the divine-human covenant described in the Hebrew Bible.”

[2]Supersessionism, Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersessionism. Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (c. 150–160 AD) is widely regarded as the earliest systematic articulation of the view that the Church has replaced Israel as God’s covenant people.

[3]“Replacement Theology: What It Is and Why It Matters for Christians,” International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, icejusa.org, citing Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 11, and Gerald McDermott’s scholarship identifying Justin as the first prominent Christian leader to explicitly call the Church “the true Israel.”

[4]“What Is Replacement Theology or Supersessionism?”, What Christians Want to Know, whatchristianswanttoknow.com. Hippolytus of Rome (3rd century) wrote that the Jewish people “have been darkened in the eyes of your soul with a darkness utter and everlasting.”

[5]“What Is Replacement Theology? A Reformed Protestant Overview,” Westminster Bookstore, wtsbooks.com/blogs/resources/what-is-replacement-theology. By the era of Augustine of Hippo (4th–5th century), interpretations spiritualizing Old Testament promises to Israel and applying them wholesale to the Church had become widespread in Christian theology, later inherited by the Reformers, including Luther and Calvin.

[6]Jerusalem Institute of Justice, “Replacement Theology,” jij.org/news/replacement-theology. “The more the church accepted Augustine’s allegorical method of interpretation, the more it became removed from the verbal content of the Bible... For centuries, the Roman Catholic Church relied heavily on Augustine.”

[7] Soccer Star Haaland Calls Freed Hostage and Mega-Fan Omer Shem Tov,” The Times of Israel, April 17, 2025, https://www.timesofisrael.com/soccer-star-haaland-calls-freed-hostage-and-mega-fan-omer-shem-tov/. 

[8] Meg Foley Yoder, “505 Days Underground: Omer Shem Tov on Survival in Hamas Captivity,” Harvard Kennedy School, Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, March 3, 2026, https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/our-work/news-announcements/505-days-underground-omer-shem-tov-survival-hamas.