There is a hard truth that has sat quietly in the background of Christian theology for almost two thousand years. Christianity, for all its beauty and brilliance, made a staggering mistake when it tried to replace the people through whom the faith itself was born. This wasn’t some tiny note buried in the margins of a dusty commentary. It was a tectonic shift, the kind that jars the inner wiring of how a Christian thinks—how you see yourself, how you even open the Bible, how the face of Jesus shows up in your imagination. For a long time the Church kept preaching grace while, right alongside it, redrawing the map of where it came from. And “quiet” isn’t the right word for that. It wasn’t quiet. It wasn’t even trying to be. The whole thing tilted under the pressure of the rewrite. The whole story groaned and tilted under the weight of that redraw. Because once Christianity lets go of Israel, it loses the very plot it believes it’s telling.

From the start, I never bought replacement theology. My world was old-school dispensationalism. This view respected Israel, yes, but kept her importance pushed out of the present. It was always pushed somewhere out on the horizon. Israel mattered, but not right now. She wasn’t at the center of the story. She was kept offstage, waiting for her turn, while the Church stood in the spotlight. It looked respectful—or at least looked enough like respect that I didn’t question it.

Looking back, though, it was just a quiet postponement of something Scripture treats as happening right in front of us, not shelved for later. I wasn’t dismissing Israel. I just wasn’t actually seeing her.

The change began when writers like Gerald McDermott started pressing the question of Israel in ways I’d never stopped to consider. Their work wasn’t scolding or polemical. He simply pointed to what the text had been saying all along. He provided an aha moment, as he showed that Israel wasn’t a prophecy on pause, nor a dormant subplot waiting for someone to throw a switch. It was the beating heart of a story happening right now. She was a covenant partner right now, woven into God’s ongoing work, not reserved for the epilogue. I hadn’t denied Israel outright, but I had eased her off to the side without really noticing I’d done it. Once I saw the error, the whole framework I had trusted began to rearrange itself.

But the theology most Christians inherited didn’t just materialize out of nowhere. It was hammered out inside real history, under real pressures, with all the fears and compromises that creep into human decisions. Supersessionism—the idea that the Church replaced Israel—offered early Christians a tidy explanation for a fast-growing gentile movement. It gave them a way to locate themselves in the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)