| I will never forget my visit several years ago to Whenchou, China, a city of ten million people, with a group of home church leaders. These pastors represented some one million local believers. What a privilege this was, especially because I was the first person to visit them from Israel. I started explaining why Israel is important and quickly found out this was nothing new to them. After the service I asked the leader: “Who taught you about Israel?” I still remember the puzzled look on his face. “It’s all in the Bible,” he replied.
This begs the question: What happened in the church for it to move so far away from this simple truth and become the primary force for anti-Semitism over the past 1,500 years? Hateful preaching of contempt against the Jews, pogroms, forced conversions, inquisitions, and finally, the Holocaust, made Christianity the archenemy of the Jews even more so than Islam.
Paul’s Doctrine on Israel
This is even more startling when the apostle Paul could not have been more clear in his teaching about Israel, to whom “pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises; of whom are the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, the eternally blessed God” (Romans 9:4–5).
Paul recognized that while most Jews had failed to accept Yeshua as their Messiah, they nevertheless remain “beloved for the sake of the fathers” (Romans 11:28). Paul saw their rejection of Jesus as a temporary state that the Hebrew prophets foretold (for example, Isaiah 6); yet he also believed eventually the time would come when “all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26). He thus admonished gentile believers not to be arrogant against the Jews (Romans 11:18) and to consider their own origins: “Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). Now, by grace, they have been brought near and share in God’s promises.
Developing Cracks
The answer of why and where the church parted ways with Israel is complex and cannot be fully covered just in this short article. In part we can blame Roman policy for it, but far more importantly we should hold the church itself responsible for the decisions its leaders took in councils and synods in the early centuries after Christ.
Even before the first ecumenical councils, the church had already started drifting away from Israel and its Hebraic, biblical roots. After the first church council, recorded in Acts 15, things started changing. First, the demographics of the church steadily changed. While it started out in Jerusalem as a 100 percent Jewish church, within a century or so gentiles became the majority. Jerusalem remained the spiritual center of the faith, but … |
