V. Israel After Christ: Fulfillment Without Erasure
There is another issue Christians have to confront, because it sits underneath much of our disagreement about Israel even when we do not realize it.
What, exactly, does the Jewish people’s covenantal history mean after Christ?
Here I want to avoid two theological shortcuts that, in my judgment, distort the question in opposite directions.
The first is familiar in American evangelicalism: dispensationalism. On this reading, the modern State of Israel occupies a particular place in an end-times prophetic timetable. Israel’s establishment in 1948 is interpreted as a direct fulfillment of biblical prophecy, and contemporary events involving the Jewish state become signs along the road toward Christ’s return.
As I said in Part 1, I do not share that theology.
The modern State of Israel is a modern nation-state. Its government can act wisely or foolishly, justly or unjustly. No biblical promise gives Benjamin Netanyahu—or any Israeli prime minister—a divine blank check. Christians do Israel no favor by treating the policies of a contemporary government as though criticizing them were somehow equivalent to resisting God’s redemptive plan.
But there is an opposite theological mistake called “Replacement Theology” or “Supersessionism.”1Supersessionists themselves divide between those who believe Israel has no future whatsoever and moderates who anticipate future Jewish salvation without national restoration. Historically, this displacement theology dominated Christian thought throughout history, though recent decades—particularly following World War II—have prompted some theologians and biblical scholars to reconsider it.
I follow theologian N.T. Wright on this question. If Paul genuinely believed Jesus was Israel’s Messiah—which the text makes impossible to deny—then it is inconceivable that he would imagine his Messiah could have followers while Israel continued unchanged. Wright contends that true supersessionism would be the notion that Jesus initiated a movement discontinuous with Israel’s history, whereas affirming and fulfilling that history through the Messiah’s arrival should not be called supersessionism at all.
Crucially, Wright emphasizes that the coming of Jesus and the Spirit fulfilled Israel’s hope for the age to come—it was fulfilled hope, not superseded hope. For early Christians, the point was not about comparing religions but about recognizing that if Jesus truly was Israel’s Messiah, then Israel’s narrative and identity had been fulfilled in him and therefore in all his people
It says, in effect, that Israel rejected Christ, God rejected Israel, the Church replaced Israel, and therefore the Jewish people no longer possess any distinctive covenantal significance.
That is much closer to the argument made by Palestinian Lutheran pastor Munther Isaac, whose work has become influential among Christians sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
Gerald McDermott reviewed Isaac’s recent book “Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza” and wrote the following debunking of a central claim:
Munther contends that the deaths of many people implies systematic intent and therefore genocide. But everything in the Gaza war suggests the absence of this intent. For example, if Israel intends to kill Palestinian civilians, why does it send Arab-language warnings to civilians before attacks? Why does it evacuate civilians through humanitarian corridors? Why does it send foot soldiers on dangerous missions when bombs dropped from the air can kill far more? As British Col. Richard Kemp once told the BBC, “I don’t think there’s ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.”
No genocidal regime provides humanitarian assistance to its alleged victims as Israel has done. By early 2025, Israel had opened aid crossing points, constructed roads to deliver aid, and in December 2024 alone oversaw five thousand trucks delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza. The provision of any aid at all contradicts the accusation of genocide.
McDermott continues:
Every death in war is a tragedy. But even if we accept the number of 50,000, this is a far cry from evidence of genocide, where powerful governments destroy the vast majority of a people group. In the Holocaust, 67 percent of European Jews were killed; 85 percent of Tutsis were murdered in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and 80 percent of Armenians were massacred in Turkish-controlled lands in 1915–1917. If we accept Isaac’s death total and realize that at least half of the supposed 50,000 Gaza dead were armed combatants, that means only 1.25 percent of the Gaza population of 2 million was killed. To put it crudely, if the IDF was intending genocide, it was phenomenally ineffective.
Finally, it beggars belief that a people intending genocide would care for enemy wounded. Yet terrorists who survived the October 7 massacre were treated in Israeli hospitals alongside Israeli victims.
These are some of the reasons that Alice Wairimu Nderitu, the former U.N. special advisor on the prevention of genocide, refused to call the Gaza war genocide. For this refusal she was dismissed by the U.N. in November 2024. It is also why the Biden State Department in December 2024 insisted that “allegations of genocide are unfounded.” In the same month, German foreign ministry spokesman Sebastian Fischer said the same.
What about Isaac’s ‘Replacement’ argument.
Christ, he argues, fulfills the promises made to Israel. The Abrahamic inheritance is no longer centered upon one ethnic nation occupying one particular territory; in Christ it expands outward toward all nations and ultimately the renewed creation. Jews and Gentiles alike receive the promises through Israel’s Messiah.
There is something important here that Christians should affirm.
The New Testament really does universalize the Abrahamic promise. Jesus is not one more episode in an essentially unchanged story about national possession of territory. He is the fulfillment toward which Israel’s story was always moving. The gospel goes to the nations. Jews and Gentiles are gathered into one people in Christ. The inheritance expands toward the whole renewed creation.
Where I part company with Isaac is what happens next.
Fulfillment is not the same thing as erasure.
Paul will not allow us to say that the Jewish people have simply exhausted their theological usefulness and can now disappear from the Christian story.
Romans 9–11 is decisive here.
Paul is writing after Christ, after the resurrection, after Pentecost, and after the gospel has begun moving into the Gentile world. And yet when he speaks about his fellow Jews—many of whom have rejected Jesus as Messiah—he still writes:
“They are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”
Present tense.
Beloved.
Irrevocable.
Those are very difficult words to reconcile with a theology in which God simply cancels his relationship with the Jewish people and transfers everything once associated with Israel to a new institution called the Church.
Paul’s Christian theology is thoroughly Christ-centered without becoming anti-Jewish. Christ fulfills Israel’s story, but somehow Israel remains within that story.
That is why I prefer the phrase:
Fulfillment without erasure.
All God’s promises reach their fulfillment in Israel’s Messiah. Gentiles are brought into the family of Abraham through Christ. The horizon of the promise expands beyond one strip of land toward God’s redemption of the whole creation (i.e. Heaven and Earth, Spirit and Matter.)
And yet the people through whom those promises came have not therefore become disposable.
Catholic theology since Vatican II has been particularly helpful on this point. Nostra Aetate returned Christians to Paul’s language concerning Israel’s “covenants” and “promises,” and later Catholic reflection has emphasized what Paul himself says: God’s fidelity toward the Jewish people has not simply been revoked.
Christians can affirm that the Jewish people remain somehow uniquely bound to the biblical story without pretending that the modern Israeli government is identical with biblical Israel.
We can acknowledge the extraordinary historical connection of Jews to the land without believing that Scripture supplies us with a modern cadastral map.
And we can resist a theology that renders the Jewish people obsolete without embracing a theology that renders Israeli policy unquestionable.
That seems to me much closer to Paul.
The Church is not called to choose between Christian Zionism without criticism and Christian theology without Israel.
There is another way.
Christ fulfills Israel.
He does not erase Israel.
And once we recognize that Scripture itself resists our desire for easy political conclusions, we are forced back into the harder work Christians so often want to avoid: prudence.
Because compassion may tell us whom we ought to love.
It does not always tell us what governments ought to do.
VI. When Christian Compassion Loses Prudence
I understand the appeal of Christians who want to say: I am pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, pro-peace, pro-justice, and above all pro-Jesus.
In one sense, how could a Christian object?
But compassion and statecraft are not the same thing.
It is one thing to say that Israelis and Palestinians ought to live together peacefully as neighbors. It is another to explain what political arrangements would actually make that possible when armed organizations reject Israel’s legitimacy, rockets have followed territorial withdrawal, and previous negotiations have repeatedly broken down over borders, security, Jerusalem, settlements, refugees, and the right of return.
Christian moral principles tell us much about the ends we should desire.
They do not always tell us which policies will achieve them.
This is the same problem I raised in my earlier piece, Politics with a Proof Text. Christians begin with something indisputably biblical: welcome the stranger, care for the poor, protect the vulnerable, pursue peace.
So far, so good.
But then, almost imperceptibly, the biblical principle becomes attached to a particular political program. Compassion for immigrants becomes one immigration policy. Concern for poverty becomes one economic system. Concern for Palestinians becomes one prescription for borders, settlements, military withdrawal, or recognition of statehood.
And then disagreement with the political prescription begins to look like disagreement with Jesus.
That is where prudence has disappeared.
Prudence is not the enemy of compassion. In the classical Christian tradition, prudence is what enables moral principles to be applied wisely to complicated circumstances. It forces us to ask not only, What do I want? but also, What will happen if we do this? What obligations compete here? What unintended consequences might follow? Who bears responsibility if the policy fails?
Peace is a Christian good.
But “make peace” is not a border map.
This is also where I think the contemporary oppressor/oppressed framework can distort Christian judgment.
The framework is not useless. Power matters. Powerful people and nations really can abuse the weak. Christians should be especially attentive to people whose suffering is easy for the comfortable to overlook.
The problem arises when relative power begins to determine moral status.
Once one side has been identified as colonizer, occupier, privileged, or oppressor, and the other as colonized, marginalized, or oppressed, the conclusions can begin to arrive before the evidence does.
The weaker party acquires a kind of presumed moral innocence.
The stronger party acquires a kind of presumed moral guilt.
But Christianity does not teach that powerlessness sanctifies us any more than power necessarily corrupts us beyond recognition. Human beings remain moral agents on both sides of a power imbalance. The oppressed can commit terrible evil. The powerful can exercise legitimate authority. And sometimes a person or nation can be both genuinely aggrieved in one respect and seriously culpable in another.
That is precisely why October 7 must remain in the story.
It is also why Christian leaders need extraordinary care in their public language.
Pope Francis showed genuine pastoral concern for Palestinians in Gaza, including his regular contact with Gaza’s Catholic parish. I have no reason to question the sincerity of that compassion.
But words spoken by a pope carry enormous weight, particularly when Jews hear them against the background of a long and painful history with Christianity. When Francis raised the possibility that Israel’s actions might constitute genocide, Jewish leaders understandably listened closely. And when his letter marking the first anniversary of October 7 spoke about a “spiral of violence” without actually naming Hamas or the perpetrators of the massacre, Jews heard a moral symmetry that the events themselves did not support.
I do not think Pope Francis intended hostility toward Jews.
That is precisely the point.
Good intentions do not eliminate the need for moral and historical sensitivity.
Christians, given our history, ought to be particularly cautious about rhetoric that can turn Jews once again into the uniquely guilty people of history—the people upon whom the sins of everyone else somehow come to rest.
Compassion becomes dangerous when it loses proportion.
Justice becomes distorted when we see only the suffering caused by the actor with greater power.
And Christian witness becomes politically naive when we imagine that loving our enemies means refusing to ask whether some enemies intend to harm the innocent.
The Christian moral imagination must be larger than that.
It must be capable of grieving Palestinian children without forgetting murdered Israeli children.
It must be able to criticize Israeli policies without turning Israel into a symbol of metaphysical evil.
And it must be willing to listen to Palestinian Christians while also asking a question Western Christians seldom ask:
What is it actually like to be a Christian minority in the broader Middle East?
VII. The Middle Eastern Christians We Rarely Hear About
There is another group whose situation complicates the story: Middle Eastern Christians themselves.
Western Christians naturally pay attention to Palestinian Christians. We should. They are our brothers and sisters in Christ, and many have suffered terribly through war, displacement, economic hardship, political instability, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But their circumstances are more complicated than the usual Western narrative suggests.
Palestinian Christians are a minority twice over: Arabs living amid a Jewish state and Christians living within a predominantly Muslim Arab society. That can create pressures in more than one direction. A Palestinian Christian leader may criticize Israeli policies publicly and sharply. Criticizing Hamas or Islamist movements can carry a very different kind of personal risk.
That does not mean every Palestinian Christian secretly agrees with Israel. It does mean we should be cautious about assuming that public rhetoric tells us everything about the pressures under which minority communities live.
One Palestinian Catholic priest interviewed described the need to be “prudent” in dealing with Muslim neighbors and students and spoke of Christians having to demonstrate their loyalty to Palestinian society. Other church sources similarly describe the difficulty Christian leaders face when candid criticism of Hamas or Islamism might place their communities at greater risk.
There is a much older history behind this.
Under traditional Islamic rule, Jews and Christians were often classified as dhimmi—protected non-Muslim communities permitted to worship and maintain communal life, but historically occupying a legally subordinate position and, in many periods, subject to special taxes and restrictions. Christians should not ignore the long historical experience of living as tolerated minorities under Islamic authority.
That broader regional picture matters.
Today Israel contains a large Muslim minority—nearly two million people—as well as an established Arab Christian population that worships openly and participates in the country’s educational, economic, and civic life. At the same time, Jewish communities that once existed across much of the Arab and Muslim Middle East have dwindled to tiny remnants or disappeared altogether.
None of this proves that Israel treats every Arab citizen perfectly.
It certainly does not erase the grievances of Palestinian Christians.
But it should complicate the story.
Christians should care deeply about Palestinian Christians. We should also care about Copts in Egypt, Christians in Iraq and Syria, Maronites in Lebanon, and other ancient Christian communities whose survival has often been precarious.
And we should be willing to ask why criticism of the region’s one Jewish state can be remarkably easy in the West, while honest criticism of Islamist power can be considerably more dangerous for Christians who actually live beneath it.
That question leads directly to the final moral issue.
What does Christianity require when evil is not merely something to forgive—but something from which the innocent must be protected?
VIII. “Turn the Other Cheek” and the Duty to Protect
This brings us, finally, to a distinctly Christian question.
What does Jesus mean when he tells us to love our enemies and “turn the other cheek”?
Some Christians conclude that the logic of the Sermon on the Mount points toward pacifism: violence only breeds violence, and Christians should refuse participation in it. I respect that position. It has a serious history within Christianity, and it takes Jesus’ commands with admirable seriousness.
But I do not think it adequately addresses the obligations we bear toward other people.
If someone strikes me, I may choose not to retaliate. I may forgive the person who wrongs me. I may even accept suffering rather than return evil for evil.
But suppose someone is attacking my child.
Or your child.
At that point, “turn the other cheek” cannot simply mean standing aside while an innocent person is brutalized. My responsibilities have changed because another life has been entrusted to my care.
The same distinction lies behind the Christian just-war tradition associated especially with Augustine and Aquinas. Neither man regarded violence as redemptive. War is not holy simply because one believes one’s cause is righteous. The use of force belongs to a fallen world.
But precisely because the world is fallen, governing authorities sometimes have an obligation to restrain those who would murder, invade, kidnap, or terrorize others.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church makes the point sharply: legitimate defense may become not merely a right but a “grave duty” for someone responsible for the lives of others.
That is the moral category I believe applies after October 7.
Israel did not merely possess permission to respond. Its government had an obligation to protect its citizens from an organization that had just demonstrated both the capacity and the intention to murder, abduct and rape them.
That concerns what just-war thinkers call jus ad bellum: whether there is a just cause for going to war.
But Christianity never stops there.
There is also jus in bello: justice within war.
Having a just cause does not make every means permissible. Civilians remain protected. Force must discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. Military advantage must be weighed against foreseeable civilian harm. Prisoners must be treated humanely. An atrocity committed by one side does not authorize an atrocity by the other.
This distinction is essential to everything I have argued.
October 7 gave Israel a just cause to respond.
It did not give Israel moral permission to do anything it wished afterward.
If particular Israeli operations were indiscriminate or disproportionate, they should be condemned. If Israeli soldiers committed war crimes, they should be held accountable. Nothing in Christian just-war reasoning requires us to deny wrongdoing by the side whose overall cause we believe to be just.
But neither does Christian enemy-love require a civil authority to leave the innocent undefended.
That, I think, is where the language of “redemptive violence” can mislead us.
The sword cannot redeem.
Only Christ does that.
Military power cannot reconcile enemies, forgive sins, heal hatred, or create the kingdom of God. No bombing campaign can accomplish the work of the Cross.
But the sword can sometimes restrain.
It can stop a murderer from murdering again. It can prevent an army from overrunning a village. It can rescue hostages. It can stand between the predator and the person he intends to kill.
That is not redemption.
It is protection.
And confusing those two things creates opposite errors. One error imagines military force can finally solve the human problem. The other imagines that because force cannot redeem, it therefore has no legitimate purpose at all.
Christianity should reject both.
The Christian must love the enemy.
The Christian ruler must also protect the innocent.
Sometimes those obligations meet in terrible circumstances where no option is clean and every available choice carries suffering.
That is why Christians need more than slogans.
We need a moral imagination capable of mercy and judgment, compassion and prudence, forgiveness and protection.
Which brings us back, finally, to Daoud Nassar and those remarkable words:
“We Refuse to Be Enemies.”
Conclusion — The Christian Moral Imagination
Perhaps Daoud Nassar’s words are the right place to end:
“We Refuse to Be Enemies.”
That does not mean refusing to recognize evil. It does not mean pretending Hamas is harmless, or that October 7 was merely one more turn in an endless “cycle of violence.” Nor does it mean giving Israel moral immunity for everything done in the name of self-defense.
It means something harder.
Palestinian civilians bear the image of God.
Israeli civilians bear the image of God.
Christians must resist antisemitism and hatred of Palestinians alike. We must mourn innocent suffering wherever it occurs, insist upon truth even when truth complicates our preferred political narrative, and refuse to turn compassion into propaganda.
Equal human dignity does not mean equal moral responsibility.
Enemy-love does not require moral blindness.
And forgiveness does not require abandoning the innocent.
The sword cannot redeem. It can sometimes restrain.
So perhaps this is the Christian moral imagination we need: one capable of grieving Gaza without forgetting October 7; defending Israel’s right to exist without baptizing every Israeli policy; loving Palestinians without romanticizing Hamas; and pursuing peace without pretending peace is possible simply because we desire it.
Refusing to be enemies does not require pretending enemies do not exist. Christian love commands us to recognize the image of God even in the person who hates us. Christian prudence does not require us to hand the innocent over to him.
Coming Next
Daoud Nassar has provided us with something more than an inspiring Palestinian story. His refusal to allow suffering and injustice to become hatred—“We Refuse to Be Enemies”—is recognizably Christian. And that raises a larger question I want to explore next:
Why?
My next long-form piece will examine the very different theological foundations Christianity and Islam bring to questions of suffering, justice, political power, conquest, and the treatment of enemies.
At the center of Christianity stands a Messiah who refuses the path of political or military conquest and accepts the Cross. Jesus does not seize earthly power to establish his kingdom. He suffers, forgives, dies, and rises—and the New Covenant fundamentally reshapes how Christians are to understand power, victory, and redemption.
Islam emerges from a different founding history. Muhammad became not only a religious teacher but a political ruler and military leader. Islamic tradition therefore inherits a different relationship between religious authority, political authority, and armed force. Muslim traditions have developed in many directions since then but those foundational differences matter.
Drawing on a substantial body of Christian and Islamic scholarship, I want to explore that contrast carefully.
My argument will be provocative, but I think increasingly important:
Islam desperately needs the real Jesus, they need the New Covenant brought about by the suffering love of the Jewish Messiah.
Not because Christians have always lived faithfully by that New Covenant—we plainly have not—but because the Cross changes the meaning of power itself.
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