Posted on November 24, 2009 - by Calvin L. Smith

Stephen Sizer as Anti-Replacement Theology Champion?

I note Stephen Sizer will be speaking at Bethlehem Bible College’s Christ at the Checkpoint conference (March 2010), aimed at promoting a reading and reflection upon Scripture from a distinctly Palestinian perspective. The title of Sizer’s paper is “Israel and the Church: Challenging Zionism, Anti-Semitism and Replacement Theology.”

Let’s leave aside for the moment the supercessionist-heavy list of speakers (excluding, of course, Walter Kaiser, a respected theologian taking the opposite view), which suggests there is unlikely to be a much-needed Evangelical theological breakthrough on the Israeli-Palestinian issue at this conference and instead yet more preaching to the choir and plenty of back-slapping. If only those critical of Christian Zionism could intelligently disengage it from supercessionism, they might find they’d command wider support.

Anyway, the notion of Stephen challenging replacement theology appears somewhat incongruous. In the past, several other supercessionists have tried (not very successfully) to distance themselves from the label “replacement theology”. You see, ditching punitive supercessionism while holding to variations of either economic or structural supercessionism (see R. Kendall Soulen’s useful book The God of Israel and Christian Theology for definitions of the terminology) doesn’t qualify as having eschewed replacement theology. True, there are technical differences between these variations of supercessionism, nonetheless all mean the same thing semantically and theologically: whether one maintains Israel has been replaced or subsumed by, or redefined/extended in light of the Church, however one chooses to word it, it is still replacement theology in concept and outcome. God’s historic people are superceded.

Thus, given how, in our correspondence last year Stephen stated categorially the Jews are no longer God’s chosen people, I will be interested to see how exactly he intends to challenge replacement theology. At the very least his paper’s title is disingenuous, even misleading. It is certainly amusing. At the risk of sounding pejorative, it’s like the Pope presenting a paper challenging Catholicism, or Benny Hinn criticising the excesses of Charismaticism. Though no doubt it will be embraced with gusto at the conference, it just won’t wash across the wider theological world.

Originally posted on www.calvinlsmith.com
Take part in my current poll.