FOUNDATIONS OF ANTISEMITISM: AUGUSTINE AND CHRISTIAN TRIUMPHALISM
"…the very presence of the Jewish people in the world … puts a great question against Christian belief in a new covenant made through Christ.”
For a thousand years and more the Church remorselessly searched out Christian beliefs considered heresies, hunted down, tortured and murdered their adherents. So how explain the survival of Jews? Not until the twentieth century were the Jews subject to extermination as a group, and that by secular forces in the Christian West. Under religious authorities the Jews were persecuted, expelled, murdered; the Crusades saw whole communities put to the sword en route to “liberate” Jerusalem from the infidels. Spain forced its Jews to convert or be expelled. Later, and even after generations, those forced to convert and their descendents were suspected of being “insincere” in their Catholicism, tortured until the “confessed,” then burned at the stake. Yet heresies from Gnosticism and Montanism in the first and second centuries to Catharism in the eleventh were all ruthlessly suppressed. The emergence of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, the most serious heretical challenge to the Church proved too widespread to be suppressed. Europe’s Thirty Year’s War began as a religious conflict.
The Church’s problem with the survival of Judaism grew increasingly difficult beginning in the 4th century. Judaism was not, of course, a “heresy.” But the survival of Jews and Judaism in a post-messianic era posed a question of the legitimacy of Christian claims to be the “new” Israel; questioned even the role of Jesus as messiah.
St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430): For the new Church the continuing existence of the Jews demanded explanation. If the Jews exist it must be part of God’s plan, but how understand that plan? Augustine attempted to provide these answers in his City of God.
According to Augustine,
“Judaism, since Christ, is a corruption; indeed, Judas is the image of the Jewish people: their understanding of Scripture is carnal; they bear the guilt for the death of the Savior, for through their fathers they have killed Christ.”
If Augustine provided the theological rationale for preserving some Jews he also maintained that Christianity superseded Judaism, inherited Jewish scripture, history and most importantly, the Covenant with God. This was Augustine’s, “‘theory of substitution’ whereby the New Israel of the church became a substitute of ancient Israel…”
“the house of Israel which [God] has cast off… are themselves the builders of destruction and rejecters of the cornerstone [Jesus]… the Lord Christ distinguished between His faithful ones and His Jewish enemies [my emphasis, also below].”
Supersessionism was not, of course, an invention of Augustine. It likely originated with Paul’s assertion that circumcision of the heart substituted for the physical act. Tertullian, an early Church Father wrote, “Who else, therefore, are understood but we, who, fully taught by the new law, observe these practices,—the old law being obliterated…” Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho wrote, “…law placed against law has abrogated that which is before it, and a covenant which comes after in like manner has put an end to the previous one.”
Augustine and a Jewish remnant: So the question before Augustine was, “If the church was the “spiritual,” the “new Israel,” for what purpose did “national,” the ancient Israel exist?” The answer, God allows the Jews to survive “debased,” “destitute” and “in dispersion,” as a warning to Christians. “The Jews who slew Him, and would not believe in Him,” were punished by God, their temple destroyed, Jerusalem leveled. God has allowed them to survive as a continuing punishment because they “bear the guilt for the death of the Savior, for through their fathers they have killed Christ.” Three centuries after the Matthew gospel the sentences that would haunt the Jews through the millennia, justification for continuing persecution, is affirmed and developed by perhaps Christianity’s greatest thinker and theologian!
In Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate Episcopal minister William Nicholls places Augustine’s approach to the question of Jewish survival in modern and socio-psychological terms:
“…the very presence of the Jewish people in the world … puts a great question against Christian belief in a new covenant made through Christ. The presence of this question, often buried deep in the Christian mind, could not fail to cause profound and gnawing anxiety. Anxiety usually leads to hostility.”
m.jpost.com/Blogs/The-Jewish-Problem—From-anti-Judaism-to-anti-Semitism/Foundations-of-antisemitism-Augustine-and-Christian-Triumphalism-365442
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