Is the Church the New Israel?
(← click) In the article "Israel and the Church – What's the Relationship?" we read of several different views on this important topic. Does the Church replace Israel as the heir of God's covenant? That's "Replacement Theology." Or do Israel and the Church refer to separate groups of people? That's "Separation Theology." Or do Israel and the Church overlap in some manner? That's "Remnant Theology."
A recent post on my social media said – "The Orthodox Church is the true Israel - Paisios." This "Replacement Theology" is the viewpoint of many Orthodox Christians; in fact, I've heard it stated quite forcefully in church by an Arabic Christian guest speaker. But this reflects the dislike of Arabs for the Jews. And it's not only the default Orthodox viewpoint, it's also the view of many Catholics and Protestants. So, what is the correct view on this touchy issue?
The first two above options – "Replacement Theology" and "Separation Theology" – are too simple-minded. They both illustrate dualistic thinking: it is a simple "either-or" decision. That type of thinking, however, is lazy logic. It's more difficult to think up a "some-of-this-and-some-of-that" type of solution: ask any computer programmer how hard it is to code such an "if-and/or-if-and/or-if-and/or" decision tree! Remnant Theology is this type of complex answer.
I've come across some rather virulent antisemitic posts by so-called Christians on social media lately, so I decided to write an answer: https://Agape-Biblia.org/Good-News-Jewish-mouse.htm – "How the Jewish mouse ate the Greco-Roman elephant." Here it is:
Did the Greco-Roman Empire assimilate the Jewish nation and hellenize this new faith in Yeshua? Or instead, did this new version of the Jewish religion adopt and assimilate the Greco-Roman Empire? Here's how the Jewish mouse ate the Greco-Roman elephant: one bite at a time, one martyr – or hundreds – at a time, over a period of three hundred years, until which time what we now call "Christianity" was considered a Jewish sect. Yeshua was a Jew who came as the fulfillment of the Jewish Bible's prophecies about the Jewish Messiah, the Annointed One. All twelve Disciples and the Apostle Paul were Jewish, and many thousands of Jews were converted in the book of Acts to believe in him as their Messiah. For almost 400 years after the Messiah's birth, the Jewish Bible – what we now call the "Old Testament" – was the only Bible that believers in the Messiah, the Khristos, knew. It had been translated into Greek (the Septuagint) about 200 years before his birth, making those prophecies available to the Greek-speaking world.
As the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 1:16 – "For I am not ashamed of the gospel of the Anointed One [the Khristos], for it is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes; for the Jew first, and also for the Greek." In Romans 10:1 he wrote – "Brothers, my heart's desire and my prayer to God is for Israel, that they may be saved." Also in Romans 10:1-2a he wrote – "I ask then, Has God rejected his people? May it never be! For I also am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people, which he foreknew."
And as Paul wrote to Gentile converts: "So the [Jewish] law has become our tutor to bring us to the Khristos, the Anointed One, that we might be justified by faith. ...For as many of you as were baptized into Khristos have put on Khristos. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Yesous Khristos, the Anointed One. If you belong to Khristos, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to promise, ...so that He might redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons" (Gal. 3:27-29; 4:5).
Bear in mind that "Yesous, the Khristos, the Anointed One" is simply "Yeshua, the Messiah" translated into Greek. We, believing Gentiles ("Greeks"), are now adopted Jews, children of Abraham! And when Emperor Constantine the Great accepted this new faith, he said – "You have conquered, O Galilean!" See the Introduction of https://Agape-Biblia.org/First-Century-View.htm and https://Agape-Biblia.org/First-Century-View-Augustine.htm for more details on the thorny issue of being "the chosen" or "the elect" – ethnic superiority, both Jewish and anti-Semitic.
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My websites have been experiencing "brute force" or DDOS attacks for the past several weeks. Finally, my monitoring service Jetpack sent me this message showing a total 118 lifetime brute force attacks on just one of my three websites, so you can likely multiply 118 by three = about 348 attacks. Each attack lasts from 5 to 15 or 20 minutes. "DDOS" stands for "Distributed Denial Of Service" which means some rogue actors have infected unwary people's computers with botnet malware that turns their computers into robots which send a rapid stream of requests to a disliked website. Then the botnet controller, most often a hacker in Russia or Bulgaria, transmits a command to the botnet to bring down my server by brute force, flooding it with thousands upon thousands of connection requests per second. The result is that my server can't respond to so many connection requests and it crashes temporarily.
A tactic of information warfare is to confuse the opposite side by sowing doubt: it can paralyze them into indifference and inaction. The RT ("Russia Today") pro-Moscow disinformation website recently posted some memes – "Ukrainian soldiers used as cannon fodder" and about NATO – "Fight to the last Ukrainian!" which some people repeat in social media. Quite often in warfare, one side will accuse the other of what the former is most guilty of: the Russian expression "pushichnaya myaso" (cannon fodder) is frequently used by ordinary Russians when referring to their own soldiers, often sent into battle poorly equipped and inadequately trained, soon becoming cannon fodder for the other side.
