The Church and Israel

Jew and Gentile: Israel and the Christian Church

What Do We Mean by “Church”?

Several things come to mind when one hears the word “church.” Initially, the term signifies the presence of a building where followers of a higher power gather in fellowship and in praise. However, a biblical understanding of the word will reveal something much more significant than a physical structure.

In and of itself, the term “church” originates from the Greek word Ecclesia — which means “called out” or the “called out ones.” Biblically speaking, the church can be defined as the followers of Christ — past, present, and future — and it is with this definition that the term “church” is most commonly used today. The church is the body of believers in Christ — in Messiah. As such, the church is known as “the Body of Christ.” Ephesians 1:22–23 states:

The word Ecclesia was not invented by the New Testament. It was already in use in the Greek-speaking world to describe a called-out assembly — a gathering of citizens summoned for a specific purpose. When the Holy Spirit breathed this word through the writers of the New Testament, He took a term the world already understood and filled it with an entirely new dimension of meaning. The Ecclesia of God is not a voluntary association of like-minded individuals. It is a divinely summoned assembly — men and women called out of the world, out of their former identities, and into a new corporate identity in Messiah. It is not defined by geography, nationality, denomination, or ethnicity. It is defined by one thing alone: faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah of Israel.

In a biblical sense, the church has little to do with denominations, and everything to do with a family of believers that have been baptized in the Holy Spirit — regardless of affiliation or denomination. This is perhaps the most radical and least understood implication of the New Testament conception of the Church. In a world divided by every conceivable barrier — racial, national, social, economic, religious — the Ecclesia of God declares that those barriers have been demolished at the cross. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28). This is not the erasure of distinctions — it is the transcendence of them.

The Body of Christ — 1 Corinthians 12

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul states that we, as believers, were baptized into “one body” and “into one Spirit.” The passage he writes is among the most carefully constructed theological arguments in the entire New Testament. It deserves to be read in full:

Paul’s argument is constructed with precision. He begins with a universal biological fact — a body is one thing, yet composed of many parts — and then makes the astonishing claim: so also is Christ. Not “so also is the Church.” He says “so also is Christ.” The body and its Head are identified so closely that to speak of the Body is to speak of Christ Himself. The Church is not merely an institution that follows Christ. It is His body — the visible extension of His presence in the world.

Into this one body, Paul insists, all believers have been baptized by one Spirit — “whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free.” These were not abstract categories to Paul’s original readers in Corinth. The hostility between Jew and Gentile was as real and as bitter as any ethnic division in human history. Centuries of mutual suspicion, religious separation, and cultural contempt stood between them. And Paul says: in the Body of Christ, that wall is gone. Both have been baptized by one Spirit into one Body. Both drink from one Spirit. The horizontal human divisions that seemed permanent and defining are dissolved by the vertical reality of a shared new creation in Messiah.

This has profound implications for the question that is at the heart of this article: the relationship between the Church and Israel. If the Body of Christ includes both Jewish and Gentile believers — if the Church is by definition a community in which the wall of partition between Jew and Gentile has been broken down — then the Church can never rightly regard Israel as its enemy, its replacement, or its theological afterthought. Paul himself — the apostle to the Gentiles, the very man who declared the freedom of Gentile believers from the Mosaic Law — was a Jewish man who loved his people with an anguish that drove him to write some of the most passionate prose in all of Scripture (Romans 9:1–3).

The Central Question: Does the Church Replace Israel?

This article provides a close examination of Israel and the Church from a purely biblical perspective. The question of whether the Church replaces Israel — or whether both continue under distinct but related covenantal relationships with God — is not merely an academic debate. It has had catastrophic real-world consequences. The theological framework that positions the Church as the “new Israel” and denies any continuing covenant purpose to the Jewish nation has served, throughout Church history, as a theological underpinning for antisemitism, persecution, and the horrifying spectacle of professing Christians participating in the oppression of the very people through whom their Savior came into the world.

It also matters eschatologically — for how one views Israel’s past directly shapes how one reads the prophetic promises of Scripture regarding Israel’s future. If the Church has inherited all of Israel’s blessings while Israel retains only its curses, then the sweeping prophetic promises of restoration, regathering, national salvation, and Messianic reign that fill the pages of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, and Romans 11 must all be “spiritualized” into something other than what they plainly say. The exegetical contortions required to make such an interpretation work are considerable — and the conclusions they lead to are impossible to reconcile with the plain reading of the text.

Paul’s answer in Romans 11:1 is direct: “God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew — by no means!” The Greek is emphatic: mē genoito — the strongest possible negative in the Greek language, translated variously as “by no means,” “God forbid,” or “absolutely not.” This is Paul’s answer to Replacement Theology, and he gives it in the most forceful terms available to him.

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Two Views on the Church and Israel

The following section presents a condensed summary of key theological arguments drawn from an article entitled “Israel and the Church: The Differences” by Dr. Tom McCall, published through the ministries of Zola Levitt. Christians Standing With Israel presents these arguments here solely for educational purposes. Authorship of the material below belongs to Dr. McCall and Zola Levitt Ministries. The full article is available at www.levitt.com.

First View: The Church Is Israel

The predominant historical position has been that the Church is the “new Israel” — a continuation and higher development of the concept of Israel that began in the Old Testament. In this view, all of the promises made to Israel in Scripture find their fulfillment in the Church. The prophecies relating to blessing and restoration of Israel to the Promised Land are “spiritualized” into promises of blessing to the Church, while the prophecies of condemnation and judgment are retained literally by the Jewish nation.

This view is called Replacement Theology, because the Church is seen to have replaced Israel in God’s economy. Dr. McCall identifies a fundamental problem with this position: the continuing and remarkable existence of the Jewish people. If Israel has been condemned to extinction and holds no divinely ordained future, how does one account for the supernatural survival of the Jewish people for nearly two thousand years against every conceivable force of destruction? And how does one account for Israel’s resurgence as an independent nation in 1948 — victorious in multiple wars, flourishing economically, and ingathering exiles from over a hundred nations exactly as the prophets foretold?

Second View: Israel and the Church Are Distinct

The second view — which Dr. McCall argues is clearly taught in the New Testament but suppressed throughout most of Church history — holds that the Church is completely different from Israel. The Church is an entirely new creation that came into being on the Day of Pentecost after the resurrection of Christ, and will continue until it is taken to Heaven at the return of the Lord (Ephesians 1:9–11). None of the curses or blessings pronounced specifically upon Israel refer directly to the Church. The Church enters into the Abrahamic and New Covenants only by divine application, not by original interpretation (Matthew 26:28).

This position leaves all the covenants, promises, and warnings to Israel intact. Israel, the natural Jewish nation, is still Israel. God has carefully preserved the Jewish people through every kind of distress and persecution — and, as Dr. McCall notes with candor and shame, sometimes the professing Church itself has been a source of that persecution. Nevertheless, God has also kept His promise to save a remnant of Israel in every generation: the Jewish believers in Christ who have joined Gentile believers to form the Church, the Body of Christ (Romans 11:5). A part of Israel — the believing remnant — intersects with the Church during the Church Age. But this does not make Israel the Church, or vice versa.

How Did Replacement Theology Become Dominant?

Dr. McCall traces how Replacement Theology, already present in embryonic form before the end of the First Century, became the official theological position of Christendom primarily through the influence of Augustine in the latter part of the Fourth Century. Augustine adopted the view that the reign of Christ would be “spiritual” rather than literal, occurring during the Church Age rather than in a future Millennial Kingdom. Such a view necessitated the theological cancellation of the Jewish nation and the transfer of all covenant promises to the Church. From that point, Replacement Theology became the dominant framework throughout the Byzantine world, survived the Middle Ages, the Crusades, and the Reformation, and remained the dominant Christian theological position until the Premillennial recovery of the last century or so.

Does Israel’s Future Diminish the Church?

Some suggest that if Israel retains a covenant future in God’s plan, this somehow diminishes the position of the Church. Dr. McCall argues the opposite: it is precisely when the Church recognizes Israel that the true distinctiveness and glory of the Body of Christ becomes evident. The Church — this called-out body composed of believing Jews and Gentiles during the Church Age — is the highest entity the Lord has created. Our Head is the Son of God Himself. We will reign with Him when He rules the earth. The Church’s finest hour will not come at Israel’s expense — it will come when Israel is restored nationally and spiritually to the Lord at the Second Coming of Christ, and the Church returns with Him as His glorious Bride. Why be jealous of what God has promised the Jewish people? As Dr. McCall writes: “How short-sighted of us!”

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The Calling of the Church in Relation to Israel

Understanding the distinction between Israel and the Church — and the profound interconnection between them — is not merely a theological exercise. It is a call to action. If the Church has not replaced Israel, then the Church owes a debt of gratitude to the Jewish people that can never be fully repaid. We worship the Jewish Messiah. We read a Jewish Bible. We were grafted into a Jewish root (Romans 11:17). We owe our entire redemptive heritage to the covenant faithfulness of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob toward His ancient people.

That debt expresses itself in several concrete obligations. The first is prayer. “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem” (Psalm 122:6) is not merely a poetic suggestion. It is a command — one that carries a specific promise: “they shall prosper that love thee.” The Church that prays for Israel is a Church aligned with the purposes of God in history.

The second obligation is proclamation. Paul’s great burden in Romans 9–11 was not merely theological — it was evangelistic. He longed for the salvation of his kinsmen according to the flesh (Romans 10:1). The Church has been entrusted with the Gospel — and the Gospel is “to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16). To abandon Jewish evangelism in the name of cultural sensitivity or theological confusion is to betray the commission we have received.

The third obligation is solidarity. In a world that has historically and repeatedly raised its hand against the Jewish people, the Church is called to stand with Israel — not politically, but covenantally. Not because of partisan alignment, but because of theological conviction rooted in the plain reading of Scripture. He that touches Israel touches the apple of God’s eye (Zechariah 2:8). The Church that understands this does not stand on the sidelines of history while the Jewish people are threatened. It stands alongside them, in prayer, in love, and in the confidence that the God who preserved Israel through every attempt at its destruction is the same God who has promised its ultimate and glorious restoration.