Augustine never promoted a Jewish state, but rather expounded the theological significance of Jewish scattering. However, one wonders if he might support such a state as a way to protect Jewish lives and practice in light of the antisemitic hostility that we have seen simmer over the centuries, erupt in Western nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and remain an ever-present threat in relation to Islamic extremists who now have the sympathy also of Westerners. This is speculative, but one can imagine it as a post-Holocaust extension of Augustine’s basic teachings on the Jews. And to extend his logic in this way does not require one to embrace dispensational Zionism.

October 7th forced the West to face up to some grim realities. One is that we remain in history, and our intractable political conflicts have not been resolved by liberal nation-building. Another is that antisemitism remains with us and afflicts a variety of tribes, both political and ethnic, both at home and abroad. This animosity is evident not only in Hamas and Hamas-friendly Palestinians, but also progressives in Western nations who have come to classify contemporary Jews and the state of Israel as privileged oppressors. At the other end of the horseshoe, there is also an emergent strain on the new Christian right that winks at Jew-hatred while it seeks to curb what it sees as Western over-commitment to the modern state of Israel. Much of this is explained as a correction of sloppy post-War geopolitical thinking, which linked up with the dispensational theology that led many Western Christians to uncritically support Israel, and Zionist Jewish leaders in Western nations. This has led to a supersessionist backlash that seems to sanction hardened attitudes toward Jewish suffering in Israel and hostility toward Jews in the West.

Some form of what has come to be called “supersessionism” is the majority report in church history. Supersessionism broadly posits that Israel has been replaced by the Christian church, and that Jews who do not believe in Christ are no longer to be identified with God’s chosen people. According to this traditional belief, Jews lost the rights to the covenant promises in their rejection of Jesus. Dispensationalism–a more novel theology, and one not uninfluenced by the astonishing founding of the state of Israel in 1948–is adamantly opposed to this reading, presenting Israel and the church as two distinct peoples of God, with two distinct plans of salvation. Dispensational theologians strongly emphasize the irrevocability of the promises to national Israel; this leads many to view the modern state of Israel through a prophetic lens. Dispensationalists and those unknowingly influenced by this theology tend to be those most sensitive to the plight of Jews in our day, while supersessionist theology has been weaponized in service of hostility toward Jews, and those who adopt the supersessionist framing tend to struggle to articulate anything positive about the perdurance of Judaism and contemporary Jews. This is exacerbated by the very common pattern of people who have grown up in dispensationalist circles finding more classical Protestant theology, stumbling upon Luther’s floridly antisemitic comments, and as a result reacting against their enthusiastically Zionist upbringing (and parents) by embracing a maximally antisemitic read of the Reformers.

This essay will investigate how Augustine’s theology relates to all of this. What I will argue is that Augustine’s “witness doctrine,” while it certainly cannot be categorized as a species of dispensationalism, does not fit neatly in most expressions of supersessionism either. Augustine, while presenting the Christian church as continuous with Israel and as the fulfillment of Old Testament promises, and while being fervent about the need for Jews to repent and believe in Christ, also provides a positive account of Judaism. Working from within the contra Iudaeos stream of patristic rhetoric and theology, Augustine added a somewhat revolutionary contribution.

Background: Contra Iudaeos

Early in the church’s history, a form of supersessionism developed that viewed the Jews as rejected by God for having rejected Christ. Much of this tradition employed an allegorical reading of Esau and Jacob as prefiguring Israel and the church, inspired by similar interpretive moves in Paul’s writings. Already by the second century, theologians and Christian apologists began to present opposition to the gospel as a permanent feature of Jewish identity and Jewish-Christian relations.[1] Such Christians devised arguments to explain why Jews were seemingly incapable of perceiving that Christians had the true understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures. As Paula Fredriksen explains in her important work on Augustine and the Jews, the rhetorical force of these arguments was exacerbated by the failed Jewish revolt led by Bar Kokhba in AD 132-135. “Gentile Christians,” explains Fredriksen, “viewed the earlier, first-century destruction of the Temple through the prism of this bloody second-century defeat.”[2] Christians linked these two failed Jewish revolts (i.e., AD 66-70 and AD 132-135) with the New Testament predictions of the destruction of the Temple and the latter’s relation to Jesus’ death. This all served to confirm the idea that the Jews killed Jesus, and thereby surrendered their special covenantal status. Christian thinkers increasingly developed the “trail of blood” motif that associated the Jews with Cain, arguing that just as the Jews killed the prophets, so they killed Christ, and thus they remain ever hostile to Christians.[3] Interestingly, the term “Jewish” was employed in various theological treatises, sermons, and debates to apply to any heresy or enemy of Christian truth. Christian theology was tempted at various points to disparage the Old Testament and “fleshly” religion. By the time of the late fourth century, rhetoric contra Iudaeos had come into its own.[4]

Augustine’s thought is somewhat unique in this context. His conception of the Jews and Judaism is marked by two poles: one more comfortably in line with the contra Iudaeos tradition, seen in his presentation of non-Christian Jews as judged and humiliated,[5] and the other a revolution within that rhetorical tradition exhibited in his doctrine of positive Jewish witness.[6] For the purposes of this essay, we will simply look at the key aspects of his witness doctrine and his reasons for espousing it. There is a strange ambivalence in this doctrine for Augustine, for it simultaneously conceives of the Jews as judged and protected, as humiliated and preserved.[7] But this ambivalent Augustinian doctrine might offer something to our contemporary debates.

Early Developments in Augustine’s Doctrine

To introduce Augustine’s “witness doctrine,” I will provide an overview of the main images employed by Augustine at each stage in his development of this theme, and then conclude with a summary of the key tenets of his mature thought on the topic.

Augustine begins to approach the witness doctrine in his early battles against the Manichees, particularly Faustus,[8] and his debates with Jerome. Here a key image is flesh. Faustus appropriated the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the day, but directed it at the catholic church. The Manichees espoused an extreme Law-Gospel contrast and pitted the Old Testament and “fleshly” faith against true “spirituality,” the latter being most purely expressed by the Manichees. Much of the early contra Iudaeos tradition was based on a derogatory dichotomy of flesh vs. spirit; true Christianity was “spiritual” and heresy was “carnal,” rhetorically rendered as “Jewish.”[9] Faustus went even further by arguing that sacrifice and “bloody” religion were inherently wrong.

Augustine made the case for the positive theological status of flesh against Faustus and the Manichees, but, in so doing, also supplied a defense of Judaism. He was helped by the writings of the Donatist theologian Tyconius, something evident in On Christian Doctrine, which Augustine began writing in 396-397. With the aid of Tyconius, Augustine began to rethink how to read the Bible and the Church’s relationship to Judaism.[10] Tyconius helped Augustine conceive of a positive understanding of the Law and of continuity between the Old and New Covenants.[11] The Law is good, and so was the Jewish understanding of the Law and Israel’s traditional practices. Christ did not abolish the Law, but revealed its depths and telos in himself. In Answer to Faustus, a Manichean, written in 398-400, Augustine argued that bloody, fleshly sacrifice was needed to point to Christ, to prepare the way for the incarnation and crucifixion–which were fleshly and bloody.

This leaves open the question about ongoing Jewish cultic practice after the coming of Christ, something which leads us to Augustine’s debates with Jerome, which are found in Augustine’s letters 40 and 82, from AD 396 and 405, respectively. These debates centered on Jerome’s interpretation of Galatians 2, but were ultimately about the truthfulness of God’s Word and the role of post-apostolic Jewish practice. Surprisingly, Jerome had argued that the debate between Peter and Paul in Galatians 2 was not genuine, since it made no sense that a Christian leader would be confused about or tempted by Jewish practices after Christ.

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