In The God of Israel and Christian Theology, R. Kendall Soulen rightly insists that Christians import supersessionism into the Bible. I am grateful to him for putting this so clearly. As Soulen knows, the New Testament is silent about supersessionism, with the exception of Romans 9-11, which upholds the irrevo-cability of God’s covenant with Israel. This is not to say that the New Testament is free of anti-Judaic polemic, some of which invites a supersessionist reading (e.g., Matthew 8). But the notion that the church had replaced Israel had to be invented before it could provide an interpretive framework for reading the Bible. The second century provides powerful exam-ples of explicitly supersessionist teaching (Soulen gives us a fine analysis of one of these in his discussion of Justin Martyr), yet the New Testament itself is strikingly lacking in such a sustained ideology of displacement. So how can we approach the Bible with a new framework that takes the whole canon into account -- even the troublingly anti-Judaic parts -- with-out consigning us to a supersessionist reading?

Soulen starts by taking a new look at Genesis 12:3, God’s initial promise to Abraham. This passage is notoriously open to two different interpretations: either "in you the gentiles shall bless themselves" (i.e., invoke you when they seek a blessing) or "in you all the gentiles will be blessed." The first alternative suggests that the gentiles, having seen Israel’s favor with Adonai, will pray to be as happy as Israel. This reading says much about the tremendous blessing Israel receives from the Lord, but nothing about a comparable blessing for anyone else. The other reading suggests that Israel has been elected in order that the gentiles may be blessed: "all gentiles shall be blessed in you."

Soulen reads the passage the second way, which is the standard Christian interpretation. But he gives this interpre-tation a new twist. First, he sees God binding Israel and the gentiles together in an economy of blessing that requires each party to defer to the other and, ultimately, to recognize unity-in-difference with the other. Thus, the gentiles must be willing to receive their blessing via God’s blessing of Israel, while Israel must be willing to receive its blessing with a proviso: the goal of its election is to teach all human beings how to embrace unity-in-difference. Moreover, Soulen distinguishes between this teaching agenda and the redemptive work of God in Christ. Jesus’s work is to overcome the sin that alienates humans from God and from one another, so that the project of maturation and learning can proceed. This way of reading the story of God’s creative and saving work is intended to avoid supersessionism in two ways. First, gentile blessing is made permanently contingent on Jewish election. Second, Jesus’ redemptive work, far from rendering Jewish election obsolete, restores the conditions for its meaningful continuance, as Jews and gentiles together live into the economy of God’s blessing.

Although I am in sympathy with Soulen’s proposal to read sal-vation history as a lesson in unity-in-difference, I see difficulties. In opting for the second reading of Genesis 12:3, Soulen does exactly what we gentile Christians repeatedly do, that is, qualify Israel’s election by finding a reason for it. But the point of Israel’s election is that it is free, utterly gratu-itous. God simply favors Israel. The irrevocability of the covenant rests on the steadfastness of God, yes. But it also rests on the fact that there are no reasons why Israel has been chosen out of the nations, and therefore nothing Israel does or fails to do -- short of refusing to claim God’s favor -- can affect the terms of the initial covenant. To tie the cove-nant to the blessing of the nations is to place a qualification on Israel’s election, admitting the possibility that if the nations are not blessed through Israel, the election will be withdrawn  -- or, more subtly, that when the nations have achieved their blessing, Israel’s election will have arrived at the end of its shelf life. And this, despite all of Soulen’s undeniably good intentions, is to leave the door open for supersessionism.

In my view, the only sure path for Christians who wish to undo the theology of displacement is to accept as given the irreducibility of God’s preference for Israel. This may be the direction Soulen is headed, with his insistence that Christians are not simply "grafted into" Israel but are always different from God’s chosen and can only receive blessing by way of God’s prior marriage to Israel. Yet I want to push Soulen’s thesis further, and, at the risk of endangering the ideal of unity-in-difference, to suggest that the only way for us gentiles to undo supersessionism is to stop caring about whether or not we have been (or are going to be) blessed by God. We need to embrace the idea of the church as non-elect. In practice this may prove impossible, but theorizing about what it would mean to be a non-elect church may be theologically fruitful. Can we distinguish vocation from elec-tion, so that the call to follow Jesus does not involve us in seeking divine favor that is not ours? Could we think of the discipleship of early Christians -- both Jews and gentiles -- as a passage from privilege into outsiderhood (from false privilege in the case of the gentile, and from authentic privilege in the case of the Jew), simply in order to be near to Jesus and hence to every neighbor? Does such thinking square with the New Testament witness? Finally, can we think of Christian discipleship in this way without forgetting that we, who have seldom been outsiders, have everything to learn from the Jews in this regard?

These are difficult questions, but they are implicit in Soulen’s profound appreciation of the deep-rootedness of supersession-ism in the Christian psyche, and the challenge its repudiation affords to the theological imagination.

The Rev. Thomas E. Breidenthal, D. Phil., is Associate Pro-fessor of Moral Theology in the John Henry Hobart Chair of Christian Ethics, General Theological Seminary, New York.