Jeremiah Wright, Born Hindu, Saved by Grace, Mar 17, 2026
There are words that have been stretched so far from their original meaning that using them honestly has become almost impossible. Antisemitism is one of those words. It gets thrown around in theological debates, in political arguments, on social media, and in church conversations with such frequency and such looseness that most people who use it have never stopped to ask where it came from, what it actually means, or whether the thing they are describing deserves the label at all.
So let us start there. With the word itself.
The term antisemitism was not ancient. It was not a biblical category or a word that came down through centuries of theological reflection. It was coined in 1879 by a German journalist named Wilhelm Marr, a man who was himself hostile toward Jewish people and who wanted a more scientific-sounding term to replace the older religious language of Jew hatred. He chose the word Semite, which comes from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah listed in Genesis. Biblically, Semitic peoples include not only the Israelites but also Arabs, Assyrians, Arameans, and several other ancient Near Eastern groups. The word was always ethnic in its reference, not theological. Marr was not describing people who disagreed with Jewish theology. He was describing people who hated Jews because of who they were by blood.
That distinction matters more than most people realise. Because what is happening in many theological discussions today is that the word antisemitism is being removed from its ethnic context and applied to theological positions. If you question dispensationalism, you are accused of antisemitism. If you do not give unconditional political support to the modern state of Israel, you are accused of antisemitism. If you hold to a covenant understanding of Scripture that does not treat ethnic Israel as a permanently separate covenant category, you are accused of antisemitism. The word has been weaponised in a way that shuts down honest biblical conversation and pressures people into theological positions through fear of accusation rather than through engagement with Scripture.
I want to engage with Scripture honestly. And to do that I need to state my position plainly before going further.
I hold to a covenant understanding of Scripture, not dispensationalism. That means I do not read the Bible as operating on two separate tracks, one for ethnic Israel and one for the church, each with its own separate set of promises, prophecies, and destinies. I believe the covenants God made through Abraham, Moses, and David find their fulfilment in Jesus Christ. I believe the people of God across both testaments are one people, one olive tree, one family of Abraham defined by faith rather than by flesh. And I believe the church is not a parenthesis inserted into God’s plan when Israel rejected the Messiah, to be set aside again once a future dispensation begins. The church is the continuation and the expansion of what God was always building. If that position makes someone accuse me of antisemitism, then the accusation is not engaging with what I actually believe. It is substituting a label for an argument.
Now let me say what I do believe about Jewish people, because it needs to be said without hesitation.
The Jewish people carry a unique and irreplaceable place in the history of redemption. God did not choose Abraham arbitrarily. He chose him in sovereign grace and bound Himself to that choice with a covenant sworn by His own Name, because there was no greater Name to swear by (Hebrews 6:13). Through that covenant came Isaac, then Jacob, then the twelve tribes of Israel, then the Law, then the prophets, then the temple, then the priesthood, then centuries of revelation that the rest of the world did not have. Paul lists what was entrusted to Israel and the weight of the list is staggering. “Who are Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh” (Romans 9:4-5). The Messiah Himself entered the world through that lineage. To dishonour Jewish people is to dishonour the very family God chose to bring His Son into human history. There is no space in genuine Christian faith for ethnic contempt toward Jewish people. None at all.
But honouring the Jewish people and treating physical descent as a guarantee of covenant standing are two entirely different things. And the Bible distinguishes between them with a clarity that cannot be honestly avoided.
The principle was there from the very beginning. Abraham had two sons. One was born through the natural means of human effort when Sarah and Abraham grew tired of waiting for God’s promise and took matters into their own hands. His name was Ishmael, and he was Abraham’s biological son. The other was born through supernatural intervention when Sarah’s dead womb was opened by God in her old age. His name was Isaac, and he was the son of promise. Both were biological descendants of Abraham. Only one carried the covenant. “For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the bondwoman and one by the free woman. But the son by the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and the son by the free woman through the promise” (Galatians 4:22-23). The covenant line ran through the promise, not the biology.
It happened again in the next generation. Isaac had two sons, twins, born at the same moment to the same mother. Jacob and Esau. Before either of them had done anything good or evil, before either of them had demonstrated faith or unfaithfulness, God said that the older would serve the younger (Romans 9:12). Not because Esau was wicked and Jacob was righteous. Jacob was a liar and a schemer. But the covenant line ran through God’s choice, not human merit or biological primacy. Paul uses both of these examples precisely to make this point. “For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel; nor are they all children because they are Abraham’s descendants, but through Isaac your descendants will be named. That is, it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God, but the children of the promise are regarded as descendants” (Romans 9:6-8). This is not a New Testament revision of an Old Testament promise. This is Paul showing that the Old Testament itself never defined covenant membership by biology alone. The distinction between the physical seed and the promised seed runs through the entire Old Testament narrative.
The prophets understood this too. Isaiah spoke of a servant Israel within Israel, a faithful remnant that carried the true identity of God’s people even when the nation as a whole was in rebellion. Jeremiah stood at the gate of the temple and told people who were trusting in their ethnic and religious identity that neither their ancestry nor their religious activity would protect them from judgment if their hearts were not right before God (Jeremiah 7:1-15). Ezekiel was told to tell the Israelites in exile that their physical circumcision meant nothing if their hearts were uncircumcised (Ezekiel 44:7). The prophets were not undermining Israel’s covenant status. They were insisting that the covenant had always been about more than blood.
So when the New Testament arrives and Paul writes that the true circumcision is of the heart, by the Spirit, not the letter (Romans 2:29), he is not introducing a radical new doctrine that overturns the Old Testament. He is bringing to full clarity something the Old Testament had been building toward the whole time. The same when he writes, “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise” (Galatians 3:29). This is not the church replacing Israel. This is the family of Abraham finally reaching the size it was always meant to be, because God told Abraham from the very beginning that in him all the families of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12:3).
Now let me address the modern state of Israel directly, because this is where the conversation becomes the most charged.
The state of Israel that was established on the 14th of May 1948 is a political entity formed through a specific and complex set of historical circumstances. The story begins in the late nineteenth century with a movement called Zionism, founded primarily by Theodor Herzl, a secular Jewish journalist from Budapest who was not motivated by biblical prophecy but by the very real and very urgent problem of European antisemitism. He watched the Dreyfus Affair in France in 1894, in which a Jewish military officer was falsely convicted of treason in a trial that exposed the depth of ethnic hatred in supposedly enlightened Europe, and he concluded that Jewish people would never be safe in Europe and needed a homeland of their own. His book Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State, published in 1896, laid out the argument. The movement he founded was largely secular and politically motivated, though it attracted religious supporters over time.
The British Mandate for Palestine, granted after World War One, set the political framework. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British government expressed support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, gave the movement political momentum. The Holocaust, in which six million Jewish people were systematically murdered by the Nazi regime between 1941 and 1945, made the urgency of a safe homeland impossible to argue against and generated international support for the partition of Palestine that led to the declaration of Israeli independence in 1948.
This is history. It is documented, verifiable, and does not require theological interpretation to understand. The state of Israel exists because of a convergence of political, historical, and humanitarian forces in the twentieth century. Acknowledging this is not antisemitism. It is accuracy.
The question that matters theologically is whether this modern political state is what the Old Testament prophets were speaking about when they wrote of Israel’s restoration. And this is where I want to be careful, because the answer is not as simple as either side of the debate usually makes it.
There are genuine Old Testament prophecies about the return of Jewish people to their land, the rebuilding of Jerusalem, and the restoration of Israel. These are real texts and they cannot be dismissed. But the hermeneutical question, the question of how to interpret them, is the crucial one. Do these prophecies point to a literal, physical, geopolitical restoration of a nation state in the twentieth century? Or do they point ultimately to the spiritual restoration of God’s people in Christ, with physical elements serving as types and shadows of a greater reality? Covenant theology and dispensationalism give different answers to that question, and both answers have serious biblical arguments behind them. What is not honest is to treat one answer as obviously correct and to label the other as hateful.
What I can say with confidence is this. The Bible nowhere says that the political state established in 1948 is the fulfilment of Abrahamic covenant promises. It nowhere says that supporting or opposing particular policies of that state is a test of Christian faithfulness. And it nowhere says that Jewish ethnic identity guarantees anyone covenant standing before God in the present age. Paul is crystal clear. “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). The categories that divide humanity outside of Christ cease to function as covenant categories inside of Christ.
Now let me address replacement theology, because that accusation will come alongside the antisemitism charge and the two are often treated as the same thing when they are not.
Covenant theology is not replacement theology. That phrase, replacement theology, is itself a polemical label coined by dispensationalists to characterise a position that most covenant theologians do not actually hold. The church did not replace Israel. Nothing was replaced. Paul uses one of the most careful and deliberate images in all of his writing to prevent exactly that misunderstanding. He uses an olive tree. The root of the olive tree is the Abrahamic covenant. The natural branches are Jewish believers. Some of those branches were broken off through unbelief. Gentile believers were grafted in, not into a new tree but into the existing one, the one rooted in Abraham. And the broken-off branches can be grafted back in if they do not continue in unbelief, “for God is able to graft them in again” (Romans 11:23). Paul then gives the most explicit warning in the entire New Testament against Gentile arrogance toward Jewish people. “Do not be arrogant toward the branches; but if you are arrogant, remember that it is not you who supports the root, but the root supports you” (Romans 11:18).
This is not replacement. This is one tree, one root, one family, with a painful season of broken branches that Paul believes is not permanent. He expects a future ingathering of Jewish people into faith in their own Messiah (Romans 11:25-26), and that expectation should shape how Gentile believers speak about and relate to Jewish people in the present. Not with contempt. Not with the kind of arrogance Paul explicitly warns against. And not with the shallow sentimentality that transfers covenant language to a political state. With genuine love and genuine hope.
Which brings me to what I think is the most important thing that needs to be said in this entire discussion.
There is a version of pro-Israel sentiment in Christianity today that has very little to do with love for Jewish people and very much to do with a theological framework that has been imported largely from American evangelical culture, particularly from dispensationalist traditions that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and which treat political events in the Middle East as signs of an imminent end-times sequence. Under this framework, supporting the modern state of Israel is not merely a political position. It becomes a test of biblical faithfulness. To question Israeli government policy is to oppose God’s prophetic plan. To hold covenant theology is to be on the wrong side of Scripture. And to raise any of the questions I have raised in this article is to invite the accusation of antisemitism.
This framework has enormous influence in churches across almost every denomination, from charismatic and Pentecostal circles to mainline Protestant congregations, and most of the people who hold it are sincere. They love Scripture. They believe they are being faithful to it. But the theology they are holding has a history and that history is not as old or as universal as they have been told. The idea of a rapture followed by a seven-year tribulation followed by a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth from Jerusalem, with ethnic Israel occupying a special covenant role distinct from the church, these ideas were not the consensus of the church across its history. They were systematised primarily in the nineteenth century, but the prophetic framework that dispensationalism built on is older than most people realise.
The futurist interpretation of Daniel and Revelation, the idea that the bulk of prophetic fulfilment is pushed into a future end-times period rather than already accomplished in Christ and in the events surrounding the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, was first developed in the sixteenth century by a Spanish Jesuit priest named Francisco Ribera. Ribera wrote a lengthy commentary on Revelation in 1590 in which he argued that most of the book referred to a future period at the end of history rather than to Rome and the events of the first century. His motive was not biblical discovery. It was a direct response to the Protestant Reformers who were identifying the papacy as the antichrist of Scripture. By pushing the fulfilment into the distant future, Ribera effectively removed the heat from that identification. This Jesuit futurism lay largely dormant for centuries until it was picked up, developed, and eventually woven into the dispensational system that John Nelson Darby built in the 1830s. From Darby it moved to Scofield, from Scofield into the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909, and from there into Bible colleges, seminaries, popular prophecy books, Christian television, and the global reach of American evangelical publishing. Christians have largely received their eschatology from this stream without being told where it actually came from, and without being told that other serious and biblically faithful Christians have read the same texts and reached entirely different conclusions.
I say this not to be dismissive of anyone’s sincerity but to make the point that holding covenant theology is not a fringe or dangerous position. It is the position held by the majority of Reformed and Presbyterian churches across church history and it is a position held by people who love the Jewish people, who pray for their salvation, and who believe the gospel is the best news that has ever been brought to any people including them.
Paul, the man who did more than anyone to establish that the covenant finds its fulfilment in Christ and not in ethnic lineage, was also the man who could not think about his own people without his chest tightening with grief. “I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my countrymen according to the flesh” (Romans 9:2-3). Read that slowly. He is saying he would be willing to be separated from Christ, the thing he loved more than anything, if that separation could bring his own people to salvation. That is not the language of someone who has theologically processed Jewish people and moved on. That is the language of a man broken open by love for a people he knows are missing the One who came for them.
That is the posture covenant theology produces. Not coldness. Not dismissal. Not the comfortable detachment of someone who has sorted out the dispensational chart and knows where everyone fits. Grief. Hope. Prayer. Active witness. Jewish people are not our theological opponents to be defeated in argument. They are our mission. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not foreign to Jewish history. It is the fulfilment of it. Every promise made to Abraham, every sacrifice in the temple, every word of the prophets, every Passover meal, every Day of Atonement, every thread of the entire Old Testament points toward a Jewish Messiah who came, suffered, died, rose and is coming again. That Messiah is Jesus. And bringing that news to Jewish people with love, with respect for their history, and with the humility of people who know that we Gentiles were grafted into their tree and not the other way around, that is the calling.
Not antisemitism. Not blind nationalism. Not the confused mixture of political loyalty and prophetic speculation that currently passes for biblical faithfulness on this subject in many Indian churches.
Covenant theology. Biblical love. Honest history. And the gospel, which is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek (Romans 1:16).
That is the position. It will not satisfy everyone. But it is the one the Bible actually teaches.
He, who has ears to hear, let him hear.