Jill Szoo Wilson

Title graphic reading “Martin Luther, Replacement Theology, and the ‘Jewish Question’” by Jill Szoo Wilson.

Martin Luther, Replacement Theology, and the “Jewish Question”

17–25 minutes

How Luther turned a theology of Jewish displacement into permission for persecution, and why the Church’s relationship to Israel remains a living theological question.

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

Author’s Note

This is the third essay in a series that began with What Is Replacement Theology? Why the Church Has Not Replaced Israel and continued with Antisemitism Today: How Christians Must Respond. The first examines the doctrine, the second considers its present dangers, and this essay turns to Martin Luther, whose movement from welcoming Jewish people in the expectation that they would convert to openly advocating their persecution shows how theology can become permission. Read together, the essays call Christians back to Paul’s warning to Gentile believers: “It is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you” (Romans 11:18).

Martin Luther’s name stands near the center of Protestant history. His defense of Scripture, his teaching on salvation by grace through faith, and his challenge to abuses within the medieval Church changed Western Christianity. Protestants still sing his hymns, study his commentaries, and describe the Reformation as a recovery of the gospel. The same man later urged Christian rulers to burn synagogues, destroy Jewish homes, seize Jewish religious books, and forbid rabbis to teach. Any honest account of Luther must include these facts.

Christians have a particular reason to face this history. Our faith rests upon truth, repentance, and the conviction that every human authority stands under the judgment of God’s Word. Luther deserves neither a protected place above that judgment nor a dishonest reduction of his entire life to its ugliest pages. His achievements help explain why his later words carried so much authority. His position made them more dangerous, because the voice calling for persecution belonged to a revered biblical scholar and reformer.

Luther’s hatred developed inside a Christian tradition that had been changing the meaning of Israel for centuries. By his lifetime, many Christians had learned to see the Jewish people as a rejected nation whose suffering proved the truth of Christianity. Luther inherited that framework, joined it to his anger over Jewish resistance to conversion, and turned an ancient theological error into advice for civil rulers. The Nazis later drew upon his language for a racial program that reached far beyond Luther’s sixteenth-century aims. His writings never caused the Holocaust by themselves, yet they supplied respected Christian words to people who wanted ancient hatred to serve a modern state.

The Warning Gentile Christians Received

The New Testament gave the Gentile Church a very different posture toward Israel. In Romans 9 through 11, Paul wrestles openly with Israel’s widespread rejection of Jesus as Messiah. He begins the final chapter with a direct question: “Has God rejected his people?” His answer is equally direct: “By no means!” (Romans 11:1, ESV). Paul can grieve over unbelief, preach salvation through Christ, and continue to affirm God’s covenant faithfulness to Israel.

Paul pictures Israel as a cultivated olive tree. Some natural branches have been broken off, while Gentile believers, branches from a wild tree, have been grafted among those that remain. The new branches now “share in the nourishing root of the olive tree,” yet Paul immediately warns them, “do not be arrogant toward the branches” (Romans 11:17–18, ESV). A few verses later he repeats the command in even simpler language: “Do not become proud, but fear” (Romans 11:20, ESV).

The image establishes an order of dependence. Gentiles receive nourishment from a root that already carries God’s promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The grafted branch receives life; it never becomes the tree’s source. Ephesians uses similar language when it describes Gentiles as once “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel” and “strangers to the covenants of promise.” Through Christ, those who were far away “have been brought near” (Ephesians 2:12–13, ESV). Nearness is a gift of grace. It gives Gentile believers a place in God’s household while preserving the history into which they have been welcomed.

Joel Richardson identifies Paul’s warning as “one of the greatest dangers of Gentile Christians,” the danger of arrogance (Richardson, “The Church Replaced Israel… Or Did It?” 12:16–12:24). He contrasts this pride with the humility of Gentile believers who understand themselves as graciously grafted into God’s continuing work through Israel’s faithful remnant (12:37–12:55). Paul foresaw the temptation. Gentiles might look at Jewish unbelief, compare it with their own faith, and mistake mercy for superiority.

Paul closes the argument by calling Israel beloved “for the sake of their forefathers,” since “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:28–29, ESV). These words leave room for Christian conviction about Jesus as Messiah and for grief over those who reject Him. They remove every ground for boasting. The Gentile Christian stands by grace and is commanded to remember it.

When the Grafted Branch Claimed the Tree

As Christianity spread through the Roman world, the Church became increasingly Gentile. It also grew farther apart from Jewish communities after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century. Many Christian writers began to describe the Church as Israel’s successor. This teaching eventually became known as supersessionism, or replacement theology: the belief that the Church had taken Israel’s covenantal place and inherited its promises, while the Jewish people remained under the judgments recorded in Scripture.

Justin Martyr shows this change taking shape during the second century. In his Dialogue with Trypho, Justin calls Christians “the true Israelitic race” because they have been “quarried out” of Christ (Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 135). He argued that the Hebrew Scriptures pointed to Jesus, a claim at the heart of Christian faith. Yet his language also moved Christian identity beyond participation in Israel’s blessings. The Church could now claim Israel’s name for itself.

By the late fourth century, John Chrysostom preached a series of sermons against members of his congregation who attended synagogues and observed Jewish festivals. His concern over divided religious practice led him to use language of extraordinary contempt. He called the synagogue “a dwelling of demons” and declared that it had become “a place of idolatry” (John Chrysostom, Eight Orations Against Judaizing Christians, 1.3). Such descriptions taught Christian listeners to associate living Jewish worship with spiritual corruption. The Jewish neighbor could then appear as the representative of a people abandoned by God.

Augustine offered a different approach in the early fifth century. He opposed the destruction of the Jewish people, yet the protection he gave them rested upon a degrading role. In The City of God, he wrote that Jews had been dispersed among the nations and were “by their own Scriptures a testimony to us” that Christians had not invented the prophecies about Christ (Augustine, The City of God, XVIII.46). Their continued existence served the Church as evidence. Their suffering, exile, and subordinate place in Christian society could be interpreted as part of that witness.

These writers differed in purpose and tone, and their texts arose from separate historical conflicts. Together they helped create a Christian imagination in which the Church possessed Israel’s Scriptures while living Jews carried the marks of divine rejection. Over time, theological claims shaped laws, sermons, and ordinary attitudes. Jewish communities faced restrictions on work and residence, forced disputations, confiscation of books, expulsion, and periodic violence. The label “the Jewish Question” belongs to a later period, although the underlying question had occupied Christian Europe for centuries: What place should Jews have within a society that regarded their continued Jewish life as rebellion against God?

Richardson summarizes the moral danger in a short sentence: “Bad theology produces bad actions” (Richardson, “The Church Replaced Israel… Or Did It?” 13:42–13:51). Theology gives people a way to understand their neighbors. When Christians saw Jewish people as living witnesses to divine rejection, cruelty could acquire a religious explanation. A persecutor could imagine himself defending Christian truth.

Luther’s Conditional Welcome

In 1523, Luther seemed prepared to challenge that pattern. His tract That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew condemned the harsh treatment Jewish people had received in Christian lands. He reminded his readers that Jesus, the apostles, and the first believers were Jewish. “When we are inclined to boast of our position,” he wrote, Christians should remember “that we are but Gentiles, while the Jews are of the lineage of Christ” (Luther, That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew).

Luther urged Christians to follow “the law of Christian love.” Jewish people should be received cordially and permitted to work among Christians, where they could hear Christian teaching and observe Christian life. He even asked his readers to show patience when conversion failed, since “we ourselves are not all good Christians either.” These words carried a humane force within a society accustomed to segregation and expulsion.

His welcome, however, rested heavily upon expectation. Luther believed that medieval Catholic corruption had hidden the gospel from the Jewish people. Once Scripture was preached clearly, he expected Jews to recognize Jesus as Messiah and enter the reformed Church. Their conversion would confirm his belief that the Reformation had restored apostolic Christianity. Jewish people remained objects of a Christian project, and Luther’s warmth depended upon the result he hoped to see.

The expected conversions never came. During the following twenty years, Luther’s disappointment hardened into fury. Jewish disagreement with his reading of Scripture appeared to him as willful blasphemy rather than sincere conviction. He also accepted old accusations and stereotypes that portrayed Jews as dangerous to Christian society. The man who once rebuked Christians for treating Jews like dogs came to describe their presence as a threat requiring government action.

This shift reveals the weakness in Luther’s earlier tolerance. Christian love had been joined to a desired outcome. When Jewish people continued to live as Jews, his welcome collapsed. Their refusal denied Luther the role he had assigned them in the Reformation story. In this, Luther embodied the Gentile arrogance Paul had forbidden: he assumed the authority to assign Jewish people their place in God’s purposes and condemned them when they would not accept it.

The Line Luther Crossed

In 1543, three years before his death, Luther published On the Jews and Their Lies. The title announces the work’s character. Its pages contain degrading attacks on Jewish faith and identity, followed by a direct appeal to rulers who possessed the power to turn his anger into policy.

Luther begins his program by advising that synagogues and schools be burned. “Second,” he continues, “I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed.” He then calls for Jewish prayer books and Talmudic writings to be confiscated. Rabbis should lose the right to teach “on pain of loss of life and limb,” while Jewish travel and economic activity should be severely restricted (Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies). Later recommendations include taking Jewish money and placing young Jews into forced labor.

The horror lies partly in the practical detail. Luther provided a sequence of actions magistrates could carry out against families and communities. A synagogue was a house of prayer where people gathered around the Torah, remembered God’s faithfulness, buried their dead, celebrated marriages, and taught their children. Luther turned its destruction into evidence of Christian obedience. Jewish homes, books, livelihoods, and freedom became targets in a campaign he presented as service to God.

His argument depended upon an older theological foundation. Luther described Jews as a “rejected and condemned people” and treated their loss of national sovereignty as proof that God had cast them aside. Once they accepted that verdict, persecution could appear as cooperation with divine judgment. The Church claimed Israel’s Scriptures and Messiah, while the living descendants of Israel were punished for refusing the Church’s interpretation of their own sacred texts.

Who Was Authorized to Act?

Another difference between Paul and Luther appears in the actions they assign to Gentile Christians. In Romans 11, Paul tells them what they must do with themselves: “do not be arrogant,” “do not become proud,” fear God, and continue in His kindness. God remains the one who judges the branches, preserves the remnant, and possesses the power to graft Israel in again (Romans 11:17–23, ESV). Israel’s future remains in God’s hands. Gentile believers receive a warning about their own posture, not authority over the Jewish people.

Luther reversed that distribution of authority. In 1543, he instructed civil rulers to burn synagogues, destroy Jewish homes, confiscate religious books, and forbid rabbis to teach (Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies). He treated his judgment about Israel’s standing before God as permission for Christian government to make Jewish communal life impossible. The grafted branch no longer received nourishment with fear and gratitude. It appointed itself caretaker of the tree.

Luther’s arrogance therefore involved more than anger or insulting language. He claimed an authority Paul had withheld from Gentile Christians. Paul’s commands discipline Christian pride; Luther’s instructions discipline Jewish bodies, homes, worship, and communities. Theology became permission when a warning about Christian humility was transformed into power over Israel.

Luther’s Words in Nazi Germany

Nearly four centuries separate Luther’s 1543 tract from Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. The distance matters because Nazi antisemitism added a racial theory that differed from Luther’s religious goal. Luther wanted Jews to become Christians and treated conversion as the desired end. Nazi law defined Jewishness through ancestry, so baptism offered no rescue. The Nazi state built a modern system of exclusion, theft, deportation, forced labor, and industrial murder. Its leaders pursued the physical destruction of European Jewry.

That distinction leaves Luther’s responsibility intact. Nazi propagandists could draw upon centuries of Christian hostility because the culture already possessed a religious language of Jewish guilt, corruption, and rejection. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum explains that historical antisemitism gave the Nazis “fertile ground,” while centuries of Christian teaching helped establish the prejudices they later exploited (USHMM, “Why the Jews: History of Antisemitism”). Luther offered them the stature of a national hero and recommendations that sounded chillingly suited to their campaign.

The connection became visible after the November 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht, when synagogues burned across Germany and Austria, Jewish businesses were destroyed, and thousands of Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. November 10 was Luther’s birthday. Soon afterward, the pro-Nazi Lutheran bishop Martin Sasse issued a pamphlet titled Martin Luther über die Juden: Weg mit ihnen!, commonly translated as Martin Luther on the Jews: Away with Them!, which compiled Luther’s anti-Jewish statements (Martin Hauger, “Martin Luther and the Jews: How Protestant Churches in Germany Deal with the Reformer’s Dark Side”). In it, Sasse declared, “On 10 November, Luther’s birthday, the synagogues are burning” (American Jewish Committee, “On Luther and His Lies”). The sixteenth-century command and the twentieth-century flames had met in public memory.

Luther gave Hitler neither racial science nor the machinery of genocide. His writings contributed something older and spiritually dangerous: permission wrapped in Christian authority. They allowed hatred to quote a theologian, destruction to borrow the language of faith, and perpetrators to place their violence inside a story that Christian Europe already knew.

The Framework in Contemporary Theology

The coercive program Luther advocated has been repudiated across contemporary Christianity. The sources below are not evidence that their authors share Luther’s animus or endorse his political program. They answer a narrower question: whether the underlying ecclesiological claim that the Church is true or new Israel and now receives Israel’s promises has disappeared from modern Christian theology. It has not. Several of the theologians examined here explicitly deny that their position should be called replacement theology, a distinction that should be acknowledged even as the structure of their teaching is examined.

The Second Vatican Council offers an influential institutional example. In Lumen Gentium, the Catholic Church’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, the history and covenant of Israel are described as preparation for the people formed in Christ. The document then identifies the Church as “the new Israel” (Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, 9). This language does not amount to an endorsement of hostility toward Jews, and other Vatican II teaching explicitly rejects antisemitism. It does show that Israel’s name can be reassigned ecclesiologically even within a church seeking a repaired relationship with the Jewish people.

A similar structure appears in Protestant publications. Writing in The Lutheran Witness, an official magazine of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, Reed Lessing states that the Abrahamic promises “are not directed toward any particular ethnic group” and that “The Church—not Jews or the Israelis—is the true Israel of God” (Lessing, “Whose Land Is It?”). This article is not an adopted LCMS confessional statement, although it provides a direct example from a denominational publication. Hans K. LaRondelle, then a professor of theology at the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Andrews University, wrote in Ministry Magazine that the Church “now occupies the place of unbelieving Israel” and is therefore endowed with Israel’s covenant blessings and responsibilities (LaRondelle, “Is the Church Spiritual Israel?”).

Contemporary Reformed theology develops this language in particular. G. K. Beale’s official New Testament biblical theology course describes Jesus and the Church as “true Israel,” calls the Church “the new Israel,” states that Gentiles may become true Israel through union with Christ, and applies Israelite restoration prophecies to the Church. The same course includes a lecture proposition announcing “the end of national Israel as God’s people” (Beale, “New Testament Biblical Theology Course”). Iain Duguid similarly writes that those united to Christ are incorporated into “the Israel of God,” that membership in this new-covenant Israel does not depend upon physical descent from Abraham, and that the restoration promised by the prophets is accomplished as the gospel moves outward to the nations (Duguid, “The Church and Israel in the Old Testament”). Duguid also maintains that God has not forgotten His promises to Abraham’s physical descendants, a qualification that distinguishes his position from more categorical forms of supersessionism.

Other Reformed teachers prefer the language of continuity or fulfillment. Keith Mathison argues that true Israel became the nucleus of the New Testament Church at Pentecost, after which Gentile believers were grafted into the existing covenant people he calls “true Israel/the true church” (Mathison, “The Church and Israel in the New Testament”). Mathison also anticipates a future restoration of national Israel, which places him outside the most categorical forms of replacement theology. Ligon Duncan rejects the label replacement theology and calls his position fulfillment theology, while maintaining that Old Testament prophecies of Israel’s restoration are fulfilled through Gentiles entering the Church and that Israel’s promises find fulfillment in one people of God (Duncan, “What Are Some Misconceptions About Covenant Theology?”). The chosen terminology changes the account of how this fulfillment occurs; the substantive claim that Israel’s promised restoration is realized in the Church remains part of the argument.

Sam Storms states the conclusion more directly. He identifies the Church as “true Israel,” composed of believing Jews and Gentiles, and argues that Israel’s prophecies, promises, titles, and privileges are applied to and fulfilled by the Church (Storms, “The Church, Israel, and ‘Replacement’ Theology, Part III”). Presbyterian pastor Nicholas Batzig likewise teaches that everything in the Old Testament that appears to belong to national Israel passes to Christ, who fulfills those realities for His people, and that Israel’s restoration promises reach their fulfillment through Christ rather than through the nation as such (Batzig, “Who Is the True Israel of God?”).

David B. Curtis presents the most categorical version among these contemporary sources. In a sermon published by Berean Bible Church, he says that the Church is the true Israel, that it inherits the promises made to Israel, and that those promises are not realized in physical Israel. He concludes that “Physical Israel is gone,” that the Church received her inheritance in AD 70, and that the only Israel remaining consists of those who believe in Jesus (Curtis, “I AM the True Vine: Yeshua Is Israel”).

These sources represent distinct traditions and contain important internal differences. They do not establish that their authors share Luther’s animus, approve his political program, or bear responsibility for violence against Jewish people. They establish a narrower point: contemporary Christian teachers and publications continue to describe the Church as true or new Israel, extend Israel’s covenant identity to Gentile believers, locate Israel’s promised restoration in the Church, or deny Israel a continuing covenantal place defined by physical descent. The vocabulary has softened, and the political conclusions have changed, while the theological question at the center of supersessionism remains active.

The Christian Duty to Tell the Truth

Christians can honor every biblical truth Luther recovered while condemning his anti-Jewish teaching without reservation. Scripture stands above the reformer. When his words collide with Paul’s command against Gentile pride and with Christ’s command to love our neighbor, Christian loyalty belongs to Christ.

Several Lutheran bodies have publicly rejected Luther’s anti-Jewish writings. The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod has condemned religious discrimination and coercion, disassociated itself from Luther’s hostile statements, and warned Christians against the “recurring pitfall” of attacking people who resist evangelistic efforts (LCMS, “Luther and the Jews”). The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has likewise reaffirmed its repudiation of Luther’s anti-Jewish attacks and violent recommendations (ELCA, “Litany of Confession”). Such statements cannot repair the graves of the dead, but they teach later generations that admiration never cancels moral judgment.

Christian repentance also requires more than distancing ourselves from Luther’s worst sentences. The beliefs that made those sentences persuasive deserve examination. If the Church presents itself as Israel’s replacement, treats Jewish survival as an offense, or uses Jewish suffering as proof of God’s rejection, the old framework remains available for another generation. Romans 11 calls the Gentile believer back to gratitude, dependence, and fear of God. Paul’s olive tree leaves no place for contempt.

Richardson says that “the church has blood on its hands” after centuries of Christian mistreatment of Jewish people (Richardson, “The Church Replaced Israel… Or Did It?” 13:42–13:51). That confession belongs within Christian faith because repentance begins with truth. It also directs Christians toward faithful action: teaching the Jewish setting of the gospel, confronting antisemitic claims, honoring the Jewish people as beloved for the sake of the patriarchs, and remembering that the Messiah we worship is the son of David.

Luther wanted the Church to submit every tradition to Scripture. His own legacy must undergo the same test. Romans 11 asks Gentile Christians to remember the root that carries them and the mercy by which they stand. The proper Christian response to Israel begins there, with humility before God’s faithfulness.

Further Reading

Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version.

Leave a comment

Trending