Supersessionism and the Abrogation of the Jewish Covenant
The Abrogation of the Jewish Covenant in the Writings of St. Cyprian of Carthage
One of the most contentious debates that has emerged in the wake of the Second Vatican Council relates to the status of the Jews vis-à-vis the Catholic Church. Thousands of pages have been written analyzing the differences between the Church’s pre and post-Conciliar positions and we certainly cannot hope to synthesize it all here. That being said, if I had to summarize the nature of the post-Conciliar pivot, I would say that it can be understood as the attempt of the Church to distance itself from the supersessionism of previous generations. “Supersessionism” is somewhat of a loaded term that invites a whole host of secondary discussions, but essentially supersessionism refers to the idea that the Church has inherited all of the promises of Old Testament Israel. Two implications flow from this: first, that if the Church has inherited the promises of the Old Testament, then the Jews have lost them; and second, that the Jews, therefore, no longer have any special status in the economy of salvation.
These conclusions have made progressives very uncomfortable, as they strike at the heart of Judaism. Judaism is a religion entirely predicated on the idea that Jews are God’s chosen people—that Jews retain a special status before God. But if the Church has inherited that status, then Judaism is entirely undermined. The post-Conciliar Church has therefore been eager to distance itself from this position, which some construe as anti-Semitic because of its implicit invalidation of the Jewish religion. The only problem is that supersessionism was widely assumed by most Catholics from the patristic era down to the 20th century, making it quite difficult to dislodge from the Church’s collective memory.
In this essay, we will consider the subject as viewed by one of the greatest patristic theologians: St. Cyprian of Carthage (d. 257). Cyprian wrote extensively on issues relating to the Old Covenant and lived in a milieu in which the Synagogue and Church were striving against one another for influence in the late Roman Empire. His testimony thus provides a valuable insight into how the relation of the Church to the Jews was considered at a pivotal moment in the Church’s history.
Let us begin with one of Cyprian’s catechetical essays: On the Lord’s Prayer. This is a traditional exegesis on the clauses of the Our Father, closely mimicking the style and structure of Tertullian’s earlier work of the same name. Cyprian mentions the Jews’ loss of the Old Testament blessings three times in this text. The first comes early, in chapter ten, where Cyprian discusses what it means to call God “Father.” He notes that calling God “Father” is a prerogative of those who believe, as it is through belief and baptism that one is made a son of God. He goes on to argue that Jews, therefore, cannot call God “Father” as through their unbelief they forfeited the blessings of the Old Covenant:
[We] say our Father, that is, the Father of those who believe—of those who, being sanctified by Him, and restored by the nativity of spiritual grace, have begun to be sons of God. This is a word, moreover, which rebukes and condemns the Jews, who not only unbelievingly despised Christ, who had been announced to them by the prophets, and sent first to them, but also cruelly put Him to death; and these cannot now call God their Father, since the Lord confounds and confutes them, saying, “You are born of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father you will do…In repudiation of these, we Christians, when we pray, say ‘Our Father’; because He has begun to be ours, and has ceased to be the Father of the Jews, who have forsaken Him. 1
