Something strange has been happening in certain corners of the Christian world. Traditional Catholics and many other Christian voices are increasingly claiming that today’s Jews are not really the Jews, that the State of Israel has no significance, and that Christian Zionism is a heresy.
These ideas are no longer confined to fringe platforms; they have entered mainstream discourse, with Tucker Carlson emerging as the most prominent public voice raising such claims. While this may seem like a sideshow to the political conversation, it actually signals a significant theological crisis happening within traditional Christianity.
For more than 1,500 years, mainstream Christian theology regarding the Jews – especially within Catholicism – was shaped by the ideas of Augustine. In his City of God, Augustine articulated what later became known as “witness theology.”
The Jews, he argued, were to survive, but in perpetual exile – scattered, powerless, and dependent – serving as a living testimony to Christian truth. This framework made sense in a world where Jews had no sovereignty, no homeland, and no political power. For centuries, this theology and the apparent facts of history aligned.
But today, that world no longer exists. The Jewish people have returned en masse to their land, ingathered from the four corners of the earth, and reestablished sovereignty. We are no longer the “witness people” of Augustine’s imagination – and that creates a problem.
Theology, at its core, is an attempt to understand God’s actions in the world. Augustine himself described theology as faith seeking understanding. He looked at the world as it existed in his time and formulated a rational theological explanation for it. But what happens when the world changes?
The official Catholic Church has been grappling with that question for decades, since the founding and success of the State of Israel. Beginning with the Second Vatican Council in 1965 and continuing through subsequent papal statements, there has been a clear shift.
In 1980, Pope John Paul II referred to the Jewish people as “the people of God of the old covenant, which has never been revoked.”
In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of God’s ongoing faithfulness to Israel, noting that “the favor of the God of the covenant has always accompanied them.”
'God has never revoked his covenant with Israel'
And in a landmark 2015 Vatican document, the Church stated explicitly that “God has never revoked his covenant with Israel” and that the Jewish people are “participants in God’s salvation.”
This is not Augustine. It is a significant theological shift – one that acknowledges a reality Augustine never faced: a restored Jewish people in their ancestral land. The Vatican has not fully resolved all the implications of this shift.
In fact, it openly admits the seemingly conflicted relationship between eternal Jewish covenantal status and Christian theology, calling it “an unfathomable divine mystery,” a direct reference to Paul’s own grappling with this exact question in the Book of Romans. But that admission itself expresses a willingness to confront the realities of history and adjust theological understanding accordingly.
Not everyone is willing to do that. The “traditional Catholic” voices now attacking Jews and Christian Zionists are, in many ways, trying to preserve Augustine’s framework intact. But they face an obvious obstacle: the facts on the ground contradict it. If the Jews of today are the Jews of biblical times – and if the covenant has not been revoked – then Augustine’s model of permanent exile collapses. Put simply, it is absurd to maintain that Augustine would have formulated his “witness theology” had he lived to see the current State of Israel.
But what about 1,500 years of Church doctrine? These “traditional” Christians have a workaround. Today’s Jews are not really the Jews. It follows that the return to Israel is meaningless, the State of Israel is biblically irrelevant, and the Augustinian tradition remains intact. This is why we are hearing these claims now. It is not simply antisemitism, though that may be part of it. It is an attempt to protect a theological system from a reality that threatens it.
At the heart of this conflict is the difference between theology and eschatology. Theology is about understanding God; people can disagree about theology indefinitely without resolution. A Jew and a Christian can hold fundamentally different views about God and still coexist peacefully. Eschatology, on the other hand, will come to head at some point. Eschatology is about how history unfolds – about what will happen in the end. And when two eschatological visions collide, history eventually renders a verdict.
For centuries, there were competing claims. One said that the Jews would remain in exile forever. The other – rooted in the Hebrew Bible and the stubborn faith of Jews everywhere – said that the Jewish people would one day return to their land. For most of history, that debate could remain theoretical. But no longer. History has spoken. The Jewish people have returned – and that forces a choice.
The Catholic Church, at its highest levels, has chosen to grapple with that reality – even if it means rethinking long-held assumptions. That is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of intellectual and spiritual humility.
Others have chosen a different path. Rather than adjust their theology, they reject the reality: they deny that the Jews are the Jews, dismiss the State of Israel as insignificant, and attack those Christians who have drawn theological conclusions from the return of the Jewish people to the Promised Land.
But this reaction, however loud, cannot resolve the underlying tension. The question will not go away: If the Jewish people are still in covenant with God – and if they have returned to their land – what does that mean?
What may look like a fringe online argument is, in fact, something much deeper: a theological system confronting a reality it can no longer explain. And that is why this is not a sideshow at all. It is a theological crisis – one that is only just beginning to unfold.
The writer is the executive director of Israel365 Action and co-host of the Shoulder to Shoulder podcast.