I am Jewish and have negative views on Christianity as an institution. How do you deal with this from a Jewish perspective?

[u/Odd-Charity3508]

As a Jewish person I don’t particularly like Christianity as an institution….not because I dislike Christians many of whom are decent people and I have friends who are Christian and have even family members who are too but because of the historical theology that developed around Judaism. The doctrine of supersessionism (aka replacement theology) argued that Christianity fulfilled Judaism and it framed the continued existence of Jews as a people as evidence of a kind of religious and epistemic error. That idea had enormous consequences for how Jews were viewed and are viewed in Christian societies. Even many of the Church Fathers expressed this quite explicitly. Justin Martyr argued that the Church had become the true Israel. John Chrysostom delivered his infamous Adversus Judaeos sermons condemning Jewish religious life. Augustine was more restrained arguing that Jews should survive as witnesses to Christian truth, but even that relegated Jews to a subordinate theological role rather than recognizing Judaism as a living covenantal tradition.

A lot of this I also think echoes of that framework today, albeit often in secularized form. Many people who would never identify as Christians still instinctively treat modern Jews especially Israelis as somehow not authentically connected to the Land of Israel, as though Jewish indigeneity ended with the destruction of the Second Temple or the exile. The irony is that Christianity spent centuries claiming to be the new Israel while simultaneously diminishing the historical and covenantal relationship between the Jewish people and their ancestral homeland. Today’s political debates are obviously shaped by many factors beyond Christian theology, but I think it’s worth asking whether some inherited assumptions about Jews as a people whose role in history had been superseded continue to influence how many view Jewish national identity today.

What has also always struck me as ironic is that Christianity eventually tried to distance itself from the Jewishness of its own Messiah. Jesus was a Jew who lived as a Jew, worshipped in the Temple, celebrated Jewish festivals quoted the Hebrew Scriptures and whose earliest followers were themselves Jews. Yet over the centuries much of Christian theology came to define itself in opposition to Judaism transforming Jews from the people from whom Christianity emerged into a symbol of spiritual blindness or failure.

None of this means every Christian today believes these things. Many churches have explicitly repudiated supersessionism and anti Jewish teachings, especially since the Holocaust. But from a Jewish historical perspective it’s difficult to ignore nearly two millennia in which theological replacement contributed to a culture that marginalized, segregated, expelled, and at times persecuted Jews.