The English used in this article or section may not be easy for everybody to understand. (November 2025) |
Supersessionism, also called replacement theology or fulfillment theology, is the idea that one religion stops being true once another religion comes to replace it.
For instance, supersessionist Christianity believes that Judaism was true once, but because the Jews rejected Jesus they stopped being the Chosen People, and the New Testament and a faith-based religion replaced Jewish Law. Islamic superssionism also believes that God gave the Torah alike to the Israelites at Mount Sinai but that the Quran ultimately replaced it.
Rabbinic Jews view supersessionism as antisemitic. It laid the groundwork for the two millennia of Christian antisemitism and persecution of Jews that peaked in the Holocaust. Supersessionism is no longer backed by mainstream churches, reportedly including the Vatican, which have switched the focus to Christian–Jewish reconciliation. Some Christians endorse the dual-covenant theology (DCT) which holds that the Old Covenant between Jews and God is eternal, exempting Jews from the need of Christian conversion for receiving salvation.
A similar, or somewhat overlapping, Christian movement that upholds supersessionism is the Christian Identity (CI) movement, whose followers believe that White people to be the "real" descendants of ancient Israelites with whom God have a covenant. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) estimated in 2023 that the CI movement had 10 active groups in the United States.
The Vatican has also rejected the idea of supersessionism [. ...] but traditionalist Catholics continue to support this doctrine and believe that there is no salvation outside of the Catholic church [. ...] One of its bishops, Richard Williamson, is a well-known Holocaust denier.