Posted today, the February 20 interreligious issue. Anchoring it is George Hunsinger’s “What Christians Owe the Jews: A Case for Soft Supersessionism.” An excerpt:

Christianity enters into profound self-contradiction whenever it is anti-Judaic; indeed, that when Christianity does not love the Jews, it corrupts its love of Jesus Christ at the very core. In this view, loving Christ is inseparable from loving the Jews—and where the Jews are not loved, Christ himself is dishonored. What I would like to advocate is a form of philo-Semitism or Judaeophilia rooted in Christ.

Anyone proposing such an idea faces a problem—namely, that this same christocentrism requires a form of supersessionism, which traditionally held that in refusing to accept Jesus as the Messiah and the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, Jews have forfeited their covenantal status as the chosen people of God…. An almost universal conviction in contemporary theology holds that supersessionism is an inevitable cause of anti-Judaism and its repellent cousin anti-Semitism, and thus that any form of supersessionism is unacceptable. And yet in my opinion the inner logic of the Christian faith necessitates supersessionism in some form. The form I will advocate is the one that David Novak, in his 2004 essay “The Covenant in Rabbinic Thought,” called “soft supersessionism.”

This approach asserts that the new covenant does not replace the old covenant, but rather fulfills, extends, supplements, and fundamentally confirms it. There is only one covenant, and thus only one people of God, and yet there are also two faiths. The presence of two faiths—in some ways diametrically opposed—represents a festering wound in the one people of God. Neither Christians nor Jews know how to heal this wound; only God does. Certainly the day is long since past when Christians might hope to heal this wound by adopting St. Paul’s strategy of “making Israel jealous.” Today any such strategy smolders in the ruins of the Shoah—for which Christian history supplied the dreadful background, if not the direct cause.

Read the whole thing here. Also featured in the February 20 issue: Julia Young on Latino Pentecostals, Tzvi Novick on Jewish universalism, and Jo McGowan on how languages reflect and reinforce social biases. See the full table of contents here. And also make sure to read the latest from E. J. Dionne Jr., who on writing about Barack Obama’s National Prayer Breakfast comments on the Crusades asks: Is a president allowed to have complicated views on religion?