As to ethnic Israel, is God finished with them? Did he change His immutable (unchangeable) mind in regard to all the promises to the OT Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, and David? I think not; rather I would argue your Replacement Theology is a construct.
I think God's promises to Abraham, Issac, Jacob and David as being father (s) of many nations is indeed fulfilled because through Christ the Gentiles (ie many nations) were grafted into the people God first chose to reveal Himself through have become one as the body of Christ in The Church.
I know you do; that is known as Replacement Theology. Grafted INTO, yes, but no does that not imply the "original vine is still alive".
Please explain "replacement theology". I've never heard of the term before now.
I'm not implying the original vine is dead. Just hybridized becoming all inclusive........if you will. The Church is Israel. Not the modern-day nation-state.
If it's all about the modern-day nation-state of Israel, as some believe, then why bother being a Christian at all?
Replacement Theology or its rejection is the key to how you see end time scenarios; or, it distinguishes amillennialism from premillennialism. The latter belief system adherents believe in a literal thousand year rule of Christ on earth when He returns and the ultimate and final land-and-rule fulfillment of the promises God made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David.
Though Israel is now a secular nation, premillennialists believe that God will finally in the end call a remnant out of ethnic Israel--the 144,000 in Revelation, twelve thousand from each tribe--and that remnant will respond with repentance and belief in Christ as Lord and savior. So, bottom line, God in this belief system still has ethnic Israel fulfilling roles at the end of the age; He is not finished with Israel as the amillennialists would believe. This is what premillennialists believe.
Replacement Theology holds that due to Israel's sin and disobedience, and rejection of Christ when He walked this earth, God has discarded them and their
[/i] promised [i] inheritance and now sees the church--all true believers--as spiritual sons of Abraham and thus the now new recipients of all those promises God made to the above patriarchs in the OT.
The key that divides these two beliefs is how you interpret the scriptures or the hermeneutic one uses. Premill's use a normal-sense or most literal sense of the words written while amill's call these scriptural passages and end times prophecies metaphoric, and symbolic, etc.
Amill's, because they spiritualize these scriptures tend to make them say what each little group therein decides they do, up to fifty-some versions of what the end times may look like, while there is much less interpretive variation among the premillennialist group because they take the scripture as it is without reading into or out of it what they might be inclined to.
Long story short, All God's promises made in the OT to those Israelites of old He has declared null and void but "the church", or all true believers, are now to be the inheritors of those promises. That's Replacement Theology.
I believe it (amillennialism) has some serious problems. The RCC and protestant Reformed denominations like the RCA, the CRC, the Lutherans and Presbyterians, for example, as groups tend to be amillennialists. While the more charismatic groups such as Evan-Free, Church of God, and some Baptists, and others tend to lean to a premillennial eschatology (end time scenario).
