‘For God’s gifts and His calling are irrevocable.’ — Romans 11:29
Brothers and sisters, there is a theology moving through our churches this year that deserves to be named plainly, and answered gently. It arrives under gracious titles — ‘Bearing Witness,’ ‘Christ at the Checkpoint,’ ‘Kairos’ — and it arrives through genuinely suffering people, whose grief is real and whose voices deserve to be heard. But underneath the compassionate language sits a theological claim that stands in direct opposition to three chapters the Apostle Paul wrote with tears: Romans 9, 10 and 11.
I want to name that claim honestly, because truth spoken without love is a clanging cymbal, but love without truth is only sentiment. We owe our congregations both.
What the theology actually says
Palestinian liberation theology — first articulated by Rev. Naim Ateek and carried forward through Sabeel, the Kairos Palestine document, and the Christ at the Checkpoint conferences — reads Scripture through a single lens: the land promises made to Israel are reinterpreted as promises fulfilled in, or transferred to, the Church, and the modern claim of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland is treated as a theological error rather than a covenant kept. Its most recent expression, the 2025 ‘Kairos Palestine II’ document, goes further still, explicitly rejecting the very frameworks — like the IHRA definition many governments have adopted — that the world uses to recognise antisemitism when it wears new clothes.
This is replacement theology wearing the fashionable dialect of justice and decolonisation instead of the old dialect of philosophy and piety.
This is not, at its root, a political disagreement about borders or security. It is a theological one. And Paul answered it two thousand years ago, before it had a name.
The antithesis of Romans 11
Paul asks the question directly: ‘Has God rejected His people?’ His answer is immediate: ‘By no means!’ (Romans 11:1). He goes on to describe Gentile believers as wild branches grafted into Israel’s olive tree, and gives us the warning we so easily forget: ‘Do not be arrogant toward the natural branches… you do not support the root, but the root supports you’ (11:18). He closes the argument with the verse that should end every conversation about whether Israel’s covenant has expired: ‘For God’s gifts and His calling are irrevocable’ (11:29).
Liberation theology, whatever its pastoral intentions, quietly answers Paul’s question differently. It says: yes, in effect, something has been forfeited. Not by explicit denial — no one stands up and says ‘God has rejected Israel’ — but by a thousand smaller moves: treating the land promise as merely spiritual, treating Jewish return as merely political, treating the covenant as a chapter that closed. This is replacement theology wearing the fashionable dialect of justice and decolonisation instead of the old dialect of philosophy and piety. Strip away the vocabulary, and the shape underneath is the same one the Church has worn before — and repented of before.
We have been here before
History gives us a sobering guide to where this theology can lead when it is left unchallenged. In England, a parish priest named Stephen Sizer spent two decades building a reputation as the Church’s leading critic of what he called ‘Christian Zionism.’ For years his diocese treated it as protected political opinion. But theology that treats Israel’s legitimacy as negotiable rarely stays confined to seminar rooms. By 2018 Sizer had shared conspiracy theories claiming Israel was behind the September 11 attacks and had appeared at a conference alongside a Holocaust denier. In 2023 a Church of England tribunal banned him from ministry until 2030. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself said Sizer’s conduct had ‘undermined Christian-Jewish relations, giving encouragement to conspiracy theories and tropes that have no place in public Christian ministry.’ A theology does not need to intend that destination to build the road toward it.
Edom’s question, asked again
We have lived through a day of Jacob’s calamity in our own lifetime — 07/10/2023 — and, closer to home, the shooting that targeted Jewish people at Bondi Beach. In the months since, we have watched the same choice Edom faced in the prophecy of Obadiah presented to the Church again: to stand with our brother, or to stand on the other side and watch. ‘You should not have looked on the day of your brother in the day that he became a stranger’ (Obadiah 1:12). Hosting a theology that treats Jewish claims to the land as illegitimate, in the very season the Jewish community is burying its dead and burying its sense of safety, is its own quiet way of standing on the other side — however loving the tone in which it is delivered.
What we are for
None of this requires us to be silent about Palestinian suffering, which is real and which grieves the Father as much as Jewish suffering does. It requires only that we refuse a theology that can only make room for Palestinian dignity by first making room for Israel’s illegitimacy. Romans 11 offers a better way: humility, not triumphalism; gratitude, not entitlement; love for both peoples that does not require the erasure of either.
President of Christians for Israel Int. Rev. Willem Glashouwer used to pray that the Church would come to its knees, ‘so that the Jewish people may suddenly feel, “We have a younger brother.”’ That is still the calling. Not the silence of Edom. Not the borrowed vocabulary of an old heresy. A younger brother — humble, grateful, faithful — who stands until He comes.
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