Cary Nelson
"The Return of Christian Supersessionism"
August 31, 2020
Description: Beginning most prominently with the Catholic Church’s ground-breaking document Nostra Aetate in 1965, and followed by several mainline Protestant denominations, there was for decades a steady effort to reject (or at least qualify) the fundamental Christian belief in supersessionism, the theological position that Christianity supercededor replaced Judaism and its divine covenant. Over the last generation, however, supersessionism has returned in company with the BDS movement. In this talk, Cary Nelson reviews both the theological and political consequences of an ancient prejudice that has been revived to give religious warrant to anti-Zionism and describes the principles that can be invoked to counter its effects.
Read Cary Nelson's paper "The Presbyterian Church and Zionism Unsettled: Its Antecedents and Its Antisemitic Legacy"
Cary Nelson, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the author or editor of over 30 books, including The Case against Academic Boycotts of Israel and Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & the Faculty Campaign against the Jewish State. His next book, Peace and Faith: Christian Churches and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict, is forthcoming.
The College of Arts