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Aquinas on Israel and the Church: The Question of Supersessionism in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas. By Matthew A. Tapie. Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick Publications, 2014. xiv + 198 pp. $24.00 (paper).
In this well-researched and thoughtful book, Matthew Tapie provides us with the most thorough exposition to date of Thomas Aquinas's theology of Israel and the church, specifically on the issue of the ongoing significance of Jewish ceremonial law. Tapie approaches Aquinas from the perspective of the church's post-holocaust, post-Vatican II rethinking of Christian teaching about Israel. While the repudiation of supersessionism is now widespread among Christian churches, the theological tradition prior to the last hundred years was fairly uniform in its denunciation of the Jews as a people judged and rejected by God. The church was understood to be the new people of God who had replaced Israel in God's plan of salvation.
Almost twenty years after Vatican II's Nostra Aetate, the "Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions," the Orthodox Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod argued that Aquinas's view of the "old law" as not only dead but deadly (that is, a mortal sin when practiced after the coming of Christ) stood in the way of further progress in Jewish-Christian relations. Tapie takes Wyschogrod's argument as a challenge and returns to Thomas to see if he can find resources for a different interpretation that would allow him to marshal Aquinas's support for this new era of Jewish-Christian cooperation.
Tapies book proceeds in two main parts. First, he seeks to clarify the definition of "supersessionism," a term that, he notes, has become widely used even as it has been vaguely defined. Second, he returns to Aquinas's...