Chapter 1 Review
Ecclesiology and Biblical Interpretation
In Chapter One, Ecclesiology and Biblical Interpretation, Mark S. Kinzer explores the complex relationship between ecclesiology (branch of theology that studies the nature, identity, structure, mission, and theological meaning of the church) and the interpretive frameworks Christians bring to Scripture. He opens by citing Charles Cosgrove, who introduces his book Elusive Israel with the question: “What ought Christians do when faced with conflicting reasonable interpretations of Scripture?” Cosgrove suggests that while biblical scholarship may establish the limited range of interpretations that a text can reasonably sustain — thereby ruling certain readings out — it cannot enthrone any single interpretation as the definitive meaning originally intended by the author.
If this is true for individual texts, Kinzer argues, it is even more applicable when attempting to summarize the teaching of Scripture as a whole. Those who treat the Bible merely as a collection of ancient Near Eastern writings may not expect a unified theological voice. However, those who honor the Bible as sacred canon anticipate that, amid its rich diversity, an underlying coherent vision will emerge. Yet even here, competing principles of coherence often present themselves, sometimes with equal plausibility.
Kinzer cautions that the church must avoid becoming so wedded to inherited traditions of interpretation that it loses the capacity to hear Scripture afresh — in ways that correct, refine, and purify those traditions. He points to the work of Richard B. Hays as illustrative. Hays perceives irresolvable tension within the New Testament because he rightly rejects supersessionism and anti-Judaism, yet continues to read texts such as Matthew, Luke, and John through traditional Christian interpretive lenses that carry anti-Jewish implications.
Social Location and Interpretive Bias
Kinzer argues that defects in the life of the interpreting community can obstruct faithful reading. One example is the visible disunity among Christian churches, which makes it difficult for believers to grasp New Testament teaching on the unity of the ekklesia.
More significantly, most contemporary Christians read the New Testament from within a social reality in which Christianity and Judaism are experienced as separate religions practiced by separate communities. Churches consciously distinguish themselves from Jewish communities, and Jewish communities reciprocate that distinction. Jews within churches are typically viewed as converts to Christianity — even if they retain Jewish self-identification — and are no longer seen as participants in Jewish communal life or tradition.
Reading from this social location, Christians often project their experience backward onto the New Testament. Peter, Paul, and James are imagined as Jewish converts to Christianity rather than as Jewish participants within a Jewish messianic movement. Jesus becomes the founder of a new religion, and the primary human division shifts from Jew and Gentile to Christian and non-Christian. In this framework, the Mosaic Law is reduced to a preparatory system whose function ceased with the coming of the Savior, no longer serving as Israel’s divinely authorized constitution.
Whether or not such conclusions arise directly from the text, Kinzer contends that many readers are predisposed to find them there because of their inherited social and ecclesial context.
Scholarly Reassessment — Yet Lingering Anachronism
Modern biblical scholarship, in principle, rejects this retrospective projection. There is broad consensus that figures such as Peter, Paul, and James understood themselves as disciples of Israel’s Messiah, not pioneers of a new religion. Scholars widely acknowledge the diversity of first-century Judaism and recognize that early Yeshua-believers functioned as a movement within that Jewish world.
Yet anachronism persists. Scholars frequently continue using terms such as “Christian” and “Christianity” when describing the earliest communities. Embedded within this language is the assumption that the Jesus movement had already broken from Judaism during the New Testament period.
Few adopt the more historically precise approach advocated by John Gager, who rigorously avoids the term “Christianity” when speaking of Jesus and his earliest followers. Gager argues that there was no Christianity as a separate religion during this period. Proclaiming Jesus as Messiah did not place his followers outside Judaism; they only became “Christians” when they came to view themselves — and were viewed by others — as existing apart from or against Judaism.
Narrative, Practice, and Theological Evaluation
Kinzer then turns to the relationship between biblical narrative and lived practice. When seeking to discern God’s voice in Scripture, interpreters situate individual texts within the Bible’s overarching story — a narrative of God entering covenant with Israel, delivering them from bondage, and giving them a way of life that manifests divine character.
Thus, biblical theology cannot be separated from embodied practice. He argues that Scripture does not merely communicate abstract truths about God but narrates the formation of a covenant people whose way of life embodies those truths.
Drawing from Jewish theological methodology, Kinzer points out that Jewish thinkers often evaluate beliefs by looking at what those beliefs actually produce in real life. In other words, the truthfulness of a theological claim is not measured only by whether it sounds correct intellectually, but by the kind of communal life and behavior it leads to. Thinkers like Eugene Borowitz and David Novak emphasize that theology and ethics are inseparable — what people believe shapes how they live, and how they live reflects what they truly believe. By appealing to this framework, Kinzer is preparing readers to evaluate Christian theological positions — especially those related to Israel, Torah, and the church — not only by how Scripture is interpreted, but also by the historical and ethical outcomes those interpretations have produced within the Christian community.
Yeshua’s Hermeneutic — Love as Interpretive Criterion
Building on this practice-oriented framework, Kinzer then returns to Charles Cosgrove and to Yeshua’s teaching on the two great commandments as a hermeneutical guide for interpreting Scripture. If theology must be evaluated in light of the communal and ethical life it produces, then Yeshua’s summary of the Law and the Prophets provides the primary interpretive criterion. Love of neighbor is not merely an ethical directive but a lens through which Scripture itself must be read. In this sense, the command to love one’s neighbor carries hermeneutical priority, shaping how love of God is understood and expressed. Interpretations that result in contempt, exclusion, or violence toward others — particularly toward the Jewish people — must therefore be reexamined, since such outcomes contradict the character of God revealed in the biblical narrative.
Kinzer illustrates this principle through the Catholic Church’s modern reassessment of Matthew 27:25. Historically, the verse — “His blood be upon us and on our children” — was interpreted as a self-imposed curse upon the Jewish people, often used to justify Jewish suffering and to support the charge of deicide. Contemporary reinterpretation rejects this reading, demonstrating how ethical accountability and historical awareness can reshape biblical interpretation in ways more consistent with the love-command that stands at Scripture’s interpretive center.
Theology, History, and the God Who Acts
Kinzer advances his argument by introducing a third interpretive factor: theological reflection on history. If Scripture reveals a God who acts decisively within history — covenanting with the patriarchs, delivering Israel from Egypt, giving the Torah, establishing David’s kingdom, judging and restoring His people, and ultimately raising Yeshua as the agent of final redemption — then God’s revelatory activity cannot be confined to the biblical period alone. The same Lord who acted in biblical history continues to act in post-biblical history. Consequently, historical developments following the close of the canon remain theologically significant and must be examined as potential arenas of divine activity. Drawing on thinkers such as Wolfhart Pannenberg and Paul van Buren, Kinzer underscores the necessity — and risk — of discerning God’s hand in subsequent historical events. Jewish philosophers including Maimonides, Yehuda Halevi, and Franz Rosenzweig similarly wrestled with the theological meaning of Christianity’s rise, at times viewing it as a providential instrument for spreading knowledge of Israel’s God among the nations. By establishing history itself as a legitimate field of theological interpretation, Kinzer creates the conceptual bridge to his next move: identifying specific post-biblical developments that demand theological reassessment, particularly in relation to Israel, the church, and their ongoing covenantal relationship.
Six Historical Developments Requiring Theological Reckoning
Because God reveals Himself through history, the unfolding history of Jews and Christians after the New Testament must also be examined theologically — leading Kinzer to identify key historical developments that reshape how Scripture itself should be interpreted. Kinzer identifies six major post-biblical developments that demand theological assessment.
1. Loss of a Visible Jewish Presence in the Ekklesia
What began as a Jewish movement gradually became Gentile-led and Gentile-populated. Scholars such as van Buren and Peter von der Osten-Sacken stress that Paul could not have envisioned a purely Gentile church. Once the Jewish nucleus disappeared, the church’s claim to continuity with Israel became abstract and vulnerable to supersessionist distortion.
2. Survival and Flourishing of the Jewish People
Contrary to early Christian expectations following Jerusalem’s destruction, Jewish communal life endured. Augustine interpreted this survival as a negative witness to divine judgment — an explanation that loses credibility in light of Judaism’s enduring vitality.
3. Rise of Violent Christian Anti-Judaism
Christian persecution of Jews raises profound theological questions. How should believers interpret a history in which Christians reenacted the passion narrative through violence against Jews?
4. The Holocaust
The Holocaust stands as the ultimate historical exposure of supersessionism’s moral and theological dangers, even while Nazi anti-Judaism operated outside explicit Christian theological structures.
5. The Return of Jews to the Land of Israel
The establishment of the modern State of Israel profoundly reshaped Christian theological reflection, prompting renewed engagement with Jewish covenantal identity.
6. The Emergence of the Messianic Jewish Movement
Finally, Kinzer returns to the reappearance of a visible Jewish presence within the ekklesia through the modern Messianic Jewish movement. Its historical development parallels Jewish national restoration, seeking to revive a form of Jewish Yeshua-faith that had largely disappeared in the Greco-Roman era.
Chapter One Summary
In Chapter One, Ecclesiology and Biblical Interpretation, Mark S. Kinzer explores how our understanding of the church (ecclesiology) shapes the way we read the Bible — and how our interpretation of the Bible, in turn, shapes how we understand the church. He begins by interacting with Charles Cosgrove, who raises an important question: What should Christians do when sincere believers come to different, yet reasonable, interpretations of Scripture? Kinzer agrees that while careful study can rule out certain interpretations, it does not always produce one single, uncontested reading. This becomes even more complicated when trying to summarize the message of the entire Bible. Christians believe Scripture speaks with a unified voice, but there are often multiple ways people try to explain that unity.
Kinzer warns that believers must be careful not to cling so tightly to inherited church traditions that they lose the ability to hear Scripture speak in fresh and corrective ways. He notes that even scholars who reject anti-Jewish theology can still read the New Testament through interpretive traditions shaped by supersessionism — the belief that the church has replaced Israel.
A major reason for this, Kinzer argues, is what he calls our “social location.” Most modern Christians live in a world where Christianity and Judaism are seen as two completely separate religions. Because of this, readers often project that separation back onto the New Testament. Jesus is viewed as the founder of a new religion, and the apostles are seen as converts from Judaism into Christianity. The division between Jew and Gentile is replaced with the division between Christian and non-Christian, and the Torah is reduced to a temporary system that no longer carries covenantal significance.
Although modern scholarship increasingly recognizes that the earliest followers of Yeshua remained within the Jewish world, these older assumptions still linger. Terms like “Christianity” are often used anachronistically, as if the church already existed as a separate religion during the apostolic era.
Kinzer then shifts to the connection between theology and lived practice. Scripture, he argues, does not only teach ideas about God — it forms a people whose way of life reflects God’s character. Drawing from Jewish theological thought, he explains that beliefs must be evaluated by the kind of life they produce. If theology shapes behavior, then interpretations that lead to hostility, exclusion, or injustice must be questioned.
This leads Kinzer to highlight Yeshua’s command to love one’s neighbor as a key principle for interpreting Scripture. Love is not just a moral teaching — it is a guide for how Scripture should be understood. Interpretations that have historically produced anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism must therefore be reevaluated. He illustrates this through the Catholic Church’s modern reconsideration of Matthew 27:25, a verse once used to justify Jewish suffering but now widely reinterpreted in light of ethical responsibility.
Finally, Kinzer introduces a third interpretive lens: theological reflection on history. Because God reveals Himself through historical action — from the covenant with Abraham to the resurrection of Yeshua — history after the Bible also carries theological meaning. Major events involving the Jewish people and the church must therefore be examined as part of God’s ongoing work in the world.
Kinzer identifies six such developments: the loss of a visible Jewish presence in the early church, the survival and vitality of the Jewish people, the rise of Christian anti-Judaism, the Holocaust, the establishment of the modern State of Israel, and the emergence of the Messianic Jewish movement. Together, these historical realities challenge the church to rethink how it understands its relationship to Israel and to read Scripture with renewed theological humility.