Theological Colonialism

Theological Colonialism 

Throughout history, conquest has rarely relied on brute force alone. More often, domination has depended on narrative control. When a people’s stories are redefined, their identity is reshaped. When sacred traditions are recast, cultural memory is overwritten. When language itself is altered, reality is reorganized. This strategy was used repeatedly by imperial systems, and nowhere is it more visible than in the treatment of Native American cultures and the later Christian treatment of Judaism.

When European colonizers encountered Native American societies, they did not simply conquer land. They restructured meaning. Oral histories that preserved centuries of environmental knowledge, theology, astronomy, and law were dismissed as folklore. Sacred histories were downgraded into myths. Complex political systems were flattened into “tribes.” Spiritual traditions were recast as superstition. Indigenous cosmologies were reframed as primitive attempts to explain nature. In doing so, Europeans seized interpretive authority over Native identity. Native peoples lost control over how their past was remembered, how their present was understood, and how their future was imagined.

This narrative colonization enabled physical colonization. If Native stories were merely legends, then their land claims were weakened. If their religions were superstition, forced conversion became moral. If their political systems were primitive, dispossession became civilizing. The theft of land was preceded by the theft of meaning.

Strikingly, Christianity employed the same mechanisms in its treatment of Judaism.

The earliest followers of Jesus were Jews. They worshiped in synagogues, observed Sabbath, celebrated biblical festivals, kept kosher, and lived fully within Jewish covenant life. The earliest Christian communities understood Jesus within Jewish messianic expectations. Groups later known as the Nazarenes and Ebionites embodied this original Jewish Christianity. They regarded Jesus as the human Messiah, upheld Torah observance, rejected divine incarnation theology, and preserved Israel’s covenantal worldview. For them, faith in Jesus did not abolish Judaism; it affirmed it.

But as Christianity spread through the Gentile world, it increasingly absorbed Greek philosophical categories and Roman imperial values. Hebrew relational theology gave way to metaphysical abstraction. Covenant language was replaced with ontological speculation. Jewish identity became a liability rather than a foundation. Gradually, Jewish Christianity itself was declared heretical.

Church fathers such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, Epiphanius, Jerome, and later Augustine systematically attacked Jewish Christian groups. Epiphanius devoted entire sections of his writings to condemning Nazarenes and Ebionites as corrupt distorters of truth. Their continued Torah observance was portrayed as regression. Their rejection of Christ’s divinity was labeled blasphemy. Their insistence on Jewish identity was framed as spiritual blindness. Through these polemics, the earliest form of Christianity was erased, replaced by a theology shaped far more by Greek metaphysics than by Hebrew covenant categories.

This theological realignment culminated in the redefinition of God himself. Biblical monotheism — centered on the one God of Israel — was transformed into Trinitarian metaphysics. God was no longer understood primarily as covenant Lord, creator, and redeemer acting in history, but as an ontological triunity of divine persons. This philosophical reconfiguration fundamentally altered Jewish categories of divine identity. What had once been relational and historical became metaphysical and abstract. Jewish monotheism was no longer treated as faithful covenant theology, but as deficient, incomplete, and primitive. The God of Israel was reinterpreted through Greek philosophical lenses, and Judaism itself was rendered theologically obsolete.

At the same time, Jewish law was redefined. Torah, which in Judaism means instruction, wisdom, covenant guidance, and delight, was recast as oppressive legalism. Obedience became bondage. Covenant faithfulness became works-righteousness. Judaism itself was reframed as a religion of fear and merit, while Christianity cast itself as the religion of grace and freedom. This inversion allowed Christian theology to define itself against Judaism, transforming covenant fidelity into theological failure.

Faith likewise underwent radical transformation. In Hebrew thought, faith is trust, loyalty, and covenant allegiance. In Christian theology, it increasingly became intellectual assent to doctrinal propositions. Faith shifted from embodied loyalty to abstract belief. The Jewish relational worldview was replaced with Greek philosophical abstraction.

Messianic hope followed the same trajectory. Jewish expectation envisioned a human king, a son of David, who would restore Israel, defeat oppression, establish justice, and inaugurate national renewal. Christianity transformed this into belief in a divine redeemer whose mission centered on cosmic salvation from sin and death. Israel’s national story was absorbed into a universalized redemption narrative. The political, historical, and covenantal dimensions of Jewish hope were displaced.

Sacred time itself became a battleground. Sabbath observance, rooted in creation theology and covenant memory, was replaced by Sunday worship. The Quartodeciman controversy revealed how early and fiercely this struggle unfolded. In Asia Minor, Christian communities continued celebrating Passover on the fourteenth of Nisan, maintaining continuity with Jewish calendrical tradition and what they believed to be apostolic practice. Rome, however, insisted on Sunday Easter, severing Christian worship from Jewish sacred time. When Polycrates of Ephesus defended this tradition, Rome threatened excommunication. The Council of Nicaea later codified this break, explicitly rejecting Jewish calendrical reckoning. Constantine himself declared that Christians must not follow the customs of the Jews, whom he described in openly contemptuous terms. Sacred time was thus weaponized to enforce theological separation.

From theological marginalization flowed legal persecution. Once Christianity gained imperial power, Jewish life became increasingly restricted. Laws prohibited Jews from holding public office, owning Christian slaves, serving in the military, testifying in court against Christians, or owning land. Jews were excluded from skilled trades and forced into socially stigmatized occupations, particularly moneylending, which Christians themselves were forbidden to practice. This manufactured economic niche later fueled antisemitic stereotypes that justified further oppression.

By the medieval period, Jews were forced to wear distinctive clothing, hats, or badges identifying them publicly. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 formalized these requirements. Jews became permanently marked as outsiders. Ghettos physically confined Jewish communities, reinforcing their segregation and vulnerability. Periodic expulsions from England, France, Spain, and Portugal destroyed entire communities, confiscated property, and uprooted centuries of settled life.

Theological hostility repeatedly erupted into mass violence. Crusaders slaughtered Jewish populations across the Rhineland. Blood libel accusations and host desecration myths justified pogroms and forced conversions. Inquisitions targeted Jewish converts suspected of secretly practicing Judaism. Pope Innocent III and later popes institutionalized restrictions that made Jewish religious life nearly impossible. Under Pope Innocent III, Judaism was effectively criminalized as a public religion. Jewish practice was tolerated only under humiliating restrictions, and Jews were legally subordinated as perpetual outsiders within Christian society.

Perhaps most devastating was the Church’s transformation of Jewish Scripture. The Hebrew Bible became the “Old Testament,” a preparatory document whose meaning was said to exist only in Christian interpretation. Jewish readings were dismissed as blind, carnal, and obstinate. Rabbinic hermeneutics were labeled corrupt distortions. Allegorical interpretation allowed Christian theologians to erase Israel from its own story, transforming Jewish sacred history into Christian symbolic theology. The Jewish narrative was not merely reinterpreted — it was seized.

This process mirrors almost exactly the treatment of Native American cultures. Just as Indigenous sacred histories were dismissed as myth, Jewish Scripture was treated as shadow. Just as Native spiritual traditions were labeled superstition, Jewish covenant life was branded legalism. Just as Native political identity was flattened into “tribes,” Jewish covenant identity was flattened into obsolete religion. Just as Indigenous land claims were invalidated by colonial theology, Jewish covenant claims were nullified by supersessionist doctrine.

In both cases, conquest began with narrative. Whoever controls the story controls identity. Whoever controls meaning controls legitimacy. European empires colonized Native lands only after colonizing Native memory. Christianity displaced Judaism only after colonizing Jewish Scripture.

The elimination of the Nazarenes and Ebionites sealed this transformation. These Jewish Christian communities preserved a form of Christianity rooted in Torah, Jewish monotheism, and covenant theology. Their suppression ensured that Christianity would develop as a fundamentally Gentile religion, increasingly detached from its Jewish origins and increasingly hostile to Jewish existence. Their disappearance erased living alternatives to imperial theology.

The consequences of this narrative conquest shaped Western civilization. They institutionalized antisemitism, legitimized persecution, and laid the theological groundwork for centuries of Jewish suffering. The Holocaust did not emerge in a vacuum. It was built upon centuries of Christian narrative infrastructure that had already stripped Jews of moral legitimacy, legal protection, and cultural dignity.

What we are witnessing, both in Native American history and in Christian–Jewish history, is not accidental misunderstanding. It is systematic narrative displacement. Sacred stories were rewritten. Identity was redefined. Memory was seized. Meaning was overwritten.

Decolonizing theology therefore is not merely doctrinal reform. It is moral repair. It is historical restoration. It is the recovery of silenced voices, suppressed traditions, and stolen stories. It seeks to return Jewish Scripture to Jewish categories, Jewish time to Jewish rhythms, Jewish law to covenant life, Jewish hope to national restoration, and Native traditions to their rightful place as sophisticated theological and historical systems.

At its core, this is about justice. It is about refusing to let empire define truth. It is about restoring narrative sovereignty to those whose stories were taken. It is about dismantling the theological machinery of conquest and allowing history, memory, and identity to speak in their own voices once again.

Conclusion 

In that sense, resisting supersessionism, resisting theological imperialism, and resisting cultural erasure are not merely intellectual exercises. They are acts of moral resistance. They are steps toward healing some of the deepest wounds left by empire — wounds carved not only into land and bodies, but into memory itself.