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covenant promises to the Jews but that God intends for the grafting in of the Gentiles to provoke Israel to jealousy and, by so doing, lead her to salvation. Far from claiming Israel has been rejected, writes Kaiser, Paul insists that “the church is built on the shoulders of the ancient promises to Israel and the future restoration of all Israel.” To embrace replacement theology is to cut the church off from its roots. Seigfrid makes a similar point, but from a different perspective: “the entrance of Gentiles into salvation does not ... result in an indiscriminate, and therefore bland, universalism in which all cultural distinctives are leveled. Rather, it represents a dramatic joining of highly fissile peoples, Jew and Gentile, who are held together solely by the risen Messiah.” God’s plan is not to absorb the Jews into the Gentile church, but to make the two into one. Though Seifrid does not make the connection, his vision of Messianic Jewish and Gentile congregations existing side by side in a rich complementarity may be unintentionally strengthened by the recent growth of multiethnic churches. Just as these churches have sought to build racially diverse congregations in which different people groups can blend together without sacrificing their ethnic identity, so Seigfrid believes that Messianic Jews can be full members of the Christian faith without assimilating into the church’s dominant Gentile culture. Craig A. Blaising, professor of theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, seconds Seigfrid’s belief and takes it one step further. By preserving Israel’s distinctive place within God’s plan, we confront the “myth of an undifferentiated humanity.” God intended for the human race to be racially diverse, a truth attested to by his careful preservation of Jewish identity and ethnicity. Unfortunately, supersessionism robbed Israel of her ethnic distinctiveness; worse yet, it robbed Jesus of his ethnic distinctiveness. Though most scholars today, thanks in great part to the theological recovery of Israel, study Jesus through the lens of first century Judaism, one of the baneful effects of post-135 supersessionism was, argues Blaising, “the effacement of the Jewishness of Jesus from Christian confession.” In a moment of great insight that should cause all Gentile Christians, whatever their denomination, to catch their breath, Blaising reminds us that “the incarnation is not just the union of God and humanity; it is the incarnation of the Son of God in the house of David as the Son of covenant promise. From a human standpoint, Jesus is not just a man, or generic man; he is that Man—that descendant of 93