Christmas And The Modern Jew

During the sacred seasons of the year, whether Christmas, Good Friday and Easter, or the Hebrew Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), the question of the Christian witness to the Jew inevitably comes to special focus. The current articles in CHRISTIANITY TODAY recognize the awesome implications of the claim that Jesus of Nazareth is the unique incarnation of the living God. So extraordinary is this claim in its involvement of the whole race that the Christian dare not muffle its pronouncement, nor dare the Hebrew ignore it. It is as impossible for the Christian missionary to hide the Light of the World in a Gentile cellar as it is for the spiritually-concerned Jew to evade the question of the promised Messiah.

Yet in our era the Christian witness often seems to lack both good missionary strategy toward the Jew and a sensitivity to his situation in life. However compelling they may be, evidences of Jesus’ Messiahship are not necessarily the best point of contact with the twentieth-century Hebrew. He sometimes wonders why, since New Testament times, Christians so often have treated the Jews so much like the Jews treated the Old Testament Canaanites and other Palestinian pagans (since the Hebrews then considered themselves under divine command, whereas Christians profess devotion to Jesus Christ, who taught that love fulfills the commandments and who required the love of enemy and neighbor alike). The long story of persecution of the Jew in the so-called Christian West has only too often dropped a silencing curtain over the Christian witness.

In the twentieth century, however, the Jew is increasingly aware that not all who call Christ Lord need really be identified with his Kingdom, any more than all who call Abraham father need really be Jews. The conflict between faith and secularism among Jews regathered in Israel has reiterated the spiritual problem with new impact. Even many a Jew in the West, who has no desire to surrender the culture and comfort of the New World, and therefore invests money rather than muscle in the Palestinian vision, nonetheless also recognizes the seeming worthlessness of life today. Most men are now convinced that doing things faster holds no guarantee that life becomes better. Actually the age of speed seems the more swiftly to have deteriorated morality and spirituality.

It is at this point of the emptiness of life that the Christian witness finds its most direct point of contact with modern Jewry. Christ’s capacity to banish the drab monotony of existence by restoring confused, lost souls to the fellowship of the Father, and by meeting life’s deepest spiritual needs, is today’s most fruitful Christian contact with the Hebrew world. The greater percent of Jewry has lost its Old Testament heritage just as fully as the Gentile world has forsaken its Christian inheritance. It becomes strategic therefore to approach the Jew today first as a modern man rather than as a Hebrew. In a world fraught with anxiety and fear, nobody need doubt that the crucified and risen Christ is ready and able to satisfy the needs of all who put their trust in him. This fact explains the refusal of the Hebrew martyrs of the Apostolic Age to be silenced. They knew that the Lord who had redeemed and commissioned them not only views this world’s struggle from his glory but also keeps ceaseless watch over his own.

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Jew and Christian who in the past have persecuted each other under the pretense of piety, in modern times have both come to grief through persecution by pagans. In apostolic times it was Saul against the Christians. In medieval times it was the Roman hierarchy against the Jew and the dissenting Christian. In modern times it has been Stalin persecuting first the Christians, then the Jews, and Hitler persecuting first the Jews, then the Christians. More than ever, an hour has struck in world affairs for all to draw near whose religious vision is Semitic, and who wait for Messiah’s coming.

An existential approach to the modern Jew, however, by no means rules out the importance of Christian evidences. Basically, mankind’s religious fate hinges upon the authenticity of revealed religion; the heart of that revelation is the promise of a supernatural Redeemer. The answer to Jesus’ question (recorded in Matthew’s Gospel, 22:42), “What think ye of Christ? whose son is he?” even still determines spiritual destinies. It is no accident of Hebrew history that since the repudiation of Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah, Jewish religious conscience has found its peace mainly by repudiating also the God of Old Testament promise; for trust in a Redeemer it substitutes works as the hope of justification. Religious history has indeed validated Christ’s words: “He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him” (John 5:23, RSV).

If Christmas serves to accent today’s emptiness of the Hebrew heart, it reveals even more tragically the emptiness of the Gentile heart. While the New Testament opens with the Jewish rejection but the Gentile acceptance of Jesus of Nazareth, multitudes of Gentiles today regard the label of Christian as simply a negative means of distinguishing themselves from the non-Christian world. By such perversion of the name of Christ they actually betray an identity with, rather than a distinction from, the non-Christian masses. The spiritual plight of our times concerns Jew and Gentile alike. All the world needs to hear and to heed the Gospel of the Saviour’s rescue of fallen men from the guilt and penalty and power of sin. Through many long centuries it was appropriate indeed to stress, as did Saul of Tarsus (“an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee,” Phil. 3:5): “… I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first …” (Rom. 1:16). In our period of spiritual sloth, however, it has become equally imperative to emphasize the closing words of the text: “… and also to the Greek.” A very real tragedy of Christmas today is that while once it was the Jew who was the unresponsive object of the biblical witness, today most of the non-Jewish world shares the Hebrew’s emptiness of soul and his lack of heart for life.

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It is sobering to remember, however, that when the Babe of Bethlehem was born, neither Jew nor Gentile knew God at close range. While the Gentiles were whoring after false gods, the Jews, as Jesus of Nazareth so incisively reminded them, were crumbling under formalism and externalism. It was a lowering day for the religion of redemption. But the star that rose over Bethlehem glowed with the light of new hope. That star is shining still, not in the physical heavens to be found by worldly wisdom, but in the eyes and hearts of those who have unburdened their sins on the Lamb of God who “taketh away the sin of the world.”

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Government Intrusion Widens In American Education

The National Defense Education Act of 1958 discloses a distressing pattern of Federal encroachment upon American education. It elevates government incursion into American educational life to the status of permanent national principle. Moreover, it enlarges private school participation in government funds. The Act virtually provides a new formula that gives advocates of tax funds for parochial schools what they want.

These facts should arouse the sluggish national conscience and elicit a wave of indignation and protest. Congressmen will tend to “protect the interests” of institutions in their respective states. Only a swift mobilization of protest, and a reconsideration of policy by educators themselves, will now avail. Citizens may well scrutinize the facts with care and ask where the precedents now erected will lead in another decade.

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The first objectionable feature lies in the Act’s expansion of government involvement in American education. In the United States, in distinction from Europe, government has not been the primary partner in education. One happy advantage of American educational freedom in this respect is the avoidance of academic program shaped by the state for national purposes rather than for the good of the individual. The very title of the National Defense Education Act of 1958 is significant.

During the past 20 years, government has made periodic penetrations into the American structure under the canopy of special emergency educational legislation. These penetrations are now being regarded as a precedent for a new governing policy in government-education affairs.

The Protestant ecumenical movement has favored Federal aid where states are unable to provide adequate schools; independent evangelical forces have opposed it on the ground that such investment sooner or later involves controls. But neither group has an unblemished record touching state intervention in education. Protestant church colleges along with Roman Catholic institutions approved the G.I. Bill of Rights providing higher educational scholarships at both national and state levels. This form of Federal involvement in education seemed not simply to provide economic advantage to schools through more tuition payments, but seemed a justifiable deviation—a debt to disrupted veterans deprived of collegiate opportunities. To limit these opportunities to public institutions seemed discriminatory. Moreover, it would have deprived many college students of desirable religious influences. Few Protestant educators—evangelical or liberal—suspected at the time that the G.I. Bill would soon be invoked as precedent for permanent government scholarships in education under a Federal program, nor for the availability of Federal funds to parochial as well as public schools, and that at the elementary and secondary no less than the collegiate level! The National Council of Churches’ limitation on government aid has been mainly concerned to restrict such assistance where the Supreme Court decision on integration lacked enforcement. Happily, there are signs that National Council leaders are now taking a more realistic look at government involvement in education.

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Few summaries of current American legislation are as sobering as that of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and Labor on the National Defense Education Act. The citizen must read it with care. Precedent already exists in some field of government policy for an educational program which may swiftly invert the historic pattern of American education. The patterns for this very inversion are now in the making, and swift public counteraction is imperative.

While in its general provisions the National Defense Education Act “reaffirms the principle and declares that the States and local communities have and must retain control over the primary responsibility for public education” and that “nothing … in this Act shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution or school system” (Section 102), yet the Act’s inconsistencies with this high statement of purpose, and its reliance on former deviations for the forging of new patterns, are of major importance. It will be well to examine these.

The Act proposes “substantial assistance in various forms to individuals, and to States and their subdivisions, in order to insure trained manpower of sufficient quality and quantity to meet the national defense needs of the United States.” But why should Federal government, it is asked, directly aid individuals if states have primary responsibility for education? And is the provision for “individuals” at the same time a loophole for corporations, and hence a bridge to the provision of such funds to all educational institutions?

The Act specifically applies the term “public” to “any school or institution” that does not “include a school or institution of any agency of the United States.” Hence it avoids the question of whether or not private schools are public schools.

Then it proceeds to the discussion of Federal loans (a proposal likely to gain sympathy, since it does not yet involve scholarships) to students in institutions of higher education. There is no restriction of such loans to students in public as distinguished from nonprofit private schools. The State plan (Section 503) specifically allows the authorization of non-public schools for these benefits: “Any State which desires to receive payments … shall submit … a program for testing students in the public secondary schools, and if authorized by law in other secondary schools.…”

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The Act apparently involves a departure from the traditional plan which reserves the full control and determination of education to the States. States’ rights are overridden by a Federal agency which sets up a staff with its operational program in the cooperating states (Section 504).

For the foregoing reasons many Christian educators feel the time has come for a new and long look at Federal involvement in American education. What happens to local control of public education if the features involved in the National Defense Education Act are implemented, and then expanded? Does the Act reflect a fundamental shift in American education, the significance of which is not yet fully apparent to the citizenry? Is American education more and more to reflect special goverment interests and financing? Are public funds to be used more and more to finance private and parochial education? Are the church-related colleges of America prepared to take on large contract obligations with the government that will more and more make them both dependent financially and demean them to agencies committed to implementation of a government program? These are the crucial issues posed to Christian conscience. Only prompt protest and action by the citizenry can frustrate the transition.

Biblical Prophecy And World Events

The Christian world is living today in a time of reaction with respect to prophetic preaching. The sense of God’s active role in contemporary history is spiritless. Although the dramatic center of Christian history doubtless stands in the past, and although Christian hope is properly turned toward the future, no good reason exists for a failure to discern the sure hand of God in current events.

Late nineteenth century postmillennialism fell into disrepute by identifying democratic social changes with the higher reaches of the kingdom of God, and early twentieth century premillennial dispensationalism in turn bred a reaction to its exaggeration of prophetic particulars. The curious result is that in our decade earth-shaking events occur and their possible prophetic significance is scarcely made a subject of inquiry.

For the first time since the apostolic age the dispersed Jews are gathered in Palestine—a frequent theme of the Old Testament prophets.

No generation in history has seen such swift propaganda advances as ours toward World Government, a theme on which Revelation 13 has much to offer.

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For the first time since the Old Testament era, nations of the ancient biblical world are crowding the front-page headlines of the world press. They have sprung to life from the dead, as it were, to engage in the dialectic of the nations. Does the biblical theme of a final judgment of the nations—of which our Lord spoke in the Olivet Discourse—bear on this?

The Bible declares that the great battle of Armageddon marks the final consummation of human history before our Lord’s return. Today, in the age of nuclear warfare, American and Russian arms are available to the nations of the Near East in the event of conflict. The far-flung lines between the Soviet and the Free World are drawn near Armageddon itself.

A revival of pulpit fantasy and speculation would be tragic in this time of national and world crisis. The Church’s first task is the proclamation of a Gospel whose content is clear indeed. But world events are too awesome to leave the subject of Bible prophecy to Jehovah’s Witnesses and the fanatics.

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