On Christian-Jewish Understanding

Can Jew and Christian now transcend their ugly recent past? Can new respect for religious freedom launch them toward mutual understanding without surrendering a vigorous Judaeo-Christian dialogue?

The rise of Christianity kindled bitter hostility in non-Christian Jews first against Christian Hebrews, then against Christian Gentiles. Jewish religious leaders stoned Stephen to silence his testimony to Jesus Christ (Acts 6:8–7:60). The high priest empowered Saul of Tarsus to bind and bring to Jerusalem any Christians found in the synagogues of Damascus (9:1–2). Discovering that the Jews approved of his murder of James the brother of John, King Herod took Peter prisoner (12:1–3). In his study of The Church in the First Three Centuries, Alvan Lamson asserts that “The worst enemies of the Christians were the Jews, more implacable than the Heathen” (Boston: Horace B. Fuller, 1869, 2nd ed., p. 90). He calls attention to the testimony of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius, and others, and concludes that the calumnies propagated by the Jews throughout the civilized world, and their slander of Christians during the first three centuries, “could have originated only in the bitterest hatred … hatred as thorough as ever rankled in the human breast.”

On the other hand, the Christian era must acknowledge no less ugly hostility and persecution of the Jew. “To the Jews,” one rabbi recently summarized, “Jesus as the Christ has meant these 2000 years of history.” Then he spoke of the Crusaders who slaughtered the Jews to “redeem the Holy Land”; of the Romanist Inquisition with its forced conversions; of the third and fourth Lateran Councils which anticipated many of Hitler’s persecution tactics; he spoke of the Nazi episode. A very fresh festering sore is the failure of the Christian community during the Eichmann era. While pagans inaugurated and implemented the Nazi crimes against Jewry, Christians stood by and accepted them uncritically. Could the Nazi persecutions have been perpetrated without a long-standing atmosphere of anti-Jewish attitudes to which the Christian community had subscribed? Because the Jews had cut themselves off from Jesus of Nazareth, had the Christians in turn severed them from the bond of humanity?

Today both Judaism and Christianity face the same threat of naturalistic relativism that already clutches half the world in the vise of communism. Those who speak of a revival of the great theistic faiths sense another equally portentous movement. The resurgence of Moslem nationalism may loose another “invasion of the Moors” upon the soft underbelly of Europe.

Can Jews and Christians—whose common glory is the revealed religion of redemptive love—possibly find a new relationship of mutual respect and understanding, and of constructive dialogue?

The Ford Foundation has granted the National Conference of Christians and Jews $325,000 to promote inter-religious relationships and to lessen the destructive social conflict shaped by religious differences. Its “Religious Issues and Public Affairs” program will concentrate on public and parochial schools, Sunday closing laws, and similar matters. Conference president Dr. Lewis Webster Jones warns: “Unless some clearer consensus can be reached, the strength and unity which America has drawn from the common acceptance of the Judaeo-Christian tradition will be weakened and dissipated.”

It should be acknowledged that some Protestant-Jewish consultations in recent years have been disillusioning. Some exchanges may even have retarded the hope of mutual understanding because participants simply “talked at” but hardly “heard” opposing sides. Some dialogues never went beyond thinly-veiled provisional outreaches. Other dialogues merely uncovered plans for neo-Protestant political strategy. Preferring the safety of “sweet reasonableness” still other discussions never courageously probed the theological concepts that underlie many of today’s sociological pressures and tendencies. As for pulpit exchanges between rabbis and ministers these attempts at interaction often revealed nothing but misplaced congregations.

Evangelical Protestants have taken little part in these dialogues. For one thing, Protestant ecumenism is largely staffed with those of inclusivist vision and temperament. For another, evangelical preoccupation with the priority of evangelism and missions may easily neglect socio-political problems and the increasingly important legal question of minority rights. Evangelical leaders are seeing more and more, however, that devotion to the message of the love of God does not justify nor compensate for a neglect of neighbor love. Southern Baptists, for example, instituted an annual Jewish Fellowship Week when they knock on a Jewish neighbor’s door and invite him to church. “But the other 51 weeks,” said a Jewish leader recently, “the doorbell is likely to be unrung—except by Jehovah’s Witnesses who are doing the calling.” The evangelical who wants a Jew only as a convert and church member but not as a neighbor has much to learn from the New Testament.

At the same time Jewish leaders sense genuine sympathy for and interest among evangelical Protestants in the destiny of the Jew. While “Christianity in general” has been blamed for persecutions associated with the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Lateran Councils, it is apparent that Protestantism has often expressed a quite different spirit. “But for the Protestant Reformation,” one Jewish historian told me in Jerusalem, “there would have been no Balfour Declaration, and no state of Israel.” Holland, one of the four Calvinistic countries of Europe, historically has been a haven for persecuted Jews. And in America where Protestantism for many generations has defined the American temper, the Jew has enjoyed influence and prominence in financial, scientific, political, educational, and other spheres. In addition many Protestant evangelicals all over the world find spiritual and biblical significance in the return of the Jew to Palestine.

As an aftermath of Nazi persecutions and the Eichmann trial, antagonism toward Christians and especially toward Christian missionaries in Israel has touched a new high. While no individual Jews who have embraced Christianity have suffered stoning, a Christian church in an orthodox Jewish sector of Jerusalem has been stoned and its services disrupted. Israeli opposition toward Christian missionaries has made The Acts of the Apostles newly relevant reading. What the state of Israel does with its charter guarantee minority rights, especially that of religious freedom, will be a key test of Jewish intentions. After centuries of personal experience of minority status in dispersion the Jews have unique opportunity in their new state to implement their political ideals.

At the same time how the Christian press is handling the Eichmann trial perturbs many Jewish leaders in America. They sense in editorial reports of the trial the same lack of charity shown by German Christians toward Jews during the Nazi era. No sense of Christian shame and guilt over this gruesome chapter of persecution and suffering is apparent. Jewish leaders complain not over the theological interpretations (although they disagree with them); they are shocked rather by the lack of soul-searching by Christians over their involvement—as if standing on the sidelines as indifferent spectators of the mass slaughter of the Jews. Certain leaders of the territorial Lutheran churches in Germany indeed have confessed that Christians did not do all in their power to assist the Jews. While there were isolated cases of help, some involving even death, no universal sense of mutual involvement prevailed. For this admission the Jewish religious community honors these Lutherans. In discussing and defining theological differences with American Protestants, the Jews are anxious to include also the issue of social attitudes and trends and consequences. In addition to his religious tenets, what does the evangelical Protestant believe about Jewish minority rights before the law?

First-century delineations are no longer adequate for the modern Jewish-Christian dialogue. In that early era, of course, Christianity was at first a Jewish sect (as it were) in quest of Christian Jews. Multiple divisions already existed in Judaism—not only between Jews who rejected and Jews who received Jesus as the Christ, but also between the Sadducees and Pharisees and Essenes. Apostolic Christianity had its incipient divisions, too, but they healed rather swiftly. Today, however, Christianity as well as Judaism are split into major rival camps; replacing “one Christianity” are segments of Greek Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism (liberal, neo-orthodox, evangelical). Replacing “one Judaism” are segments of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism. Viewed from this perspective “the Judaeo-Christian tradition” is a veritable theological Babel.

If a renewed bond between Judaism and Christianity is a live prospect at all, the soundest common denominator would seem to be the Bible, even if the Christian shares the Old Testament with the Jew in a way that the Jew does not share the New with the Christian. This fact pinpoints both the common background of Judaism and Christianity and their later divergence. Yet even in this divergence the devout Jew and the Christian find much in common. The New Testament presents Jesus the Jew of Bethlehem and Nazareth, who for 19 centuries has captured the love and devotion of countless Gentiles. It presents devout Jews like John the Baptist and the disciples impelled by the prophets toward Jesus of Nazareth. It records the evangelists’ tidings of redemption in terms of “promise” and “fulfillment.” Paul, the learned, fanatically-dedicated member of the Sanhedrin, in his New Testament Epistles pleads at one and the same time for monotheism and the lordship of Jesus Christ. To many a Hebrew rabbi today, much of this “fulfillment” rests on a misreading and misunderstanding of the Old Testament. The Christian apologist who simply denounces the Jews for blindness may thereby cancel opportunity jointly to “search the scriptures” from which both Jew and Christian have much to learn.

Discernment “after the flesh” or “after the spirit” means vastly changed vistas for Christian and Jew. As Professor R. J. Zwi Werblowsky of Hebrew University has said: “The basic assumption that the Church is the legitimate fulfillment of the Old Testament Israel, implying as it does a complete break right in the middle of Jewish history, is of no reality for the historic consciousness of Israel according to the flesh.” Similarly many evangelical Christians deny that the “organized” visible Church—whether in its traditional or in its modem ecumenical structures—represents apostolic Christianity “after the spirit.” The Christian “explains” the Jew in the plan of God in relation to Christ and the Church; the Jew interprets his function in the world and in the divine economy as a Jew and within the framework of Judaism. Imperative, therefore, is a fresh understanding of both Judaism and Christianity “after the spirit” rather than “after the flesh.”

Many factors differentiate Israel and the United States as democratic powers. Their similar dedication to human rights however, should supply some reciprocally useful guidelines in handling minorities and in meeting inter-religious attitudes. Many Jews champion separation of church and state, a struggle whose implications encompass both Israel and America. Is the Israeli tendency to deal with religious differences through religious communities a sufficiently constructive solution for minority groups? Does such a policy shortchange the guarantee of individual liberty? On the other hand does the American emphasis on individual rights overload dissident minorities with initiative for social change at the expense of the majority?

In Jerusalem the Israel-American Institute of Biblical Studies (an evangelical Protestant institution) is respected for including on its faculty a Jewish scholar who teaches Christian church history from a Hebrew point of view. Would not Jewish-Protestant understanding be similarly enhanced if a Jewish seminary in America invited some competent evangelical scholar to teach the “promise-fulfillment” motif from the Christian point of view?

In addition to “what are the minority’s rights” Israeli leaders tend to ask “what can the minority do for the young state?” To what extent are missionary privileges to be weighed on just such a scale of nationalism? Missionary establishment of an agricultural school, for example, gains much greater favor than missionary establishment of a religious training school, since the state, after all, depends for survival on a land-based economy. Do Jews in America interpret religious rights in the same way? Are outsiders free to challenge and remold a country’s traditions? Should people’s religious liberty in a country be contingent upon specific identification with the interests of that country? Are religious expression and philanthropy to be tested by the yardstick of indirect political service? If missionaries practice “charity” as an integral part of Christianity should their help to the physical needs of unfortunate people be demeaned as bribery? Many such questions challenge Israel today.

Evangelical Protestants must carefully determine what projects to sponsor in Israel and what qualifications to require of Christian workers. Most unfortunate indeed is assignment of missionaries to Israel who know little of Jewish history and life. If his students, one Hebrew University professor observed, knew as little about Christianity as many missionaries know about Judaism he would promptly “flunk them.” Yet in view of conflicting interpretations for both Jew and Christian, to “know Judaism” and to “know Christianity” are far from simple objectives. Orthodox Jewry and evangelical Protestantism could profitably study the Gospels and Epistles together, could with respect and forbearance together traverse the New Testament area of divergence in search of mutual understanding. Christian missionaries in Israel, moreover, must have a working knowledge of the Hebrew language, if besides seeking conversions they seek to promote inter-religious understanding through significant dialogue. In this regard Southern Baptists have developed a commendable program of Christian writing in Hebrew which both enlarges Hebrew literature and the influence of Christianity.

Statement By Evangelical Editors

Issued in Jerusalem, Israel, on May 26, 1961.

As Editors of American Protestant evangelical magazines, we believe that the present moment of world history offers a fresh and providential opportunity for Hebrew-Christian understanding. A “breakthrough” of the barriers that have deadlocked orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians is now a live possibility for the first time in nearly 2000 years.

This new opportunity will require creative exploration and spiritual earnestness on the part of both Jewish and Christian participants.

Vital aspects of such an approach are:

Christian recognition that the people of Israel are in God’s plan.

Christian commitment to unconditional love for the Jewish people everywhere.

Conversation between orthodox Jewish scholars and evangelical Christian scholars whose common devotion to the authority of the Old Testament is their bond and point of beginning.

Christian-Hebrew dialogue should move from the profundity of evangelical conviction to the profundity of Jewish traditional belief. The Christian message is directed toward the Messianic consciousness of the Jew. The New Testament does not condone a “least common denominator” approach.

In recognizing anew the Hebrew ancestry and preparation for the Christian faith, Christians find in the nation of Israel a unique locale for such dialogue. Their settlement in Palestine now shelters once dispersed Jews from the intolerance of state religions and also from the barbarian cruelties of a wicked Gentile era forgetful of Judaeo-Christian ethics. Israelis also have an opportunity to transcend the intolerance of the first century of the Christian era in the land of Palestine. The heritage of religious liberty guarded by separation of church and state, which has shaped a hospitable national climate for American Jewry, can also guide Israel in the provision of a larger freedom for Protestant and other religious workers.

CARL F. H. HENRY, Editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY

KENNETH L. WILSON, EXECUTIVE Editor, Christian Herald;SHERWOOD E. WIRT, Editor, Decision.

Several practical, perhaps bold proposals for improving Judaeo-Protestant understanding are not amiss:

1. Professorial exchange between an evangelical Christian scholar as guest lecturer at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an orthodox Jewish scholar as guest lecturer at an evangelical college and seminary in America.

2. Welcome acceptance of Christian missionaries in Israel and similarly of Jewish neighbors in America.

3. Objective review both in America and Israel of opportunities on radio and in other mass media for minority groups; review of practices in respect to observances of special days in respect to religious emphases in public schools, and so on.

4. Open exploration between Jewish and Christian biblical scholars of each others’ views, and co-operative study on such projects as the identity of Messiah, the suffering Servant, and the place of the Jew in God’s plan.

5. Soul-searching repentance for lovelessness and broken neighbor-love.

After all, do not Jew and Christian share in the same spiritual heritage and in the same entrusted responsibility in the pagan world? The promise, the Person, the power, and the fulfillment of redemptive love remain exclusively unique to biblical religion.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.