Christians and Jews—Bound Together

Let’s face the hostility head on.

What advantage has the Jew?… Much, in every way! What if some of them were unfaithful?” Thus Saul of Tarsus, better known to history as Paul, who styled himself “a Hebrew of the Hebrews” (Phil. 3:5) expressed the attitude of one early Christian towards the Jews (Rom. 3:1–2). “I ask then, has God rejected his people? God forbid!” (Rom. 11:1).

Paul did not hesitate to criticize his ancestral people, even while attesting the zeal for God of unconverted Jews (Rom. 10:2). Paul’s prayer that Israel, which God had hardened against Jesus the Messiah, might yet be saved (Rom. 10:1) is cited by the contemporary German theologian, the late Paul Althaus, as an indication of the fact that “hardening” or “passing over” by God is not definitive, in the sense of double predestination. The relationship of believing Christians, Jews but especially Gentiles, to unbelieving Jews has always been a complex one. The special place of the Jewish people in God’s plan is acknowledged; God’s faithfulness to his covenant with them, despite their stubbornness, becomes a source of assurance to Gentile Christians as well, who also know themselves to be “chosen in him [Christ] before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4). The knowledge that God has a blessed future for the Jewish people despite their resistance to the claims of Christ encourages Gentiles to hope for their own unbelieving relatives, on the basis of the promise of Acts 16:31, even though they may see scant evidence of faith in members of their household. Yet, at the same time, as the Gentile disciple of Jesus acknowledges a certain primacy of God’s favor to the Jew, he frequently cannot avoid irritation and exasperation, or even anger, with the Jews who disdain the Messiah who came first for them, and only in the second place to the Gentile.

For this reason, it may well be true that it is precisely the Christians with the deepest sense of who Jesus Christ is and what he has done who can be most resentful, indifferent, or even contemptuous of Jewish attitudes towards Jesus. At the same time, it is also exactly those orthodox, fundamentalist, or evangelical Christians who do understand and acknowledge that the Jew had and still has a special place and dignity in God’s plan. The so-called liberal Christian may be a social anti-Semite, but is rarely a religious one, for he cannot blame the Jew for rejecting messianic claims he himself demythologizes. The conservative Christian may sense a terrible frustration, even anger, at the way in which the non-Messianic Jew rejects Jesus. Nevertheless, by the same biblical authority that tells him that Jesus is able to save him to the uttermost, the Gentile Christian also learns that the Jews retain a special place in God’s affection. Although Paul was the Apostle to the Gentiles, in many respects he is the most deeply Jewish of New Testament writers; he repeatedly attests his continued love and respect for his former coreligionists.

Nevertheless, Paul’s philosemitism, if we may call it such, does not stand alone in the New Testament. John the Evangelist, called “the divine” by early Christians, although racially as Jewish as Paul, has contributed to Christian hostility to Jews by his frequent use of the term, “the Jews” for those Jews who rejected and killed Jesus. The Jews who accepted Jesus, in John’s language, are no longer called Jews. John’s distinction between “Jews” (those Jews who rejected the Messiah) and disciples (those, in John’s day almost all Jews, who accepted him) was not recognized by pagan contemporaries: for them Jews and Christians, at least at the outset, were all alike, even though it was occasionally the non-Messianic Jews who provoked the public authorities against the Christians, also largely ethnic Jews (e.g. Acts 18:12–23).

At the outset, unbelieving Jews provoked governmental reprisals against Christians as disturbers of the peace. But soon the shoe was on the other foot. Of all the civil uprisings and rebellions that troubled the Pax Romana, none was fiercer than the Jewish War of A.D. 66–70, which ended in the reconquest and destruction of Jerusalem. Prompted by what they took to be God’s guidance, members of the Jerusalem church fled the city before its fall. For this reason, Christian Jews were regarded as traitors by the Jewish survivors of the war, and from A.D. 70 onward there was no longer a significant distinctively Jewish Christian community. Converted Jews began to assimilate and to lose their ethnic identity among Gentile Christians. Unconverted Jews often confounded Gentile Christians, who claimed to be the legitimate heirs of Old Testament traditions, with their superior knowledge of the Bible. A converted Gentile philosopher, Justin Martyr (first half of the second Christian century), intellectually the most distinguished scholar among early Gentile converts, has given us an extensive defense of Christianity against learned Jewish objections, his Dialogue with Trypho (circa 150). Justin’s Dialogue sets a high level for religious discussion. It ends with Trypho wishing Justin a good voyage to Rome (where Justin ultimately won the martyr’s crown) and Justin in turn praying that Trypho and his friends might come to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah.

Nevertheless, such Christian cordiality towards Jews, although frequently voiced in the writings of other Church Fathers, became more and more mingled with expressions of hostility. The third-century African Christian Tertullian contrasted Gentile learning unfavorably with the wisdom of Solomon. But—especially as pagans utilized Jewish attitudes to embarrass Christians—Christian rejection of the Jews and things Jewish became more common. The anti-Christian Emperor Julian the Apostate (361–363) made an attempt to involve the Jews in his short-lived effort to discredit Christianity by an attempt to rebuild their Temple. The tendency of the church in the patristic era to an otherworldly asceticism, and—especially since Augustine—to amillennialism, was accompanied by a growing disdain for the Jews. Thus, centuries later, a Lutheran amillennialist, John T. Mueller, calls premillennialism not merely a “figment of the human mind,” but, citing the Augsburg Confession, a Jewish opinion (Christian Dogmatics, Concordia, 1955, p. 621; the relevant article of the Augsburg Confession, XVII, is interpreted differently by Lutheran premillennialists, who hold that it condemns as a Jewish opinion only the view that there will be a return of Christ, or the Messiah, before any resurrection of the saints). The important thing to note here is that Christians have tended to be more hostile to the unconverted Jews of their day as they tended to spiritualize the biblical doctrine of the millennium and advocate an otherworldly, ascetic approach to discipleship. But it is precisely the characteristic of so-called fundamentalists and evangelicals not to spiritualize the millennium nor to mistake the biblical call for a separated life for a command to asceticism. Thus, among the most conservative Protestants, an emotional hostility to unbelieving Jews because of their denial of Christ is frequently mingled with grudging or even romantic admiration of the Jews for God’s acknowledged faithfulness to them.

The greatest of early Latin-speaking theologians, Augustine (354–435), frequently cited as one of the early representatives of Christian hostility to Jews, nevertheless places the ancient Jews head and shoulders above the pagans in his great theological study of history, The City of God (e.g. Book IV, chapter xxxiv). Augustine notes the grudging respect of the great pagan philosopher Seneca for the Jews, based on the fact that they alone among ancient peoples “know the cause of their rites.” He praises the superior spiritual discernment of Jews compared to Gentile peoples (On Christian Doctrine, Book III, chapter vi). Augustine’s older Greek-speaking contemporary, John Chrysostom, criticizes the Jews for rejecting Christ and gives evidence of some hostility, but claims, following Paul, to want to do away with “every suspicion of hatred.” Apparently Jews and Christians engaged in mutual conviviality, for the fourth-century Synod of Laodicaea prohibits feasting and sharing unleavened bread with Jews, classing them together with Christian heretics. The great fourth-century Cappadocian Father, Gregory of Nyssa, warned against fellowship with unbelieving Jews as a temptation to apostasy. Although these synodical and theological warnings clearly evince a certain hostility to the Jews, they also give evidence of the fact that fraternization was by no means unknown.

It was the early Middle Ages, when a renewed “Roman Empire”—actually the Germanic kingdom of the Franks—sought to protect Europe from Islam that religiously based anti-Semitism became apparent among Christians. For a time the Muslims appeared intellectually superior to European Christians, and their Jewish interpreters and popularizers formed convenient targets for Christian hostility. When Christian Europe went on the offensive against Islam in the Crusades, in many cases the “infidels” within Europe—the Jews—suffered first. The spread of a Yiddish-speaking Jewish diaspora in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland and Russia, resulted from the dispersion of medieval German-speaking Jews in a series of persecutions that attended the Crusades (Yiddish is essentially medieval German written in Hebrew script and with many Hebrew loan-words).

The fact that an outbreak of anti-Semitism among Christians has several times coincided with conflicts between Christian Europe and Islam (under Charlemagne, during the Crusades, and during the wars for the liberation of Spain in the fifteenth century) should not be overlooked today, when the largely Muslim oil-producing nations are squeezing “Christendom”—Europe and America—and placing us under pressure to abandon support for the state of Israel. Where “Christian” anti-Semitism has flourished, it has generally done so in the context of a “Christian state,” where the Jews appeared as a threat to political rather than religious unity. (This offers a precise parallel to the persecution of Christians in pagan Rome, which was largely for political, not religious, reasons.) It is precisely the most spiritual of Christians—Wesleyans and other evangelicals in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Britain, Pietists in nineteenth-century Germany—who have been most tolerant of Jews and Jewishness. It was the anti-Christian Hitler, who also fought against both Protestantism and Catholicism, who unleashed the incredible “Holocaust” against European Jews. Many Jews today, especially in the context of the recent NBC television series, “The Holocaust,” are interpreting Hitler’s atrocities as the expression of religious, i.e. Christian, anti-Semitism. This is a dangerous error, for—as Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt pointed out—it is precisely the suppression of Christianity that sets the stage for virulent persecution of the Jews. Conversely, anti-Semitism is a phenomenon that paves the way for totalitarianism and the persecution of Christianity. Thus Christians have every reason to fear a rise of anti-Semitism, for it is a prelude to anti-Christianity, while Jews are ill-advised to foster secularism to the detriment of popular Christianity, for that in turn is a prelude to persecution of the Jews.

It is generally acknowledged that the Calvinistic wing of the Reformation was the least inimical branch of Christianity with respect to the Jews. Indeed, Calvin himself as well as his most rigorous followers was accused of obscuring the difference between the New Testament and the Old and with seeking to set up a Christian theocracy patterned on Old Testament Israel. Yet, Paul’s acknowledgment that God has maintained his covenant love for Israel appears in a paraphrase by John Calvin: “Of old, certain peculiar prerogatives of the church [by this term, Calvin means God’s covenant people, the Jews in the centuries before Christ, and particularly the New Testament people after Christ] remain among the Jews. In like manner, today we do not deprive the papists of those traces of the church which the Lord willed should among them survive the destruction. God had once for all made his covenant with the Jews … their treachery could not obliterate his faithfulness.… Whence the Lord called the children born to them his children” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book IV, Chapter ii: 11). Unfortunately, Martin Luther’s record is less creditable. At the beginning of his career as a Reformer, Luther optimistically set out to evangelize the Jews who, he was convinced, resisted the Gospel only because it had been so distorted by the papacy. Indeed, the Reformation itself was marked, at the outset, by the defense by scholars of Jewish religious literature against efforts to destroy it—instigated, as it happened, by Johann Pfefferkom, a converted Jew. In 1523, Luther wrote a tract, That Jesus Was Born a Jew, a touching tribute to the Messiah’s national origin. Later in life, Luther turned vehemently against the Jews. Like Luther’s attack on the German peasants during the Peasants’ War, his anger at the Jews was incited by what he considered a threat to the most central Gospel doctrine, that of justification by faith. Many of the antitrinitarians of the Reformation era deliberately appealed to Judaism in support of their views, while the trinitarian Anabaptists appeared to Luther to be using Jewish models to defend a new legalism that, in his eyes, was as dangerous to the Gospel as the Galatian error had been in Paul’s day.

Some Noteworthy Titles

Here are some of the titles released in the last year or so that should be of particular interest to our readers who want to learn more about Jews and Judaism.

A basic reference work, one that should be in just about any library from high school on up, is the New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia, recently issued in its fifth edition, with major updating since it was first published in 1959. It is edited by Geoffrey Wigoder and published in America by Doubleday. The encyclopedia was prepared in Israel by some two hundred scholars and there are more than 2,000 double-column pages of entries on almost everything Jewish.

We Jews: Invitation to a Dialogue by Efraine Rosenzweig (Hawthorn) is by a rabbi with experience in trying to communicate something of the diversity of Jewishness to Christian audiences. Jewish Ideas and Concepts by Steven Katz (Schocken) attempts to give a systematic overview of Jewish religious thought. Rabbi: The American Experience by Murray Polner (Holt) is a popular account of what rabbis are like in a wide variety of settings. Christians need to recognize that much Jewishness does not express itself in religious categories, at least not the kind that Christians are used to. Ultraorthodox Jews make colorful copy on the press and TV documentaries but they are only one part of the Jewish people. For a good selection of writings by major, nontraditional thinkers, see Modern Jewish Thought edited by Nahum Glatzer (Schocken). An essentially secular position is frequently encountered among people of Jewish ancestry and is advocated in Humanistic Judaism by Sherwin Wine (Prometheus).

We need to read what Jews say of themselves as well as reading what Christians have to say. God Has Not Rejected His People by Richard De Ridder (Baker) is a brief book with useful suggestions for further reading. Most evangelical writing on Jews is from a dispensationalist stance, but De Ridder teaches at Calvin seminary, so his book is a welcome sign that other evangelicals can also be concerned about Jews. Contrary to what most Jews think a Jew can be a Christian. Judaism as a religion (to which non-Jews can convert) is distinguishable from ethnic Jewishness. Some recent Jewish Christian writings: Over the Stumbling Block: Inviting Jews to Jesus by Dan Wishnietsky (Broadman) is brief, with half of it relevant Scripture quotes; Chosen: Communicating With Jews of All Faiths by Lee Amber (Vision House) has a question-and-answer format and stresses diversity; Some of My Best Friends Are Christians by Zola Levitt (Regal) is a chatty, how-to-witness guide: Christ in the Passover by Ceil and Moishe Rosen (Moody), tells how Orthodox Judaism’s passover testifies to Messiah; The Underground Church of Jerusalem (Nelson) and the fictional An Israeli Love Story (Moody), both by Zola Levitt, give interesting but not definitive insights into Jewish Christianity in Israel. Jews and “Jewish Christianity” by David Berger and Michael Wyschogrod (Ktav) criticizes the kind of book mentioned above and is aimed in part at Jews who might convert.

Of special interest is Evangelicals and Jews in Conversation on Scripture, Theology, and History edited by Marc Tanenbaum, Marvin Wilson, and A. James Rudin (Baker). The book includes seventeen papers presented at a New York conference in 1975 between leading scholars and ministers from the evangelical and Jewish communities. Ecumenically oriented Christians are much more likely to have at least implicitly repudiated attempts to encourage Jews to accept Jesus as Messiah. For a collection of official statements by church groups see Stepping Stones to Further Jewish-Christian Relations compiled by Helga Croner (Anti-Defamation League). Samuel Sandmel’s When a Jew and Christian Marry (Fortress) is quite interesting. It is aimed at the couple who have already made the decision.

Honor the Promise: America’s Commitment to Israel by Robert Drinan (Doubleday) is a staunchly pro-Israel book by the Jesuit congressman from Massachusetts.

Finally, reading for a lifetime can be found in Bibliographical Essays in Medieval Jewish Studies, the second volume of a series launched in 1972 with The Study of Judaism: Bibliographical Essays and sponsored jointly by the Anti-Defamation League and Ktav Publishing House.

DONALD TINDER

Nevertheless, despite all the sympathy we can bring for Luther in his frustration at not being able to win the Jews to Christ and in his fear of a renewed legalism, it is impossible to excuse the attacks of his declining years, begun with a 1542 pamphlet, Against the Jews and Their Lies. On February 14, 1546, only a few days before his death, in what turned out to be his last sermon, Luther denounced the Jews and called on the civil authorities to deprive them of their citizenship and expel them from the land—measures later implemented, at the beginning of Jewish persecution, by none other than Adolf Hitler. It should be noted, however, that Luther’s anti-Jewish diatribes, far from being endorsed by Lutherans generally, caused great dismay among his friends and fellow-Reformers, notably Philip Melanchthon and Heinrich Bullinger. It would be as wrong to reject the Lutheran Reformation because of Luther’s anti-Jewish outbursts as it would be to reject Calvin’s achievements because of his persecution of the antitrinitarian Miguel Servetus. In the case of the Jews, Calvin’s record is far more acceptable than Luther’s. He did not, it is true, exonerate them of the charge of crucifying Christ, but he correctly points out that “they had the same defense as that in which we [Gentile Christians] confidently glory” (Commentary on Romans, at 10:2). In Calvin’s view, converted Jews will obtain the first place in honor, “being, as it were, the first-born in God’s family” (11:26). Ultimately it was Calvin’s veneration for the Jews, rather than Luther’s final hostility, that has come to characterize conservative Protestantism, marked as it is in this area more by Calvinistic than by Lutheran theology. Later theologians in the Calvinist tradition—for example, Rousas J. Rushdoony in his Institutes of Biblical Law—at times express an admiration for the Jews that verges on adulation. During the Six Days’ War and accompanying oil crisis, it was the Netherlands—the most Calvinistic of European nations—that resolutely refused to abandon Israel for the sake of oil concessions. And it is Europe’s foremost Calvinist political thinker, Jacques Ellul, who continues to appeal to the conscience of the Christian West—if it still has one—to stand by Israel in the face of the ever mounting pressures from its numerically vastly stronger Arab antagonists.

In short, the attitude of Christians towards Jews, while by no means uniformly honoring to our Founder and his Jewishness, is certainly not one of persistent hostility. It is precisely the spiritual leaders of Christianity, especially but not only those in the Reformed and more recently dispensational traditions, who have praised and supported the Jews and their new national state. Where Christians have engaged in persecution and violence towards Jews, far from being because of their religion, it is usually identifiably the result of the triumph of political and economic forces over spiritual ones. In a thoroughly Christian commonwealth, such as Calvin sought to establish in Geneva and the Puritans planned in New England, Jews would always be slightly ill at ease and out of place. But they would never be persecuted. In a secularized society in rebellion against God and Christ—such as Hitler established in Germany and towards which we are evolving in the United States—there can be no guarantee of the security of Jews. As the most distinctive and most vulnerable religious community, the Jews can expect persecution from a militantly secularistic state. No Jewish efforts to blend in and become assimilated, even by the repudiation of religion and the adoption of atheism, will protect them, for the Old Testament covenants, like New Testament baptism, leave an “indelible mark” on those who have shared in them. What Jews experience in a militantly secularistic society can only be, for Christians as well, an ominous portent of things to come. In each other’s eyes, Jews and Christians may be religious antagonists, but in the eyes of this-worldly secularism, they are remarkably alike. Let no believing Christian think that abuse of the Jews will leave him untouched—and let no Jew think that a society that mocks and scorns the religion Jesus founded will long be gracious to the race from which, according to the flesh, he came.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

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