Page 5118 – Christianity Today (2024)

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Throughout its 33 years, CHRISTIANITY TODAY has kept close watch on Washington, D.C.—its power brokers and decision-making machinery. (One need only review the past year’s News sections to see what we mean.) Therefore, in keeping with tradition, this issue offers an evaluation of the Reagan years from a Christian perspective, by six nationally known commentators.

Not surprisingly, Kim Lawton, CT’S Washington correspondent, was deeply involved in the section’s development, working closely with associate editor Rodney Clapp in pinpointing authors and outlining individual assignments.

This has been a hectic first year for Kim, whose introduction to print journalism (she had worked exclusively in radio) just happened to fall in a presidential campaign year. Although the deadlines seemed a bit more manageable (Kim had been responsible for three to four radio news stories daily), story selection and development was no less challenging. And exhausting.

After joining the ct staff in September 1987, Kim made Iowa and its telltale caucuses her first campaign stop. Other whistle stops followed, including Kansas City (where she attended a Republican platform committee meeting), and the party conventions in New Orleans and Atlanta (where she accidently found herself in a riot between police and the Ku Klux Klan).

Kim likes to be where the action is, and is consequently sorry to see the campaign drawing to a close. But then, there’s always a new presidency, a new Congress, and the judiciary to report on.

The beat goes on.

HAROLD B. SMITH, Managing Editor

Cover illustration by Paul Turnbaugh.

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The scene is a darkened hospital ward. An intern stands over Debbie, a young woman with terminal cancer. Her breathing is labored as she struggles for oxygen. She weighs 80 pounds. She is in horrible pain.

The doctor has never seen Debbie before, but a glance at her chart confirms she is not responding to treatment. He leans down to hear her whisper, “Let’s get this over with.”

Most doctors would have hurried to give relief against the pain, or tried to offer some solace to the anguished relative standing near the bed. But this intern measured out 20 milligrams of morphine into a syringe—enough, he wrote later, “to do the job”—and injected it. Four minutes later, Debbie was dead. The doctor’s only comment: “It’s over, Debbie.”

Stories like this, publicized a few months back, are shocking but should not surprise us. While no one likes to admit it, active euthanasia is not uncommon. It has been closeted in hospital ethics committees, cloaked in euphemisms spoken to grieving relatives. It is the unnamed shadow on an unknown number of death certificates—of handicapped newborns; sickly, aged parents; the terminally ill in critical pain.

No, Debbie’s case is something new only because of the public nature of both its telling and the debate that has followed.

This story was first written, anonymously but without apology, by the intern himself, and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)—one of the most respected medical journals in the world.

Following the article’s publication, the commentary came fast and furious. Some experts dismissed the incident as fictional. Others believed it, but focused their criticism on the young doctor’s lack of familiarity with Debbie’s medical history.

But the article’s greatest effect was to yank euthanasia out of the closet and thrust it into the arena of national debate. On the surface that might seem healthy, getting the whole ugly issue into the open. But there’s a subtle danger here: The JAMA article and the impassioned discussion it provoked offer a case study of a recurring process in American life by which the unthinkable in short order becomes the unquestionable.

Usually it works like this: Some practice so offensive that it could scarcely be discussed in public is suddenly advocated by a respected expert in a respected forum. The public is shocked, then outraged. The very fact that such a thing could be publicly debated becomes the focus of debate.

But in the process, the sheer repetition of the shocking gradually dulls its shock effect. No longer outraged, people begin to argue for positions to moderate the extreme; or they accept the premise, challenging instead the means to achieve it. (Note that in Debbie’s debate, many challenged not the killing, but the intern’s failure to check more carefully into the case.)

And gradually, though no one remembers quite how it all happened, the once unspeakable becomes tolerable and, in time, acceptable.

An example of how this process works is the case of hom*osexuality. Not long ago it was widely regarded, even in secular society, as a perversion. The gay-rights movement’s first pronouncements were received with shock; then, in the process of debate, the public gradually lost its sense of outrage. hom*osexuality became a cause—and what was once deviant is today, in many jurisdictions, a legally protected right. All this in little more than a decade.

Debbie’s story appears to have initiated this process for euthanasia. Columnist Ellen Goodman welcomed the case as “a debate that should be taking place.”

So what was once a crime becomes a debate. And, if history holds true, that debate will usher the once unmentionable into common practice.

Already the stage is set. In a 1983 poll, 63 percent of Americans approved of mercy killing in certain cases. In a 1988 poll, more than 50 percent of lawyers favored legal euthanasia. The Hemlock Society is working to put the issue on the ballot in several states.

I don’t intend to sound alarmist; legal euthanasia in this country is still more a threat than a reality. But 20 years ago, who would have thought abortion would one day be a constitutional right, or that infanticide would be given legal protection?

The path from the unmentionable to the commonplace is being traveled with increasing speed in medical ethics. Without some concerted resistance, euthanasia is likely to be the next to make the trip. As Ellen Goodman concluded her column, “The Debbie story is not over yet, not by a long shot.”

Indeed.

Novelist Walker Percy, in The Thanatos Syndrome, offers one vision of where such compromising debates on the value of life might take us.

The time is the 1990s. Qualitarian Life Centers have sprung up across the country after the landmark case of Doe v. Dade “which decreed, with solid scientific evidence, that the human infant does not achieve personhood until 18 months.” At these centers one can conveniently dispose of unwanted young and old alike.

An old priest, Father Smith, confronts the narrator, a psychiatrist, in this exchange:

“You are an able psychiatrist. On the whole a decent, generous humanitarian person in the abstract sense of the word. You know what is going to happen to you.”

“What?”

“You are a member of the first generation of doctors in the history of medicine to turn their backs on the oath of Hippocrates and kill millions of old, useless people, unborn children, born malformed children, for the good of mankind—and to do so without a single murmur from one of you. Not a single letter of protest in the august New England Journal of Medicine. And do you know what you are going to end up doing?”

“No,” I say …

The priest aims his azimuth squarely at me and then appears to lose his train of thought.…

“What is going to happen to me, Father?” I ask before he gets away altogether.

“Oh,” he says absently, appearing to be thinking of something else, “you’re going to end up killing Jews.”

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ARTBRIEFS

It probably won’t give Cats much competition. But a Lamb’s Players stage adaptation of Walter Wangerin’s award-winning Book of the Dun Cow was received warmly by Southern California drama critics. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Nancy Chumin said, “The Lamb’s repertory company has done nothing less than reclaim the world of the imagination for the theater.” San Diego Union critic Welton Jones called it “delightfully staged” and “winningly performed.”

Rather than portraying Wangerin’s rooster hero as the San Diego Chicken (the Padres’ baseball mascot), Lamb’s Players opted for glitzy costuming, using brightly colored fabric arranged like feathers around actor David Cochran Heath’s neck and ankles. It was then up to Heath and his chickenlike twitch of the neck to further create the role of the rooster who must save the world.

Each season Lamb’s Players, a repertory group with Christian commitment, programs a mix of plays with outright religious content and those that, though not explicitly Christian, articulate moral and ethical concerns. The Book of the Dun Cow ran from June 24 through July 24 in suburban San Diego.

The World From A Wheelchair

Two remarkable displays of art accompanied the Congress on the Church and the Disabled last July 7–9 at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois.

The first was a nearly complete assembly of devotional artist Joni Eareckson Tada’s works. The full-sized works displayed a remarkable technique not visible in the smaller greeting card and plaque formats generally accessible to the Christian bookstore goer. Included were preliminary studies and drawings for many of the paralyzed artist’s paintings, evidence of the careful preparation and research that go into her work.

For example, in creating The Nativity, commissioned by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association for a 1979 Christmas telecast, Tada pored over photographs of women who had just given birth, heads of infants, even x-rays of a baby’s skull. Her careful preparation and technique make the paintings worth seeing.

The retrospective included a preparalysis painting (Steeplechase, 1959) in which the ten-year-old artist shows strong composition and an eye for detail. And unlike the representations of biblical scenes, landscapes, and still lifes that are available in Christian bookstores, a single abstract (The Brush, 1979), displays the power of pure kinesthetic expression in one vigorous stroke of blue paint.

Also on view were nine works by the winners of a national juried contest for disabled artists. The show was on display through September 1.

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INTERVIEW

When Sheila Walsh’s album Say So was released earlier this year, CTasked this pioneer Christian rocker and new cohost of “The 700 Club” about her songs and where she’s headed musically.

On Writing Her Song “Trapeze”:

About 18 months ago I lost my voice just before a major tour. The day before the tour a throat specialist said, “You can’t even speak a word for months; we may have to operate, and you may never sing again.” Some Christians said, “God has done this to you because you think too much of yourself.” I went to a small cottage and fasted and prayed. I felt God showed me that my security was resting in what I do rather than who I am.

“Trapeze” is about how I’ve been so used to flying by myself, I didn’t even need a safety net; suddenly I found myself falling out of the sky. Then, when I thought it was too late, his hands came out and grabbed me.

On The Importance Of The Local Church:

It’s especially important for someone in itinerant ministry. We have a group of six elders and their wives who meet with us regularly and know everything about us—the good, the bad, and the ugly. They even know the things I pray I’ll never do but are potential temptations to me when I’m tired, fed up, or mad at my husband. The fact that they love and care for us has been absolutely key.

On The Evolution Of Her Sound:

The first album I ever made—a real low-budget thing—was very true to me at that time. I did all my vocals between midnight and 4:00 in the morning because that’s when we got the studio cheapest. And I loved it. Later, I think I was trying too hard to have an image that would relate to people.

When Steve Lorenz became my comanager, he asked, “Why do you speak so much between your songs in concert?” I realized my songs didn’t say much. He told me to go to a record store and buy every album I’ve ever loved and write down what touched me about it. So I threw everything I’d done out the window and started from scratch.

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CRITIQUE

The best that can be said of TV justice is that it sometimes pits the victorious underdog against the nefarious oppressor. But that is still a long way from the Old Testament prophets, who rattled the very walls of society until the wicked persons and institutions came crashing down. And it’s an even more distant route to the historic justice of God that sacrificially saves and mercifully condemns.

But you can also leave it to modern television to produce not one, but four competing pictures of justice: “People’s Court,” “Perry Mason,” “Matlock,” and “L.A. Law.” Will the real justice please stand up?

Enter Mason, who from 1957 to 1966 ruled the judicial roost. Nearly every week he managed in an hour to gain in-court confessions from some of the shrewdest criminals to appear on TV. If only the courts of our land would take Mason’s technique to heart! Forget about highly trained attorneys who grew up with their noses in legal tomes. Give us tenacious spirits thirsty for 60-minute justice.

Enter the “People’s Court,” where Judge Joseph Wapner has presided for seven years over an odd collection of Southern California small-claims-court characters. In each half-hour episode, Wapner, a retired judge permitted by California law to make legally binding decisions, dispenses justice on two real cases selected from thousands of claims filed in Los Angeles County. Plaintiffs and defendants—true Californians who appear before Wapner’s TV bench in shorts, tank tops, or less—agree to accept his judgments.

The Illusion Of Freud’S Irreligion

Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious, by Paul Vitz (Guilford, 287 pp.; $19.95, cloth). Reviewed by Mary Vander Goot, a counseling psychologist in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and author of Narrating Psychology (Wyndham Hall).

Only a scholar of Paul Vitz’s caliber would dare suggest that Sigmund Freud had a Christian unconscious. And only a scholar with Vitz’s breadth and independence could sort through the evidence and convincingly demonstrate that such a thesis is solid.

Why should anyone care whether or not Freud had a Christian unconscious? The answer lies in the pervasive influence of his thinking upon our culture.

Freud was one of the major promoters of the view that religion, rather than being a fact of life, is a set of optional prejudices to which people cling because it affords them some sort of comfort. He insisted that only scientific reason could serve as a valid authority.

Today, relatively few people know the source of this view, but the argument itself has become a standard ingredient in the modern mentality. It has been used over and over again to support the claim that religious belief is a private matter, having to do with opinion rather than truth.

Freud was tolerant of religion only as he was tolerant of any kind of irrational fear, self-defeating habit, and immature behavior. His own approach to psychoanalysis, Freud believed, was a means by which people could be shown the misguided motives for their out-moded beliefs and actions so that finally they would relinquish these illusions.

How interesting, then, that a thinker who claimed he had no need for religion could not himself get away from its influences.

Earlier studies of Freud’s Jewish origins have demonstrated that Freud continued to be very Jewish in the style of thinking with which he approached major problem areas in his own life and in those of his patients. For example, David Bakan, in Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (Van Nostrand, 1958), suggests that Freud grew up in a center of Jewish thought where Jewish habits of thinking were in the air. Although Freud never studied Judaism, he came to know it in the fashion that all children come to know the beliefs of their families and friends.

Bakan and several Freud biographers recognize that Freud went through a long stage during which he was openly hostile to all sorts of Jewish religious practice. But Bakan demonstrates compellingly that Freud’s writing is laced with references to the traditions of Jewish mysticism.

Religious Longings

Vitz now adds the view that Freud was equally influenced by Christian tradition. As a psychoanalyst, Freud was a master at uncovering the hidden motives and desires of his patients. Vitz, using Freud’s own method, shows that he was driven by a religious longing that he himself could not understand, but from which he could not escape.

For example, Vitz presents evidence that Freud’s early childhood caretaker was not his own mother but rather a devout Catholic nanny. Freud’s parting from her while still a young child seems to have been a great loss to him. In his professional work he returned repeatedly to the theme of a child who had lost his true mother. He did major studies of the Greek drama of Oedipus, who lost his true mother; of Moses; and of a da Vinci painting of the Christ child with Mary and his grandmother (Saint Anne), both portrayed as madonnas. These and other examples build the case that the influence of Freud’s Catholic nanny was a profound factor in his early development.

Another theme that Vitz explores in detail is Freud’s attachment to Rome. Freud made numerous trips there and spoke of his journey as a pilgrimage. While in Rome he immersed himself in Christian art, and on one occasion intentionally visited the city at Easter.

Vitz, however, clearly is not suggesting that Freud became a professing Christian, or even that he was appreciative of the Christian tradition. Rather, Vitz’s evidence points only to the claim that Freud could not escape the influence of religion.

Inescapable Encounter

Of particular importance in Vitz’s work—beyond the insights into Freud himself—is the clarity and understanding he brings to the ways in which religious traditions are transmitted. For those of us who live in a society that claims religious neutrality, Vitz’s work offers an important moment for reflecting on our own assumptions about how belief is formed and whether or not it can be excluded from public life.

It is clear from Vitz’s work that religion is more than doctrine or creed. It is in the architecture of cities, the traditions of art and music, the calendar of holidays, and the impressions of children. Religion is planted in the unconscious of persons who are raised in a culture. It is carried unawares from one generation to the next. The origin and force of these influences may be something that even those persons themselves cannot grasp.

When Vitz suggests that Freud had a Christian unconscious, he is recognizing that Freud grew up in a Western culture whose dominant religious tradition is Christian. As such, Freud was unavoidably exposed to Christian influences. To escape these influences he would have had to become something other than the Western man he was.

Is the pattern Vitz has uncovered a pattern that is peculiar to Freud? Is it not likely that a leader who shapes the imagination of a culture is also influenced by the spirits of that culture? The encounter with these spirits may be congenial or reactionary, but it is inescapable. Every thinker, whether Christian, Jewish, or secular, lives in a culture where the power of belief has left its mark, and where the forces of unbelief wrestle to undo these effects.

In the interest of toleration, most of us have learned to be discreet about religion. However, our efforts at tolerance have gone to an extreme, so that today opponents of religion have more liberty to speak out than do the faithful. To maintain the illusion that religion is of marginal importance sometimes requires that we not tell the truth as we see it, and equally often requires that we pretend that we are naïve. It is this misunderstanding that Vitz challenges so effectively.

What Makes An Ethic Evangelical?

Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics, by Oliver O’Donovan (Eerdmans, 284 pp.; $18.95, hardcover) and Freedom for Obedience: Evangelical Ethics for Contemporary Times, by Donald G. Bloesch (Harper & Row, 342 pp.; $24.95, cloth). Reviewed by Allen D. Verhey, professor of religion, Hope College, Holland, Michigan.

Oliver O’Donovan and Donald Bloesch agree that ethics can be part of the good news of the gospel and not just an addendum to it. But if they agree that ethics can be evangelical, they give different accounts of how ethics can be evangelical.

O’Donovan, an Oxford University theologian of increasing stature, has written a brilliant book. It is an account of ethics that is evangelical by beginning with the good news that God raised Jesus from the dead. The Resurrection vindicates and fulfills God’s good creation and our created life within it. Therefore, the gospel holds us to our moral reality as creatures of God in God’s world; it does not remove us from it.

Accordingly, O’Donovan affirms an objective moral order that is built into the universe. This order may be known in fragmentary and incomplete ways by any person who lives in God’s world, but it can be known as a whole only in Christ.

An evangelical ethic, then, need not deny moral knowledge outside Christ. But an evangelical ethic will not substitute such knowledge for the gospel as an acceptable moral foundation.

For O’Donovan, the good news of resurrection is not simply objective. It also forms and nurtures within believers a subjective moral reality that conforms to it. Because Jesus has been raised, the Spirit is poured out, and the Spirit makes God’s moral reality present to us and authoritative for us. It evokes our free response to it.

This means the redeemed creation does not merely confront us with its objective reality. Instead, by the Spirit, it includes us and enables our genuine participation in it. In Christ, by the Spirit, human beings assume their proper place within the order of God, the place of dominion given to Adam. This is a dominion marked not only by sharing in the authority of Christ, but also by sharing in the salvific concern of Christ for the true being of all God’s creation.

This brief overview does not do justice to O’Donovan’s book since it fails to capture either the subtlety or the cogency of his argument. It also omits O’Donovan’s thoughtful engagement of other theologians, and his perceptive commentary on matters such as church discipline and the moral significance of baptism. Suffice it to say that it is an outstanding book, an account of the Christian life that evokes both joy and discipline. It is, and is destined to remain, a book from which subsequent attempts to form an evangelical ethic will learn and a standard by which they will be judged.

Concrete Commands

Donald Bloesch, of Dubuque Theological Seminary, has made genuine and significant contributions to evangelical thought. But Freedom for Obedience does not live up to the level of his previous work. Bloesch describes his ethical position as “evangelical contextualism.”

By that label he owns the claim of Karl Barth that the decisive criterion for an evangelical ethic is the concrete command of God in the moment. Barth deemphasized the moral knowledge available to all persons by virtue of general revelation, as well as the entire idea of broad ethical principles applying to all times and all places.

Such an understanding of ethics is flawed on several counts. Theologically, it construes God’s relation to morality too simply as “Commander.” Morally, it construes discernment too simply as “hearing” and not sufficiently as reflection. But its fundamental flaw is its subjectivism, for how can one test the claim to “hear” the command of God without reflection or discussion with others? One might think and talk about the sorts of things God has commanded in the past, but that is not determinative for Barth’s and Bloesch’s ethical theory. Or one might think and talk about a moral principle, but that, too, is not determinative for Barth’s and Bloesch’s ethics.

Of course, when decision is called for, both Karl Barth and Donald Bloesch are better than their theory, and both attempt to convince their readers on the basis of good reasons..

The ‘Other Side’ Of Arafat

Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker? by Alan Hart (Sidgwick and Jackson, 501 pp.; $21.95, hardcover), reviewed by Roger Malstead, who has been a Christian leader in the Middle East for more than 20 years; and Bob Hitching, director of Reach and Teach ministries and author of two books on the Middle East.

For more than 20 years, Alan Hart has been one of Britain’s leading investigative journalists. His role in “Panorama,” the widely acclaimed BBC political affairs program, cast him as one of the foremost authorities on the Middle East.

Hart’s credentials and skills as a journalist provide the main point of interest in this book. The obvious political statements are definitely not mainstream evangelical in their ethos. However, the book’s compelling style and researched documentation makes it important reading for those who want to approach the subject seriously and develop a well-informed point of view.

Hart’s book is now several years old, having first been published in England before reaching the American market. Yet, because recent developments in the Middle East have given new importance to Arafat and the PLO, the book is a valuable source of a different perspective.

The entire report is the antithesis of the generally accepted notions of both Arafat and the PLO. Arafat is portrayed as a victim rather than a culprit. His rise to power is explained in politically shrewd terms, yet tempered with a perspective that shows him held in almost messianic esteem by the Palestinian populace.

Highly skilled documentation of many of the controversial points of history replaces the emotional propaganda that so often surrounds this subject. Hart traces the PLO’s development from a small group in a Kuwait apartment to a multinational organization.

The real villians of the book are not the Jews, as one might expect, but rather the front-line Arab states and the superpowers. The PLO is portrayed as a blindfolded pawn in a chess game.

Passion For Justice

Perhaps the most disturbing revelation of Hart’s documentary is Arafat himself. If what Hart says is true, Arafat is an intensely sensitive man with a passion only for justice and equity; a man who finds death abhorrent, yet who has lived with bloodshed for over 35 years.

Another surprise is the role of Father Iyad, an Arab Catholic priest, in the Palestinian movement. On more than one occasion Arafat has gone to Iyad for counsel and guidance.

In late 1965, for example, after Arafat and some of the top leadership of the plo were almost killed in Beirut, Father Iyad tells this story:

“On this occasion he did not come to me at the convent.… He told me that his colleagues on the Central Committee [of the PLO] were asking him to give up the military way and that he was refusing to obey their instructions. He said he understood their fears that he would be pushed into becoming a Syrian puppet. But they did not understand him. ‘I will never, never, never become the puppet of any regime.’ … After that he did not speak for some moments. Then he [Arafat] said: ‘Father, I have decided that I must continue with the armed struggle. Will you give me your blessing?’

“I said: ‘Yes’: and I did. I told him the following: ‘God is love and love is justice. You will not be fighting alone.’ He smiled.”

So often the Middle East conflict is seen in terms of Muslim and Jew. Yet this conversation with Father Iyad underlines how a significant group of Christian Palestinians has a passionate allegiance to the liberation struggle.

Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker? is definitely the “other side” of the story concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict. But it is a side worth hearing clearly in the continuing din of the Middle East

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Together, Rabbi James Rudin, national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee, and Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, president of the Holyland Fellowship of Christians and Jews, have been involved in dialogue with evangelical Christians for over 30 years. They have met with evangelical educators from institutions such as Wheaton, Gordon, Ashland, and Trinity. They have talked to local church congregations and Sunday school classes. They have listened to evangelicals talk about Christian theology. And they have described for evangelical ears what contemporary Judaism is like from the inside. But until recently, there was one group they had not met with—representatives of evangelistic organizations that single out Jews as their target audience.

The Christianity Today Institute invited Rabbis Rudin and Eckstein to meet with Michael Rydelnik, Long Island director of Chosen People Ministries and pastor of the Plainview, New York, Olive Tree Congregation; and with Susan Perlman, a missionary with Jews for Jesus.

Such organizations have been the focus of much criticism from both the Jewish and Christian communities. They have been accused of using deceptive and high-pressure techniques; of alienating Jewish people from their families; of turning away from Christianity many more Jews than they convert; of exploiting their own rejection by the Jewish community to raise money in the evangelical community; of presenting an inaccurate and incomplete picture of Judaism to evangelical churches. (Rabbis Eckstein and Rudin in turn have been accused of devoting themselves to “antimissionary activity.”)

These criticisms are difficult to investigate: What seems “deceptive” to some is merely “contextualized communication” to another. And what is “antimissionary activity” to some is “bridge building” and “dialogue” to others.

A meeting seemed to be called for. In addition to the representatives of contemporary mainstream Judaism and evangelistic organizations that focus exclusively on Jews, the CT Institute invited Alan Johnson, professor of biblical studies and ethics at Wheaton College, who has participated in formal evangelical-Jewish dialogues.

Here is a summary of the (often heated) discussion:

Why do Jews object to evangelism?

Rabbi Eckstein offered two major objections:

First, it’s because of the historical baggage we carry around after 2,000 years of Christian witnessing to the Jewish people—it was so “loving” that we were loved to death. Our entire being responds to that one act of proselytizing in 1988 with 2,000 years of history behind us.

Second, survival is the Jewish mandate. There is a clash between the evangelical great commission and the Jews’ primary raison d’être. The Great Commission is to preach the gospel. The “Jewish great commission,” especially after the Holocaust, is survival. Philosophers today talk about survival being the 614th commandment (traditionally there were 613).

So, anyone or anything that will enhance the Jewish raison d’être will be welcome. And anyone or anything that detracts from this primary Jewish objective will be fought.

After the meeting, Perlman pointed out that Jews who believe in Jesus are indeed committed to the survival of the Jewish people. “If we weren’t,” she said, “I would not call attention to the fact that we are Jews. I was born a Jew and I’ll die a Jew, but that does not preclude my being a Christian as well.”

Can one be both a Jew and a Christian?

In the Jewish community, there is a difference of opinion on this: Eckstein cited the highly publicized Brother Daniel case from the early fifties in which a Jewish person not only accepted Christianity but became a brother. Brother Daniel then went to Israel and applied for automatic citizenship on the basis of the Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to any returning Jew. The rabbinic courts said this person remains a Jew. But the political courts said no, he has accepted something quite distinct from Judaism. This person may have been born into this community, but he has given up the rights, privileges, responsibilities, and obligations of this community by accepting another system. Therefore, he has to live by that system.

“But it goes even further on a gut level,” said Eckstein. “It’s an act of betrayal, an act of treason to the people. When a Jew accepts Jesus, he has accepted idolatry. And when that person then comes back into the Jewish community—not just going off quietly into some church, but having it as his or her life mission to come back into the Jewish community to try to teach them to accept a system that for Jews is idolatry (for Gentiles it’s not)—that is a different story.”

When Eckstein referred to Rydelnik and Perlman as “two former Jews,” both responded vociferously. But Rudin also followed the “Brother Daniel thesis.” “I consider them former Jews and not members of the authentic Jewish community,” he said.

Rydelnik looked to another source for defining whether or not he is a Jew:

I respect the Israeli courts. However, I don’t think they are the last word on this issue. The New Testament says that a Jew who believes in Jesus is still a Jew: Paul wrote that he was a Jew. The New Testament says I’m a Jew.

And so does my heritage. The suffering in my family was as Jews. My mother believed in Jesus and still went to the concentration camp. The Nazis did not make the distinction.

Now, I identify as a Jew: this is what my heritage is, what my destiny is, and what my Messiah teaches.

Rydelnik tried out a syllogism: If Jewishness is peoplehood; and if “a Jew remains a Jew” even when he is nonobservant; and if Christianity is an act of faith, “something people must decide for themselves”; and if “Jewishness is not an act of faith,” but “something we’re born into in which we have no choice”; then, “when we make a faith decision to accept Jesus, it does not affect our Jewishness, we’re still part of that people.”

The response was sharp. Eckstein said Rydelnik was trying to define peoplehood as opposed to religion, something that violated Jewish self-definition.

And Rudin accused Rydelnik of “using Christian terminology to refute Rabbi Ecksteir.” To talk about Jews who “abandon the Jewish religion” doesn’t make sense in Judaism, said Rudin. “To talk about Jews as abandoning the Jewish religion or saying they’re unchurched, or they are not an observing Jew—this is using Christian categories. We’re not a confessional group,” said Rudin, as he brought the discussion back to the mandate for survival: “Is it good or bad for the Jews? It’s clear to me, after nearly 2,000 years of Christian attempts to move Jews into the Christian community, that proselytizing is obviously bad for the Jews.”

Do Hebrew Christian groups use unethical techniques?

Both rabbis expressed strong reservations about certain evangelistic approaches and their results:

• Undermining relationship with family or religious institutions. Rudin recounted the story of a University of Illinois student who was subjected to severe mental distress because Christian evangelists told him his mother was going to hell and that he should break ties with her.

Rydelnik affirmed his ministry’s efforts to encourage people to maintain family ties. And Perlman stated her own experience—that the labeling by Jewish leaders of groups like Jews for Jesus as “cults” creates an atmosphere in the Jewish community that immediately produces family problems. Perlman continued: “Over a period of time, when that person has continued in devotion to their family, there still may be great disagreement over whether Jesus is or is not the Messiah, but the family has healed, and the relationship goes on.”

• Advertising Hebrew Christian congregations under the “Jewish” heading in the classified ads. This practice continues in Chicago where the headings read: “Jewish, Conservative; Jewish, Messianic; Jewish, Orthodox; Jewish, Reformed.”

• Distributing “Jewish art calendars with prophecies of Messiah.” Rydelnik’s ministry advertises a Jewish art calendar complete with dates for the various Jewish holidays and the beginning and ending of each weekly Sabbath. Rudin objects. This kind of calendar is essentially Jewish (a label he won’t apply to Rydelnik’s group). Thus, for Hebrew Christians to advertise it seems “deceptive.”

Of course, Rydelnik says he is fully Jewish and has a right to use a Jewish liturgical calendar. In addition, he makes it clear to whoever calls in response to the ad that his organization believes that Jesus is the Messiah. “Do you still want the calendar?” he asks. The sign outside his congregation also makes it clear that his group believes in Jesus. “We’re very up-front,” he says.

• Simultaneously claiming to be the evangelistic arm of the church and claiming to be Jews. In a Jews for Jesus “confidential report” marked “not to be distributed to non-Christians,” the organization says they are “an arm of the local church” and “primarily evangelists.”

“What’s this about being Jews?” Rudin asked. And why the cloak of secrecy—“confidential report … not to be distributed to non-Christians”?

Perlman explained the “confidential” label: Jews for Jesus has had trouble with Christians sharing with Jewish friends publications that were aimed at evangelicals as if the materials were evangelistic tracts. But there was certainly nothing secret about a report of which 250,000 copies had been printed. And she explained that calling the organization “fundamentalist evangelical” and “Jewish” at the same time posed no problem for her. She herself belongs to both a messianic congregation (that worships on Friday nights) and a Conservative Baptist church (that worships on Sunday mornings). She is comfortable in both places.

Do evangelicals get an incomplete picture of Judaism from Hebrew Christians?

How would evangelicals feel, Eckstein asked, if an ex-evangelical who turned Mormon went about explaining evangelical Christianity to Mormons, allowing Mormons to derive their view of Christianity from someone who rejects the traditional mainstream approach of the Christian community. He compared this with Messianic Jewish groups talking to evangelical churches about Judaism. Rudin offered another analogy:

You can talk to divorced people about marriage, but that doesn’t give you a complete picture of marriage. You talk to other people: those who have never married, those who are currently married, and those who are divorced.

So to talk to Jews for Jesus or Chosen People Ministries as if they are the only experts about Jews does not exhaust authentic knowledge. They really don’t present a full and very serious picture, in the sense of people who are committed to the continuity of the Jewish people.

Is it valid to target missions at Jews?

“I have no problem with someone who holds the Great Commission, who welcomes all those who wish voluntarily to come,” says Rudin. “What I object to is people who make their life’s work campaigning as Jews to bring specifically Jews to the Christian belief system. It is as if Jews were two-dimensional cardboard cutouts whose only role is to be a candidate for conversion. That doesn’t exhaust Jewish life.”

Johnson responded by noting the long tradition in Christian missions of focusing on specific ethnic and cultural groups in the proclamation of the gospel: for example, mission organizations that focus on Chinese or Slavic peoples. “It isn’t just the Jews who are ‘targeted’,” said Johnson. He continued:

Because of ethnicity and other dimensions, it seems perfectly legitimate from the Christian standpoint to focus on a particular group’s way of understanding truth.

It has to do with communication of the message. And communication has to be contextually oriented. We learn by the paradigm of the New Testament itself. Each of the four Gospels has a different ethnic contextualization. And as the gospel went out of the Palestinian Jewish culture into other parts of the world, certain kinds of terminology were dropped because they did not have any coinage in those communities.

Rydelnik also pointed to the New Testament: “Paul rejects unethical means, but he does not reject contextualization. He says that to the Jew he became as a Jew that he might win Jews.”

Is the alienation of many Jews reason to abandon targeted missions?

Both Rudin and Eckstein said they believed that many more Jews are alienated permanently by Hebrew Christian missions than are won. The implication: such missions are ineffective and ought to be abandoned.

But Johnson pointed to the history of Christian mission: How Adoniram Judson went seven years without a convert in Burma, yet his sending agency continued support. Johnson said that in the evangelical community, even if it could be shown that there are diminishing returns from Hebrew Christian evangelistic organizations, many would continue to support a witness to this segment of the population.

“The fact that the message alienates is not something that is foreign to the New Testament,” said Rydelnik. “Paul’s message probably alienated many more than it won.”

Rydelnik felt that in asking Hebrew Christian organizations (with their allegedly offensive techniques) to desist in order to improve Christian-Jewish relations, that one was really asking for a Christian witness that didn’t communicate at all.

At the end of the day’s discussion, Alan Johnson concluded:

I would like to say to the more mainline evangelical constituency that we should continue to support the efforts of Hebrew Christian groups such as are represented here, because we believe they are theologically compatible with our understanding of Christianity. And we base that compatibility on the parallels we find in the New Testament.

But we know there is a long history that has intervened between New Testament times and the present that we cannot ignore. We nevertheless get our authoritative base on the paradigms of the New Testament itself, where we find wholly Jewish churches, as well as mixed congregations of Jews and Gentiles, and wholly gentile churches. And, they were seen as being compatible and mutually edifying.

At the same time, I would emphasize that we cannot as non-Jewish believers in Jesus be insensitive to the alleged abuses that such groups may be accused of within the Jewish communities that do not believe in Jesus.

How should Christians witness to Jews?

Rudin discussed various terms: witness, proselytize, proclamation, mission, conversion, teshua (turning). Witness was seen to be a positive word (as was teshua). Proselytize was clearly negative (as was mission). Asked about proclamation, Rudin responded:

You can proclaim all you want, but you have to make us jealous. So far in my life of over a half-century, I haven’t seen much in Christian life to make me jealous to be one.

We live in a society where words have been distorted and basically good words have been abused. Instead, you judge by deeds, by actions, and by the quality of life. When I look at an evangelical family in my apartment house, I am very proud that they’re my neighbors. Their quality of life, their exemplary prayer life, the care with which they are raising their children to certain moral values—that to me is witnessing; that I applaud.

“It’s okay for Christians to witness,” said Eckstein. “The question is how it’s done.”

Eckstein went on to discuss “some of those ways in which Christians can sensitively share with the Jewish people while affirming, not compromising, their Christian identity in the process”:

First, through dialogue and through building the trusting relationship which dialogue enhances.

Second, sharing with unconditional love. Do not just love Jewish people because they can potentially become Christians or in order that they become Christians, but demonstrate genuine unconditional love. Love us as we want and need to be loved, not as you selfishly want to love us.

Finally be a blessing unto us as Genesis 12:3 urges, not just by preaching and talking about blessing, but by being a blessing. And let’s agree to leave it up to God to bring about any conversions.

Marvin R. Wilson

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Anti-Semitism and the church—and how they grew.

From the biblical period to the present, it is difficult to find a single century in which the Christian church has not in some significant way contributed to the anguish of the Jewish people. Of course, Jesus and his followers and the believers of the earliest church found their identity as part of Judaism. But by the middle of the second century C.E., the church defined itself not only apart from Judaism, but as having taken its place. The history of Christian contempt for Jews and Judaism is not intelligible without a survey of the factors that contributed to this radical shift of identity.

First, there were theological differences centering on the teachings of Jesus, and particularly on the question of his messiahship. By presenting himself as a “new Torah,” Jesus did not meet the expectation of the masses. For them he did not embody or represent the hope of Israel. The land yet writhed under Roman oppression.

Second, the church was successful in reaching out to Gentiles, which led to the landmark ruling of the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15). That decision, about the year 49, released gentile converts from the necessity of circumcision and adherence to the Mosaic law. By championing the cause of gentile freedom from Jewish rituals and regulations, Paul and the apostolic leaders had opened a door that allowed for a rapid transition to a reconstituted community. This created a new challenge as Jews and Gentiles had immediate difficulty learning to live harmoniously within the same body. The move from worship on the Sabbath to the Lord’s Day is but one important example of change the church faced at this time.

Third, the persecution of Jewish believers was a factor in the split. The growing antagonism also resulted in an effort to root out from the synagogue all minim (“heretics”). All who deviated—both Jews and Jewish Christians—from Pharisaic norms were no longer welcome within the community. It was an attempt to enforce a particular definition of Jewish purity with the thought of preservation and survival.

Fourth, in two Jewish revolts against Rome (66–73 and 132–135), Jewish Christians refused to fight, compromising their allegiance to the Jewish community and their identity with the Jewish state. On the other hand, the Jewish support of the messianic claimant, Bar Kokhba, nailed shut the door of lingering hope that Jewish Christians had for a change in the majority’s convictions. Further, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the disappearance of all major sects but the Pharisees, forced a reformulation of Judaism. At Yavne, through the work of the Pharisees, a new Judaism gradually emerged. Rabbinic Judaism, as it came to be called, was a separate religion from Christianity, which considered all Jewish Christians personae non gratae in the synagogue.

Thus, what had begun as an intrafamily dispute developed into a permanent breach—in the words of Otto Piper, “a rivalry between the religions of the synagogue and of the church.”

The “New Israel” Emerges

Paul’s warning to gentile believers about pride (Rom. 11:17–24) went unheeded. The church had become overwhelmingly composed of Gentiles. So they reasoned, as newly ingrafted branches, that there was no more need for the support of the root (Israel). What presumption! At first, the Gentiles were but a rejected wild olive branch allowed by God’s mercy to be grafted into the believing family of Abraham. But in the second, third, and fourth centuries a new spirit of arrogance and supersessionism had arisen. Paul had insisted that God did not reject his people, for “God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable” (Rom. 11:29). Yet Gentiles claimed to have replaced Israel. As the “new” Israel, the gentile church spiritually expropriated what had belonged to Israel. Though some of this spiritualizing interpretation begins in certain passages of the New Testament, it becomes fully developed in the writings of early church fathers.

At first the church was a remnant within Israel, participating in new-covenant life inside of a renewed “Israel of God.” Of this Jewish haburah (religious brotherhood), Gentiles had no part. For when the church began, Gentiles were described as those “who do not know God” (1 Thess. 4:5). But now, those formerly outside of the covenant had displaced the physical sons of Abraham who had given them spiritual birth. This displacement resulted in many institutions and concepts of Israel being de-Judaized or Hellenized by the gentile church. In his Dialogue With Trypho, a Jew, the apologist Justin Martyr stressed that what was of old and belonged to Israel—including the Jewish Scriptures—was now the property of Christians. They are “not yours but ours,” stated Justin emphatically.

The tearing away from Jewish roots resulted in the church defining itself largely in non-Jewish terminology. The word “Christianity,” derived from Christos, a Greek rendering of the Hebrew mashiach or “Messiah,” is representative of this process. Dom Gregory Dix has called attention to some of the other, significant changes: “‘The Living God’ became ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus’ and ultimately ‘God the Father.’ ‘The Messiah Jeshua’ became ‘Jesus Christ the Son of God’ and, ultimately, ‘God the Son.’ The ‘New-Covenant-life’ became ‘the Spirit’ and ‘the Paraclete’ and, ultimately, ‘God the Holy Ghost.’ The ‘New Covenant’ became ‘the Atonement.’ ‘The Nazarenes’ became ‘the Christians.’ The ‘Scriptures’ became ‘the Old Testament.’ The ‘Israel of God’ became ‘the Holy Church.’ “In addition, the memorial feast of the Last Supper came to be known as the “Eucharist.”

Furthermore, the church came to refer to the Scriptures with a new set of terms: “The Torah” became “the Pentateuch,” “Tehillim” (Psalms) became “the Psalter,” and Greek names such as “Genesis” and “Exodus” gradually replaced their Hebrew counterparts. The origin and development of the word “Bible” is also Greek.

The apostle Paul spent much of his life in the Hellenistic world where the majority of Jews were dispersed. But he had considerable misgivings about those whose philosophy centered solely on the wisdom of the Greek world. Accordingly, he expounded to the Corinthians what he found as a new and better world view. To know “Christ crucified,” argued Paul to both Jews and Greeks, was to know “the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:18–25). Yet, by the middle of the second century, Christianity had accepted and employed Greek philosophy. As the “new” Israel sought to gain a hearing for the gospel message among Gentiles, the church moved, as it were, further from Mount Sinai and closer to Mars Hill.

Justin Martyr had been influenced by Platonic thought before his conversion. After he became a Christian, Justin carried many of Plato’s ideas into his teaching. As the Hebrew Scriptures were used to bring Jews to Christ, Justin used Platonic thought to reach Greeks. In the following century, Clement and others from Alexandria placed even greater emphasis upon reading the Bible with Platonic eyes. One result was that third-century Christians began to view the physical world of flesh and matter as evil. The perpetuation of this view throughout the centuries would have dire consequences for the church’s understanding of salvation, spirituality, and marriage and the family.

From De-Judaizing To Anti-Judaism

Christian hostility to Judaism has usually brought in its wake hostility to Jews. The two are so intimately connected they are often inseparable. As Stuart Rosenberg has perceptively observed, “Anti-semitism and anti-Judaism, history teaches, feed upon each other; they are twin phenomena.” The actual term anti-Semitism, however, was not introduced until 1879, by Wilhelm Marr, a German political agitator. At that time it designated anti-Jewish campaigns in Europe. Soon, however, it came to be applied to the hostility and hatred directed toward Jews since before the Christian era.

The topic of anti-Semitism is never far from the collective conscience of world Jewry. In today’s church, however, the story of animosity, enmity, and strife directed by Christians toward Jews remains generally untold. Perhaps this is the case because the history of the church is about as long as the history of the evils directed toward Jews—if not in the overt acts of Christians, certainly in their guilty silence.

Portions of the New Testament and other early Christian literature contain striking anti-Jewish rhetoric. It is crucial, however, to make an important distinction about these polemical outbursts against Jews and Judaism. As Richard Longenecker has written, in the New Testament the polemic against the Jews was “an intrafamily device used to win Jews to the Christian faith, in the second century it became anti-Semitic and used to win Gentiles.” In the first case it was directed mainly by Jews against Jews, and in the second mainly by Gentiles against Jews.

The attacks in the New Testament sound harsh, for these were Jews speaking to other Jews about very visceral and revolutionary issues. Traditional Jews did not believe that the Messiah had come. The followers of the Nazarene did. Hence, each group fired bitter accusations against the other. In Matthew 23 Jesus is roundly critical of the Pharisees; but he, himself, was likely representative of the same Jewish sect. He calls them “hypocrites,” “blind guides,” “blind fools,” and “snakes,” and compares them to “whitewashed tombs.” In another context Jesus rebukes his fellow Jews by saying, “You belong to your father, the devil” (John 8:44). Paul writes to the Thessalonians about “the Jews” who “drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to all men” (1 Thess. 2:15). John writes to the church at Smyrna about Jews who are “a synagogue of Satan” (Rev. 2:9).

It is one thing to read this inflammatory language in the context of an intramural Jewish debate. It is something else, however, to take this stinging rhetoric—as the church tragically has done over the centuries—and use it to promote the condemnation of Jews and the negating of all that is Jewish. Sadly, this latter type of anti-Judaism is prevalent in the gentile Christian writings of the early church fathers.

The Early Fathers: Blaming The Victims

By the middle of the second century, the writings of the church fathers reveal considerable racial antagonism between gentile Christians and Jews. The Letter of Barnabas and the works of Ignatius of Antioch and Justin Martyr are particularly worthy of note.

The posture of the church was decisively set against the synagogue. Whereas one gentile nation after another had responded positively to the Christian missionary outreach, the synagogue continued to cling stubbornly to its ancestral faith. This left the church increasingly frustrated and embittered. Sermons, dialogues, diatribes, and polemics became the order of the day. The church sought to “conquer” its opponent by seeking every possible evidence to demonstrate that Judaism was a dead and legalistic faith.

The gentile church hastened to employ the ideological leverage it got from the two thwarted Jewish revolts. The overthrow of the Jewish nation—especially the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the temple by gentile armies—was seen as divine chastisem*nt, proof that God had rejected his one chosen people. The crushing defeat of the nation provided ammunition for apologists who now insisted the church was the authentic Israel of God.

The death, exile, or slavery of thousands of Jews allowed for further arguments against Judaism. In the Roman Empire, Judaism lost its status as a religio licita, a legal exception to the cult of emperor worship. No Jew was allowed to come near the city of Jerusalem. The Pax Romana would not be denied. Jews were now condemned to wander among the “Christian” nations, those new inheritors of the covenant promises.

The sack of Jerusalem was also viewed by the church as punishment of Jews for the crime of crucifying Jesus. Jewish suffering and ostracism were attributed to the ignorance and apostasy of a reprobate people who had put to death the Christ. The theme of “Christ-killer” is accordingly now picked up in the writings of church fathers. Let us note two examples, Justin Martyr and Origen.

Justin was a converted gentile philosopher who died a martyr in Rome. Justin’s second-century Dialogue With Trypho, a Jew represents, in Pinchas Lapide’s words, “the prototypical contrast of the Christian protagonist triumphant and the nervous Jew on the defensive.” Justin argues his case by stating that Jews are separated from other nations and “justly suffer.” Justin hammers in his point by focusing on the fact that Jewish cities are “burned with fire” and Jews are “desolate,” forbidden to go up to Jerusalem “for you have slain the Just One, and His prophets before Him; and now you reject those who hope in Him.…”

In a similar vein, Origen in the third century wrote, “And these calamities [the Jews] have suffered, because they were a most wicked nation, which, although guilty of many other sins, yet has been punished so severely for none, as for those that were committed against our Jesus.” Again, in clear terms, the suffering of the Jewish people is directly related to their “sin” of rejecting Jesus.

Furthermore, the Fathers taught that the unfaithfulness of the Jewish people resulted in a collective guilt that made them subject to the permanent curse of God. Accordingly, church fathers from the time of Jerome and Augustine (late fourth century) applied the lesson of the barren fig tree (Matt. 21:18–22) to the Jewish people. Jesus had said, “May you never bear fruit again.” Thus the church argued that Jews were a people eternally “cursed” by God. All blessings throughout Scripture earlier ascribed to Israel, the church now claimed for itself. All curses, however, it left for the Jews.

Allegory To The Rescue

The early Fathers had to solve the problem of what to do with the Old Testament. Their anti-Judaic stance forced them to view the Jewish Scriptures with its strange laws and customs as offensive at worst and little more than antiquated at best. In addition, the church had taken the position that it had replaced Israel. No longer a remnant within Israel, it had become a separate gentile body. Accordingly, it proudly bore the new role of adversary to the parent that had given it birth. For the church, therefore, to admit any real connection with the Old Testament as the teacher that prepared the way for the gospel would be to grant a measure of legitimacy and historical validity to the Jewish people. The church was caught in a bind.

One solution was offered by Marcion, a wealthy, second-century Christian shipowner from Sinope (in what is now northern Turkey), who came to Rome. Marcion appears to have been influenced by the dualistic teachings of Gnosticism. He was violently opposed to anything Jewish and argued that the Old Testament should be removed from the canon of the church. Although Marcion’s solution generally reflected the anti-Judaic attitude of the second-century church, the church could not totally cut itself off from the Jewish Scriptures. These Scriptures provided the church with its raison d’être. The church had superseded Israel, and the Old Testament was the descriptive document that defined the inheritance to which this “new” Israel laid claim. Furthermore, to eliminate the Old Testament would remove from the church a major apologetic tool in its controversy with Judaism. In order to support the messianic claims of Jesus, the church adduced before its Jewish opponents hundreds of Old Testament prophetic texts. So the church needed to save the Old Testament and, accordingly, rejected Marcion’s extreme position.

The church fathers, however, found their solution in allegory. This way the Old Testament could be made a “Christian” document. Through their efforts to spiritualize, typologize, and Christologize the text, the early fathers were able to find abundant Christian meaning in the Old Testament. Christ, or New Testament thought, was read into, rather than out of, the biblical text in some of the most obscure places. Accordingly, Irenaeus, Origen, Augustine, and others developed a system of allegorical exegesis that had the disastrous effect of wrenching the biblical text from its plain historical meaning.

Transferring the Jewish Scriptures to the “new” Israel meant clothing them in Christian dress. For example, the sacrifices of the Old Testament became bread and wine; the 12 bells on the priest’s robe signified the 12 disciples. In early Christian allegory, different levels of meaning may be distinguished, such as moral, spiritual, and eschatological. But the Christological meaning is especially common. For example, in patristic hermeneutics the scarlet cord of Rahab represents salvation through Christ’s blood; and in the account of the Flood (Gen. 6–8), Noah symbolized Christ, and the ark, the church.

The history of biblical interpretation proves that at best allegorical exegesis is both suspect and risky. (During the Reformation, Luther denounced the allegories of Origen, and called allegory “the scum on Scripture,” “a monkey-game” and a “nose of wax,” that is, something that can be bent any way desired.) The exegetical integrity of the text is surrendered to the wasteland of subjectivity. The authorial intent of the passage stands in jeopardy of being compromised or entirely lost.

But vapidity of meaning may not be the only loss sustained by a hermeneutic that primarily spiritualizes the text. There may be implications for the issue of anti-Semitism as well. In this connection, Harold O. J. Brown has observed 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.” Brown’s point that there is a tendency in the church—especially since Augustine (c. 400)—to amillennialism, accompanied by an increasing disdain for Jewish people, is worth serious consideration.

By Marvin R. Wilson.

From a non-Jewish perspective, it has been often assumed that the catastrophic fall of Jerusalem and the miserable suffering of the Jewish people spoke in the most dramatic way not only about the identity of God’s elect, but especially about the vindication of Christian claims made for Jesus. However, as G. W. H. Lampe correctly observes, for Gentiles and Jewish Christians “the decisive event which vindicated Jesus as the Christ, the Lord, the Son of God, was not the destruction of his enemies but his resurrection from the dead.”

Most of the Christian literature throughout the second and third centuries reveals more of the same: a general ridicule and contempt for Jews and Judaism. For example, in the Epistle to Diognetus, an exposition of gentile Christianity to Gentiles, the writer calls attention to the Jews’ “mutilation of the flesh as a proof of election, as if they were, for this reason, especially beloved of God.” He also cites their “general silliness and deceit and fussiness and pride.” In addition, the works of Cyprian, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and Irenaeus are among those of special note.

In the fourth century, when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire, Jews experienced a further wave of discrimination and persecution. Many of their legal rights were lost. Jews were not permitted to dwell in Jerusalem. They were also forbidden to seek converts. In 339 it was considered a criminal offense to convert to Judaism. Several decades following this, the Synod of Laodicea ruled against Christians feasting with Jews, classifying those who did so as heretics. Around 380, Ambrose, bishop of Milan, praised the burning of a synagogue as an act pleasing to God.

Before the end of the century, John, a presbyter in Antioch, unleashed a series of eight Homilies against the Jews. Because of his eloquence, John became dubbed chrysostom, the “goldenmouthed.” The sermons of Chrysostom were primarily intended to keep Gentiles from being drawn to Jewish worship and law. He vehemently and irrationally attacked Jews. In his homilies, Chrysostom—like many of the Fathers before him—emphasized that because “the Jews” killed Christ, God has rejected them, destroying Jerusalem to display his disfavor. But in his First Discourse, his choice of anti-Judaic rhetoric is utterly crude and thoroughly offensive—and all the more so coming from the lips of a presbyter from Antioch, where believers first bore the name “Christian” (Acts 11:26). A selected sample from this most judaeophobic Father reads:

Many, I know, respect the Jews and think that their present way of life is a venerable one. This is why I hasten to uproot and tear out this deadly opinion … the synagogue is not only a brothel and a theatre; it also is a den of robbers and a lodging for wild beasts … when God forsakes a people, what hope of salvation is left? When God forsakes a place, that place becomes the dwelling of demons.… The Jews live for their bellies, they gape for the things of this world, their condition is no better than that of pigs or goats because of their wanton ways and excessive gluttony. They know but one thing: to fill their bellies and be drunk.

Throughout the centuries such vilifying of the Jewish people has not been confined to sermons like that of Chrysostom. It has also been perpetuated through shameful acts of hatred by confessing members of the Christian community—so much as to make the gospel story all the more incredible to Jewish ears. Little wonder that the rabbis in the talmudic period sometimes used a sarcastic pun to refer to the gospel. For Jews, the “Gospel” (Greek, euangelion) became the “wicked scroll” (Hebrew, aven gilyon).

“Christ Killers” And “Sucklers Of Sows”

In the Middle Ages, Jews were largely excluded from Christian culture. Jews sought to avoid social, economic, and ecclesiastical pressures by living in secluded quarters of their cities. The Jewish people were considered useful for one main purpose: money lending. This isolation of Jews from the larger society led Christians to accuse Jews of being pariahs. Stripped of many personal liberties, and victimized by an elitist “Christian” culture, Jews were required to wear a distinctive hat or patch sewn on their clothing. The very idea of “hebraic” was commonly equated with “satanic.”

Jews experienced a barrage of accusations: They were said to have a peculiar smell, in contrast to the “odor of sanctity.” They were held responsible for many evils, the “Christ-killer” charge still prominent. They were called desecraters of the Host, allegedly entering churches and piercing the holy wafer out of which the “real blood” of Jesus flowed. They were accused of murdering Christian infants in order to use their blood (instead of wine) at the Passover Seder. They were blamed for poisoning wells and thus causing the Black Plague that killed one-third of Europe. They were also said to be sucklers of sows. Jewish art from this period depicts the Jew as humbled and downcast, rather than proud and upright.

The church launched the First Crusade in 1096. Urban II called for soldiers of Christ to liberate the Holy Land from the Moslem invaders. However, on the way, the “infidel” Jews suffered gravely at the hands of the Crusaders. Thousands of Jews who had refused baptism were murdered in the streets. Numerous mass suicides occurred. Synagogues were torched. But with all this, Jews steadfastly refused most attempts at conversion.

As the Middle Ages drew to a close, Jews experienced additional indignities and forms of persecution. During the thirteenth century, holy books were seized, and burned by cartloads. In Spain, a church council ruled that if a Jew tried to convert a Christian he was to be killed and his property taken. Jews were forbidden to eat with or talk to Christians. They became homeless wanderers, expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306, and subsequently from cities in Spain, Germany, and Austria.

The Inquisition and expulsion of 1492 resulted in thousands of torturings, burnings at the stake, and forced conversions. Jews were ordered to leave Spain or face death. Many Jews converted in public, but remained Jews in private. These Jews were known as Marranos. More than 150,000 others fled Spain, but were not allowed to settle in western Europe. Eventually, these refugees made their way to North Africa, Morocco, and eastern Mediterranean lands.

Pogroms And Propaganda

Martin Luther made a decisive break with the Catholic church. The issues central to this Reformer’s thought included faith and works, Scripture and tradition, and the priesthood of believers. But this was not Luther’s complete theological agenda. Toward the start of his influential career he expressed hope of reaching the Jewish community with the gospel. In 1523 he issued a tract, “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew,” which affirmed the Jewish descent of Jesus. Luther pointed out that early missionary outreach to Jews failed because of the “wicked and shameless” life of popes, priests, and scholars rather than evil or obstinacy on the part of Jews.

However well-meaning Luther was at the start, he changed. When Luther saw that Jews failed to respond, he began to turn against them, issuing a series of vitriolic pamphlets. In these bitter diatribes one finds Jews labeled as “venomous,” “thieves,” and “disgusting vermin.” Furthermore, Luther called for Jews to be driven out of the country permanently. Appealing to this and other anti-Semitic doctrine, four centuries later the Nazis carried out Luther’s desire with horrifying success. Fortunately, in recent years, through the efforts of both Jewish and Lutheran leaders, considerable improvement in interfaith relations has been achieved.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century the largest Jewish population in the world (six million) was in czarist Russia. There Jews experienced a series of vicious pogroms that left thousands dead. Others, joining Jews from other European lands, fled to America. There they hoped to find a place, earlier described by George Washington as offering “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Between 1880 and 1910 more than two million Jews immigrated to America through New York City. In 1894 the trumped-up treason trial in France of the Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus drew the problem of anti-Semitism to world attention.

In the twentieth century, the Holocaust stands as an unparalleled embodiment of the horror of anti-Semitism. Nazi propaganda stated that the human race must be “purified” by ridding it of Jews. The “final solution” to the Jewish “problem” was camps, gas chambers, and crematoria. Between 1933, when Hitler came to power, and the end of World War II, some six million Jewish lives were destroyed. It is to the shame of Christians everywhere that the established church did so little to prevent or protest the slaughter.

At present, anti-Semitism persists wherever Jews are found. Jews of Russia and France have been especially oppressed. In European countries and in the United States, recent anti-Jewish incidents have included synagogue smearings and bombings, desecration of gravestones, vicious graffiti, Nazi pamphlets, and grotesque Jewish stereotypes in the press. At other times, the so-called polite variety of anti-Semitism is found, namely discrimination and/or antipathy displayed toward Jews in the social, educational, and economic realms. Jews are still unofficially shunned by admissions committees at some private schools and by membership committees of exclusive clubs.

We have covered all too briefly nearly two millennia of the history of contempt. But, in conclusion, it must be stressed that the Holocaust did not happen in a vacuum. Though it was devised in a country with an enviable reputation for brilliant culture and intellectual sophistication, the seeds of anti-Semitism had been planted much earlier. The Holocaust represents the tragic culmination of anti-Jewish attitudes and practices that had been allowed to manifest themselves—largely unchecked—in or nearby the church for nearly two thousand years. Perhaps the most important reason the Holocaust happened is that the church had forgotten its Jewish roots.

Marvin R. Wilson is Ockenga professor of biblical studies at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith, to be copublished by William B. Eerdmans and the Center for Judaic-Christian Studies.

- More fromMarvin R. Wilson

David A. Rausch

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Christian views of Judaism are changing.

For Christians and Jews whose perceptions of one another are drawn from stereotype and caricature rather than actual interaction, three events made June 1987 a significant month.

The Reverend Bailey Smith, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, was being publicly criticized once again. Smith had gained notoriety for his statement, “God Almighty doesn’t hear the prayer of a Jew,” but was later cited as an example of a repentant fundamentalist when he met with Jewish leaders and traveled to Israel as an act of reconciliation. Now the itinerant evangelist and member of the board of directors of the bankrupt PTL ministry told a conference of Southern Baptist evangelists in St. Louis that “unless [the Jewish people] repent and get born again, they don’t have a prayer!”

During the same month the 199th General Assembly of the 3.1 million-member Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) passed a controversial paper, “A Theological Understanding of the Relationship Between Christians and Jews,” after downgrading its status from “policy statement” to “study paper,” and modifying its statements on the State of Israel. Benjamin Weir, who had just returned from 16 months as a hostage in Lebanon, had made an impassioned plea to scuttle stronger statements in support of Israel. He told the assembly that he would find it “very difficult to live with the paper” if it called Israel the promised land for Jews. The study paper was changed to reject the notion that the State of Israel fulfilled God’s promise to the Jewish people. A small, but vocal group of Hebrew Christian Presbyterian ministers criticized “what the paper did not say.” And Herbert Links, executive director of the Committee on the Christian Approach to Jews, Presbytery of Philadelphia, complained that “the tone of the document advocates dialogue with Jews rather than a sharing of the Gospel.” Links asserted, “In any modern ‘inter-faith dialogue’ there’s always a Jewish hidden agenda which disallows any discussion regarding the real issue—the Messiahship of Jesus. How then can there be honest ‘dialogue’ between Jews and Christians if He is excluded?”

If the Presbyterian statement was embroiled in controversy even as a “study paper,” the 1.7 million-member United Church of Christ’s affirmative resolution made at its June 1987 convention in Cleveland, Ohio, was destined for continued bitter debate. To pass the declaration at their general synod, the resolution committee had to fight strong opposition even to get it on the floor; and floor leaders had to delete references to Israel’s “right to exist.” Surprisingly, the final resolution passed smoothly, expressing that Judaism and Christianity were equally legitimate and asking forgiveness for the historical Christian anti-Semitism that denied Judaism’s validity. While Robert H. Everett, pastor of Emanuel Church, Irvington, New Jersey, insists that the resolution “puts the U.C.C. on record as being in the forefront of Jewish-Christian relations,” he acknowledges that “the U.C.C. has been, on a national denominational level, rather hostile to Israel and we had expected problems in this area.”

Mainline denominations, such as the United Church of Christ, are huge aggregates of members of many different theological persuasions—with many different approaches to Christian-Jewish relations. In the past year, the UCC resolution has been assailed from both sides of the theological spectrum. Conservatives have accused the resolution of “giving away the whole theological store.” Some have gone as far as to state that “for our revelation to be true, Judaism has to be false,” and “the church is definitely the successor institution to Judaism.”

At the other end of the spectrum, liberal challengers insist that any validation of Judaism empowers Zionism, a philosophy they view as “imperialistic” and “racist.” Jewish leaders have been alarmed at anti-Zionist rhetoric from National Council of Churches’ administrators and United Church of Christ opponents that in Jewish eyes verges on hatred. They have taken note of deep pockets of anti-Semitism within liberal and mainline Protestantism, a phenomenon that both liberal and conservative Christian participants in Christian-Jewish dialogue sadly admit.

Evangelicals On The Rise

The strong feelings that surround Christian-Jewish relations do not occur spontaneously or in a vacuum. The Presbyterian paper had been originally presented in 1983; the UCC resolution had been the work of various committees over a three-year period. Bailey Smith had made his original infamous remark in 1980. Christian-Jewish dialogues had entered a new era of rapprochement during the 1960s, and considerable interaction among selected national leaders had taken place in the past two decades.

During those decades, the Jewish leadership, more comfortable with liberal theologians, had to come to grips with the ascent of conservative Christian theology. The rise of political fundamentalism and the emergence of evangelical Jimmy Carter (Newsweek declaring 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical”) led to a surprising number of articles and books on conservative Christianity. A 1976 Gallup poll indicated that approximately 50 percent of all Protestants and 20 percent of all American Catholics claimed to have been “born again.” The 1970s also brought a deeper awareness of the Holocaust and Christian anti-Semitism, as theologians and historians grappled with the moral failure of Christendom. Israel and Zionism were increasingly under attack at the United Nations; and in worldwide perception, the Jewish state was increasingly viewed as a Goliath, rather than a David.

Jewish leaders involved in dialogue were often caught in a revival of liberal-conservative Christian spats. Jews interested in evangelical-Jewish conferences were asked by liberal Christian colleagues: “Why do you want to have relationships with those evangelists and religious bigots?” And some evangelical leaders asked their newfound Jewish friends: “How can you dialogue with those liberals who do not support Israel, despise the Bible and Jewish peoplehood?”

Charles Y. Glock and Rodney Stark’s Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism (1966) was cited by liberals to “prove” that the more conservative a Christian was the more anti-Semitic he or she tended to be. One famed liberal church historian used this study to explain to Jewish readers (alarmed by Jimmy Carter’s overt evangelicalism) that while most evangelicals supported the State of Israel, their support was “puzzling to Jews, because domestically Evangelists have often tended toward anti-Semitism, while mainline and liberal Protestants, not known for anti-Semitism ‘next door,’ often are more ambiguous in their support for Israel.” Jewish readers were not quite sure they wanted to know the evangelicals this liberal historian caricatured:

Evangelicals produce those Miss Americas who tell you over lowcut bathing suits and evening gowns how much they love Jesus. They favor Marabel Morgan, who teaches slavish submission of wives to husbands for Jesus’ sake, in The Total Woman. She gives Evangelical wives counsel on how to dress up in boots and baby doll nighties and to “put out” sexually so that hubby will give many material goodies in return. They are behind what is often called the Jocks for Jesus movement, being almost obsessed with sports.

Within a few years, however, this same church historian observed that evangelical-Jewish relations was “the most significant religious trend in the United States.”

Misunderstanding of evangelicalism persists: The PTL and Swaggart debacles have not helped change the Elmer Gantry stereotype of evangelists. (To the Jewish community, evangelical and evangelist are synonyms.) Jews generally expect tracts, disrespect, dishonesty, and a hard-sell approach from evangelicals: During televised football games, the fans lifting banners inscribed with John 3:16 must be “evangelicals.” And a 1986 Anti-Defamation League survey of evangelical attitudes included Mormons as “evangelicals.” (Nevertheless, this survey showed more positive attitudes toward Jews than a 1966 survey.)

Evangelicals And Jews

As evangelical-Jewish relations have matured through three national dialogues (1975, 1980, and 1984) and numerous local conferences throughout the United States, the seeds of conflict (as well as understanding) present in mainline denominational struggles have also been seen among evangelicals. Evangelical theologian Donald G. Bloesch, of the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary and a participant in the Second National Conference of Evangelicals and Jews, is concerned that both the Presbyterian study paper and the UCC resolution “tend toward universalism and religious relativism.” Ken Myers, an evangelical member of the PCUSA and editor of This World and the newsletter Public Eye, noted that he was “struck by how many assertions of the Westminster Confession are compromised if one accepts the teaching of the new PCUSA statement.” Several evangelical leaders in the Reformed tradition are concerned that Jews will not accept as “good, decent Christians” those who cannot share such universalistic statements.

Off the record, other evangelicals remarked that both the PCUSA and the UCC were honestly trying to deal with the historic anti-Semitism within the church and the problems vexing Christian-Jewish relations. These evangelicals believed the declarations were making grassroots Christians more aware, and one evangelical leader observed that in spite of the problems, the declarations were “a breath of fresh air” in the stagnant denominational atmosphere of anti-Jewish rhetoric.

And yet, most evangelicals involved in dialogue with the Jewish community realize there is a fine line between holding to their beliefs and drifting into a live-and-let-live ecumenical relativism. Evangelicals do not have the luxury of choosing beliefs as their liberal counterparts do. At the same time, evangelicals know little about modern Jews and modern Judaism. Demographically and socially they are often separated from their Jewish neighbors, and they face the daily anti-Semitism, racism, and bigotry propounded by the surrounding culture. They stereotype and caricature the Jewish community as extensively as the Jewish community stereotypes and caricatures them.

The success of the evangelical-Jewish conferences among leaders has been in bringing the two different communities of faith with two different agendas together to share their concerns. Evangelicals often approach dialogue with a theologically oriented agenda, genuinely interested in deepening their knowledge of the Jewish roots of Christian faith: “What do they believe about the Messiah, sin, atonement, redemption, and interpreting the Bible?” Jews, on the other hand, have a this-world, socially oriented agenda: “Let’s talk about human rights, social action, religion and politics, Israel, and prejudice.”

In the national conferences between evangelicals and Jews, both agendas were incorporated with a pleasant broadening effect. In the first national conference, “The Messiah” was the second topic area discussed, while “Responses to Moral Crises and Social Ferment” was the fifth topic. Jews learned that evangelicalism does have a social conscience. Evangelical scholars learned that modern Judaism has an impressive dimension of theological expertise. After coming together with a measure of fear, friendships began to evolve as caricatures began to dissipate. Sensitivity developed during frank and honest discussions, and the great diversity found in both communities led to the exclamation: “Why haven’t we worked together before in these areas of moral concern?” In fact, in a number of conferences, participants had to chuckle at times during vigorous ad hoc discussions when they realized that a Jew and an evangelical were arguing fervently on the same side of an issue, while a Jew and an evangelical on the other side zealously opposed their views.

Most evangelical and Jewish leaders involved in dialogue puzzle over how to reach the grassroots of their communities where significant attitudinal change may occur. For example, most evangelical laypeople (like most clergy) are unaware that Judaism teaches grace and faith; that torah is mistranslated as “law,” and is actually related to the root “to teach”; that the Pharisees were some of the best people of their day and a highly diverse group; that both Jesus and Paul were observant Jews; that when Paul says man is justified by faith and not by works of the law, he is saying nothing foreign to Judaism. Nevertheless, even in Sunday school curricula published by the four major evangelical companies, dichotomies are often drawn between Christianity and Judaism that build a false impression of Judaism. Evangelicalism is just as guilty as other segments of society of “bearing false witness” about Jews and Judaism.

In addition, evangelicals are basically unaware of how Christian teaching has been abused to persecute Jewish people for centuries. Sunday school curricula for the spring quarter of 1988 from the four major publishers include quite a few allusions to “the Jews” killing Jesus. The teacher’s booklets do not mention the danger of forming anti-Jewish attitudes through such teaching; there are no warnings of possibly engendering hatred or stereotypes in the minds of the students.

Richard V. Pierard has recently called into question the perceptions that a nationally known evangelical clergyman has imparted about Jews and Judaism. “Of course, he did not belittle or denigrate Jews in every sermon, but even a single disparaging remark is one too many,” the evangelical historian at Indiana State University stated. “And … on numerous occasions through his rhetoric, choice of words, and even intonation … he has manifested a kind of antipathy to Jews and Jewishness.”

Pierard’s concerns over sermons that portrayed “the wickedness of the Jews,” spread the “Christ-killer” theme, distorted Judaism, and stereotyped modern Jewish people through biblical allusions would unfortunately apply to sermons heard weekly from evangelical pulpits. Even a prominent leader of a Jewish evangelistic organization repeatedly commits such caricature. A number of evangelicals have grave concerns whether progress in relationships between the two communities can really gain ground unless these false beliefs are changed. The question is whether evangelical Christianity must build itself up at the expense of an inaccurate portrayal of Jews and Judaism. Certainly, most evangelicals believe their faith needs no such false foundation, but lack of sensitivity to such portrayals necessitates a major reorientation in evangelical teaching.

Convincing And Converting Jews

More visible, but not necessarily more important than Christian ignorance of Judaism, is the conflict over evangelism. In dialogue, Jews soon found that evangelical leaders deplored any deception in presenting the gospel to Jewish people. Deceitful techniques and lack of respect for potential converts was mourned by evangelical and Jew alike. Evangelicals insisted that undue pressure on the prospective convert was out of order, because only the Holy Spirit could convict and convert. The Christian’s task was to be a faithful “witness.” Jews learned that Christianity at its very core was witness-oriented—the early Christians were evangelistic; in fact, first-century Judaism was evangelistic.

More important, Jews learned that for an evangelical to denounce witness altogether meant ostracism from his or her faith community. This past spring, one periodical sought to have a debate by evangelical theologians over whether one should witness to Jewish people—only to find that those who would disparage evangelism completely were not considered evangelicals. Nevertheless, in the 1970s Billy Graham expressed his concern over the emphasis at Key ‘73 on missions that target Jews alone, stating that he had “never felt called to single out the Jews as Jews nor to single out any other particular groups, cultural, ethnic, or religious” (CT News, March 16, 1973, p. 29). And in 1977, the American Jewish Committee gave this evangelist their first National Interreligious Award, noting that Graham had strengthened “mutual respect and understanding between evangelical and Jewish communities” (CT News, Nov. 18, 1977, p. 49).

Evangelicals, on the other hand, are continually learning the shocking anti-Semitism couched in historic Christian “witness.” From Chrysostom to the Crusaders, from Martin Luther to the Holocaust, “evangelism” and “proselytization” have often been attempts to eradicate Judaism. The Jews’ only escape from Christian persecution throughout the medieval period was to convert to Christianity. In fact, the Nazi regime was the first time in history that conversion could not save the Jew. Thus, when Jewish people meet an evangelical, they expect to be pressured to convert.

Some missionary enterprises to Jewish people have techniques of confrontation and insolence. At the least, Jewish people experience the same irritation during evangelical witness as do most evangelicals when a pair of very knowledgeable and proof text-laden Jehovah’s Witnesses rap on their door. Ironically, Jewish people are often eager to know what an evangelical believes if a friendship is built on mutual respect.

Mainline denominations have had heavy involvement in Jewish evangelism in the past. The Presbyterians, for example, set up many Hebrew Christian churches in the early decades of the twentieth century. However, most Jewish missionary organizations today are supported by evangelicals.

Evangelicals are also involved in modern “messianic synagogues,” to the consternation of the Jewish community. While some Jewish leaders can bring themselves to accept the evangelicals’ need to evangelize, “Hebrew Christian” churches and “messianic synagogues” are perceived as deceptive attempts to convert Jews who would not otherwise become Christians. Indeed, messianic synagogues that turn toward more traditional Judaism are soon out of business, and those converts searching for a more Jewish worship often complain that the messianic synagogue in their area “is just a glorified charismatic service with a few Hebrew words thrown in.” And, unfortunately, many leaders and workers in missionary enterprises to Jews oppose evangelical-Jewish dialogue. They fear such dialogue will damage both the financial support for their ministries and also evangelical good will toward their organizations.

Jews point to the tens of thousands of dollars spent to make one Jewish convert to Christianity. Although such converts are few (and just as many Christians convert to Judaism every year without such solicitation), there is great fear of the annihilation of Judaism through missions aimed solely at Jews. Even the Philadelphia messianic synagogue, Beth Yeshua, that has opposed Moishe Rosen and Jews for Jesus, is intensely opposed by the Jewish community. Nationally, a Jewish leader who would accept Hebrew Christians or Messianic Jews as Jews would soon lose status in the Jewish community.

Still, some Jewish leaders have come to understand that evangelicals cannot be told to cease to evangelize entirely, as many liberal Protestants have done. Even the respected Anglican proponent of Christian-Jewish relations, James Parkes, insisted that Judaism was not an “alternative scheme of salvation to Christianity, but a different kind of religion.” For the most part, Jews have no desire to make modern Christians into nominal Christians, but rather are seeking to eradicate the religious intolerance that has led to Jewish persecution in the past. Rabbi Joshua O. Haberman of the prestigious Washington (D.C.) Hebrew Congregation explains that the Bible is both the Christian’s and the Jew’s “spiritual rock of ages,” the “beacon of moral guidance and salvation” on which evangelical-Jewish relations will continue to grow.

The Erosion Of Christian Zionism

Evangelicals have been recognized in Jewish circles as supporters of the State of Israel. On the grassroots level, the large majority of prophecy-minded premillennialist evangelicals wholeheartedly support the Jewish state and hold the Jewish people of history in awe. But in academic circles and in leadership positions, evangelical support is much more equivocal. They point out that Arab and Palestinian Christians have been exerting pressure for a more balanced viewpoint, and evangelical missionaries in the Middle East have found it necessary to be as firmly supportive of the Arab cause as their more liberal colleagues. The mood at most evangelical seminaries and colleges is currently ambivalent towards the Jewish state, and several evangelical periodicals have totally abandoned a prophetic Christian Zionist stance.

William Sanford LaSor pointed out some of these pressures two decades ago while professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary. In defending Arab rights following the 1967 Six-Day War, LaSor explained that “only one who has lived in the Arab world and has talked intimately with Arabs knows how deep are the wounds caused by the formation of the State of Israel.” He related the extreme difficulty of using the Old Testament with its passages on “Zion” in a Christian service in the Arab world, and stated candidly: “If you ask an Arab Christian what solution he has to offer to the present problem, you will get the same answer you get from a non-Christian Arab: Israel must be effaced, every Jew must be driven into the sea.”

Thus, the issue of Israel has created a deeper division among those involved in Christian-Jewish relations than has evangelism. The few Christian Zionists involved in mainline denominational leadership positions are vehemently opposed, ridiculed, and have been forced from administrative roles. For instance, the Reformed Church in America is reported to have removed the Reverend Isaac Rottenberg from his administrative position in the denomination for his pro-Israel stance. This liberal clergyman until recently headed the National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel. In addition, those Catholic priests who expected the Roman church to recognize Israel during the nation’s fortieth anniversary have been sadly disappointed. Is this anti-Zionism in its various degrees and forms in the church anti-Semitic? Father Ed Flannery responds: “Not necessarily, but almost always … it has become more difficult with time to remain anti-Zionist and non-anti-Semitic, given the mortal threat to Israel’s existence by its Arab enemies.”

Roman Catholics: Fighting Anti-Semitism Inside The Church

At a recent national convention of Christians and Jews, a well-respected Catholic speaker was asked, “Where are the evangelicals in this conference?” He quipped: “That’s all we need … them here passing out their tracts!” If the truth be told, however, many of the anti-Jewish Christian attitudes, portrayals, and cliches were conveyed to the Western world through this leader’s church.

When Pope John XXIII decided to undertake a study of anti-Semitism in the church, conservative leaders in the Vatican immediately opposed the initiative. Although the pope had made it clear to the Curia that the forthcoming Vatican Council II should strive to take a firm stand against the evil of anti-Semitism, the cardinals rejected the first Christian Unity draft proposal because it hinted that the Vatican should grant diplomatic recognition to Israel. (In 1963, Arab diplomats made it clear to the new pope, Paul VI, that any attempt to speak out or act on behalf of the Jews might jeopardize the well-being of the nearly three million Roman Catholics in Arab lands.)

The elimination of the “Christ-killer” theme has posed an even thornier question for Roman Catholic leaders. Meeting in synod on November 20, 1964, the bishops initially agreed upon a strongly worded resolution affirming the hope that Christians “may never again present the Jewish people as one rejected, cursed, or guilty of deicide.” Yet this simple statement failed to gain the necessary votes. Also rejected was the statement that church workers and priests should “not teach anything that could give rise to hatred or contempt of Jews in the hearts of Christians.”

For two decades, more liberal Catholic leaders have been working to elaborate the positive theological perspective of Jews and Judaism missing from Vatican II’s 1965 Nostra Aetate (or Declaration of the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions). In March 1988, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) authorized the publication of Criteria for the Evaluation of Dramatizations of the Passion, which Eugene Fisher, executive secretary of the Secretariat for Catholic-Jewish relations of the NCCB, said sought to eliminate an “unfortunate tendency to set up a dramatic, but unhistorical opposition between Jesus and the Jewish people in depicting the events of Jesus’ ministry and crucifixion.” Edward H. Flannery, the priest who graphically depicted the history of anti-Semitism in Christendom in The Anguish of the Jews, has devoted his life to dispelling such caricatures of Jews and to bringing a more positive Catholic stance toward the State of Israel.

By David A. Rausch.

In the evangelical community, the debate often ensues over prophetic interpretation. “I have yet to see a Reformed amillennialist leader who has come to grips with the reality of the State of Israel,” one respected premillennialist evangelical leader privately contended; “they have the same trouble overcoming their Augustinian interpretation that Catholic leadership often has. Unfortunately, this attitude is transferred to the Jewish people.” Pastor Doug Shearer of the New Hope Christian Fellowship in Sacramento, California, and leader of TAV, a Christian Zionist organization involved heavily in dialogue, yet refusing to compromise its witness, maintains that “premillennialist leaders today are not picking up the gauntlet on Israel” and that they continually “trivialize Zion.”

Shearer further states that “premillennialists are not responding to the moral crises of the day,” with the result that a new postmillennialism is making inroads into the Christian community. These ultra-Reformed “Christian reconstructionists” purport to have definite answers and definite solutions that Shearer believes are dangerous to both Christians and Jews (see CT, Feb. 20, 1987, “Democracy as Heresy,” for a report on this movement). Shearer, like a number of other leaders contacted, believes that such movements, coupled with anti-Israel bias in evangelical academic circles, will change the grassroots support for the Jewish state within decades.

Nowhere is the change becoming more evident than in charismatic and Pentecostal circles. A contingent of Christian Reconstructionists and Reformed amillennialists have become part of Pat Robertson’s CBN University, where a debate now ensues. In Pentecostalism’s fastest-growing denomination, the Assemblies of God, the premillennialist interpretation required of all ordained pastors, as well as the churches’ historic support for Israel, is being eroded. David A. Lewis, a popular Assemblies preacher and teacher involved in dialogue, has recently written:

Dominion theology [Christian reconstructionism] has previously had its greatest influence among non-Charismatics, but has strongly penetrated Charismatic circles and is admittedly determined to take over the Charismatic movement’s theological mode of thinking. Although they have their differences, there is this in common: a theological antisemitism is almost universal in these new doctrinal constructs. This theological antisemitism manifests itself in both contempt for the Jewish people and the idea of replacement (the church takes the place of National Israel. God has no further use for Israel as a nation or people).

Lewis organized the Evangelical Christian Leadership Summit Conference that convened in Tulsa, December 9–12, 1987. His concerns are shared by already beseiged Assemblies leaders on state and national levels.

For their part, Reformed amillennialist evangelicals argue that their theology should be welcome in Christian-Jewish dialogue, and that their sincere opposition to anti-Semitism should not have to lead to theological affirmation of Jewish people or a Jewish state. They feel alienated and spurned in Christian-Jewish dialogue by a basically premillennialist evangelicalism on the one hand, and a universalist mainline ecumenism on the other. “We must be honest that Christianity has superseded Judaism, and the church is now God’s covenant community,” one leader commented; “the Jews are no longer the covenant people of God, and Judaism has no more validity than Islam.”

Grassroots Gains

Although tensions are clearly visible on the national level between Christians and Jews, frank discussions and stronger relationships continue to blossom. On the local level, among Christians and Jews who lack national prominence, some of the greatest gains in understanding and day-to-day friendships are being accomplished: housewives and businesspersons, clergy and teachers. This is as it should be, for unless the grassroots of this nation build bridges of friendship and understanding, unless the millions of Christians and Jews dispel damaging prejudices and caricatures about the other, official pronouncements from leaders accomplish little. In getting to know one another through discussion, Christians and Jews have been able individually to break down incredible barriers.

“Loving your neighbor as yourself” is a Jewish dictum that continued as a Christian dictum because it was commanded and modeled by a very Jewish Jesus. Christians have begun their journey as neighbors often by feeling the pain of the Jewish people through history. Jewish people have responded appreciatively to those who have grappled with the injustice of this history, those who feel pain and regret over what has been done in the name of Christ.

The norm governing relationships between human beings in Judaism and in the teaching of the Jewish Jesus is compassion and love; and one finds that Christians and Jews who have become friends often acknowledge that their interaction became firmly grounded in love and concern. Through mutual respect and a spirit of humility, they gained a budding friendship. The task of reconciliation was so large that emotional and spiritual healing had to take place. The “strangers” became “neighbors” by making themselves vulnerable—vulnerable to misunderstanding; vulnerable to rejection. They agreed to listen to one another; to learn of the other’s tradition and faith.

Because of the history of anti-Semitism and the deep involvement of committed Christians in that history, it is necessary for the Christian to listen, learn, and love the most at the outset. Jews should not be expected to meet the Christian halfway (although, surprisingly, many do).

David A. Rausch is professor of church history and Judaic studies at Ashland College and Theological Seminary, Ashland, Ohio. He has published more than 200 articles on Jewish-Christian relations and has participated in numerous dialogues on the national and local level. His eighth book, Building Bridges: Understanding Jews and Judaism (Moody Press), was released earlier this year. He is also the author (with Carl Hermann Voss) of Protestantism: Its Modern Meaning (Fortress Press).

- More fromDavid A. Rausch