Rather than share too many of my own thoughts today, I want to point in the direction of people with much more substance to offer, and some of the things they have to say about the relationship and history between Christianity and Judaism.
I’m going to just quote from a couple of sources, Marvin Wilson’s Our Father Abraham and Jacques Doukhan’s Israel and the Church. There are many other good sources from which to quote, yet blogging is time-consuming; there will be other days.
The only thing I want to mention is an explanation for why I bother to share these quotes, or even talk about Jewish roots at all. My rationale is deep and multi-faceted, but I’ll try to list a few reasons:
1. We’ve turned the Apostle Paul’s writing into its antithesis. Paul was very much about preserving the Jewishness of the gospel, yet we, for 1900 years, have made his writing into a polemic against those roots. (Which connects to my next point.)
2. We’ve less than 100 years removed from the Holocaust. That tragic event was not random or spontaneous; it was the pinnacle of a long line of Christian theology prime for such (mis)application. For some theologians this was worlds apart from their intentions for the Jewish people; for other theologians that much cannot be said.
3. With the development of the New Perspective on Paul (NT Wright, EP Sanders, James DG Dunn), more and more Christian leaders are coming to their senses. I interpret this as more than academic growth – I see this as an attempt by God to redirect what Rob Bell rightly calls a Church in exile. Speaking of Bell, he and Doug Pagitt have each released books in recent years that have discussed Jewish roots and how selling that rootedness for a Platonic version of the gospel got us where we are today – in exile.
These guys are great, but there’s no way they can write enough to adequately supply the Church on this topic (especially when this focus is secondary and indirect to other points they make in their works). We need multiple, solid sources as we learn all over again what it means to be Christian, grafted into to the people of God.
I have no intention of being an academic source on the matter, but I want to be pastoral in pointing people toward good information.
4. History is important. It’s not that we need to consider history for the sake of preserving our trajectory (as is the case with most traditionalists), but by knowing our history we can learn who we are (corporate narrative), the decisions that brought us here, and whether we want to adopt them all over again or move forward into decisions, mentalities, and theologies that are more historic still.
5. We serve a God who keeps promises. To quote (though very loose paraphrase) something I heard Dr. Wilson say in a lecture: Be careful what you say regarding God’s covenant to Israel. If he can [as some of you think] break His promises to them, then what’s to say He won’t do it to you.
Quotes to consider
Doukhan on Jesus and the Law
Although Jesus, Paul and all early Christians were Jewish, their theology is sometimes treated as if they were not Jews… The teaching of Jesus is clear on the matter. To the multitudes and his disciples he affirmed and recommended faithfulness to Jewish traditions; he even acknowledged the authority of the rabbis of his time: “The scribes and Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it” (Matthew 23.2-3). When Jesus explained that he came not “to abolish the law or the prophets… but to fulfill it” (Matthew 5.17), he did not mean to weaken the value of the law, that is, to say that the law was no longer valid. The Greek word pleroo translated here by “fulfill” means “to make complete.” As attested in the Greek Septuagint, behind this Greek word is the Hebrew word ml’, which means “to fill, to make full, to bring to plentitude.”
- Jacques Doukhan, Israel and the Church
Doukhan on how Jesus was received by his fellow Jews
Yet, Jesus was sentenced to death, traditionally pictured by Christians as a big crowd of Jews shouting, “Crucify him!” How can we explain this sudden shift from love to hatred? How can we reconcile the great popularity of Jesus for so many years and the admiration of the majority of the Jews with this one-day change and this demand for the death sentence? Political opportunism or fickle human changeableness could be a part of the answer. But even if we take these factors into consideration, we still stumble on the testimony of the New Testament, which clearly and unambiguously repeats that only a minority of Jews were involved. And these few men were in fact worried precisely because they were observing that a growing majority of Jewish people was responding positively to Jesus. Each gospel reports the minority viewpoint.
- Doukhan, Israel and the Church
Wilson on the gradual split
But in the second, third, and fourth centuries a new spirit of arrogance and supersessionism had arisen. Paul never anticipated that things would develop this far. He insisted that God did not reject his people, for “God’s gifts and 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.
- Marvin Wilson, Our Father Abraham
Stark on the timeline for the fallout
Jewish Christianity played a central role until much later in the rise of Christianity – that not only was it the Jews of the diaspora who provided the initial basis for church growth during the first and early second centuries, but that Jews continued as a significant source of Christian converts until at least as late as the fourth century.
- Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History
Doukhan on mis-perceptions about the timeline and the actual timeline (separate quotes)
According to some scholars, [good Jewish-Christian relations] changed, however, with the Jewish wars when Christians failed to support the nationalist movement against Rome and, instead of fighting along with their Jewish compatriots, chose to flee to Pella in Perea, which triggered the Jewish rejection. Christians were now seen as traitors and were no longer considered part of the family. This classic interpretation of the consequences of the Jewish revolts overlooks an important consideration: Christians were not the only Jews who did not participate in the wars against the Romans.
The historical fact that Jewish-Christians were still considered full members of the Jewish community until at least the fourth century, and the absence of any substantial evidence of Jewish rejection of Christians, suggests that the decisive factor that separated Jews and Christians is to be found rather in the Christian church. The synagogue did not expel Christians; instead, the church rejected the Jews.
- Doukhan, Israel and the Church
Wilson on early Church Fathers and the incorporation of dualism
Justin Martyr had been influenced by Platonic thought before his conversion. After he became a Christian, Justin brought 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 would place even greater emphasis upon reading the Bible through Platonic eyes. One of the results was that the 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, especially in the understanding of such areas as salvation, spirituality, marriage, and the family.
- Wilson, OFA
Two quotes from Wilson regarding Marcion and Neo-Marcionism today
For nearly two thousand years Christianity has been debtor to the Jewish people for sharing this rich legacy. But it is tragic to realize that many Christians have avoided the Old Testament as a matter of “benign neglect”… This kind of warped thinking may be traced, at least in part, to the curricula of Christian colleges and theological seminaries. Many of these schools require more New Testament courses than Old Testament ones, and they often require study of Greek but make Hebrew optional. In actuality, however, the strains of a deeper dynamic are at work, an historical cancer that may be traced to Marcion in the second century.
Neo-Marcionism also tends to be advanced when a church communicates to a nearby synagogue the impression, “We don’t have anything to learn from you and your dead, legalistic religion, but you’ve got everything to learn from us.” Such an attitude smacks of an exclusivism and elitism that can only further fortify the barrier which has divided Synagogue and Church since the first century.
- Wilson, OFA
Doukhan on Marcion as agitator
However, at the time of the Marcionite heresy, in the second century, Christian reaction to the identification with Jewish customs became important. Thus Marcion ordered fasting on Saturday: “Because it is the rest of the God of the Jews, who has created the world and has rested on the seventh day, we fast on that day in order not to accomplish what was ordained by the God of the Jews.”
-Doukhan, Israel and the Church
Doukhan on Marcion, Augustine, and dualism
The suspect nature of replacement theology is already betrayed in the language itself that expresses it. Indeed, the contrast between Israel of the flesh and spiritual Israel not only pertains to the dualistic thinking inherited from gnostics and Marcion, but it also contributes to the traditional anti-Semitic portrayal of the Jew as a carnal figure. Augustine spoke of the Jews as an “ungodly race of carnal Jews.” Chrysostom went further along the same line and described Jews as “obstinate animals… fit for slaughter.” This dehumanization of the Jew “without soul” was one of the most prevailing themes in the church fathers’ polemics.
- Doukhan, Israel and the Church
Samuel Sandmel on fate and predestination
The view that the destiny of each man is predetermined by God is only superficially similar to the Greek view of fate. Fate was a blind force which directed what was to happen to men and gods alike, and what was fated could not be altered. It is different too from the view known as predestination, which, in a sense, is kindred to fate except that it is God who fixes the unalterable fate. The Jewish view – we might call it providence – never concluded that a totally unalterable future lay ahead, for such a view contradicted God’s omnipotence and mercy.
- Samuel Sandmel, as quoted in Wilson’s OFA
Wilson on a narrative understanding of faith – a God who is “down and in” and a people who walk in the Way
Some would define religion as a system of ethics, a code of conduct, an ideology, or a creed. To a Hebrew it is none of these; such definitions are misleading, deficient, or inaccurate. Rather, a Hebrew understood his daily life of faith in terms of a journey or pilgrimage. His religion was tantamount to the way in which he chose to walk. Even before the Flood, people such as Enoch and Noah “walked with God” (Gen. 5:24; 6:9). If a person knows God, he is daily at God’s disposal and walks in close fellowship with him, along the road of life… Everyone who walks through this life chooses a road or way for his journey. There is the “way of the wicked” (Prov. 15.9) and the “way of the righteous” (Ps. 1.6), and God knows the way a person takes (Job 23.10). God enjoins us “to walk in all his ways” (Deut. 11.22), so that we may say before him, “My steps have held to your paths; my feet have not slipped” (Ps. 17.5)… The concept of “the way” is also found in other religious literature outside the Bible. For example, the Dead Sea Scrolls indicate that the Qumran community called itself and its life “the Way.” In addition, the Didache, a short anonymous book of Christian instruction from the second century, discusses extensively the “Two Ways,” the Way of Life and the Way of Death.
- Wilson, OFA
Wilson on 1900 years of forgetting Paul’s letter to the Romans
A study of the last nineteen hundred years reveals how the Church left its original Jewish nest and considerably distanced itself from the Semitic culture that gave it birth. The Church paid little heed to the exhortation of Paul to continue in what it had learned and believed in the context of its Hebrew beginnings. Rather, as it became more and more Hellenized by moving westward through the Mediterranean world, it began to be led away into strange teachings (cf. Heb. 13.9)… The Church became vulnerable to [heresy] by cutting itself off from the very root that nourished its beginnings. John Spong has pointedly and succinctly explained the effect: “When Christianity severed itself from Judaism the Christian faith itself became distorted.”
- Wilson, OFA
Wilson explaining what we’re supposed to do with all this information
A profound and abiding Christian appreciation for Jewish culture and the Jewish people comes from sensing inwardly that one’s deepest spiritual identity is with a Jewish Lord, and that “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4.22)… It is the existential realization that spiritually one is “grafted into Israel,” a Jewish people.
- Wilson, OFA
