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The author, a Christian theologian and scholar, is married to Nina Tamarkin, who is Jewish. Fifteen years ago, they decided to raise their son in the Jewish faith, and to participate in each other’s religion as their respective convictions allowed. In this excerpt, the author describes Yom Kippur, or Day of Atonement. During most …
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A 19th-century American once had to explain why he had been tarred and feathered in a small town. The hapless fellow told interviewers that the community had put him to the test on the Monroe Doctrine. “I told them that I loved the Monroe Doctrine. I lived by the Monroe Doctrine. I said that I …
Continue reading “A Judeo-Christian Looks at the Judeo-Christian Tradition”
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"Anti-Semitism" carries a great deal of emotive force. Hitler’s maniacal program of genocide, which annihilated 6 million Jews in our century, has imbued the term "anti-Semitism" with a quality of dread — dread of an incoherent and unconditional evil which is unaccountably present in human form. However, since the end of World War II and …
Continue reading “Anti-Semitism: Boundary of Jewish-Christian Understanding”
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Can you be a practicing Jew and also believe that Jesus is the messiah? The customary answer is no. Though Christianity began as a Jewish sect, it quickly became an all-gentile affair. Indeed, Christians came to understand themselves as people who by definition were not Jewish and who believed that Christianity had “superseded” Judaism — …
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I often tell my students that if I weren’t a Christian, raised in the Reformed tradition, I would probably be a Jew, and if I weren’t a Jew, I’d be a Buddhist. These three traditions engage me by the power of their stories, the seriousness with which they address the meaning of suffering, and their …
Continue reading “Fierce Landscapes and the Indifference of God”
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At the center of all Jewish-Christian dialogue is the inexorable messianic question: "Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?" The messianic hope leads us to Jesus, but it also hinders Jews from seeing Jesus as the expected messiah who has already come. Jesus replies to John the Baptist’s messianic …
Continue reading “Israel’s No: Jews and Jesus in an Unredeemed World”
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Book Review: Christianity in Jewish Terms Edited by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel and Michael A. Signer. (Westview). A Christian who leads a Bible study for his teammates as well as pregame prayers with the New York Knicks recently raised hackles with his comments about Jews printed in the New York …
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A large Mercedes taxi was taking me to 3 Ibn Ezra in Jerusalem, one of the most unusual cities of this world, to the home of Mordecai M. Kaplan. I had been told that he was living in Jerusalem, alert and testy, but feeling somewhat neglected. Deciding that no student of religion in America could …
Continue reading “Mordecai Kaplan: Prophet of Pragmatic Theology”
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The topic of Protestant-Jewish relations has previously been broached in these pages. Carl Evans’s “The Church’s False Witness Against Jews,” which appeared May 5, 1982, inspired us to write this article. Evans attempted to enhance Protestantism’s respect for Judaism by showing that the elder tradition, as represented by certain rabbinic parables, is, like Christianity, a …
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Christian evangelism among Jews remains one of the most sensitive and controversial issues in Jewish-Christian relations. In 1975 when the Vatican issued its “Guidelines and Suggestions” for contacts between the church and the Jewish people, the document was greeted by Jewish leaders with a mixture of delight and distress: delight at the change of outlook …
Continue reading “Should There Be a Christian Witness to the Jews”
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Paul M. Van Buren’s offering in The Christian Century’s “How My Mind Has Changed” series (June 17-24, 1981) is eloquent testimony to a new awakening occurring in academic circles. Christian theologians, biblical scholars and church historians are becoming increasingly aware of the necessity to rethink what they do in light of Jewish theology, history and …
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To outsiders it must often appear that through the centuries Israel has been the tail that wags the dog of history. With the future so obviously in the hands of others, Jews have taken chunks of the Jewish heritage and fashioned new modes of self-expression at the various stops the train has made. In a …
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When I began research on the new Messianic Jewish congregational movement over four years ago, I soon learned that both Christians and Jews were experiencing a great deal of frustration. For mainline denominations; the Messianics’ claim to be “Jewish” believers of Jesus was regarded as deceitful. The Jewish community viewed them as a cult. One …
Continue reading “The Messianic Jewish Congregational Movement”
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In Walter M. Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz, the symbolic Jewish character says, “I was told to wait, and I wait.” With admirable tenacity, Benjamin survives for centuries on the edges of a fast-flowing civilization, contributing little save his own Wandering Jewish presence, a lonely witness to the unredeemed state of the world. His Messiah does …
Continue reading “What to Do Until the Messiah Comes: On Jewish Worldliness”
