Letter to a Friend and Pastor about Jews and Christians
Shalom,
I appreciated the message very much this morning but did not have an opportunity to speak with you after the service. I was especially struck by your words that no matter what we have done to others or how we have failed them or have failed God, God loves us anyway. I was so struck by these words because they were words that expressed the essence of what I have always understood the Christian message to be. As I listened to you I asked myself, How can Christians say this to themselves and yet not say this to Israel?
How can they say to one another that God loves us no matter how we have failed Him or one another and not say this to Israel, Jesus' own people, his nation? Those who over the centuries have spoken for Christianity have said that God's love is only for those who choose to believe in that love, and since Israel as a nation did not choose to believe in God's love as expressed in Jesus, His love is only for those individual Jews who do believe in Jesus, and for the gentiles who choose to believe in that love. Which is it, then? Does God love sinners, or only Christian believers?
No Christian seems to deny that God loved Israel as a nation at the beginning, that Israel was His chosen family, that is, before the death and resurrection of Jesus. No Christian seems to claim that before, from the time God took Israel out of Egypt, that He only loved certain individual Jews, the ones who believed in the promise of the Messiah, but that He did not love the nation. Nevertheless, the consensus of Christianity has always been that once the nation as a nation did not receive Jesus, God turned from the nation as a nation to choose only the separate individual believer, adding one believer to another, to make a new people and a new religion. But how can we go on and on saying that the individual can utterly fail God and their fellow human beings and every other creature and still God will love them but the nation, the nation God chose and called His own and promised with an eternal covenant to always be His own, because they failed as a nation to follow in Jesus' footsteps to the cross, have as a nation, lost God's love?
Surely we must acknowledge that there are collective sins, sins that are committed by people collaboratively, which no individual could be held accountable for alone without holding accountable those who are equal accomplices. Indeed, there are acts both for good and for evil that no individual alone can perform, that can only be performed when people league together. Is there no atonement for such sins? Is there only atonement, and only forgiveness for sins that people are individually responsible for? And there are corporate sins, these are sins of people as fathers and as mothers, of kings and queens, of Adam and Eve. Such corporate sins are sins committed by all human beings not in the capacity of who they are but in the capacity of what they are, members of the human race having responsibility for humanity itself in some way and at some point. Can there be no repentance and repair for corporate sins or collective sins, only for the private sins of the individual in isolation? After 2,000 years Christianity has not come to these questions in any proper sense, much less answered them, but it should have come to them long ago, as well as to the answers to these questions.
Christianity cannot claim that failure to believe in Jesus when the Christian Gospel is first heard is the unpardonable sin, or when next heard, or when next heard. For Christians will share the Christian Good News endless times, even with one who rejects it. If Christians cannot say with regard to the individual that unbelief is the unpardonable sin, how are they excusable for saying this with regard to God's nation as a nation? We are not even discussing here that Jews who understand the Hebrew Scriptures according to an understanding that trusts God to be the Redeemer of Israel have a different understanding of what a Messianic Good News must be. We are only asking here whether the traditional Christian understanding of the Christian Gospel is consistent or inconsistent with itself when it basis itself on being good news for individual believers in Jesus by making itself bad news for Israel corporately, as a nation.
While there has been a minority voice within Christianity that has said that if Israel as a nation should repent God would return to them as a people, even as there has always been a minority that has outright said that God will never again choose Israel, the majority has always been more or less quietly agnostic on this point. But while being quiet about this, Christianity has gone ahead and built a great organizational edifice upon the assertion that God has transfered the blessings once promised to Israel as a nation to the assembly of individuals who did not reject the salvation offered by Jesus.
Without necessarily saying so, the effect has been to act as if Israel had committed the unpardonable sin in not collectively or corporately accepting Jesus when he came to them. What if missionaries went to a new tribe in the jungle of Bolivia and some individuals from the tribe turned to them and their message but the tribe as a whole turned against the missionaries and killed them. Would Christianity then say, Well the Gospel was brought to this tribe and was rejected, therefore the tribe has committed the unpardonable sin. God has rejected them. Only those individuals who disown the tribe and come out to us can be saved. The tribe no longer has any rights before God as a people. We can confiscate their land. We can treat them in every way as not being a family or a people. We know that some, when they conquered the New World tried to do exactly this in the name of Christianity. We also know that we do not believe this is true Christianity. So why do we still build the church on the foundation of doing exactly this to God's people, Jesus' family, Israel?
How greatly through the centuries have those who have made enemies of other peoples in the name of Christianity, and have conquered them, misrepresented the Jewish faith of Jesus, whose Hebrew name would be Yehoshua, and who in Aramaic would be called Yeshua, and all those who followed him, as recorded in the books of the apostles! But that misrepresentation can only be shone clearly in terms of what has been done from the beginning in the name of Christianity to the Jewish people.
And yet it is not the true understanding of sin or of righteousness, of the sin or righteousness of the individual or the nation, that traditional Christianity has most severely misrepresented by not treating Israel with the grace with which it treats its own members. It is the love and the justice of God that it has most severely misrepresented. For it is anti-Israel Christianity that reads the apostolic writings to say that God loved the world by first giving His son, when no one yet believed, not as a response to some group of believers! No! It was, anti-Israel Christianity says, when all were yet sinners, when all were yet in darkness. It says, on the one hand that it is not Christian belief or acceptance or commitment that moves God to love the world, neither corporately nor individually. It is only because God first expressed His love for the world with transcendent personal passion that anyone is able to believe perfectly. And so there we have it. In anti-Israel Christianity the effort has been made to say this on behalf of the individual human being while at the very same time denying it on behalf of the corporate human being, the nation of Israel, which is Humanity as God chose it. And therefore anti-Israel Christianity is a greatly confused message, to the Jew first and also to the nations. The anti-Israel element in Christianity has greatly inhibited human ability to understand how that the whole family of Creation in heaven and earth that waits for redemption derives from the Father of Israel.
And if there should come in Christianity a collective desire to repent of this wrong, how should they repent? How should they right something that has been so long wrong? It is surely not the will of God concerning one who realizes, as they go to offer their gift before the altar, that they have sinned against their fellow that they should destroy their own spiritual health in seeking to rectify their wrong. But it is still His will that they seek rectification before offering their gift. This is the teaching of Jesus.
I was once told by a wise person that there is the following analogy between natural and spiritual birth. This person said to me that if with the birth of a calf there is a twist in the birth there will always be a weakness in the area of the body where the twist occurred and that this principle applied to rebirth as well as natural birth. If there was this twist in the birth of Christianity, once it became a religion of the nations, the twist that, instead of graciously proclaiming to Israel without ceasing that if there was any good news that they had found through the Jewish people then surely there was a treasury of great news awaiting the Jewish nation, that gentile Christianity immediately began to say that Israel was to be condemned for spilling the blood of Jesus, then there is all the more reason that Christianity must be treated most carefully and graciously in the rectification and healing of this twist in its birth. For Christianity is crippled in the very aspect where it needs to seek reconciliation with the Jewish People. With what fear and meekness must we turn, therefore, and walk in the path of the commandment of peace in any dialogue between Jews and Christians.