Evaluating Judaism

The world is filled with wonders:  it is apparently a controversial thing to affirm that Judaism was a true religion worshipping the one true God.  A sentence affirming this in the recent online OCA Essential Orthodox Christian Beliefs:  A Manual for Adult Instruction has given great offence to those reading it with hostile eyes, and so I will try to explain it again perhaps a little more clearly.  What follows are of course my own thoughts, not the official line of the OCA or of Ancient Faith, or of anyone else.  And, like those offering the OCA online Essential Orthodox Christian Beliefs, I am always happy to explain, add, revise, and clarify.  My main point of clarification is that in my essay I was speaking about the Judaism of Paul’s day, not the Rabbinic Judaism of today.  As usual, I was writing as an exegete, not a social commentator of religion.

By the statement that the apostles regarded Judaism as a true religion and as worshipping the one true God, I meant that Christianity did not regard Judaism as worshipping a false god or an idol in same way as did (for example) the ancient pagans or the modern Hindus.  St. Paul described the formerly pagan Thessalonian Christians as those who “turned to God from the idols to serve a living and true God” (1 Thessalonians 1:9) and his Jewish spirit was provoked when strolling through Athens and seeing how the city was full of idols (Acts 17:16).  He did not so regard his fellow Jews in this way, presumably because he felt that they already worshipped the living and true God.   Judaism in Paul’s day was a true religion in the midst of a world filled with idolatry.

But there was something important lacking in his fellow Jews in his day:  they stumbled at a step where they should have mounted up, so that after Jesus came, their religion was fast becoming deficient—viz. they needed to augment their faith in the God of Abraham with faith in Jesus as the divine Messiah.  It was only through faith in Jesus (and therefore through baptism into His Church) that they could retain their covenantal status as the Israel of God and inherit the blessings promised to Israel by the prophets.  Unlike the pagan Thessalonians, they didn’t need to switch gods; they only needed to accept Jesus as the Messiah and become Christians.

In this the Jews did not differ from those in other religions—as I said in my piece, “the Church calls them all [i.e. those of all religions, including Judaism] to join in the saving worship of the Trinity, to accept Christian baptism, and to live as part of the Church”.

Conversion from Hinduism (for example) involves renouncing one’s ancestral gods, and turning from one’s scriptures to accept a different God and different Scriptures.  Converting from Judaism does not involve renouncing the God of Israel or accepting different Scriptures.  Rather, converting from Judaism involves fulfilling one’s ancestral faith, not renouncing it in a way that converting from Hinduism does.  That is what I meant when I said that Judaism is a true religion.  One could paraphrase by saying that the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God (Romans 3:2).

I am aware that this declaration about converting from Judaism to Christianity is controversial, and that those practising Rabbinic Judaism will of course disagree with it.  But the declaration represents the teaching of the New Testament and so, as a Christian, I am struck with it, regardless of whether or not it jeopardizes my coveted status as a “known modern ecumenist”.  Those who have read my body of work over the past twenty years or more know that I have always asserted that the Orthodox Church is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church confessed in the creed, and that I have never held what is sometimes called “the branch theory”, and that whatever my many failings, that sort of ecumenism is not among them.

As said above, this twin declaration about the Judaism of Paul’s day being a true religion and its need to embrace Christ should all be uncontroversial to Christians who accept the New Testament and, fun though it may be, one need not draw dramatic unwarranted conclusions from it, attributing to me things I do not hold.  But we should speak a little more about just how Orthodox Christianity should regard Rabbinic Judaism which rejects the claim that Jesus is the Messiah.

Here the picture is a little less clear, since the New Testament was written before Rabbinic Judaism emerged and solidified in the wake of the Temple’s destruction.  I suspect that this will be somewhat controversial, and so I assure the reader in advance that I intend no offence to anyone.  My intention rather is simply to state what I think is the teaching of the New Testament.  For ease of presentation, I will number the points I would like to make.

1. Ever since the cross, Resurrection, and ascension of Christ, all the blessings promised by God to His covenant people only come through faith in Christ and membership in His Church.  That is, salvation, forgiveness, rebirth, sonship, and access to the Father are only available through Jesus. (John 14:6, Acts 4:12, Ephesians 2:18).  That does not mean (in my view anyway) that all non-Christians are going to hell after they die.  But it does mean that the experience of salvation and transformation is this life is only available in Jesus.  (The fascinating topic of the ultimate fate of non-Christians will not be addressed here.)

Jews practising Rabbinic Judaism need to come to faith in Jesus as their Messiah just as do the Gentiles and join the Church.  That is what St. Paul meant when he said that God shows no partiality (Romans 2:11) and why he preached to the Jew as well as to the Gentile, insisting that the Gospel was the power of God for salvation to everyone who had faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek (Romans 1:16).  Paul obviously thought that in his day Judaism was now insufficient and needed the addition of faith in Christ Jesus—that was why he worshipped in their synagogues, sacrificed in the Temple and strove mightily to bring them to Christian faith.

2. Rabbinic Judaism is not synonymous with Mosaic religion.  Specifically, Rabbinic Judaism lacks the Temple and its sacrifices, which were considered as the means of forgiveness and salvation for as long as it stood.  (See the Song of the Three Young Men 15, in Daniel 3, with its prayer that after the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians Israel had “no burnt offering or sacrifice or oblation or incense, no place to make an offering before God or to find mercy”.  Note:  it was through the sacrifices mandated in the Law through Moses that Israel’s worshippers “found mercy”).

After the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. Mosaic religion was mutilated and deficient, lacking its beating heart, which is why it was so widely mourned by the Jews as a terrible catastrophe.  Obviously the Jews at the time had to carry on somehow, and they found refuge in the thought that prayer and penitence might somehow take the place of sacrifice.  It was something of a stopgap solution, but what else could they do?  For us it is enough to note that Rabbinic Judaism should not be equated with the religion of the Old Testament.  The former became a religion of a Book in a way that the latter never was.

3. The New Testament regarded the Judaism of its day as valid, but now outdated. In the words of Hebrews 8:13, the Old Covenant centered on the Mosaic Law had become “obsolete” and therefore as “growing old and ready to vanish away”. The sacrifices, central to forgiveness before Christ came, were now superfluous.  They might still “sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh” and for removal of ritual impurity, but they could not and never could “purify the conscience from dead works to serve the living God” or “make perfect those who drew near” to God through them (Hebrews 9:13-14, 10:1).  The sacrifice of Christ on the cross revealed anew and once and for all the limitations of animal sacrifice.  With Christ a new and hitherto unimagined cleansing and power had come into the world, and in its light one could see as never before the limitations of Judaism.  As with the Law, so with the Temple sacrifices:  “what once had splendour has come to have no splendour at all, because of the splendour that surpasses it” (2 Corinthians 3:10).

Though the apostles had no quarrel with the Temple and its sacrifices while the Temple stood (Acts 21:26 is clear about that), their spiritual center had shifted.  Jesus’ death was now the true and saving sacrifice, and His Church the true Temple.  Like circumcision, once so central to Jews, the Temple cult had been rendered spiritually superfluous.  To paraphrase Paul in Galatians 6:15, “neither Temple nor its sacrifices count for anything, but a new creation”.  The Temple and its cult could function as an image, a promise, and a prophecy of God’s presence in Israel, but it no longer could function as the effective means of its realization.  The realization and the reality were now found in Christ.

4. The New Testament’s fervent and violent denunciation of the Jews was not aimed at Judaism as a religion or at all Jews because they were Jewish. Rather these denunciations presupposed a determined and violent persecution of the nascent Church on the part of the local Jews. We see this in 1 Thessalonians 2:14f:  the Jews upon whom God’s wrath had come were those Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and drove Paul out and hindered him from speaking to the Gentiles.  Paul’s words here were not aimed at all Jews everywhere.  Here, as in many places in the Bible, context is everything.  Presumably the Jews who did nothing to oppose Paul and the Christian movement were not in his mind when he wrote this.

We see this also in the denunciation in Revelation 3:9 where the local Jews of Philadelphia were denounced as “a synagogue of Satan”.  The offence which warranted such verbal violence was not simply the Jewishness of the local Jews, but their persecution of the local Christians.

This all means that the wrath of God upon the Jews depended to a great extent upon whether or not they persecuted the Christians and upon the violence of their rejection of Christ—precisely the same yardstick which determined the wrath of God upon the Gentiles.   If anyone hates Christ and blasphemes against Him (as we find in some places in the Talmud) then divine wrath may be expected in response, whether the blasphemer be Jew or Gentile.  In my (admittedly limited) experience, not all Jews regard everything in the Talmud as authoritative.  It is one thing to say that a Jew does not enjoy the access to the Father enjoyed by the Christian.  It is quite another to say that the wrath of God abides on him as it did upon the Jews who ran St. Paul out of town simply because he is a Jew. Discernment—not always found in fundamentalists—is required.

One final point about this debate as a whole:  it is unhealthy and unhelpful to conduct such debate in a spirit of quarrelsome judgmentalism, reading texts with hostile eyes.  If one truly has the wisdom which is from above, one will discuss and debate with a spirit that is pure, peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits.  One will humbly inquire and investigate the meaning of a text before rushing to denunciation and delighting in derision.  The harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace (James 3:17-18).  True debate is not conducted in a spirit of angry judgmentalism masquerading as zeal for truth and traditionalism, keen to pounce upon imprecision and take the mote from the neighbour’s eye while retaining a log in one’s own.  As James 3:15 reminds us, such “wisdom” does not from down from above, but is earthly, natural, demonic.