On Appreciating Your Judeo-Christian Heritage

 An article recently promoted by Gab prompts me to write.

 

“The Old Testament Belongs to Christ and His People Alone” by Andrew Isker

https://biblescienceforum.com/2022/07/13/

 

What is the relationship of Jew to Christian today?  Isker leans toward antipathy; I lean toward sympathy.

Is it appropriate to speak of a common Judeo-Christian heritage?  Isker argues no; I believe it is.

 

I agree with the article, that Jews are not saved by being Jews.  They must come to Christ in faith like anyone else.  If you don’t know the Son, Jesus, then you don’t know the God of the Old Testament, either.  True.  There should be no assumption of spiritual favoritism for the Jew before God, as a Jew.

 

But the Old Testament IS the heritage of the Jews – God revealed Himself to Abraham and his descendants.  To say they don’t belong to them, as the article title claims, is a deep insult and obviously untrue.  Have modern Jews forfeited the Old Testament writings by rejecting the Messiah they point to?  That is not how Paul spoke (Romans 3:2; 10:2).  Jesus didn’t even claim this when He said they were searching their Scriptures, and they spoke of Him (John 5:35).  Paul held out hope for his fellow countrymen, even while they largely rejected Jesus, the Christ, to his face.  He always went to the synagogue first in his mission work (Romans 1:16), because the Jews were seeking the Messiah.  When they rejected Jesus, Paul’s response was, “Maybe they’ll come to Him later, after many Gentiles do” (Romans 11:25-26).  It wasn’t, “The Old Testament isn’t even theirs at all.”  He didn’t speak of their Scriptures being taken from them, but that they had a veil of misunderstanding over their minds as they read them (2 Cor. 3:15).  It can be true that the Hebrew Scriptures still “belong to” the Jews (an ambiguous phrase), and also that when you reject the Son, you reject the Father (1 John 2:23).

 

A lot of Messianic Christian thought and practice is silly or unbiblical (keeping feasts, the exotic attraction of Hebrew words, in itself, e.g.), but it remains true that Christianity has Jewish roots.  We Christians are adopted, ingrafted children of Abraham, Jesus will always be the Son of David, and we should appreciate our family heritage.  Not stridently denounce and deride our older brothers (Romans 11:18).  The latter attitude will impoverish us of a great heritage.

 

The Jews did not reinvent their religion after 70AD, though they did adapt it to the lack of a temple and sacrifices.  Yes, they rejected Christ, and later codified many extraneous oral traditions in the Talmud.  But to call Judaism after 70AD a “cult formed after Christ,” and a “made-up religion” is false and uncharitable.  When Jews today reject Jesus, they do not reject their Scriptures, but misunderstand them.  They adhere to them zealously, but without knowledge (Rom 10:2).

 

What the OT asserts morally is continued on rightly by the Christian worldview.  The liberalism or legalism of modern Judaism is irrelevant.  Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, etc. would have sided with Christians in the culture wars against unbiblical immoral practices.  To refuse the ‘Judeo-Christian’ term is overly-exclusive, when we should welcome Mormons, Jews and Muslims in the public-square fight as co-belligerent allies for morals taught in the Old Testament.  The ”Judeo” doesn’t refer to contemporary, apostate, liberal Judaism.  It is claiming the heritage of God revealing Himself to His people, not only for 2,000 years, but for 6,000 years.

 

The position articulated in the article seems to be an over-reaction to dispensationalism, which favors Jews over-much.  I am not a dispensationalist, and never have been exposed much to their thought.  This may lead me to be less strident on these points.  A covenantal understanding of Scripture holds all of Scripture together, making a Judeo-Christian heritage a natural assumption.

 

This is a theological disagreement.  I do not assume any racist, or anti-semitic views on the other side.  It’s tempting to smell a visceral antipathy for modern Jews in such articles, but I think it is just a frustrated rebuke of those who have rejected Jesus, their own Messiah, whom they should receive.  Part of the difference here may be how a Christian views an orthodox Jew, in contrast with an LGBT advocate or an abortion doctor.  I see them both as apart from Christ, but in a very different light.  Not all who reject Christ are in the same deep level of wicked as Isker seems to assume the modern Jewish religion is.

 

I think my motivation in writing this is to maintain a high level of sympathy and openness to Text-believing Jews.  An open hand of invitation is far better than a door slammed in their face.