How Christians Tell the Story of Judaism (Lynn Cohick)

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 10:31 pm by Scot McKnight

How Christians Tell the Story of Judaism (Lynn Cohick) 2015-03-13T22:31:56-05:00 Scot McKnight

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The Apostle Paul re-imagined after Yad Vashem, by Lynn Cohick, professor at Wheaton College.

Last summer (2013) I went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum located in Jerusalem, Israel. It was my third visit in seven years. This time I visited as a member of The Christian Leadership Initiative, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and the Shalom Hartman Institute. As I went through the museum exhibits with Jewish colleagues, I heard with new ears the “Christian” rhetoric that supported Nazi ideology. My Jewish friends pointed out the “righteous gentiles” who, in the name of Christ, protected Jews. Before walking through the museum, an Israeli born instructor, whose mother was a Holocaust survivor, taught my group about Zionism, focusing on how this ideology split the Jewish community in the 18th and 19th centuries. She spoke about the ways people tell and re-tell their history. She noted that Yad Vashem, which opened in 1957, was re-done in 2005 when the second generation after the Holocaust argued that the first telling of the story cast Jews as mere victims, weak in the face of existential threats.

Viewing the museum with Jews, and hearing Jews tell their history, led me to consider how Christians tell their stories, especially how they talk about Christianity in relation to Judaism.

Two weeks before this visit to Jerusalem, I taught an intensive course on Philippians to a group of MA students and church leaders. In Philippians 3:1-12, Paul describes his personal biography as a Jew; he was born into a Diaspora Jewish family, and joined one of the leading and admired “denominations” of Judaism of his day – the Pharisees (see also Acts 22:1-5). Paul’s words have been read as a wholesale critique of Judaism, with the terrible consequences of Christian anti-Jewish rhetoric and political aggression against Jewish communities.

The juxtaposition of these two events – studying Philippians and visiting Yad Vashem – invited me to consider three questions:

Does Paul think Christianity replaces Judaism?

How does Paul relate the gospel message to Judaism?

How should Christians relate to Jews today?

Does Christianity Replace Judaism?

Considering the first question, so much depends on definitions. In Paul’s time, there was no such thing as Christianity as we have it today. Paul considered himself a Jew, a Jew who identified Jesus of Nazareth as God’s promised Messiah. Paul the apostle followed the Jewish calendar of festivals, he worshipped in the Temple, and he supported the circumcision of his co-worker, Timothy. Yet many Jews in Paul’s day condemned his teaching that belief in Jesus the Messiah made gentiles full members of God’s family. Most Jews believed that the Messiah would draw gentiles to God and cause them to embrace the Jewish lifestyle (circumcision, Sabbath, food laws).

Yet Paul could say that believers in Christ are “the circumcision” (Phil 3:3). That is, those who follow Jesus the Messiah are “marked” as the people of God. Paul imagines the followers of Jesus standing downstream in the same river in which the biblical Israelites stood. God’s redemption story begins with Abraham’s calling and is only fully accomplished in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Belief in Jesus for the forgiveness of sins also unifies all peoples into the one Body of Christ (Eph 2:11-16).

The Gospel and Judaism

Paul’s message that the Holy Spirit lives in both Jewish and gentile followers of Jesus astonished and offended. It astonished because gentiles were “unclean” idolaters. It offended because Paul declared that belief in Jesus made gentiles clean and able to participate as full members in God’s family (Gal 2:15-16). However, he never asks his Jewish brothers and sisters in Christ to forgo Sabbath rest, or munch on a cheeseburger, or neglect circumcising their infant sons. He celebrates his God-given heritage, God’s faithfulness to his people. Paul realigns the boundary fence that marks off the people of God. No longer is it the Law, now it is Christ.

The gospel is rooted in resurrection power, a power unmatched in the Law. The gospel is lived by the power of the Holy Spirit; the Law is powered by individual effort. The gospel life is one of participation in Christ’s suffering with the hope of bodily resurrection. The gospel points forward; the Law focuses on the present (Phil 3:9-14).

In sum, Paul celebrates his heritage as a Jew, but does not let that define his life as a follower of Jesus. Paul distinguishes two categories within God’s Law – one that differentiates “clean” (Jew) and “unclean” (gentile) and another that advocates righteous behavior, for example, warnings against idolatry and sexual immorality. The first category of “clean” and “unclean” has been wiped away by Christ’s work (Phil 1:9-11). Thus for Paul, the gospel flows from “Judaism,” if by that one means the story of God’s redemption of a people to live faithfully for him. Paul insists the gospel creates a people saved through Christ’s death and resurrection, and made to live holy lives in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Christianity and Judaism today

After 2,000 years of Christian history, how should evangelical Christians relate to Jews today? The short answer is: with great humility and a listening ear. We must take into account the wretched treatment of Jews at Christians’ hands – sadly, we cannot unscramble that historical egg. Thus the Evangelical’s natural (and correct) reflex to invite someone to accept Jesus’ salvation offer is heard by most Jews today as an invitation to self-destruction. Most Jews today believe that becoming a follower of Jesus is the same thing as becoming a Christian; and if they become a Christian, then they are no longer Jewish. Most Evangelicals I know would not ascribe to that equation; nevertheless, this understanding is the reality within the Jewish community.

I encourage Evangelicals to get to know their Jewish neighbors as friends, explore with them how they understand their Jewishness, and celebrate with them their ancient heritage. And I suggest that we express our evangelical confidence in Christ’s work by sharing our own story, without pushing for their conversion. Let your Jewish friend take the lead, ask the questions, share his or her stories. Listen and pray, trusting God that your testimony of Christ’s grace in your own life will work to repair centuries of Christian abuses against Jews.

The Righteous Gentile, the faithful Christian

My own life with God in Christ is richer for having Jewish friends. Yad Vashem notes the righteous gentiles who befriended Jews in their hour of need, including the Wyrzykowskis, who took in a Jewish family fleeing the pogroms in Lomza, Poland. Mosze Olszewicz, one of the Jewish children sheltered by this Christian family, wrote that these “noble Christians…risked their lives to save us….They are like parents to us.” Mosze describes his family wandering in the forest during the winter and coming upon a farmhouse where they begged for bread. They received not only bread but also a meal. The next day, the Wyrzykowskis said “Don’t go. You are merely children. What we eat – you will eat. Whatever happens to you – will happen to us. We cannot have you fall into the hands of the Germans.” And so for two and a half years, the family hid in a hole under the stabled animals, and were fed and cared for by this Christian family.

Paul encourages the Philippians to imitate him and those who live exemplary lives (Phil 3:17). I think Paul would put the Wyrzykowskis on the list of those who looked not to their own interests, but to the interests of others (2:4), and who stood as “children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation” (2:15).

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