Ask the Pastor

Pastor Ken Ranos

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:

“The more I have learned about antisemitism, the more I have become
deeply troubled by the antisemitism in the Christian New Testament. I’m especially troubled by supercessionism. How can we read the New Testament and still love and follow Christ without being supercessionist?

Antisemitism is one of the deep-seated, vile characteristics of society and the church that disgusts, and yet puzzles, me. As best I can tell, antisemitism and anti-Judaism has existed since ancient times, but I’ll confess that I don’t know why exactly the hatred for this particular ethnic and religious group has been so pervasive throughout history. It has even been a hallmark of Christianity, to our great shame.

Antisemitism is any prejudice, hate, or hostility directed at Jewish people because they are Jewish. Antisemitism can be motivated by ethnic tensions, religious disagreement, racism, or ideology. It is characterized by negative stereotypes and the belief that Jewish people deserve any misfortunes that fall on them. It looks like anything from perpetuating the lies that Jewish people control all of the world’s money and are the puppet masters of the world’s economy, to the horrific and systematic extermination of Jewish people as in the Shoah (Holocaust) of the 1940s.

Supercessionism is the belief that Christians have replaced the Jewish people as God’s Chosen People, and that the promises made to the Jewish people are now null and void, inherited by Christians instead.

In 1994, and then again in 2021, the Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America adopted “A Declaration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to the Jewish Community” (https://download.elca.org/ELCA%20Resource%20Repository/Declaration_Of_The_ELCA_To_The_Jewish_Community.pdf). It opens, “In the long history of the church, the treatment accorded the Jewish people by Christians has been among our most grievous and shameful legacies. Very few Christian communities of faith were able to escape the contagion of anti-Judaism and its modern successor, anti-Semitism.” Why have Christians been so antisemitic, both in the past and in the present?

Attitudes toward Jewish people in the Christian New Testament warrant careful examination, especially as we read the scriptures with two thousand years of history informing our reading.

There are many instances in the New Testament of the writers disparaging the Jewish people. The Pharisees and temple elite are often pitted against Jesus when it comes to theological interpretation. They conspire to have him arrested and killed. Multiple times in the Gospel according to John “the Jews” try to stone Jesus to death. John is particularly bad about this; the other Gospels most often talk about the Pharisees and scribes, but John frequently chastises “the Jews”. Paul tells the Corinthian church that so many bad things happened to the Jewish people in the past so they could be reminders to Christians to not “desire evil as they did.” Bigots looking to justify their hatred from scripture need not look very far or for very long.

It is vitally important to remember that Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, the Messiah/Christ, IS a Jewish man. He was born a Jewish man ethnically and religiously. His core twelve disciples were all like him, ethnic and religious Jewish men. The women who provided the economic means for Jesus to live were ethnic and religious Jewish women. Paul, the outsider apostle and most important writer in the New Testament, was not only an ethnic and religious Jewish man, he was proud of it.

Therefore, one has to understand that the tensions between Christians and Jews portrayed in the New Testament are INTERNAL tensions between different Jewish groups, and they are theological differences. In the same way that Lutherans, Catholics, Baptists, Mennonites, and other groups are all united in their Christian beliefs, so too did the Judaism of Jesus’s day (and modern Judaism) consist of different groups with different ideas that, while united as Judaism, didn’t always agree.

We know the names of some of these groups: Samaritans, Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots. Sometimes, the conflicts between these groups (and early Christians) were respectful. Other times, it was violent. The conflict between the early Christians and the Jewish people must be understood this way.

It is therefore incorrect and dangerous to assume that the New Testament is monolithically opposed to Judaism or the Jewish people, especially in a way that justifies antisemitism. Unfortunately, we do, and we know too well what happens when we do. Some examples:

Marcion in the second century CE was so antisemitic that he declared the God of the Hebrew Scriptures to be an entirely different God than Jesus Christ and removed from his version of the Gospel according to Luke anything that linked Jesus to his Jewish heritage. Eusebius, a bishop in the third century CE, states one of his reasons for writing his “Church History” to be exposing the way the “whole Jewish nation” plotted to have Jesus killed. Such beloved names as Tertullian, Origen, Augstine, John Chrysostom, Hippolytus, Ambrose, Jerome, all condemn the Jewish people. Some even justify the discrimination and death visited on them.

By the Middle Ages, antisemitism was in such force in Christian nations that the Jewish people were confined to ghettos, expelled from kingdoms, had their rights revoked, and were murdered in pogroms. Martin Luther late in his life wrote “On the Jews and Their Lies”, attacking “these miserable and accursed people” and “their poisonous activities”; his writing was one of the justifications for the Shoah.

It is still common for Christians to believe that the Jewish people killed Jesus (they didn’t, the Romans did), that the Hebrew Scriptures are all about following rules (they aren’t), that God in the Hebrew Scriptures is just an angry, judgmental God (far, far, FAR from the case), that God will no longer keep the covenant with the Chosen People (of course God will), or that it’s appropriate to refer to hypocrites or legalistic people as “Pharisees” (it’s not).

So what can we do?

First, we must strongly condemn the antisemitism in our midst. It is wrong. It is dangerous. It is anathema to the reign of God. It is unequivocally against the teaching of Jesus Christ. We bear the shame of two thousand years of Christian justification for the mistreatment of the Jewish people, and it is up to us to stand up against it.

We must remember that Jesus, his disciples, his family, and the early church were Jewish. We must raise up the story of God’s faithful adherence to the covenant with the Jewish people. We must place more weight and significance to those parts of the New Testament that not only speak well of the Jewish people, but actively combat the idea elsewhere that the Jewish people have been replaced or that God has abandoned them. We must remember that the Jewish people are our elder siblings in the faith in God, and that God has built a covenant with them that God will not abandon. We must recognize that our understanding of God in Jesus Christ is only possible because of our shared inheritance with the Jewish people–the roots of our theology, scriptures, and worship are all Jewish.

But more importantly, we have to act. Publishing statements isn’t enough (we’re good at that). We have to change the way we think and act. When we hear someone condemn the Pharisees, we need to speak up and remind them that the Pharisees opposed Jesus’s interpretation, but were some of the greatest moral leaders in their community and are the ancestors of the modern Rabbis. We need to stop talking about unyielding people and positions as “Pharisaic”. We need to work to understand the nuances of the Sanhedrin’s position as a vassal authority under the Roman Empire faced with the prospect of a populist revolt that Rome would not tolerate. We need to reread the Gospel according to John, pausing every time he talks about “the Jews” to remind ourselves that John himself was a Jew and was writing in the context of inter-Jewish tension. We need to emphasize in our proclamation of the gospel that Jesus was executed by the state for treason and sedition, not by the Sanherin for blasphemy. We need to train ourselves out of our Jewish stereotypes.

And the work we need to do is not just internal to ourselves. We must do the hard work of reconciliation with our Jewish neighbors, which will not always be a pleasant experience. We have to admit that we were wrong, ask for forgiveness, and then make amends, not on our terms, but on the terms of those we have wronged. It’s only within the last century that the church has woken up and realized its antisemitic history and theology is wrong. We’ve just begun to repent.

The good news is that we are working. We are learning. We are changing. It’s going to take a long, long, long time; there’s two thousand years of mistrust and hatred to overcome. But God is in the business of reconciliation, especially between siblings.

Pastor Ken Ranos

UPCOMING QUESTIONS:

Is God’s love unconditional?

PREVIOUS COLUMNS:

Ask the Pastor, Nov. 2020 (Heaven and the Resurrection)

Ask the Pastor, Dec. 2020 (Faith and Belief)

Ask the Pastor, May 2021 (The Gnostics)

Ask the Pastor, July 2021 (The Nicene Creed)

Ask the Pastor, August 2021 (Forgiveness)

Ask the Pastor, February 2022 (Bishop Controversies)

Ask the Pastor, February 2022 (Thwart God’s Will?)