Is the Gospel Hate Speech?

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Is the Gospel Hate Speech?

Melanie Phillips, writing in Commentary Magazine a few years back, informed readers that:

“The really difficult problem is that supersessionism is not some fringe theology but is deeply rooted in Christian thinking. At the most basic level, the Church believes that Christianity superseded Judaism. The Holocaust caused Western churches to rethink this, although those in Eastern countries remained unmoved. But whereas in the 1965 Papal encyclical Nostra Aetate, the Catholics tried openly to face up to and repudiate their own anti-Jewish thinking, the Protestant churches quietly brushed supersessionism under the carpet.”

In other words, those who entirely embrace Christ and his teachings and become members of the Church He founded are, it seems, necessarily ‘anti-Jewish’. For some reason, the foul mass-murder of Jews in Europe under the profoundly anti-Semitic (not to mention anti-Christian) race-obsessed Nazi regime is an event which should make people rethink their acceptance of Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah prophesied in the Jewish scriptures and the true source of unity of the people of God. Quite why this follows is never explained.

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The Old Covenant: Revoked or Not Revoked?

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More and more Catholics, Protestants and Jews are seeking to overturn 2000 years of Christian teaching concerning the Old Covenant. Although the Church has always taught that the Old Covenant is revoked, what we are now being told by theologians, clerics and lay persons in high places is that it has not been revoked. These critics, who refer disparagingly to the traditional doctrine by such names as “supersessionism,” “replacement theology,” “revocation theology,” etc., are all seeking for one thing – to establish the position that: a) the Jews retain legal possession of the Old Covenant; b) that this covenant is independent of, but runs concurrently with, the New Covenant; and c) most hold that the Old Covenant is the means by which God provides salvation to the Jews. We are hearing this new teaching from almost every quarter of the religious world and it is one of the fastest growing problems in the Church today. At its root, it emasculates the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ, and does so for the people who need it the most – the Jews.

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Invincible Ignorance

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I appreciated Dr. Jones’ tone in his response to my letter October 2004 (“Privilege and Blessing”) that primarily addressed his June 2004 article (“Is St. John an Anti-Semite?”). And I want to again reiterate my respect for Dr. Jones for his scholarship and long-time service to the Church on various fronts. However, I submit respectfully that Dr. Jones did not accurately reflect my position in saying Mr. Nash proposes a dichotomy which may have currency in the culture wars but has no theological basis. Mr. Nash proposes a distinction between ADL Jews and “faithful Jews.”

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The Once and Future Heresy

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The Once and Future Heresy

Gershon Gorenberg’s study of the eschaton immanentizers alive and well in Israel today starts by introducing us to Melody, the almost red heifer, who was born there a few years ago. The reason this cow became front page news in that country is that if she were completely red, at age three, she could have been slaughtered and used for ritual purification purposes for priests at Jerusalem’s Jewish Temple, according to the prescriptions of Numbers 19. As you probably know there hasn’t been a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem since 70 A.D., when the Romans, under Titus, burnt down the one built by Herod. The territory atop Mt. Moriah is currently occupied by a holy Muslim site, the al-Asqa mosque. However, there is a sizeable group of people who view the events of the 20th century as prologue to the construction of the third Jewish Temple on that site; not all of these people are in Israel and, as this book indicates, most of them aren’t Jewish.

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