Join this growing community and explore interactive, meaningful and fun experiences that are easily accessible on the go or at home. Affiliate Hat ReformJudaism. Home Learning Answers to Jewish Questions. What are the main differences between a Jew and a Christian? Answered by.
Related Questions Are there options for interfaith couples to be buried in the same cemetery? I am Jewish, and my wife is not. The present study has been six years in preparation. It is the product of a project begun in within the former Presbyterian Church, U. The study has been developed under the direction of the church's Council on Theology and Culture, through a process which involved many people reflecting diverse interests and backgrounds, both in the United States and the Middle East.
In the course of addressing this subject, our church has come to see many things in a new light. The study has helped us to feel the pain of our Jewish neighbors who remember that the Holocaust was carried out in the heart of "Christian Europe" by persons many of whom were baptized Christians.
We have come to understand in a new way how our witness to the gospel can be perceived by Jews as an attempt to erode and ultimately to destroy their own communities.
Similarly, we have been made sensitive to the difficult role of our Arab Christian brothers and sisters in the Middle East. We have listened to the anguish of the Palestinians, and we have heard their cry. The paper which we here present to the church does not attempt to address every problem nor to say more than we believe that we are able truly to say.
It consists of seven theological affirmations, with a brief explication of each. Together they seek to lay the foundation for a new and better relationship under God between Christians and Jews. They are:. These seven theological affirmations with their explications are offered to the church not to end debate but to inform it and, thus to serve as a basis for an ever deepening understanding of the mystery of God's saving work in the world.
The defining of terms on this subject is complex but unavoidable. We understand "Judaism" to be the religion of the Jews. It is practiced by many today and extends back into the period of the Hebrew scriptures. Judaism of late antiquity gave rise to that form of Judaism which has been developing since the first century, known as "Rabbinic Judaism.
Both Christianity and Judaism claim relationship with the ancient people of Israel; the use of the term "Israel" in this study is restricted to its ancient reference.
When referring to the contemporary State of Israel this document will use "State of Israel. We understand "Jews" to include those persons whose self-under-standing is that they are descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah, and those converted into the Jewish community. We recognize that Jews are varied in the observance of their religion, and that there are many Jews who do not practice Judaism at all.
The language of this paper is conformable to General Assembly guidelines for inclusiveness within the Presbyterian Church U. It avoids gender-specific references either to God or to the people of God, except in reference to the Trinity and the Kingdom of God and in direct quotation from Scripture. The word "Lord" is used only with reference to Jesus Christ. The paper acknowledges the role of both women and men in the church's tradition.
The following affirmations are offered to the church for our common edification and growth in obedience and faith. To God alone be the glory. We affirm that the living God whom Christians worship is the same God who is worshiped and served by Jews.
We bear witness that the God revealed in Jesus, a Jew, to be the Triune Lord of all, is the same one disclosed in the life and worship of Israel. Christianity began in the context of Jewish faith and life. Jesus was a Jew, as were his earliest followers.
Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles, referred to himself as a "Hebrew of the Hebrews. Jewish liturgical forms were decisive for the worship of the early church and are influential still, especially in churches of the Reformed tradition.
Yet the relationship of Christians to Jews is more than one of common history and ideas. The relationship is significant for our faith because Christians confess that the God of Abraham and Sarah and their descendants is the very One whom the apostles addressed as "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This expectation of the reign of God in a Messianic Age was described by the Hebrew prophets in different ways. The Scriptures speak of the expectation of a deliverer king anointed by God, of the appearing of a righteous teacher, of a suffering servant, or of a people enabled through God's grace to establish the Messianic Age.
Early Christian preaching proclaimed that Jesus had become Messiah and Lord, God's anointed who has inaugurated the kingdom of peace and righteousness through his life, death, and resurrection. While some Jews accepted this message, the majority did not, choosing to adhere to the biblical revelation as interpreted by their teachers and continuing to await the fulfillment of the messianic promises given through the prophets, priests, and kings of Israel.
Thus the bond between the community of Jews and those who came to be called Christians was broken, and both have continued as vital but separate communities through the centuries. Nonetheless, there are ties which remain between Christians and Jews: t he faith of both in the one God whose loving and just will is for the redemption of all humankind and the Jewishness of Jesus whom we confess to be the Christ of God.
In confessing Jesus as the Word of God incarnate, Christians are not rejecting the concrete existence of Jesus who lived by the faith of Israel. Rather, we are affirming the unique way in which Jesus, a Jew, is the being and power of God for the redemption of the world. In him, God is disclosed to be the Triune One who creates and reconciles all things.
This is the way in which Christians affirm the reality of the one God who is sovereign over all. We affirm that the church, elected in Jesus Christ, has been engrafted into the people of God established by the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Therefore, Christians have not replaced Jews. The church, especially in the Reformed tradition, understands itself to be in covenant with God through its election in Jesus Christ.
Because the church affirms this covenant as fundamental to its existence, it has generally not sought nor felt any need to offer any positive interpretation of God's relationship with the Jews, lineal descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah, with whom God covenanted long ago.
The emphasis has fallen on the new covenant established in Christ and the creation of the church. Sometime during the second century of the Common Era, a view called "supersessionism," based on the reading of some biblical texts and nurtured in controversy, began to take shape.
By the beginning of the third century, this teaching that the Christian church had superseded the Jews as God's chosen people became the orthodox understanding of God's relationship to the church.
Such a view influenced the church's understanding of God's relationship with the Jews and allowed the church to regard Jews in an inferior light. Supersessionism maintains that because the Jews refused to receive Jesus as Messiah, they were cursed by God, are no longer in covenant with God, and that the church alone is the "true Israel" or the "spiritual Israel.
The long and dolorous history of Christian imperialism, in which the church often justified anti-Jewish acts and attitudes in the name of Jesus, finds its theological base in this teaching. We believe and testify that this theory of supersessionism or replacement is harmful and in need of reconsideration as the church seeks to proclaim God's saving activity with humankind. The scriptural and theological bases for this view are clear enough; but we are prompted to look again at our tradition by events in our own time and by an increasing number of theologians and biblical scholars who are calling for such a reappraisal.
The pride and prejudice which have been justified by reference to this doctrine of replacement themselves seem reason enough for taking a hard look at this position. For us, the teaching that the church has been engrafted by God's grace into the people of God finds as much support in Scripture as the view of supersessionism and is much more consistent with our Reformed understanding of the work of God in Jesus Christ.
The emphasis is on the continuity and trustworthiness of God's commitments and God's grace. The issue for the early church concerned the inclusion of the Gentiles in God's saving work, not the exclusion of the Jews. Contact us at letters time. The hand of a man reading the Bible. By John Barton. Related Stories. President Trump Invoked Executive Privilege. Here's the History of That Presidential Power.
Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. Need help? Visit our Help Center. Neither should the Palestinian Arabs alone have to bear the consequences of the conflict, nor should only Israel be held responsible for the situation. For that reason, even those not directly involved must participate in efforts to procure a durable peace in the Middle East. German Christians in particular must not evade their part in this task.
They will also have to strengthen their bond with Arab Christians who by the conflict were placed in a very difficult situation. Jews — Christians — Germans. We Christians pay heed to the particular difficulties arising out of the relationship between Germans and Jews. A long common history of Jews and Christians in Germany has frequently resulted in mutual stimulation as well as antagonism.
Ever recurring enmity against Jews is due not only to religious causes but to economic, political, and cultural ones as well. Based on Christian-Germanic and racist ideologies, Jew-hatred in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries became especially virulent. In its ultimate consequence, it led to the persecutions of Jews after and, finally, to the murder of about six million Jews in Europe. Up to the beginning of the Second World War, many German Jews were able to escape, especially through emigration, the fate that threatened them.
During the War, however, men, women, and children in Germany and all the occupied countries were deported to extermination camps and murdered. Only a few Jews during that time were still able to emigrate or go into hiding.
Together with the Jews, millions of non-Jews became the victims of persecution. Only a few Germans had full knowledge of the entire plan of destruction but most of them knew of the legislation and public Jew-baiting in , the burning of synagogues and plundering of stores in November , and the sudden disappearance of Jewish neighbors and school fellows. Rumors and foreign news broadcasts also added to the available information.
Yet, most Germans did not believe or did not want to believe the planned destruction of European Jewry, the so-called "final solution". They set their mind at rest with the news of a resettlement of Jews in Eastern Europe; the Christian Churches were largely silent. Only a few people who thereby endangered their own life, helped Jews to flee or kept them in hiding. The extermination of six million Jews and the almost complete destruction of Jewish culture in Europe caused a profound trauma in the mind of the Jewish people all over the world.
Its effects, which will make themselves felt for generations to come, often find expression in insecurity and anxiety as well as over-sensitivity toward any endangerment of Jewish existence. Jews in Israel and the diaspora identify the catastrophe of the holocaust by the name of Auschwitz in Poland, the largest of all the extermination camps. Similar to Hiroshima, Auschwitz became the symbol for the experienced horrors of extermination.
It also was a turning point in historical and theological thinking, especially in Judaism. Out of these culpable omissions of the past, special obligations arise for us Christians in Germany, namely to fight newly developing antisemitism, even under the guise of politically and socially motivated anti-Zionism. We must cooperate in a new relationship with Jews.
Today's efforts to re-fashion the relationship between Christians and Jews have made both of them aware again that, despite all contrasts, they hold much in common. It follows that this common ground must be concretely developed in the present and for the future.
After all that has happened it behooves us to proceed with great care. Only tentative beginnings can be indicated. The belief that man as the image of God bears responsibility for the whole earth, including the shape of human life, could serve as a point of departure. People of various religions and beliefs in all continents are fighting for a more humane world and Christians and Jews must take part.
Their faith in the One God who created one humanity, challenges them — as well as the Muslims — to stand up for solidarity with all men.
Without the conviction that every human being is of equal worth before God, the development of human rights is unthinkable in our time. It is all the more frightening to see how much the reality remains in arrear of this program. That applies to lack of social justice, to discrimination, persecution, and maltreatment for racist, religious, and political reasons. Holy Scripture, to which Jews and Christians refer their life, emphasizes the love of God for the disadvantaged and deprived.
It is a task, then, for Christians and Jews to fight against the power of those who succeed and enrich themselves at the expense of the weak. Another important task, despite all evident difficulties, must be the joint effort of Christians, Jews, and Muslims on behalf of justice and peace in the Middle East.
The ever more apparent threat by technology to human existence makes it imperative to comprehend the world once more as a creation of God, to deal with it appropriately and according to the mandate received from God. That means that we turn away from a position in which man makes himself the measure of all things, exploits the world for his own good exclusively, and thereby becomes dependent on what he himself has produced.
It is primarily a question of Christians and Jews becoming aware of their common responsibility for the development of society and its realization, which will result in further areas of joint action. Encounter and witness. Christians and Jews interpret and confess in different ways their faith in the One God who reveals himself in history. The Torah, as the centre of Jewish faith, is a divine plan and tool for the development and fulfillment of the world. Jesus Christ takes that place in Christianity, as salvation for all men.
In the face of such common ground as well as differences, the encounter between Christians and Jews must not be confined to a mere social meeting. Joint listening to Holy Scripture may lead to an enrichment and clarification of one's own faith. The more open and intensive such an encounter will be, the more candid can we discuss that which separates the two groups. Yet, both must witness to their own faith: The divine charge makes the believer a witness who by word and deed must realize his identity as Christian or Jew.
An encounter on this basis can hope to be fruitful only if the long and painful history of mutual relations is conscientiously taken into account. To spread the faith among the nations, was a characteristic of Judaism at the time of Jesus. The early Christian community followed along the same path, to fulfil the mission received from its Risen Lord.
It resulted in widespread Christian missionary activity among Jews and Gentiles and brought about the formation of communities composed partly of Jews and partly of Gentiles. At the beginning of the Church, Jews could be baptized in the name of Jesus and continue to belong to the Jewish people. In the course of a divergent development, conversion to Christianity gradually implied a loss of Jewish identity.
With the growing expansion of Christianity, the Jews became a minority. In the end, Judaism became the only religious minority tolerated under the aegis of a state church that defined all areas of community life.
Under this unequal distribution of power, a great deal of pressure was put on the Jews in the course of centuries. Apart from persecutions and expulsions, forced conversions took place as well as religious discussions which were to prove the superiority of Christianity. The proper meaning of a Christian witness toward Jews was thereby often obscured and turned into its opposite.
Changed intellectual and social conditions in the modern world generated serious attempts among Protestants to regain the original meaning of a Christian witness toward Jews. That applies particularly to the era of a developing Pietism which, by referring back to the Reformation, re-emphasized the freedom of the Gospels. The effects of Christian social superiority were somewhat softened by the personal witness of individual Christians who turned toward the Jews.
From such religious motifs developed the mission to the Jews which led to fruitful encounters between Christians and Jews. A renewed Christian interest in Judaism, particularly from a scholarly point of view, was thereby awakened.
Since the Enlightenment and due in part only to the mission to the Jews, more and more Jews converted to Christianity for social reasons. After a period of growing antisemitism during the 19th and 20th centuries during which some Christians protected individual Jews and after the terrible events of National Socialist persecution of the Jews, the situation has changed in many ways. The Church has lost much of her former importance in public life and her extensive failure during the Jewish persecutions has again and to a very serious degree shaken her unprejudiced witness toward the Jews.
The witness to our own faith, necessary for a fruitful encounter, has become severely encumbered by shortcomings and faulty elements of Christian customs in the past. Missionary practices exist even today which give Jews justified cause for suspicion. Such practices, however, are decidedly rejected by the Church and even by those individuals who favor a missionary witness toward the Jews.
Such misuse, however, does not release Christians from an authentic endeavor to render account according to the Gospels, "for the hope that is in you" 1 Pet Faith must not remain silent. After all that has happened, there are many different opinions on the proper way of Christian witness. The discussion during the last few years has centered mainly on the terms "mission" and "dialogue"; these were often interpreted as mutually exclusive.
We have now come to understand mission and dialogue as two dimensions of one Christian witness and this insight corresponds to the more recent view of Christian mission generally. Mission and dialogue as descriptions of Christian witness have an ominous sound to Jewish ears. Christians must, therefore, re-assess the meaning with regard to the Jews, of their witness to Jesus Christ as salvation for all mankind, the terms by which to identify their witness, and the methods of procedure.
The Church must not fail to admit and candidly state that she stands in need of talking to the Jews.
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