I believe that both history and theology offer warrants for respecting the belief and practice of Jews rather than seeking their conversion to Christianity. Yes, I know in John’s Gospel Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (xiv, 6). I know that in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus mandates, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit . . .” (xxviii, 19). But we should not read these texts without attentiveness to how we have used them against Jews (and others as well). In the nearly 2,000 years since the evangelists wrote these texts, Christians have vilified Judaism and persecuted Jews as “Christ killers”. Ours is a shameful history: denigration of a people, compulsory baptisms, the crusades and Inquisition, confining Jews in ghettos and attacking them in pogroms. Particularly after the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered in the most barbaric ways, we must not use our sacred texts in ways that would mean the end of Judaism. Yet to seek conversion of Jews to Christianity is ultimately to seek Judaism’s demise.
It is fundamental to Christianity that God entered into covenant with the Jewish people ”” a covenant that, as Pope John Paul II said many times, was “never revoked”. God is faithful to covenants, and, therefore, the way of Judaism is salvific for Jews. Torah is a path to holiness.
The fact that Christians have misused certain verses does not change the fact that Y’Shua came to the Jewish people as their messiah, the fulfillment of the older covenant and to initiate a new covenant, spoken of in Isaiah and Jeremiah, and in every book of the Tenach.
What it does mean is that we must be even more sensitive in presenting Jesus to the Jewish people, being mindful of how they have been abused in His name.
Or as one messianic-Jewish songwriter states [url=http://www.delusionresistance.org/christian/LWW/hineni/hineni07.html]”I knew Jesus before He was a Gentile”[/url].
Somebody buy that woman a new Bible. Hers must be missing Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews.
Of course God is faithful to his covenant with Abraham and his descendants, the Jews. He does so in order that they might hear the Gospel proclaiming that the messiah promised long ago has come, in Jesus of Nazareth, who fulfilled the promises made in Genesis and the prophecies made all through the Hebrew Bible.
Yes, we have often done a very poor job of dealing with the Jews. Often, dreadful things have been done in the name of Christianity – but often those things were done by those without a clear understanding of the faith they professed, or by those who were merely nominal Christians. (In these days, the greatest enemy of the Jews is not Christians – nominal or otherwise – but Islam.)
If something has been done badly, the solution is not to give up on it, but to do it well.
[blockquote]Yet to seek conversion of Jews to Christianity is ultimately to seek Judaism’s demise.[/blockquote]
To which the answer comes plainly: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” And, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
But from this bit at the start of her essay I can understand her opinion regarding Jesus as the Christ: “I confess that a Jesus who consigns people to the fires of Hell for unbelief is not the Jesus whom I seek to follow.”