Firmly Held Beliefs Often Require Judgments

When the Southern Baptist Convention announced that it wanted to convert Jews, all hell broke loose. Singling out the Jews smacked of anti-Semitism, some said. Religions shouldn’t proselytize anyhow, others maintained. Above all, many rejected as unseemly any confrontation between religions, religious debate being found disruptive and offensive. Southern Baptists, it was said, have no business denigrating Judaism.

But people who take their religion seriously do make judgments about other religions, and these judgments involve rejection of error and confession of truth; that is what religious conviction is all about. Good relationships between religions ought not suppress open debate about religious truth and error. If Jews who practice Judaism believed that Jesus Christ was the way to God, they would accept him, so practicing Judaism represents a rejection of Christianity and all other religions. If the Baptists conceded that Jesus Christ saves everyone but the Jews, they would by their own lights count themselves anti-Semites. No one should take offense when people affirm their religions, including their difference from, their rejection of, all other religions. Monotheism allows no alternative.

Rejecting Judaism and converting the Jews represent the very foundation of Christianity. The apostle Paul said so in so many words: “If righteousness comes through the Torah, then Christ died for nothing” (Galatians 2:21). As University of Rochester Religious Studies Professor William Scott Green writes: “Christianity began as a kind of Judaism. The conflict between what became two religions began as a quarrel within Israel. . . a family feud about God’s will for Israel and about the definition of Israel itself.”

To object to the Southern Baptists’ initiative is to reject the Christianity of nearly 20 centuries. Anti-Judaism is what makes Christianity Christian. Not only so, but the persistence of Judaism--and that means the vitality of the religious practice of Jews--calls into question the integrity, indeed the very point, of Christianity.

Why do the Jews who practice Judaism object so strongly to the decision of the Southern Baptists? The same centuries-old convictions that account for the Baptists’ recent decision explain, also, the response of those who practice Judaism. For while Christianity emerges as not-Judaism, Judaism does not define itself as not-Christianity. Christians face in Judaism competition about the true meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) and in Jews’ persistence in Judaism an explicit rejection of Christ. And they are right. But Jews for their part have reacted to Christianity only because they have had to: Christianity ran the world in which they made their lives. No theological conviction of Judaism requires Judaism to pay special attention to Christianity in the way in which Christian theology requires a (negative) doctrine of Judaism.

Jews object to the Baptists’ objective because Judaism deems all religions equally true or false by the unique criterion of the Torah. But if others choose to provoke religious debate, Judaism has ample resources, considerable experience and a powerful case to make in its own behalf.

Does that mean that the Southern Baptists are wrong to precipitate a religious debate? Not in my view.

On the contrary, the Baptists serve contemporary religious dialogue by setting forth their claim to exclusive possession of the truth. They thereby force Christians of different sorts, as well as Jews, to consider the foundations of their faith. The Southern Baptists are right to call Judaic and other Christian faithful to a reassessment of their deepest convictions. From such a confrontation, the rebirth of informed and well-considered faith must come as the one sure result--not conversion of all or most of the Jews. What has not happened for 2,000 years is unlikely to happen in the next 1,000 years either. Faithful Jews find certainty in the conviction that God wants them to be what they are: loyal to the Torah of Sinai and that alone.

The Southern Baptists have seized the moment. When through the Judaic response they discover that Judaism is a religion too, and that when pressed Jews respond with intense loyalty to their religion, they will appreciate how much their initiative has contributed to the renewal of Judaism.