I like nothing more than giving history or theology lessons. Seriously, give me a topic that I think I know something about, and I will spew until you pay me to stop. I read the manuscript I was given, outlining alleged antisemitism in the church, and decided that the problem really needed a broader view to explain it fully.
For the record, the manuscript is an unpublished work by a man who appears to be a linguist with a couple of printed works to his name. The manuscript was shared with the idea that it wouldn’t be released to the general public at that time. I still have this manuscript, but I agreed not to share it and I will not do so now, nor give any further details about its author, other than to say that he appears to be a Presbyterian who was confused about his theology. He rails a bit about “Replacement Theology,” pointing out that another name for this is “Covenant Theology” (in my experience plenty of people who aren’t Covenant Theologians believe that the Church is now Israel, but that’s for another day); he appears to have been back-doored into dispensationalism by his desire to understand the Jewish people. As far as I know Presbyterians are defined by Covenant Theology, although what is contained in the Westminster Confession of Faith isn’t as complete an exposition of Covenant Theology as it could be. He also spends a paragraph disclaiming British Israelism, which, as you’ll see later on, is more than a little ironic in our story. The author worked backwards from modern dispensational statements that equivocate “Replacement Theology” with a hatred of the Jewish people, and read this equivocation into the works of the earliest writers of the church, “realizing” that the earliest Church Fathers considered themselves as inheriting the promises of Israel.
I am going to try to stop saying this, but I feel certain that those of you reading this who knew me when I was part of the ministry are once again wondering if I am some sort of antisemite. Maybe I’m just gun-shy, but I also know that when I was back there myself, I would have wondered. Perhaps you’re all better about this sort of thing than I was (see my “Stickler” piece earlier), but in case you are wondering, let me try to make this clear to you. I still consider myself to a great extent a Judaeophile. I love the Jewish people, I continue to have interest in their customs and traditions, and I am still fascinated by rabbinic Judaism. However, I do not love rabbinic Judaism (the religion and its practices) as I once did. If you can’t separate these two ideas, then you will not understand this. I know that religious Jews who read this have often been told that one cannot separate the people from the religion without destroying both; more than a few twentieth-century Jews (including our favorite tour guide in Israel, as we stood on Masada in May 2000) have pointed out that Zionism or superior training and firepower did not save the Jews through the centuries, but the traditions carried from one generation to the next by the rabbis and the synagogues did. I would only say that God preserves nations and their identities, for His purposes. Men do not and can not maintain their tribes throughout the centuries if God does not have a purpose in their doing so. But my point is, I can’t love rabbinic Judaism, because I only have room in my heart for one God and one doctrine, and that God is the Triune God Who revealed Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the Old and New Testaments, and that doctrine is a mystery before the Incarnation leading to the presentation of the image of the invisible God in the man Christ Jesus. Those who stop believing the Word of God at or before the appearance of the Son of God have read God’s book only to stop just when it was getting good. Rabbinic Judaism is a fork in the road, seeing Christ in the distance and choosing to go someplace else, and building up a sacred tradition to justify the change.
I’m going to try to stop justifying myself to my doubters now. We’ll see how far I get. I only write so much about this, because I know where I was, and I know that I would have shut the conversation down before now, without a good reason to continue it. But on with the show…
One of my postmodern mantras was (and sometimes still is; old habits die hard) this: we hate and fear because we do not understand. This is, of course, silly; I hope that no matter how much I understand Nazi Germany, I would still hate it and fear its possible resurgences. Plumbing the depths of sin with the light of God’s Word should always cause us to hate it more and flee it. But when I started to read what had been written about the Jews by some of the early Church writers, I immediately wondered why they hated the Jews. (I had the same problem I wrote about above; I couldn’t separate contempt for false doctrine from a contempt for the Jewish people.) Some of them were unquestionably influenced by general antisemitism in their day, and a faulty concept of how the consequences for sin would be borne by individuals and nations. There were some who thought of the Jews as deicides (literally, “God-killers”), and this is not acceptable—the fact is, both Jews and Gentiles worked together to crucify the Lord of Glory, and the sin of mankind as a whole is what made it necessary, and the real “blame” for the murder of Jesus lies with His Father, Who sent His Son to die, in His love for us. We are all accomplices to deicide; some of us have been forgiven by the Victim and His Father, though, and for that I am forever grateful. There weren’t too many of the early fathers who advocated violence or a loss of what we would now consider “civil rights” for the Jews for this sin, though; they merely used it as an explanation for Jewish misfortune. I think this was a shortcut which doesn’t take much into account, and doesn’t explain why other people groups have suffered, either at the hands of the Roman Empire or elsewhere, but there you have it. Church Fathers sometimes believed weird things; if later generations used their sometimes deficient doctrines as license for sin, whose fault is it? It’s hard for me to answer questions about the early Church; the more I learn I find the less I know. Many of the pre-Nicene fathers were under strains that I can’t imagine: they taught from texts that may not have contained everything our Bibles have; they were being actively persecuted off and on, sometimes locally, sometimes throughout the Empire; they were taking on heresies that, while they are often still around today in some form or another, they were first rearing their ugly heads in that time, and it is hard to find a balance when you’re fighting heresy. Trust me, I know.
Quickly my concern in this history changed, because as I read more, I found I had more questions. It stopped being about “why the church ended up antisemitic,” and started to become “why the church ended up wrong about everything.” In fact, our group taught that organized Christianity is riddled with a cancer of paganism, and the charges have always been substantiated by vague references to Mystery Babylon (primarily Hislop’s work The Two Babylons), Mithraism, and antisemitism. I had been challenged by people, among my friends and coworkers, to put up or shut up—demonstrate that the church was corrupted and evil, or stop taking shots at it. I hadn’t been around the ministry when the primary teacher had gone through these things in great details (he did give us his videos from the period, but we didn’t watch many of them; we didn’t have the time, and didn’t know if it was important to take the time), so for me no proof had really been given. However, I had already learned that when the teacher “proved” something, I often wasn’t satisfied with the answer, and had to track it all down myself to figure out what I believed and why. I wrote my differences with the teacher off to different personalities, different styles, and rarely, different standards of proof. But I believed, like any good postmodernist, that God’s truth could accomodate his standards and mine, and I saw no reason to disbelieve anything he said at this point. It was simply a matter of determining what had happened to the church, and I had a built-in way to figure out if I was right, because if I arrived at the same conclusion as he did, then I had nothing to worry about. This of course made it an easy short-cut to just lean the proof toward his answer whenever possible. Circular reasoning? Maybe in your puny Western mind, but you need to learn to think like the rabbis before you judge me.
So, what did the Gentile church bring in that the Jews didn’t? I took an ignorant short-cut, and assumed that it must be Greek philosophy. Never mind that some authors have traced the inroads of Greek philosophy into Jewish thinking before the common era; don’t confuse me with the facts! I took a quick overview of everything that was outwardly wrong with Catholicism (by “outwardly” I mean “not soteriology or theology, but religious practice”), and started looking for it in a couple of popular histories of philosophy. I outlined the growth of scientific principles and the ethical discussions of the Greeks before Christ, focusing particularly on the tendency to demonize matter in favor of the intellectual or spiritual, because I saw in this the roots of Gnosticism and later monasticism. I did a couple of months on Greek philosophy before we got into the broad brush-strokes of the early church, then shifted to the work of Ernest Martin in discussing the canonization of the New Testament.
This was a tricky bit for me, because I was only just now starting to figure out that there was something amiss in the whole discussion of the Canon of the New Testament. The Catholic Church claims, more or less, that the tradition of the Church safeguarded and produced the New Testament. Protestants claim that the New Testament was the foundation of the Church. But in the first and second centuries we have a pretty serious chicken-and-egg problem. Ernest Martin gets around this by claiming that the apostles established the complete canon before they died. It should, perhaps, get an “A” for effort, but the fact is that Martin was short on facts and long on conjecture. He absolutely had to prove that the inspired writers produced the inspired canon, before they passed from the scene; otherwise the church for the first 2-3 centuries was the instrument of the Holy Spirit to safeguard and bring together the Canon. It is hard for somebody who believes that the majority of the church is fatally wrong (like Martin often did, and like we did) to accept that God could use the Church to bring forth His Word, without falling into a full-blown “Magisterium” idea that says that the Church has an ongoing right to interpret and change the canon of Scripture. If you are sure that the church’s direction in areas like when to worship, calendrical details, and high Christology or Trinitarian doctrine was completely off-base by the time of the Council of Nicea, then you are not going to be too fond of the idea that that same church was able to maintain the true Word of God and bring it forth perfect and inerrant. How could people so right about some things be so wrong about others?
A high view of God’s sovereignty would have fixed that, and a whole host of other issues. But it would be a long while before that would happen. In the meantime I assumed that Martin was right (I liked his answer best, certainly) and forged ahead. I went through a couple of councils before ending at some point before the iconoclast controversy, and that takes us well into fall of 2000. However, before we get that far, there are a few more things to deal with: my first attempt at coping with Romans 11, the trip to Israel in May 2000, and my becoming the only teacher of the group in St. Louis. If you think that we have plumbed the depths of my theological problems… you haven’t seen anything yet. I went off the deep end, and never realized that somebody had drained the pool.
