Philo-Semitism has been and continues to be the default position of many North American evangelicals, thanks, no doubt, to the continued influence of dispensationalist theology. If you have lived in evangelical sub-culture long enough, you probably have Gentile friends who try to do the Messianic Jew thing, kippahs, tallits, shofars, and all. And even if this fashion has been eclipsed in recent years due to the resurgence of Calvinism, the fact that Calvin was one of the greatest OT interpreters means that our love for the Jewish people is going nowhere. (It’s an abstract love, to be sure. Most evangelicals have little contact with actual Jews.)
Still, I wonder if this love has gone far enough. What I have in mind in particular is the way in which Jewish identity gets handed on in the earthiest way from parents to children, along with what Christians can learn from this. It is not that Jewish identity is merely biological, as the Nazis and far too many contemporary people believe. No, Jewish identity is theological: a Jewish child is a part of the covenant people. To be sure, the halakhic criterion of matrilineal descent means that there is an element of biology involved, which, when pressed too far, might reduce identity to race. But the fact that converts are accepted — that mothers themselves might be converts — presses back towards a theological definition. One online commentator writes, then, that “Judaism is something we are proud to do, not something we are proud to be.”
Read Full Article »