The Problem of Christian Antisemitism

The Problem of Christian Antisemitism

by Joseph Keysor

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Copyright Joseph Keysor 2014.

All Rights Reserved

Published by Athanatos Publishing.

Cover by Julius Broqueza.

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The Problem of Christian Antisemitism

During World War II,a church dignitary refused to help some Jews unless they converted to Christianity.¹ If he had read the parable of the Good Samaritan more carefully, he might have realized that the Samaritan did not inquire about the religious affiliation of the wounded man before giving him aid. Probablythe Samaritan recognized the wounded man as a Jew and helped him regardless of the traditional enmity between their peoples. When Jesus said we should love our neighbor as we love ourselves he did not mean except for Jews, or except for people who do not agree with us about religion.

Beyond merely treating the Jews like anyone else, Paul teaches that we should have special regard for the Jewish nation, because unto them were committed the oracles of God (Romans 3:2), oracles that are vital to the Christian religion. Moreover, we know that Christ was born into a Jewish family and circumcised on the eight day according to the Law of Moses, with a sacrifice offered by his parents on his behalf in Jerusalem also according to thatLaw. When Christ appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus he spoke to Paul in Hebrew (Acts 26:14), and the earliest Christians were Jews. What to do with the first non-Jewish Christians was something of a problem that had to be resolved by a church council.

What reasons are there, then, for Christian antisemitism? It has been asserted that Christians see the Jews as a threat because their unbelief calls the legitimacy of our faith into question; that we need the support of the Jews to authenticate our faith, and that their continued existence in unbelief is intolerable to us.As elementary as that logic might seem to those who are unfamiliar with biblical teaching, it is not the real issue. That human nature, whether Jewish or Gentile, is fundamentally alienated from God and cannot believe without the gift of faith, is a basic Christian concept (I Corinthians 1:17-29). Those who do not understand this lack faith. They also do not believe or understand the Bible, which says that when their time has come God will give it to the Jews to believe (Romans 11:11, 25-26).

The fact that the Jews or anyone else, even our closest friends and family members, reject Christianity is not a stumbling block to the serious Christian.Concerning the Jews, Paul plainly teaches us that the Jews will not believe until the appointed time - yet their unbelief, until such time as God chooses to turn them, is the riches of the Gentiles (Romans 11:12). As such it is part of God’s providence.My private interpretation of this is, that if the Jews as a nation had from the start accepted Christ, they would have had a natural human tendency to be proud of their elite status. Gentiles, conversely, would inevitably have considered themselves to be second-class citizens, and would hence never have been able to fully enter into the blessings of grace.

Whatever the proper understanding of that verse might be, the Jewish rejection of the gospel was in no sense a hindrance to the spread and to the establishment of Christianity. The message of Christ does not depend on and has never depended on such merely human authentication. The real origins of Christian antisemitism, as was elaborated on in the previous chapter, are not in simple insecurity, but rather in human sin and evil.² These can flourish behind a facade of religiosity, and have been active in various forms in the church from its first beginnings until today. They will remain active until the end of the age and the return of Christ. Thus it is not in the Bible, but in disobedience to the Bible, that we need to search for a solution to the problem of Christian antisemitism.

But the Jews rejected Jesus! So have many other people also rejected Jesus. We also who now call ourselves Christians rejected Christ before we came to believe, and are no better than anyone else (Ephesians 2:3). Historical instances of antisemitism, pogroms, lies, and many evils committed against the Jews are thus testimonies not to Christianity, but to the failure of Christians to understand their calling. If that means much of church history has been a failure, so be it, but let us not forget the myriads of ordinary and unremembered Christians who have been sincere enough in their walk with Christ to be far removed from massacres, cruelties, and hatreds. They, too, are part of church history.

Anti-Jewish aspects of medieval Christianity such as the Crusader massacres, charges of Jewish ritual murder, or torturing communion wafers (desecration of the host)did not even appear until a thousand years and more after Christ. Prager and Telushkin report that The first accusation of ritual murder was made in 1144, and the first recorded accusation of host desecration came in 1243(this was 28 years after the Fourth Lateran Council declared the doctrine of transubstantiation to be official church teaching).³ Surely if such things were endemic to Christianity they would have appeared long before that. They have exactly zero biblical basis, and emerged only in a time of great spiritual darkness, ignorance, and superstition.

Ridiculous medieval stories about a Jew who stabs a communion wafer but converts to Christianity when he sees blood flowing out of it have no place in the hundreds of volumes by countless Christian theologians, commentators, pastors, and devotional authors. Even Luther, who is constantly pointed to, wrote literally dozens of volumes of collected works in which the Jews are not relevant and not an issue. Weird stories of saints, legends, and miracles were one of the abuses the Reformation sought to correct. No Protestants, in spite of our many and obvious failings, have ever been concerned with sacred communion wafers, as they have no biblical basis.

When writing about communion, Paul was not concerned about communion wafers being tortured. He was concerned about people partaking of communion unworthily, making themselves guilty of the body and blood of the Lord (I Corinthians 11:27). Here it is not Jews, but rather people with the name and appearance ofChristians, that according to Scripture are guilty of Christ’s death. If anyone crucifies Christ afresh it is not those Jews (or anyone else) who merely deny Christ (as I also denied Christ for many years) – it is those who partake of communion unworthily, or who have had some experience of the truth of Christianitybut then fall away (Hebrews 5:4-6). The attribution of Christian anti-Judaism to the belief that Jews crucify Christ afresh just by existing in unbelief has nothing to do with serious Christian doctrine or practice.

How many of the things that occurred in the medieval period were nothing but sin and evil in Christian disguise! That people should be forced to convert on pain of death makes a mockery of every single scriptural teaching about baptism. When the Ethiopian eunuch requested baptism, Philip said to him, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest (Acts 8:37). That forced baptisms should later be upheld as binding was the result of ignorance of biblical Christianity, even of salvation itself. Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, even atheists will I believe fare better on the Day of Judgment than people who use the power of the church and the name of Christ to perpetuate such sin, ignorance, lies and evil. Far from justifying them, their use of Christ’s name will I believe bring them greater condemnation.

But what of certain medieval regulations against the Jews that are said to have been copied by the Nazis? Does that show a Christian influence on Naziism - or does it show the same underlying force of evil, hatred, and lies working both in a deeply corrupted and worldly Christianity in the Middle Ages and in secular ideology in our own times? The second alternative means that many who had the name of Christian were spiritually akin to the Nazis (lacking of course modern technology and ideology). This they will find to their sorrow on the Day of Judgment, when it will be evident that using the power of the church and the name of Jesus Christ to persecute Jews (or anyone else, including dissenting Christians like the Waldensians or the Albigensians) was in fact sin against God. Such things should reflect only on the deluded people who practiced them (many of whom probably never even read a Bible), not on those who do not practice such things because of the genuineness their faith.

Prager and Telushkin’s detailed study of antisemitism lists 10 parallels between church laws against the Jews and Nazi laws.⁴ Yet, many parts of medieval Europe lived without such laws, and not a single one of the examples given comes from Protestant countries after the Reformation. That the Church of the Middle Ages, with its pomp, glory, wealth, pride, power and cruelty had strayed very far from the teachings of Christ is a regrettable fact which we do not have to try and cover up or explain away. We may point out that persecution of Jews has nothing to do with the ordinary lives of countless Christians, in many countries over long periods of time, and that it is a direct denial of many biblical teachings. We may also point out that none of those restrictive medieval measures came anywhere close to the worst Nazi excesses, which were totally unimaginable in the Middle Ages.Apart from undeniable similarities, there were also profound and equally undeniable differences in motivation and in end result.

A better understanding of the contested relationship between religious and Nazi antisemitisms will have to follow a closer examination of the latter. For the present, let us remember that Jews polluting the blood purity of the Aryan race was not a concern of traditional religious antisemitism. Neither was the belief that the Jews, through Christianity, had corrupted Europe with false values that were contrary to nature and harmful to the German nation in its struggle for survival. These and still other ideas foundational to Nazi antisemitism emerged in the nineteenth century and