An Epistle to the Gentiles

‘He is our peace who hath broken down the wall between us.’ — EPISTLE TO THE EPHESLANS

I

THE ‘Epistle to the Jews’ which appeared in the December Atlantic was doubtless read by Gentiles as well as Jews. It may be this rejoinder will be read by Jews as well as Gentiles. We are grateful to Mr. Cournos for his daring and earnest and eloquent presentation of an old problem in a new light. He has said things that needed to be said without mincing words, and he has lifted the whole question of Jewish-Christian relationships up to a higher level. ‘Is this idea reactionary?’ he asks. ‘Is it revolutionary?’ ‘Am I after all a heretic?’ This paper is offered as a friendly and wholly sympathetic comment.

It happens that but a few weeks ago I found myself in conversation with a distinguished Jewish writer and lecturer, the author of many books, including a discerning one upon the Jews. We were discussing the resurgent tide of paganism now sweeping the western world — the breakdown of moral standards, the widespread cynicism and secularism which threaten the very soul of the race, the abandonment of worship, the apparent return of the old heathen gods. And we were agreed that Jews and Christians alike as worshipers of God, as interpreters of those eternal values which matter most in life, were facing once more an evil thing, a mass attack from all quarters upon the very sanctuaries of the soul of man. He spoke of anti-Semitism. I spoke of Antichrist. And there we were, Jew and Christian, conscious that we were after all comrades, foot soldiers together in a common cause, ‘wrestling not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’ The things that separated us were trivial, or so they appeared, compared with the high and holy things that united us. And so I dared to ask my newly made friend: Why cannot Jews and Christians unite and settle once and for all this so-called Jewish problem, which after all is equally a Christian problem? Are the two religions hopelessly irreconcilable? Are you Jews not kinsmen of Jesus? Are we Christians not Israelites too, if not after the flesh yet by promise, grafted in, as one of our Apostles (the greatest of them, perhaps, and a Jew) has said — grafted in among the Jews and ‘with them made a partaker of the root and fatness of the olive tree’?

And do we not also worship the one true and only God? Is not the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses and Amos and Isaiah the God of Jesus and Peter and Paul? Your God is our God. Our Christ is your Christ. Your prophets are our prophets. Our Apostles are your kinsmen after the flesh. If only we can break through this tangled mesh of ancient prejudice (on both sides), and gain a clearing where we can look steadily and clearly and objectively at the situation, face Jesus Christ together, evaluate His personality and mission, absorb and reflect together His spirit, we shall find that two thousand years of blundering — mostly, I am prepared to admit, on the part of socalled Christians — has not defeated the divine will that the wall of partition between the Jews and the Gentiles should be broken down and the new and universal Israel established. And now comes Mr. Cournos boldly saying, ‘Jew and Christian can both deny Christ or meet in him. A real acceptance of him by one or the other must inevitably involve both.’ To which I say, Amen.

Christians as well as Jews often overlook the fact that Christianity is essentially not a rival but a revival of Judaism. ‘Think not,’ said Jesus, ‘that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.’ In the strictest sense Our Lord did not found a Church, for it was already there. The Church was the holy people of God, Israel. Into this Church Our Lord himself was initiated by circumcision on the eighth day. The coming of Christ meant not the extinction of Israel’s Messianic hope but its consummation. The Koinonia or fellowship of disciples gathered about Jesus was a fellowship of ardent Jews who could join with aged Simeon looking into the face of Christ and then exclaiming, ‘Mine eyes have seen thy salvation ... a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.’ It was in the coming of the Kingdom or universal reign of God which Jesus proclaimed that the hopes of Israel were to be fulfilled and crowned. We cannot be too often reminded that Jesus was a Jew, that He was reared in a Jewish home, and taught the Jewish Scriptures by a Jewish mother; that He was obedient to the Jewish laws, regular in attendance at the local synagogue, scrupulous in His observance of the Jewish feasts, and passionately devoted to the glorious worship of the temple which He loved to call His Father’s house.

The twelve apostles were Jews, all of them, and the number of them was clearly determined by the number of the tribes of Israel. They thought as Jews. Their religious experience was expressed in Jewish terms. They were scrupulous in their daily worship in the temple; even after the Resurrection and Ascension they continued to keep the Sabbath as well as the first day of the week. The Galilean fisherman Peter insisted that only Jews were eligible for membership in the Church. Only the circumcised could be admitted to the fellowship of the mystery.

There was indeed a crucial moment in the early history of Christianity when the scale trembled in the balance determining whether Christianity should be but a Jewish sect or a world-wide, interracial, universal religion, in which there should be ‘neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.’ The first Council of the Church held in Jerusalem in the middle of the first century settled the matter, the doors were swung open to the Gentile world, and that extraordinary Jewish convert Saint Paul was out like a flame over Asia Minor, haunting the market places, the heathen temples, but always first the synagogue, witnessing, arguing, explaining, persuading, preaching that out of Judaism had come the anointed Redeemer of the world. Had his profound and vibrant experience of a new religious life through the discovery of Jesus lessened his passionate devotion to Judaism? Quite the contrary. His love for Israel was only intensified. ‘Hath God cast away his people?’ he asks. ‘God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew ... at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace.’

Accusations were not wanting that he was a traitor to Israel; he was beaten with forty stripes save one, and stoned as an apostate, but he proudly reaffirmed again and again his loyalty to Israel. ‘Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I.’ His position is clear. The good news of Christ was ‘the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek’; ‘Glory, honour, and peace, to every man that worketh good; to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile.’ The Jew was always first in his thought, and he does not hesitate to ask and answer the question: ‘What advantage hath the Jew and what profit is there of circumcision? Much every way. Chiefly because that unto them were committed the oracles of God.’

Look about you, Christians, and see how thoroughly Semitic are not only your origins but the whole texture of your religious ideologies. Matthew Arnold called them your ‘Hebrew old clothes.’ Our Scriptures are Jewish and nothing else — not only the Old Testament, but the New Testament as well, every word of it. The great prophets of Judah and Israel we have accepted as our own. Daniel Webster used to say that before going into debate in the Senate he drank the fortieth chapter of Isaiah as a stirrup cup. We understand. There are none like the great Hebrew prophets to rouse the spirit to a sense of the righteousness, the holiness, the majesty and might of God.

The Jewish Psalter is our chief devotional literature, and the spring of all our hymnody; the moral code of Moses is carved deep in the conscience of the Gentile world. The Ten Commandments are still a part of every Christian child’s education. We are summoned to our daily morning worship by the Venite in the Ninety-fifth Psalm. At Evensong a Jewish maiden sings ‘Magnificat’ and aged Simeon, the saint of the temple, chants his ‘Nunc Dimittis.’ Our chief service, the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion sometimes called the Mass, is a spiritualization of the Passover Feast, with the blessing of the bread and wine, the offering of a mystical Lamb of God, and a joyful participation in the sacrificial meal. One of our benedictions is the benediction of the high priest of the temple. Bethlehem Ephratah of Micah’s prophecy is our holiest shrine, and no Zionist ever had a greater devotion to Jerusalem than has the Christian who sees in her the type of the heavenly city coming down out of heaven adorned as a bride for her husband.

All our theology, all our Christology, all our soteriology, all our doctrine of sin and salvation, of sacrifice, of atonement, of priesthood, of prayer, of worship, of world redemption, are colored through and through with Jewish concepts and bear upon them the inextinguishable evidence of their debt to those whose genius for religion justifies their title to be in a very real sense the chosen people of God.

II

The stumblingblock in the rapprochement of Jew and Christian is of course Jesus — Jesus the crucified. Paul was right. ‘To the Jew he is a stumblingblock, to the Greek foolishness, but to those who believe, both Jew and Greek, the power of God and the wisdom of God.’ But the enlightened Jew of today, like the enlightened Gentile, is reappraising the person and mission of Jesus. A process of revaluation has been going on for a long time. We have all discovered that He was not the ‘pale Galilean’ of Swinburne, nor the rather wild and willful apocalyptic visionary of Schweitzer, nor the gentle sentimentalist of the nineteenth-century liberals, nor the ‘noxiously exaggerated hero’ of Emerson, but rather, as Mr. Cournos says, ‘the supreme realist, the keystone of our ultimate faith, the most perfect man among the fully acknowledged hierarchy of the Jewish prophets, a Christ whose perfection, whose godlikeness, are not affected by symbols or extraneous meanings, a greater than Hillel and Isaiah who preceded him, even as they were greater than Moses who preceded them.’

These eloquent words from a modern Jew are very significant. They point once more to the baffling mystery of a life which reveals man at his highest — a life of such moral and spiritual perfection that God shines through His every word and act. As Mr. Wells has said, ’He was always right, and He never tangled His miracles.’ If one can believe in the moral miracle of a human life sinlessly, perfectly lived, one is not inclined to cavil over a biological miracle like that of the Virgin Birth. ‘If I believed in the sinlessness of Christ as you do,’ said Huxley to Bishop Gore, ‘I would expect a physical miracle to parallel that moral miracle.’ Christianity does not believe Jesus to be divine because of His birth. It accepts Him as God Incarnate because of His life and death and resurrection, and in the light of this faith finds the story of the Virgin birth, as theologians say, ‘congruous.’

‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one God.’ The Jew is a monotheist. That majestic affirmation is at the very heart of Israel’s faith. The Christian is not faithless to this inheritance. The Christian also is a monotheist. He worships but one God, the God who inhabits Eternity, the God who manifests Himself in many ways but supremely in those values of personal human life recognizable as divinely true and beautiful and good. And when that revelation rises, as it does in Jesus, to unique heights, to the very ultimate peak of intellectual and moral and spiritual splendor, what shall man do but fall upon his knees in the presence of the burning bush of a human nature which carries, without breaking down into abnormality, a perfect human theophany of God ? It is this recognition of God’s supreme revelation in terms of our humanity and of Jewish humanity that opens that earlier Epistle to the Hebrews which announces that ‘God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person . . . sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.’

The heart of Christianity is just here — not mere hero worship of Jesus of Nazareth, but recognition of Him as God incarnate, God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself; and it is to be hoped that Judaism in its approach to Christianity will never be content to come to terms with any attenuated or marginal forms of Christianity which, however sincere, have abandoned that essential faith which the Church has held semper, ubique, et ab omnibus. Certain liberal temples of Judaism, indeed, have long been scarcely discernible from certain so-called Christian churches which present a diluted and ambiguous gospel with no roots in either Christian philosophy or Christian theology, a gospel which turns out to be only a kind of eager desire to share in uplift and reform. Rabbi Hirsch when once asked, ‘Are you not really a Unitarian?’ wittily replied, ‘No, I am a Jewnitarian.’ But Jewnitarianism is neither one thing nor the other. Hybrid types in religion, like hybrid types in biology, are likely to have neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity.

I suspect that not a little of the difficulty in reconciling Judaism and Christianity has arisen not so much in the field of theology as in the field of human behavior. Mr. Cournos recalls his childhood days when he was greeted in the village street with ‘ Christ-killer! Christkiller! ’ That cry, begotten in ignorance and wicked prejudice, is being repeated to-day on a grand scale in Germany. And that cry down through the ages is a commentary on the hideous failure of Christians to reflect the spirit of Christ.

Here is the terrible tragedy of Christian-Jewish relations — not the crucifixion of Jesus by a group of nationalistic Jews, but the crucifixion of the Jews by nationalistic followers of Jesus. Love, forbearance, tolerance, humility, are indelible marks of true Christian character, and we Christians have been hateful, arrogant, brutal, inhuman in our treatment of the Jew. We acknowledge it. But are we repentant? If a wave of antiSemitism is on the rise, where is it on the rise if not among so-called Christians? They are a reproach to Him, and a scandal to the Church. They, not the Jews, are the ‘Christ-killers,’ for they ‘crucify the Son of God afresh and put Him to an open shame.’ They have forfeited the right to be recognized as interpreters of Christ. They are not light-bringers, but heralds of the blackness of darkness. They are, to use His own terrible words, ‘whited sepulchres, full of dead men’s bones,’ the dead bones of racial prejudices.

Even here in America signs are not wanting of this anti-Semitism which is equally anti-Christian — here in the country of Haym Salomon, here in the country which has upon its Supreme Court Brandeis and Cardozo, here in the New York of Otto Kahn, Jacob Schiff, Nathan Straus, and Felix Adler, here in the Chicago of Judge Mack and Henry Horner and Julius Rosenwald, here in the Boston of the Filenes. Over and over again one hears the old stale accents of this ancient race prejudice. ‘The Jew,’ we are told, ‘is controlling our finance, our radio, our movies, our government. There is Morgenthau, there is Cohan, there is Frankfurter. The Jew is capturing all our scholarships and winning all our prizes in college; better hasten to set a stiff racial quota and keep him out. The Jew is a dangerous radical; remember Karl Marx! The Jew is a libertine; he is corrupting our literature our drama, our art: consider Epstein. The Jew is noisy and ostentatious and greedy and aggressive; don’t let him into this club or that hotel or he will bring in all his tribe and overrun the place.’

It is idle to argue with the Jew-baiter, and the Jew-hater. He will howl you down every time. It is futile to remind him that there are only four million Jews in America and only fifteen million in the world. He will answer that they should all take boat and make for TelAviv in Palestine. The one thing he will not do is face what he considers a problem as a true Christian would face it. If Jews move into a neighborhood, Christians become alarmed, and hasten, not to fraternize with their neighbors, but to move out; presently the Christian Church building is offered to the synagogue, and the faithful disciples of Christ establish their altar somewhere else and set about raising money to send missionaries afar to convert the Buddhist and the Mohammedan, the Hindu and the Palestinian Jew, to Jesus Christ. What a travesty upon the religion of the Son of Mary! What a denial of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man proclaimed by Jesus Christ!

But are the Jews entirely free from blame in this matter? Have they not deliberately helped to mix the bitter cup which now they drain with lamentations? Do they not insist upon standing aloof, upon encysting themselves racially and religiously from their fellow citizens? A very pertinent question has recently been asked by the editor of one of our great religious weeklies: ‘Can the Jew hope to dwell permanently in the midst of alien cultures and maintain his own insulated cultural stream except at the risk of a social tension which is constantly threatening to break into overt tragedy?’ I have read many replies to that question, but none of them has seemed quite to answer it. The Jew is magnificently loyal to his religion; it provides him with a social solidarity and blesses his home, unites his family, moves him to great and humanitarian charitable enterprises; but he seems willing and content to cherish that religion for himself alone. He shows no eagerness to share it with outsiders. A Gentile is simply barred out. It does look as if the Jewish religion were for Jews only: no others need apply. And the inevitable result is ‘that a suspicion lurks in the Gentile mind that Judaism is held by Jews as an instrument of racial unity and continuity rather than a universal religion.’ In a word, ‘it must be clear to both Jew and Gentile that a social or racial group which sets itself with impenetrable determination to resist the normal influences of culture transfusion and confirms its isolation by religious sanctions is doomed to disaster.’

Mr. Cournos, I believe, is right. ‘We Jews must come to terms with Christianity. It is the only way out.’

III

Religious tolerance we must all agree upon. President Eliot chose for one of the inscriptions on the Court of Honor at the Columbian Exposition these words: ‘Toleration in Religion, the Best Fruit of the Last Four Centuries.’ But is tolerance enough? And, as Robert Frost would ask, ‘Do good fences make good neighbors?’ A visitor to Ireland a few years ago discovered a witty old peasant in Kerry who, discussing the age-long bitter controversy between Catholics and Protestants, remarked, ‘If we could all agree to be atheists we could all live peaceably together as Christians! ’ I wonder! The world is full of smug people who think they are religiously tolerant when what they really are is religiously indifferent. Toleration, it must be remembered, is not easy except for people who do not believe anything very much. An age of toleration is likely to be an age of skepticism. And this seems to be a skeptical age.

The greater credit, then, to the Christian and the Jew who have learned real tolerance, which is not a spirit of compromise or of weak convictions, but a spirit of strong brotherliness and love. True tolerance relies not upon compromise but upon courtesy, not upon evasions or doubles entendres but upon sympathetic desire to get the other man’s point of view, not upon bigotry but upon generosity; the attitude that expresses itself in ‘I don’t agree with you, but I would give my life to defend your right to differ with me.’ But, just as Edith Cavell held that ‘patriotism is not enough,’ so we hold that religious tolerance is not enough. We must go the next step, we must trudge the second mile, we must earnestly seek to break down the wall of separation between brothers who are worshipers of the same God and lovers of the same Christ.

In the Temple at Jerusalem was a beautifully carved balustrade separating the outer court, and from it rose columns at regular intervals, bearing inscriptions — some in Greek, some in Latin characters — to warn aliens not to enter the holy place. One of these Greek inscriptions was discovered a few years ago and can now be read in the museum in Constantinople. It runs thus: ‘No alien to pass within the balustrade round the temple inclosure. Whosoever shall be caught so doing must blame himself for the penalty of death which he will incur.’ It was this wall of partition which was vividly in the mind of that early Christian who wrote to the little company of believers in Ephesus. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘ that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called the Circumcision in the flesh made by hands, who were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world, are now made nigh. For Christ is our peace who hath made both [namely, Jew and Gentile] one, and hath brokendown the middle wall of partition between us, having abolished the enmity, for through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. Therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God.’ Once we have met together in Christ the wall is down.

But how can this be accomplished? How can the ideal of this typical early Christian writer be realized, how can the dream of Mr. Cournos and many another contemporary Jew come true? The task is not an easy one. Centuries of wellrooted custom and tradition and prejudice are not easily overcome. Fierce and burning loyalties will be clamant in opposition. For a Jew to be baptized is from the Jewish point of view but to announce apostasy and to invite disgrace. For a Christian, on the other hand, to stay his missionary effort to make Christ known to all men is to be faithless to His cause, which is to bring Christ to the world and the world to Christ.

The situation looks hopeless. But be sure it is not hopeless. With God all things are possible, and even the stupidity and willfulness and selfishness and sinfulness of man cannot in the long run thwart His holy will. Judaism and Christianity belong together. Without Christ, Judaism is unfulfilled. Without Judaism, Christianity is incomplete. Signs are surely not wanting of the fruitfulness of the great œcumenical movements drawing into conference on Faith and Order and Life and Work the divided groups in Christianity, looking to a visible unity of the Church, a united front against the forces now threatening the spiritual life of man. Why not hold a conference of Jews and Christians, not to discuss tolerance, but to discuss unity? It is a daring proposal. Perhaps such a conference or series of conferences might issue in a corporate movement whereby the rich variety of rites in the Christian Church might be still further enriched with a Hebrew rite, the retention of distinctive Jewish liturgical forms, the retention even of circumcision where desired, all within the framework of a Christian order and for the expression and promotion of the Christian faith.

The recent Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, were he alive, would endorse such a suggestion. ’The Jews,’ he wrote, ‘cannot be incorporated into any Gentile form of Christianity; there will always be the Jew and the Gentile in the communion of the Catholic Church, as well as the Latin, the Greek, the Anglican, and all other branches of the true vine. And when the Jew sees his Promise in Christ, he will mould into his national liturgy acts, rites, and ceremonies which are his and not ours, which if he may not force upon us, we may not prohibit to him.’

Meanwhile, may we not hope that many more Jews will take the trouble to read not only the Gospels but those earlier Christian writings, the Epistles, to see for themselves precisely what the Christian teaching is? And may we not equally exhort Christians to read and study more earnestly the law and the prophets, without which Christianity is not to be understood? There is an old legend that a vase was placed by God at the foot of His throne. In this the tears of Israel, wrung by persecution, are treasured. On some remotely distant day when the cup is full to overflowing God will at last send His redeemer. But suppose that redeemer has come and has not been recognized because His unworthy disciples got in the way? The cup is surely full to overflowing. The day of Israel’s redemption is here. Together Christian and Jew may reverently join in the ‘Olenu’ prayer from the morning office of the Jew: ‘ May the time not be far distant, O God, when thy name shall be worshiped in all the earth. May all created in thine image recognize that they are brethren, so that one in spirit and one in fellowship they may be forever united before thee. Then shall thy Kingdom be established on earth.’ And let all who are true Israelites respond ‘Amen.’