An Epistle to the Romans: Modern Style

LATELY a grieving son of the Dispersion has come among you writing thoughts which may deceive your understanding because of the yearning in his heart and the manifest sincerity of his speech. He bids his fellow exiles make peace with our Christian household, for that alone, he warns them, can safeguard a demoralized Judaism and secure its menaced covenant against the new Cæsars of the hour.

By admission of this earnest advocate of spiritual union with Christianity, Christ was a true prophet in whom Israel reached its highest expression of authentic spirituality; ‘apex of their culture’ and ‘keystone of our ultimate faith.’ Can, then, His divinity be denied without stigmatizing Him as a false and misleading prophet, a veritable charlatan? For did He not repeatedly proclaim Himself in unmistakable terms ‘the Son of God’? He does not describe Himself as ‘one of the Sons of God ’ or as ‘the favorite Son of God,’ as suggested in the ‘Epistle to the Jews.’ During the formal process of judicial interrogation the High Priest Caiaphas demanded categorically: ‘I adjure thee by the living God that thou shouldst tell us if thou be the Christ, the Son of God.’ The answer is equally categoric and affirmative: ‘I am.’ The High Priest, scandalized and outraged, rent his garments, saying: ‘He has blasphemed; what further need have we of witnesses?’ And Jewry’s understanding of Christ’s further claim to be the promised Messiah is equally unequivocal. Jewry itself formulated the indictment, comprehending clearly the implication. Correcting Pilate’s Gentile ignorance, the synagogue required precision : ‘ Write not, the King of the Jews, but that he said I am the King of the Jews.’

Because of these claims, not because of His minor social, economic, or philosophical teachings, was He crucified. The attributes of divinity and Messiahship are inseparable from His person both by testimony of His own declarations and by the synagogue’s plain accusation. The writer of the ‘Epistle to the Jews ’ is in error, therefore, when he refuses to consider the divinity of Christ as relevant to the present discussion. On the contrary it is the main discussion, and without it there would be small need for any discussion at all except of incidentals. If Jewry accepts the invitation to consider Christ hereafter as its greatest prophet, Judaism must accept the prophet’s two major contentions, that He was the Son of God and the Messiah. Accept the basic virtues of integrity and clarity in the prophet and you must accept the logicality of consequences. Reject either and you reject both. These two fundamental claims to divinity and messianic mission have not been attached, accretion-like, to Christ’s teachings by Paul or Augustine or Aquinas, but stand admitted as capital points in the court record. If they are conceded to be there but untrue, then the pretender was either insane or a dangerous criminal, no fit claimant for higher place than Moses and Isaias and Hillel.

This historic dilemma, which Jewry has faced since the Apostolic age, will not be softened or mitigated by evasion or compromise. The ‘Epistle to the Jews’ counsels acceptance of the culture of Christianity but not of its dogmas. Now Christianity, to be sure, is not only a religion but a culture, which has profoundly affected the form, the content, and the specific temperament of western civilization. It is not only a faith but a habit of thought, a way of living in society, and a normative psychology for reacting to external phenomena. But that synthesis of distinguished qualities and significant externalities which men call culture is, on analysis, naught but the tangible and visible expression of a spirit vitalized and rendered creative and vocal by inner belief. Without the sustaining beliefs of Christianity there would be no sanction in Christian morality, no imperative in Christian ethics, no significant logic in Christian metaphysics, no satisfying harmony in Christian music, no lasting pigmentation in the Christian painting of life and human destiny, no symbolism in the solidity of Gothic architecture, no cohesion in Christian civilization. The cult of external form and the symmetry of multiplicity with unity may soothe the æsthetic sense but will not satisfy the intellect in its native capacity for ultimate truth.

Christianity has hung Beauty as a lamp in her sanctuary, but the Light within is Christ. The psychology of motivation is very important. To attempt separation of Christian culture from Christian belief is to do violence to the unity of the Christian synthesis. It is a counsel of desperation that will not satisfy complete curiosity and certainly will not reveal the specific genius of Christianity.

‘We Jews must come to terms with Christianity. It is the only way out for us,’ are words cited in the ‘Epistle to the Jews’ as having been spoken by another intelligent coreligionist. Christianity, while welcoming this evidence of new interest and solidarity, will reply: ‘What terms? You and I now live on terms of practical equality and understanding in our respective communities, in our social life, in business, in politics, and on the Supreme Bench. What remains to negotiate?’

The answer is patent, unless Jewry, like Pontius Pilate, asks what truth is only for purposes of conversation. The only factor remaining unsolved in the equation of reconciliation between Jew and Christian is the integral Jesus of Nazareth. The spirit manifested in the Epistle is welcomed, but the dialectical reservation, if maintained, will kill the spirit. The proposal means much, or it means nothing. To accept Christ means to accept the whole Christ, not to dissect Him arbitrarily into calculated percentages of acceptable and nonacceptable sections, labeling some dogmatic, others cultural.

If I were a Jew convinced intellectually of the nonfulfillment to date of Old Testament prophecies respecting the Messiah, and believing, as then I must, that the Anointed is yet to come, I would stand fast and reject Christ’s claims in toto. The logic of my position would compel me to regard Him as a monstrous impostor. If He could proclaim Himself the Son of God before the Sanhedrin, if He could impersonate the promised Messiah before the Roman governor, if He could deliberately disturb the Holy City even to riots that ended in bloodshed and take steps to perpetuate the fraud forever by the agency of a universal Church; if, in a word, He could be a rogue in the major premise, I will not compromise with Him on the minor issues of high culture, moral beauty, or social enlightenment. He must in that hypothesis forever remain a scandal to the Jews and a stumblingblock to the Gentiles. If the divinity of its Founder be excluded, Christianity inherently would be no more salvific than Confucianism or Buddhism.

And do you, my brethren, be quick and constant to decline any invitation to devitalize the living Christ by conceding that the branch of Christian culture is viable apart from the vine of Christian revelation. The moment you do so, you hasten the degradation of your sanctuary into a place for rhythmic dances, cinematographic entertainments, oratorios, and lectures on current events. You will have sacrificed religion as such and entered into a losing competition with social-welfare agencies.

We followers of the Prince of Peace are accused in the Epistle of having always cursed and persecuted Jewry, until Jews in self-defense have been forced to seek security by the power of money. Be courteous but firm in reply. Be historically-minded though not polemically heated. Jewish friends may not like your history, for now you must speak three hard sayings. The accusation, which they resent, of being considered the Old Moneybags of Society, the proverbial pinchpenny of the ages, antedates the appearance of Christianity. Moses recognized that disposition in his people when he left them for a space to commune with God on the Mount. For, taking earrings from all who wore them, Aaron fashioned a golden calf, and it was that idol which, on his descent from Sinai, Moses found them all adoring and confessing: ‘These are thy gods, O Israel.’

It would be naïveté to suggest that idolatry of gold is an exclusive vice of Jews. Far from it. The point I raise is the chronology only. There was no Christian provocation in the desert, only voluntary choice. And there was no numerus clausus on the porch of the Temple when Christ drove the moneychangers out with a lash and the stinging rebuke: ‘My house shall be called the house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.’ He spoke as a Jew to Jews. Marx, Engels, Trotsky, and the Bolshevism of Lenin and Stalin, were not Jewish reactions of self-defense against Christian discrimination, but the climax of progressive social revolt against a capitalism that had departed from Christian principles under the fascination of the Industrial Revolution and which had been heavily financed by Jewish capital. The Jew was not the cause of the Russian Revolution, but the entrepreneur, who recognized his main chance and seized it shrewdly and successfully.

Persecution for conscience’ sake is recorded very early in the Christian era, but it was instigated by Jews against Christians, not by Christians against Jews. Saul of Tarsus was no Christian, but an orthodox Jew when he started for Damascus breathing slaughter and bent on extirpating a nest of new disciples there in the Christian Ghetto. And Stephen, the proto-martyr of Christianity, was not stoned by Torquemada. For four centuries until Constantine, Christianity lived in catacombs, a social pariah and a political minority too weak and insignificant to persecute anybody. Meanwhile the Jewish moneylender was steadily increasing his control of mobile capital and accumulating the resentment which occasioned much of the anti-Semitism of later ages. Magna Charta (1215) has several paragraphs against him, nominatim. Again, I am not indulging in the easy device of meeting charge with hateful countercharge, but simply correcting the chronology of the ‘Epistle to the Jews.’

If even the children of moujiks in the streets of Kiev shouted ‘Christ-killer’ at the author of the Epistle, may it not be because a whole people once shouted in Pilate’s courtyard, ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children’? What the Russian children did not know was that it can be a saving blood as well as a malediction. Some drops of it must have fallen on a poor dying Hebrew, a condemned thief nailed to a second cross beside the dying Christ. For that agonized Jew heard what no man yet had heard: ‘Amen I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in paradise.’ Although theology knows of some souls whose salvation has been revealed, either explicitly or by inference, I know of no other human being who heard such direct assurance in such unequivocal language from the lips of the Son of God Himself. And he who merited it was a Jew. That is a precious counter-heritage which no Jew should forget, nor Christian either.

Both Christendom and Jewry can fairly say ‘Peccavimus.' The Christian Church has little to be proud of in those depressing pages of its history which recount the multiplied abuses that gained such an obstinate foothold in Renaissance Christianity. I counsel you all to read the chastening recital of the Catholic historian Ludwig von Pastor, touching the low ebb of discipline and morals before the deluge of revolt that destroyed the unity of Christendom in the sixteenth century. Read and be humble in debate. By confession and humility is the Christian soul purged of guilt. Only by truth is the mind of man, be he Jew or Gentile, freed from error. Neither confession nor truth is easy victory. See to it that you strive to conquer in both. The plenitude of the new law is love. The old was fear. You are of the new.

Valete.