By Quin Hillyer at PJ Media;
There’s a fascinating book review (I haven’t read the book itself) published online June 22 at Christianity Today whose topic tracks a question I’ve asked in writing for years. As I put it in a column years ago at the Mobile Register, “why aren’t Christians more Jewish?”
What I mean (and have written several times) is that even a fair amount of theological study hasn’t given me an answer to why Christians don’t still celebrate a lot of Jewish customs and holidays. Why don’t we still memorialize Yom Kippur or the Passover seder? Why don’t we light the candles of Hanukkah? Jesus and his disciples did, so why don’t we? Christianity was built on the foundation of Judaism, so why do we ignore so much of that foundation?
Obviously, our Pauline theology explains why we aren’t subject to every jot and tittle of every law in Leviticus, but we still are of a faith that cannot be understood without an understanding of our Jewish roots – and there is no good reason why major Jewish observances shouldn’t also be Christian ones.
All of which can serve as a predicate for Nathan Finn’s Christianity Today review of Gerald McDermott’s Israel Matters: Why Christians Must Think Differently about the People and the Land. Explains Finn:
McDermott is part of a group of scholars who identify with the “New Christian Zionism” movement. Their goal is to convince contemporary believers that Israel is not the backstory of the church, but a key part of the future of the faith. In Israel Matters, McDermott makes a nuanced case for the centrality of Israel in redemptive history—past, present, and future.
…
[Later in the column:]
In short, Christians should look at the central tenets of Christianity and the central tenets of Judaism not as an either/or choice but as a both/and consummation. And we should open ourselves to “a fresh appreciation of the Jewishness of Jesus and his earliest followers.”
(Thank goodness, by the way, that most Christian denominations in the past 50 years have firmly rejected the once-prevalent understanding that Jews in general were responsible for the Crucifixion, rather than the historical and theological truth that the fault belonged only to a small group of Temple leaders and their most avid courtiers.)….
[The full column is here.]
