Jews and Christians Together

A reader of this blog recently opined, "And there isn't any "Judeo-Christian" anything: there is just Christian and Jew, and ne'er the twain shall meet." This provocative comment ignited some animated push-back from other commenters. And so it was serendipitous that I should stumble this morning upon Jews and Christians Together by Ian Speir. If my reader seeks to decouple the Christian from the Hebraic, Speir and those he quotes aim to bring them together, but in a way that seems to favor the Hebraic over the Christian. Here is a taste (bolding added):

Those ideas and values—mediated through the Bible, accelerated by the rise of the Christian West, and strained through the filter of the Reformation and the Enlightenment—found good soil in America. They are at the root of some of our country’s most fundamental convictions, like [such as]  human dignity and ordered liberty, the necessity of freedom of conscience, and the insistence that the common good is best secured when men and women are free to pursue lives of virtue. 

These civilization-shaping ideas do not depend upon the Constitution; they predate it. The Declaration calls them rights—though they are equally responsibilities—that are “endowed by [our] Creator.” They are more than a frame of government or a social contract. They form a civilizational covenant, transcending the ebb and flow of history and the politics of a particular moment. 

At times these values have been called “Judeo-Christian.” The better descriptor is “Hebraic,” a term that simultaneously captures their worldview significance and their biblical source. 

In his lecture, Cohen insists that the “Hebraic spirit” of America and of the West is now at stake.

I will leave it for you to decide whether the thought in the bolded passage goes too far in  the direction opposite to that of my reader. 

How should we characterize the spirit of America and the West? Off the top of my head, here are four options that may serve as a menu for further rumination:

a) The spirit of America and the West is not Hebraic but Christian with Christianity decoupled from Judaism. (The extreme  view of my reader which is nonetheless useful as a foil against which to contrast more plausible views.)

b) The spirit of America and the West is Hebraic-Christian with primary emphasis on Judaism. (This seems to be the view of Speir and those he cites.)

c) The spirit of America and the West is Hebraic-Christian with primary emphasis on Christianity which, while in continuity with Judaism,  supersedes and perfects it.

d) The spirit of America and the West is the spirit expressed in (c), and thus the spirit of Jerusalem but a Jerusalem supplemented and where necessary corrected and held back from fanaticism and 'enthusiasm' (Schwärmerei) by the enlightenment values of Athens (philosophy) both ancient and modern.  (This, I want to suggest, comes fairly close to the classically liberal spirit of the Founders who were men of the 18th century Enlightenment.)

This schema does not cover all the options, but may be of some use.  Of the four, I prefer (d). 

Comments

[john doran]

1) The Jews of the New Testament (and, a fortiori, today, are not the Hebrews from the Old Testament (i.e. the Tanakh): they are the doxastic decedents of the Pharisaical Jews with whom Jesus disputed. Their primary religious text is the Talmud, the core of which was laid down during their Babylonian exile. What Christ thought of the Pharisees and Sadducees is clear.

2) If you have not read the Talmud, then calling my views about Judaism and Christianity "untenable" is like calling someone's views on Plantingian or Kripkean modal logic "untenable" without having read either The Nature of Necessity, or Naming and Necessity.

3) Thus, Speir either misspeaks or dissimulates by calling Judaism, "Hebraic".

4) That having been said, Jesus came to fulfill the Law, thereby transforming it into something new: Christianity.

5) The West is foundationally Christian. Full stop.

Whichever of the Founders of your (once) great nation did not actually call themselves Christian, were nonetheless indelibly etched with its basic morality, which morality has made the Western world possible.

[EG]

I hope I didn’t hallucinate that the first version of this post had no comments enabled.

[james soriano]

I agree with you, Bill. I’m a Type D kind of guy. The Western tradition can be traced on a back-ward bending arrow from Rome to Athens and thence Jerusalem, its starting point.

Although our tradition stops in Athens, it rejects Greek two-valued logic, the choice of an either/or alternative in a contentious argument, and typically returns an answer of “both.” But the “both” is given in such a way that it synthesizes what is good in the contending ideas and reformulates them them into a whole that is more satisfactory that either of the alternatives.

In the early years it was asked: Was Christ God or man? Is the material world real and is it good, or is our spiritual nature the only thing that is real and good? Does man owe allegiance to God or to Caesar? Did Mary give birth to a man or to God? Does man find salvation only through grace or by his works? Is truth to be found in divine revelation or can it be found in the unfolding of history itself? Does Scripture consists only of the accounts of Christ or should it include that which went before Him? Is the human body worthy of salvation or is the spiritual part of our nature the only thing that is saved?

In every case, the answer came back: “both.” Where did this pattern of thought come from?

We can see at work in the early Church councils. We can see it in the spread of Christianity as it conquered the ancient world, and as it rejected the various heresies that flourished at the extreme poles of an argument.

So if the question today is put thus: “Was the West founded primarily on an Hebraic spirit or is it entirely the offspring of Christianity, then let us stand on the shoulders of those who went before us and say: “both.” Both in a way that synthesizes what is good in each, keeping in mind that such a synthesis needs a boost from Athens to maintain balance.

[BV]

John,

I removed 'untenable' to make my schema more objective and less tendentious.

[BV]

I'm glad we agree, James. But I wouldn't say that our tradition rejects two-valued logic: standard logic is two-valued. But I know what you mean. Our Christian tradition, derived from Judaism but augmented and informed with Hellenic elements, aims at the synthesis of seemingly opposing ideas, and thus the mediation of extremes. Your examples are well-chosen.

Is Christ divine or human? Both; he is the God-Man. Christ is fully human and fully divine: one person in two natures. But this appears to be a contradiction inasmuch as human nature and divine nature include logically incompatible properties. For example, humanity includes mortality whereas divine nature includes immortality. So the question naturally arises: how is it possible for one and the same person to be both mortal and immortal?

Aquinas, the Great Synthesizer, takes this problem very seriously because he has the highest regard for Aristotle with his two-valued logic and law of noncontradiction (LNC). And so he tries to show that there really is no contradiction. Christ is mortal qua man but immortal qua God; limited in knowledge qua man but unlimited in knowledge qua God, and so on. Unfortunately, this "reduplicative strategy" as it is called is not quite satisfactory. I have gone into this in other posts. The Christological 'heresies' arise when attempts are made to make logical sense out of the God-Man idea.

For example, docetism attempts to avoid the contradiction by maintaining that the humanity of Christ is merely apparent, not real.

And so the tension between Athens and Jerusalem remains. I am rather less sanguine than you are about the viability of the various syntheses.

[Kurt Schneider]

It depends on how we interpret there isn't "Judeo-Christian anything". On the one hand, it is the Catholic Church specifically and the Christian religion more broadly that built Western civilization. There is no such thing as a "Judeo-Christian" religion. Of course there is overlap between the two religions and thus we could also interpret "Judeo-Christian anything" as sympathetic to the Marciom heresy. That would be a mistake.

The only way to make sense of "Judeo-Christian" is in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. The New Covenant is the fulfillment of the Old Covenant. Jesus Christ is the unblemished sacrifice. His sacrifice on the cross fulfills the sacrificial system of the Mosaic law. Jesus Christ is the "Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world". Jesus Christ also fulfills the Davidic kingdom. Nome of this makes any sense seperated from the Old Testament.

Furthermore, the purpose of Israel was to prepare for the coming of the Messiah who would bring salvation to all the nations. It is in this sense Jesus is the new Jacob and the Patriarch of a universilized Israel (i.e. the Church or “new Israel”). Thus when we properly understand Christianity the "Judeo" in "Judeo-Christian" is completely subsumed.

[BV]

Kurt sez: >>There is no such thing as a "Judeo-Christian" religion.<<

I agree.

>>it is the Catholic Church specifically and the Christian religion more broadly that built Western civilization.<<

Partially correct. The Greek and Roman contributions cannot be left out.

And because there is no Judeo-Xian religion, the Establishment clause of 1A cannot be rightly invoked to prevent the posting of the Ten Commandments in public places. The Ten are common to both Judaism and Christianity.

[Hector]

"And there isn't any "Judeo-Christian" anything: there is just Christian and Jew, and ne'er the twain shall meet."

I think we need to clarify something in order to discuss the accuracy of the term 'Judeo-Christian' - what do we mean by 'Judeo-'? If we mean by 'Judeo-' the very significant contribution of the ancient Jewish people to our moral, spiritual and anthropological conception of ourselves, a contribution substantially Hellenized no doubt, but hardly a negligible element of Western civilisation, then it's hard to see the objection. Christianity started out as a Jewish cult, Jesus preached in synagogues, he did not preach to Gentiles etc. One hardly needs to labour this point. And to include the contemporary Jewish people as part of that inheritance seems reasonable even if Rabbinic Judaism is not a straightforward continuation of ancient Jewish practice - they are co-heirs of this tradition, in a way that Confucian or Hindu civilisations are clearly not (Islam I will put aside for now as a more problematic case). It seems to me that that is what we do mean and is the intention of most people when using the term, at least here in England.

This is little different than talking about our civilisation's other basis, the 'Graeco-Roman', which hardly requires us to incorporate as fundamental all that the Greeks or Romans have done since those foundational centuries in ancient times. Clearly by 'Graeco-Roman' we do not mean moussaka, vespas and a remarkable number of stray cats are fundamental to Western civilisation (sensitivity police please note: this is an affectionate joke). But that the latter are peripheral phenomena doesn't mean that they are not therefore part of said civilisation.

So to twist the 'Judeo-' here to mean 'Rabbinic Judaism' at the exclusion of both the ancient Jewish influence (which has sophistically been defined out of existence) and the post-emancipation secular Jewish influence on the West seems either dishonest or confused. Are Einstein, Freud and Kafka not part of Western civilisation?

And if 'Judeo-' were, implausibly, taken to mean solely 'Rabbinic Judaism'? Well, it would be easily arguable that Rabbinic Judaism itself is not a fundamental or central element of Western civilisation but it is still a part of it - however peripherally - and developed largely within it (also to some extent in the Islamic world). And even so the contributions to Christendom of Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple are not negligible - e.g. the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Tanakh was used by many Protestant translators of the Bible into vernacular languages; the Kabbalah influenced large numbers of Christian thinkers, etc. That's before we even get onto the simply enormous contribution of post-emancipation secular Jews to Western civilisation.

The issue with the term 'Hebraic' is that Christianity was born in a Hellenized world and some of the ideas Speir mentions come from pagan Greek and Roman sources which can hardly be called 'Hebraic' in any way. To discount the Greek element is just as misleading and historically inaccurate as trying to erase the Jewish contribution. I am strongly in agreement with Speir that (most) Jews and (most) Christians have a 'shared civilizational mission'. I say 'most' because some Jewish and Christian individuals and groups are, sadly, anti-civilisational. And in saying that I do not mean that the very significant differences between Judaism and Christianity are therefore made to disappear - but in a severe crisis which threatens both faiths those differences can be largely put aside in order to realise shared goals. But then there are very significant differences between English and Italian culture but I still think those nations have a shared civilisation mission and face a similar crisis, and so on.

So I would argue, and I do not think this is a controversial claim, that the roots of our civilisation are 'Judeo-Christian' and 'Graeco-Roman' - and, more controversially in some quarters, that the intellectual and spiritual pinnacle of that synthesis is the Catholic Church. And that across the Western world we, Jew and Christian alike, currently face a very real threat from various quarters - both domestic and international - to our cultures, ways of life, civilisation.

Bill, you will hardly be surprised to discover that I also affirm (D). I think, if you haven't already read it, that you'd find Remi Brague's 'Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization' very interesting on this topic.

[EG]

Hi Hector,

Thanks for I think a useful comment, both in substance and intention. I am vaguely familiar with Brague, I have one of his titles in my library somewhere.

I’m reminded how important memory and memory-preserving practices and institutions are to creatures such as ourselves. We forget so much even in our own lifetimes, to say nothing of the likely many, many bits and important pieces constantly lost (and then, sometimes, in whole or in part, variously depending either recovered or reinvented as someone else’s work/opinion/interpretation) in individual deaths, destruction of records of all sorts, and the various up to modern social and cultural practices that undermine if not actively counter remembering and preserving (even when it is prudent for many or most no longer to remember clearly or faithfully.)

And so, recovering actual positions and beliefs, and the plural is important, but harder to distinguish between what was a common ordinary view from one that was official or which was more “political.”

Also, as for America’s history, I think there were various sorts of comprises made about the outward “faith” of its people, who as a friend reminded me was in some parts variously acceded to or ignored in favor of regional faiths and beliefs, in defiance of anything official. We might for example discuss the significance of Puritanism, and how that the American settlers were “breakaways” from the European ideas of faith and freedom, etc. I’m inclined to say it’s a mixed bag that ebbs and flows as various groups vie for power, status and influence, and are perfectly content to re-write, distort or just wholly fabricate history to suit their own ends, and this is likely as true now as true in any time in human history, most especially in matters of religion and foundational self-beliefs/mythologies (here being used in the sense of a framing story of who and what we are.)

[Hector]

EG,

You're welcome. Sorry it's taken me a few days to reply - I've had a terrible cold.

Brague is one of the best scholars/thinkers around today. The current crop of French intellectuals has some impressive figures: Brague, Jean-Luc Marion, Pierre Manent, Luc Ferry among others.

Civilisation is a constant battle against our natural state of forgetting.

>>the various up to modern social and cultural practices that undermine if not actively counter remembering and preserving<<

Yes, these are very concerning. I greatly fear in particular that through our technological ingenuity we've created the means which will be our undoing - things like TikTok are really concerning and social media in general seems to have destroyed intelligent public debate. The level of historical ignorance even among the elites is shocking. I think that's true across most of the West now. For example, that false narratives claiming that Churchill was a genocidal monster or that the history of Britain is one of little more than brutality and oppression can spread so easily among the British middle-classes is truly disturbing as only a very small amount of historical knowledge is required to inoculate one against such beliefs. But then many people saw what happened on Oct. 7 in Israel and then rapidly forgot about it and decided Israel were the bad guys. I find it difficult not to be misanthropic these days.