Judaism

Sproul JrArticle by Dr. R. C. Sproul, about the relationship of Judaism to Christianity. There is a reason why the broader world, including the secular world, speaks of this thing that they call Judeo-Christianity. Well, what’s Judeo-Christianity? It’s an attempt to acknowledge that one of the things that Christianity has in common with Judaism is a belief in a transcendent God. It’s a belief that at least the Bible or parts of the Bible is the revelation of God. It’s a belief in the existence of a transcendent moral standard that is immutable.

Years ago, J.D. Hunter, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, published a landmark book that has helped shape the culture called Culture Wars. In that particular book, Hunter argues that the battle lines in the culture wars are not drawn specifically between this religion and that religion that at least recognizes itself as a religion. This is not India at the time of its independence when you had Hindus and Muslims at war with each other. Rather, he argued, the fault line is between those who believe in a transcendent moral standard, and those who don’t. And those who do believe would include the tradition of Judaism, it would include Christianity, it would even include Islam. And on the other side we have what he calls the progressives, those who deny that there is a transcendent standard.

Well, Judaism is a monotheistic religion that looks to the Old Testament as an authority, that believes in the existence of God, that the God that exists made the heaven and earth, made Adam and Eve, spoke to Abraham. That’s where we start to see, there’s so much overlap, that we’re tempted to look at Judaism as sort of Christianity minus Jesus, or Christianity as Judaism plus Jesus. We recognize that God worked in and through the Old Testament and that He called together His saints and gathered them into His Kingdom in the Old Testament, and so we have this continuity with Old Testament Judaism, but it raises the question, how do we look at Judaism after the advent of Christ?

Well, it would be nice and pleasant and polite to suggest that Judaism in our day is specifically Christianity minus Jesus. You hear people express that reality by saying things like this: Christians and Jews worship the same God. Well, not only do I disagree with that, but I’m going to argue that Jesus Himself disagreed with that. It’s true that they have the Old Testament and we have the Old Testament and New Testament, it’s true that they have been given much.

But Jesus Himself said that you cannot have the Father without the Son. You cannot separate the Father and Son in such a way that you are, I don’t know, ? of a Christian because you’ve got ? of the Trinity in your sort of pantheon. Rather, the rejection of Jesus as the Son of God, the chosen Messiah, as God the Son, necessarily requires the rejection of God the Father as God the Father. You can’t have the Father without the Son and you can’t have the Son without the Father. One thing we need to make sure we understand is that our understanding of the Trinity cannot be a tritheistic understanding. That is, an understanding that affirms that there are somehow three gods, so you can get one without the others.

Rather, the triune God is a triUNE God. And in fact, ironically, our Jewish friends should help us remember that. I’ve often said that if there was an emblematic text in all of the Old Testament that sort of defined and united the self perception of the Jewish people, it would have been Deuteronomy 6:4, what we call the Shema. And that text, if you look at ancient manuscripts, all through the whole of the Old Testament you have this really careful copying of the text in such a way that there is no margin, there is no punctuation, in fact, it’s so zealous to cram as much as they can into a small space, they don’t even have vowels.

But if you look at the text, you’ll find that there is one text that is sort of written in bold, written in larger, and that is the Shema, which reads “Hear Oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Absolutely true. This is an affirmation of God’s unity, of His simplicity, and our embracing of the Trinity should never undo that affirmation. But what this means is that if Jesus is God the Son and you reject God the Son, than you’ve rejected this one God, the God who is one.

Judaism has much to commend it, we have much in common with them, we can work together as co-belligerents, but we must understand that even while we affirm that those who were redeemed in the Old Testament were redeemed because of their submission to and their trust in the coming work of Jesus Christ, that we are not sharers of the same faith.

Understanding Sola Scriptura

michael j krugerArticle by Michael Kruger (original source we are bombarded with declarations that something is true and that something else is false. We are told what to believe and what not to believe. We are asked to behave one way but not another way. In her monthly column “What I Know for Sure,” Oprah Winfrey tells us how to handle our lives and our relationships. The New York Times editorial page regularly tells us what approach we should take to the big moral, legal, or public-policy issues of our day. Richard Dawkins, the British atheist and evolutionist, tells us how to think of our historical origins and our place in this universe.

How do we sift through all these claims? How do people know what to think about relationships, morality, God, the origins of the universe, and many other important questions? To answer such questions, people need some sort of norm, standard, or criteria to which they can appeal. In other words, we need an ultimate authority. Of course, everyone has some sort of ultimate norm to which they appeal, whether or not they are aware of what their norm happens to be. Some people appeal to reason and logic to adjudicate competing truth claims. Others appeal to sense experience. Still others refer to themselves and their own subjective sense of things. Although there is some truth in each of these approaches, Christians have historically rejected all of them as the ultimate standard for knowledge. Instead, God’s people have universally affirmed that there is only one thing that can legitimately function as the supreme standard: God’s Word. There can be no higher authority than God Himself.

Of course, we are not the first generation of people to face the challenge of competing truth claims. In fact, Adam and Eve faced such a dilemma at the very beginning. God had clearly said to them “You shall surely die” if they were to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:17). On the other hand, the Serpent said the opposite to them: “You will not surely die” (3:4). How should Adam and Eve have adjudicated these competing claims? By empiricism? By rationalism? By what seemed right to them? No, there was only one standard to which they should have appealed to make this decision: the word that God had spoken to them. Unfortunately, this is not what happened. Instead of looking to God’s revelation, Eve decided to investigate things further herself: “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes … she took of its fruit and ate” (3:6). Make no mistake, the fall was not just a matter of Adam and Eve eating the fruit. At its core, the fall was about God’s people rejecting God’s Word as the ultimate standard for all of life.

But if God’s Word is the ultimate standard for all of life, the next question is critical: Where do we go to get God’s Word? Where can it be found? This issue, of course, brings us to one of the core debates of the Protestant Reformation. While the Roman Catholic Church authorities agreed that God’s Word was the ultimate standard for all of life and doctrine, they believed this Word could be found in places outside of the Scriptures. Rome claimed a trifold authority structure, which included Scripture, tradition, and the Magisterium. The key component in this trifold authority was the Magisterium itself, which is the authoritative teaching office of the Roman Catholic Church, manifested primarily in the pope. Because the pope was considered the successor of the Apostle Peter, his official pronouncements (ex cathedra) were regarded as the very words of God Himself.

It was at this point that the Reformers stood their ground. While acknowledging that God had delivered His Word to His people in a variety of ways before Christ (Heb. 1:1), they argued that we should no longer expect ongoing revelation now that God has spoken finally in His Son (v. 2). Scripture is clear that the Apostolic office was designed to perform a onetime, redemptive-historical task: to lay the foundation of the church (Eph. 2:20). The foundation-laying activity of the Apostles primarily consisted of giving the church a deposit of authoritative teaching testifying to and applying the great redemptive work of Christ. Thus, the New Testament writings, which are the permanent embodiment of this Apostolic teaching, should be seen as the final installment of God’s revelation to His people. These writings, together with the Old Testament, are the only ones that are rightly considered the Word of God.

This conviction of sola Scriptura— the Scriptures alone are the Word of God and, therefore, the only infallible rule for life and doctrine—provided the fuel needed to ignite the Reformation. Indeed, it was regarded as the “formal cause” of the Reformation (whereas sola fide, or “faith alone,” was regarded as the “material cause”). The sentiments of this doctrine are embodied in Martin Luther’s famous speech at the Diet of Worms (1521) after he was asked to recant his teachings: Continue reading

Division Demolished!

Text: Ephesians 2:11-22

The Jewish/Gentile division is unlike any other, and what is more, God planned for it as He made a distinction between Israel and every other nation on earth, making them His own special people. Yet in Christ, the erected barriers are not merely discouraged but utterly destroyed. In Christ’s cross all racial and social divisions are obliterated forever!