Note: I originally wrote this in 2018 and have reposted here as its former home on the internet has discontinued.
When I was growing up, for reasons I’m not entirely able to explain, I had a particular love of the traces of Jewish culture that I encountered in my Christian upbringing. When I was a teenager, I read the Old Testament for myself – and I absolutely loved the books of law, much to the bafflement of my Christian friends and family. I also studied German at A-level, including Max Frisch’s play Andorra, which is about anti-Semitism.
This meant that for much my life, I saw myself as one of the ‘good guys’ when it came to Christian-Jewish relations. But more recently I’ve been looking back and thinking, ‘Wait… what if I’m not?’
I was woefully ignorant of the church’s long, sad history of anti-Semitism
Growing up as a Protestant Christian, I knew that Martin Luther (1483–1546) had established the doctrine of justification through faith, but it was only in my late teenage years that I stumbled over a statement he’d made about the Jews. It was in a book about the holocaust and when I spent my gap year in Germany, I asked a Lutheran minister about whether this quote really happened. He cringed and said, “Yeah, Luther was an anti-Semite.” Oh. And I’d had no idea.
I was also blithely unaware that there was such a thing as holocaust denial. Until one day, in Germany, I was in a café talking with man (he was not German) and he said this whole business about 6 million Jews being killed by the Nazis was made up. Heads started turning and I felt wildly uncomfortable.
And then there was the time at university when I first watched a film adaption of Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice. It was the version with Al Pacino playing the Jewish merchant Shylock. Shortly after it begins, you see one of the lead Christian characters in the play spitting at Shylock, unprovoked. And again, I thought, “I had no idea.”
But you know what, I probably should have had an idea.
And I would love to say that, with these experiences, I began to realise that maybe I wasn’t as informed as I thought I was, but I’m not sure that’s true. I didn’t have any Jewish friends, I hadn’t read any Jewish literature outside of the Old Testament, I wasn’t making any effort to study the recent history of the Middle East or Britain’s involvement in the formation of the state of Israel, I didn’t think that holocaust denial or anti-Semitism was something that ever happened in Britain, and I was still willing to roll with sermons that used crass stereotypes to describe Jews during the time of Jesus.
So, the only thing I was really standing up for was a less dismissive reading of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. That’s not a lot.
If we want to be people who actively further God’s justice and peace on earth, then we need to be people who will go out our way, who take risks, who listen humbly, who lift the voices of the marginalised, who reach out, who pursue learning, who accept correction, and who persist in doing good.
The church needs to talk about Luther, properly
For sure, I heard a lot about Luther growing up and his role in the reformation. But I didn’t hear anything about his anti-Semitism. Now, I dare say Luther did many good things when it came to justification by grace through faith, but his attitudes towards Jewish people followed the same course of much of the church throughout history.
As Richard Harvey, a Messianic Jew, puts it in his book Luther and the Jews: putting right the lies:
[p57] …The majority of the early church fathers [had] argued… that God had finished with the Jewish people because the church (made up mostly of the nations) had become the new Israel, the true Israel. And furthermore, the old Israel, the Jewish people, were condemned to wander the earth, without a king or a home, as “reluctant witnesses” of their involvement in the crucifixion of Christ.
While this theology was developed by the church fathers Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, what it meant in practice was developed by Chrysostom and Augustine. Luther, as an Augustinian monk, inherited the views of Augustine on Jews and Judaism.
But he didn’t challenge them. He challenged the Catholic Church’s teaching on indulgences (this was where rich people bought prayers for when they die, so they spend less time in purgatory). He challenged whether the Bible should only be read in Latin. And he challenged whether the Vulgate Latin translation was as reliable a starting point as the original Greek and Hebrew. But he didn’t challenge anti-Semitism. Instead he cut himself off from Erasmus, who would have had the intellectual rigour to challenge him, and he refused to meet to meet with Rabbi Josel Rosheim when Josel asked Luther to intercede.
More than that, Luther leveraged his political influence, his religious influence, and his grasp of satire to incite other people to exclude, persecute and kill the Jews. His writings were littered with anti-Semitism and he wrote four significant works, the largest of which was written in 1543, titled ‘On the Jews and their lies’. It’s 65,000 words long.
Needless to say, four hundred years later, Hitler found Luther’s anti-Semitic writings very useful.
If we want to be people who actively further God’s justice and peace on earth, then we’ve got to be prepared to wake up to our everyday assumptions. We’ve got to carefully consider those assumptions, and we’ve got to have the courage to go against those assumptions when people are being oppressed on account of them.
And we’ve got to do this, even in the areas where we consider ourselves to be strong.
The hard graft of working on our blind spots
In the New Testament, James wrote that salt water and fresh water don’t come out of the same spring, and neither should both good and bad things come out of our mouths. But they do, and they have done.
In many ways, Peter was a compressed example of exactly this in Mark 8. One minute he’s, “You’re the Messiah, you’re the son of the living God.” The next minute he’s, “Hey Jesus, stop talking about all this suffering nonsense, that’s not what the Messiah is meant to do.” Jesus is the son of the living God, but Peter knows best.
It’s cringe-worthy when you can see it, but when you’re doing it, you don’t see it.
Luther thought he was a very gracious and reasonable person when it came to the Jews. He was wrong.
We can just as easily think we’re very gracious and reasonable people. And we can be just as wrong.
It would be easier not to write about this, but I think we should. That said, we need to take great care in how we talk about it. Understanding is a long process of learning and listening that requires dialogue from both sides of a divide. And if we want to do this ourselves, then we will have to look for ambassadors who are willing to engage in dialogue with us.
Finding the right people is important.
Sometimes our questions will betray our ignorance and prejudice. And it’s for this reason, it’s because we may say offensive things even when we don’t mean to, that we need to respect the fact that not everyone from a certain group of people will be willing to be an ambassador to us. Being an ambassador is a calling and it’s a tough one, we shouldn’t try and force someone from the other side of a divide into that role, certainly not for the sake of our own personal learning.
But when we meet an ambassador, who is willing to invite us into their space – whether that’s their homes, their social spheres, or indeed their stories about who they are as a people – we need to participate as a guest. Their spaces are not places for us to take over; their stories are not narratives for us to claim and re-write as our own.
Concluding thoughts
The story of God’s revelation to humanity is a story that necessarily includes his relationship with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and their descendants. Because of who I believe Jesus was (is), I believe that Gentile Christians get to enter into this grand story and participate in it as equals. I stand by that. But even with this shared participation, it is still a story we’ve been grafted into. Christians don’t get to claim superiority and we don’t get to take over the whole story as if it’s always been all about us.
One of the things about grafting branches into trees, is that although the branches become part of the tree, their fruit remains distinctive. As Christians we will have a distinctive story and history, which includes the ministries of Peter and Paul, the early church and the church fathers. For those of us who are Protestant like myself, it will include the reformers such as Luther, whose academic work in translating the Bible, the whole Bible, direct from the Greek and Hebrew, was hugely important in broadening Christians’ knowledge and understanding of both Old and New Testaments. We’ve got some really good stories and good heritage to be proud of; we shouldn’t feel like we have to appropriate the entire Jewish story as our own, just because some of our important stories haven’t been canonised into scripture.
And this image of grafting goes two ways. When other people want to graft into Christian culture, whether that’s our church, our community, or our country, we shouldn’t expect them to lose their distinctiveness. Sometimes I encounter the belief that if a group of people comes into another culture and holds onto their distinctiveness, then they’re like an ivy that wants to grow up all around the tree and eventually kill the tree. I don’t think we need to be afraid of that. This tree is made of stronger stuff.
PS Yes, I got the title of this post from the Mitchell and Webb sketch “Are we the baddies?“