Jesus is not the messiah...

[Guest]

Hello, Steve,

Thank you again for your response.

I would certainly acknowledge that there were people of faith before the Sinaitic covenant, and that there have been people of faith who are not participants in the covenant since its inception.

However, I would question that the keeping of the covenant is always and only "a manifestation of one's already existing faith." As I imagine you might agree, many people keep the covenant without faith (albeit imperfectly), for social reasons or family tradition or for other reasons.

I would argue that for such people, the covenant can act as a factor that leads to faith. In my own journey, I have kept Torah to greater-and/or-lesser extent for more than twelve years, and I can testify that it can be a powerful agent for personal formation. It may not change the hearts of everyone, admittedly, but it can change the hearts of some people as it shines the light of God into their lives.

To return to a theme, I would take issue with drawing a dichotomy between earthly things and eternal or spiritual things. The Sinaitic covenant -- with its blessings and curses and dietary codes and sacred and mundane rituals -- shapes not only people's earthly lives. By shaping their earthly lives, it plays a role in their eternal destiny, because our eternal future hinges upon the lives that we choose to pursue on this earth. The two are a continuum -- this life and the next, this world and the world to come -- and the overarching story abides in both.

Thank you once more for your response,
Emmet

[Guest]

To return to a theme, I would take issue with drawing a dichotomy between earthly things and eternal or spiritual things. The Sinaitic covenant -- with its blessings and curses and dietary codes and sacred and mundane rituals -- shapes not only people's earthly lives. By shaping their earthly lives, it plays a role in their eternal destiny, because our eternal future hinges upon the lives that we choose to pursue on this earth. The two are a continuum -- this life and the next, this world and the world to come -- and the overarching story abides in both.



Emmet, Thus lies the difference between Christianity and Judaism and most other religions. We believe that a true faith will change our hearts first and give us the desire to do good works, but the works themselves don't save us but rather Christ's sacrifice.
I agree with you that following Torah or any part of Torah can change one's heart about believing in God because it is the Word of God and it can plant the seeds of faith into a receptive heart.

[Guest]

Hello, Steve,

Thank you again for your response. I truly appreciate your willingness to continue in discussion.

It often is important for Christians to speak of faith leading to actions, and I would agree with this emphatically. From a Jewish perspective, it is also important to talk about how actions lead to faith. I think both truths are worth validating and paying attention to.

I appreciate your statement that the word of God can plant seeds in a receptive heart. For my part, I would go even further and say that hearing and acting upon the word of God can contribute to the receptivity of even a hardened heart.

On a second topic, I acknowledge that many/most Christians identify the sacrifice of Christ as the salvific nexus for divine-human relations (and by this, I expect you mean death upon the cross? -- some Christians might understand the sacrifice more comprehensively). I think that it is worth considering how exactly this salvation should be understood to transpire. How do you understand this to work?

Thank you for your time and your thoughts,
Emmet

[Guest]

On a second topic, I acknowledge that many/most Christians identify the sacrifice of Christ as the salvific nexus for divine-human relations (and by this, I expect you mean death upon the cross? -- some Christians might understand the sacrifice more comprehensively). I think that it is worth considering how exactly this salvation should be understood to transpire. How do you understand this to work?


Hi Emmet, I understand salvation to mean man being reconciled back with God through Christ's sinless life and suffering and death on the cross. Throughout the OT and NT i believe that sin separated man from God and that impasse could not be overcome without Christ because "the wages of sin is death" and the NT says that Jesus came "to save us from our sins."
1st John 1.7 "but if we walk in the light ,as he is in the light ,we have fellowship with one another ,and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin."
1st John 1.9 "If we confess our sins ,he is faithful and just ,and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

So we have the opportunity to have our sins forgiven but also to be cleansed or liberated from sin IF we confess our sins and walk in the light.

[Guest]

Hello, Steve,

Thank you once more for your response. I hope that you will pardon me for pressing you for greater clarification. I wish not to be antagonistic, so please let me know if at any point you would prefer to let the dialogue rest.

You have cited that "the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin." How do you understand this working? How does the blood of Jesus cleanse us from sin?

Your second citation seems similar to a Jewish perspective. The dynamic in Ezekiel 18 [especially verses 21-22 & 27-28] describes God's attitude toward issues of sin and life/death. I think it is interesting that Ezekiel is set in a context of Babylonian exile, where his companions may have had to wrestle to some extent or another with the loss of the sacrificial system. It is noteworthy that Ezekiel identifies repentance as the pivot for moving from death to life, without any explicit appeal to blood sacrifice. By this I do not mean to do away with the significance of blood sacrifice, but rather to raise the question of whether its role in the salvific process is ancillary. Also, I would wish to affirm God's role in nurturing the process of repentance in a person's life; it is not simply a human work.

On a second point, you have described "man being reconciled back with God through Christ's sinless life and suffering and death on the cross." How do you understand this working?

To return to Ezekiel 18 [especially verse 20], the sin (and virtue) of each person is their own. How does what one person does (Jesus), alter the dynamic of God's relationship with other persons (sinners)?

On a final point, how do you understand being "cleansed and liberated from sin"? How does this occur, and what does this look like in a person's life?

I hope that you will pardon my dissecting this. I am not merely trying to throw out a flurry of obnoxious questions. I have spent time as a graduate student in theological studies, so these points of detail are important to my mind.

Thank you for your time and for your thoughts.

Shalom,
Emmet

[Guest]

Hi Sterling (Emmett/kaufmannphillips),

It is good to have you posting with us. It has been many years since we have seen each other, and I want to respond to you more at length at another time. I am currently in Jerusalem, where I have been teaching for the past week, and will be for the coming week as well. My internet access here (and my free time) is limited, so I will have to save my longer responses for later.

For now, I would like to comment on a couple of things. You wrote:

"It often is important for Christians to speak of faith leading to actions, and I would agree with this emphatically. From a Jewish perspective, it is also important to talk about how actions lead to faith. I think both truths are worth validating and paying attention to."

I acknowledge that a course of works may, at times, lead a person to a point of faith, but there is a difference between what Christians say on this and what you are saying, in that Christian faith, if genuine, will always lead to a life of good works. Any faith that does not do so is "dead" and is not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ.

On the other hand, while religious works might lead the practitioner to embrace faith in God, this is by no means inevitable, and the presence of an external religious life may, in fact, mask the deficiency--causing the religious man either to believe that he possesses a faith which he has never known, or else to deny the need for such faith, assuming his works to be sufficient.

This latter problem is found in the church, as well as in the synagogue and the mosque, but, wherever it may be found, it is not the means by which men find or maintain a relationship with God, according to the teachings of Christ and the apostles.

I do not expect the teachings of Christ and the apostles to carry any weight with one who has embraced Judaism, but the decision of where the truth lies, now as always, depends upon the credibility of the sources of our information.

The source of modern Judaism is not the written Torah. This is the source of First-Temple Judaism, and one of the important sources of Christianity as well. When you say that you and others "keep the Torah," I can hardly take this seriously. When was the last time you offered a lamb or a bull in Jerusalem? For that matter, how many times a year do you make pilgrimages to keep the feasts in Jerusalem? Such pilgrimages and offerings are essential to genuine Torah observance (unless we excise Leviticus and half of Exodus from our definition of "Torah").

You are very intelligent, and it is a pleasure to read posts by someone who can graciously and articulately present his positions, as you do. For this reason, I am sure that you have a well-thought-out answer to the challenge presented in my previous paragraph. However, whatever answer the rabbis may give, it must necessarily be a somewhat desperate, man-made expedient, created to bolster a defunct religious tradition in the absence of its original, central concern--namely, an atoning sacrifice, as ordained by God and commanded by Moses.

Modern Judaism depends upon the assumption that, in addition to the written Torah, there is an equally authoritative "Oral Torah," which was orally passed down from the time of Moses and preserved in the teachings of the rabbis. Since there is no indisputable mention of such an oral Torah, either in the written Torah, nor in the other prophetic scriptures, one might be forgiven for suspecting that the claim of the rabbis that they have preserved such an oral law, and that it dates back to Moses, is little more than a fabricated self-validation of their own opinions.

The authority behind the Christian Gospel, is the written Torah, as clarified by two first century rabbis (Jesus and Saul/Paul), and the men they personally trained. One of these rabbis was also the Messiah, as evidencedby His resurrection from the dead. Both Jesus and Paul (and their students) performed miracles, as did Moses and the prophets of old, thus continuing the tradition of the miraculous attestation of God's inspired spokesmen--a tradition which was indisputably inaugurated in Moses.

I am not surprised that persons of a particular bent are attracted to much of the beauty and poetry preserved in ritual Judaism. I suppose it is the presence of this same taste in others, which draws them into the "high church" traditions of Christianity. The moral excellence of the Torah may also be attractive to some who find the looseness of our modern age offensive. But such moral uprightness can be found in the best specimens of every religious community, whether Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Mormon, Sufi, etc.

If one does not choose to follow Jesus as one of his disciples, it makes no difference which religious tradition he/she may adopt. If such people are sincere, and well-disciplined, they will live better lives than they might have lived without their religion. Of course, a very high percentage of those who reject Jesus (in every religion, including Churchianity) are manifestly prone to the externalism and hypocrisy, of which the Pharisees and many professing Christians are the best examples.

My main consideration in choosing to be a disciple of Jesus over becoming an adherent to any alternative religious faith is one of authority. That is, "which faith stands upon the most authoritative foundation?" In seeking the answer to this question, I have concluded that Jesus, the Messiah, and those whom He appointed to carry His message, have a credibility as God's spokesmen that is second to none.

[Guest]

Hello, Steve,

It is great to hear from you! I have long appreciated your warmth and kindness toward me in the past, and I look forward to visiting with you again in the future. I have been gratified to see that you meet in SW Washington periodically, and once fall comes and Sabbath sundown allows for it, I hope to visit on such an occasion.

I appreciate that your current engagements limit your opportunity for responding to different points. There is much to engage in Jerusalem, and I wish you the best of blessings during your time in the city. I hope you will pardon my responding at the present to some of your comments, and looking forward to your continuing a dialogue at your convenience.

I will agree with you often! Depending upon our semantics, we might both agree that genuine faith always involves activity as well as belief. We also might both agree that genuine belief may not always involve proper activity (cf. James 2:19). Finally, we might agree that such genuine belief would not constitute genuine faith.

I would not disagree that an external religious life might mask a deficiency in one's faith. This is a part of the truth that many Christians are sensitive to, and I am probably unneeded to reinforce it in this forum. But there is another part of the truth, which considers the formation of proper relationship with God, and the contribution of actions to this process. This part of the equation is less appreciated in some Christian circles, and it is possibly a positive contribution that I can make.

If I may offer an illustration: Christians are sensitive to the internal as a root of the external, and this is exemplified in believers' baptism as an outward marker of preexisting internal faith; Jews are sensitive to the external as a root of the internal, and this is exemplified in circumcision as an outward marker that exerts an influence on subsequent inner formation. A Christian perspective would acknowledge that God has ordained both markers, and I propose that God is sensitive to the fact that the outer affects the inner and the inner affects the outer.

It is my hope to extend theological thought beyond a simple, lopsided dichotomy. This dichotomy has become a neurotic fixation for some people, and it can do a disservice to truth. A more holistic appreciation for the interrelationship between faith and actions is desirable.

To move on to another point, you raise the issue of keeping Torah in the absence of the sanctuary cultus. To step aside for a moment, I would not consider Jerusalem to be a necessary locus for the sanctuary, but that is at best a tangential issue. As you may know, I am unable to offer a lamb or a bull anywhere, because I am not a Kohen (priest); neither am I able to make a pilgrimage because there is no operational sanctuary, and for my part, I am by accident of birth unable to operate one directly. However, I would not consider this to be a violation in the keeping of Torah, any more than I would consider the inability to pay a tithe because marauders had carried off my entire flock to be a violation. The best the robbed party can do is persevere until their circumstances improve sufficiently to fulfill the mitzvot more completely. I and many faithful Jews have been robbed of the opportunity to fulfill the mitzvot of the sanctuary, and if the Kohenim and the Levi'im cannot be persuaded to operate one, then the culpability rests upon their heads. I propose that God, for his part, will not condemn the victims for others' wrongdoing.

To engage a related point, it begs the question to label Judaism "a defunct religious tradition in the absence of its original, central concern -- namely, an atoning sacrifice...". Although atoning sacrifice is a central concern for many Christians, I would object to the characterization of sacrifice as the central concern for Judaism, in any era. I will agree that sacrifice is commanded, and I would affirm that sacrifice is intimately related to safeguarding the central concern for Judaism. However, some of the prophets insist that sacrifice is not the primary concern of Judaism, but rather the faithfulness of the people (e.g., I Samuel 15:22; Hosea 6:6; Micah 6:6-8; cf. Isaiah 1:11-18; Jeremiah 7:22-23; for material beyond the prophets, cf. Psalm 51:16-17; Proverbs 21:3). This is not new to you, I am sure. Since sacrifice is auxiliary, not central, Judaism is hardly "defunct" in its absence.

To shift once again to another point, it is not a major concern of mine to validate rabbinic tradition. Although many Jews are rabbinic in the way you have articulated, others would not regard the "Oral Torah" in such a way. Some of these are Karaite Jews; it is probable that many more are simply liberal. America has afforded Jews the opportunity to develop in highly diverse ways from "Orthodox" Judaism, which is a minority tradition in the US. As for your suspicions about the "oral law," is it that much different from the sense of apostolic succession that emerged in the church? But I will not try to saddle modern Christianity with that construct, any more than modern Judaism should be saddled with the "oral Torah" construct. Both traditions are more diverse than that.

On a final point, I agree that the issue of authority is extremely relevant when it comes to adhering to a religious tradition. You have appealed to miraculous attestation, but I am sure you will acknowledge that miraculous works have been attributed, rightly or wrongly, to religious leaders of many different persuasions. I do not expect that you will become Russian Orthodox because of Seraphim of Sarov, nor that you will become Hasidic because of Israel ben Eliezer. And so I must imagine that it is not merely the claim of miracles that makes you assign authority to the founders of Christianity. I trust that you have other reasons for doing so, which you would mention if you had greater tme and opportunity.

Thank you, Steve, for weighing in. I look forward to the privilege of dialoguing with you in the future on different matters.

Shalom aleykhem be'emeth,
Emmet

[Guest]

You have cited that "the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin." How do you understand this working? How does the blood of Jesus cleanse us from sin?

Hi Emmet, I believe that as the only begotten Son of God Christ had the authority to represent mankind to God and through that authority to solve the otherwise unsolvable problem of sin and the resulting separation from God. In Lev 17.11 it says "For the soul of the flesh is in the blood ,and i assigned it to you upon the alter to provide atonement for your souls ,for it is the blood that atones for the soul." (Tanach by Stone)
This command was never rescinded and God several times instructed the jews "to bring their offerings to the temple" 2 Ch 28.24-25. Now the temple is detroyed and although God gave extensive instructions in Lev about the sacrificial system He allowed the temple to be destroyed.
I agree that God did say he prefers a repentent heart rather then sacrifices because without a repentent heart the sacrifices were empty at best and perhaps worse but He never did away with the system.
So Christ because of His authority took upon himself the burden of taking the place of mankind before God and meeting the requirement of the law by living a sinless life and suffering and dying and shedding His blood for the remission of sins as per Lev 17.11.
The way we can get cleansed and liberated from sin going forward is because His death and resurrection and ascension made way for the Holy Spirit to come and indwell the heart of every believer to convict us from sin and keep us from sin. However as John said we are still responsible for "walking in the light" as Christ does not give believers a free ticket to heaven by engaging in continual willful sin.

[_Ely]

I believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the hope of Israel but I have been greatly blessed in reading Emmet's posts. You've made some really excellent points. I especially liked what you said about rituals being kinetic poetry - great stuff.

Ely

[Guest]

Hello, Steve,

Thank you for continuing to dialogue! I appreciate your responses.

On your first point, I would disagree that the problem of sin and separation was otherwise unsolvable except through intermediacy. I believe that God has demonstrated his ability and willingness to deal with human beings directly, despite their sinfulness. Few would argue that the prophets were sinless, but according to the text, God was able to deal with them (cf. Isaiah 6:5-7). On the other hand, I am doubtful that even the most stellar intermediary could viably represent human beings in a way that was contrary to their actual being. God knows what each of us are in our hearts, and even the most heroic attempts of an intermediary to represent us differently will not convince him otherwise.

On your next point, I agree that the sacrificial law was never rescinded. I would argue, however, that the primary obstacle to resuming the ministry of the sanctuary is the willingness of the priests and the Levites. There is no reason that the sanctuary must be constituted upon the Temple Mount, and the ministry of the sanctuary can be resumed at any time.

On the other hand, Jesus was not a sheep or a goat or a bull or any other of the approved/required sacrifices under God's system. Quite the contrary -- God did not and does not countenance the act of human sacrifice. This is a major point of the Akedah narrative, where God prevents Abraham from sacrificing Isaac and introduces a ram in his stead. But on the other side of the coin, Jesus' faithfulness could not have been sustitutionary, as he could not have satisfied the requirement of the law for any human but his own self (cf. Ezekiel 18, especially v. 20). If Jesus were perfect, then this would have fulfilled his own personal responsibility to his God, but it would not have fulfilled the personal responsibility of his cousin or his nephew or whomever else.

I would emphatically agree with you about the role of the Holy Spirit in sanctification. I would demur, however, if one argued that the Holy Spirit was not available to people until the Christian era.

I very much appreciate your statement that "Christ does not give believers a free ticket to heaven by engaging in continual willful sin." This is consistent with an overall understanding of sacrificial dynamics, where sacrifice is not a substitute for obedience, but rather an instrument for reconciliation.

Thank you again for responding, Steve.

Shalom,
Emmet