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A Religious Bridge between Jew and Christian:
Shall We Recognize Two Covenants?
- Abstract
There are, today, many weighty reasons for supposing that the Jewish and Christian communities that have traveled side by side through history for almost nineteen hundred years should wish to understand each other. Indeed, there has been no lack of such “interfaith” attempts, but most of them have failed because they were without a proper basis in religious faith itself, because they were not grounded in religious truth. Any genuine dialogue between church and synagogue calls for an honest inquiry into the real basis for an understanding between Judaism and Christianity, as well as the inevitable limitations on such an understanding.
It is quite clear that the attack upon Judaism in the past twenty years was also an attack upon the Christian church, that when the synagogue was assaulted the Jewish element in Christianity was assaulted with it. It is impossible to forget that the founder of Christianity was, in flesh and blood, a Jew, that the first Apostles who brought his teachings to the Gentiles were Jews. The attacks (by, for instance, Alfred Rosenberg) directed against the Old Testament as an essential component of the Christian message point to the ever widening realization that Christianity is closely bound up with Israel. This is as true today as it was two thousand years ago; indeed it is especially true today, since historical destiny is forcing the two faiths into a common front. For Judaism and Christianity have a common enemy, the general godlessness which denies the existence of a transcendental realm. Thus the question of a mutual understanding between the two faiths has become particularly timely.
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