Firmly Held Beliefs Often Require Judgments

When the Southern Baptist Convention announced that it wanted to convert Jews, all hell broke loose. Singling out the Jews smacked of anti-Semitism, some said. Religions shouldn't proselytize anyhow, others maintained. Above all, many rejected as unseemly any confrontation between religions, religious debate being found disruptive and offensive. Southern Baptists, it was said, have no business denigrating Judaism.

But people who take their religion seriously do make judgments about other religions, and these judgments involve rejection of error and confession of truth; that is what religious conviction is all about. Good relationships between religions ought not suppress open debate about religious truth and error. If Jews who practice Judaism believed that Jesus Christ was the way to God, they would accept him, so practicing Judaism represents a rejection of Christianity and all other religions. If the Baptists conceded that Jesus Christ saves everyone but the Jews, they would by their own lights count themselves anti-Semites. No one should take offense when people affirm their religions, including their difference from, their rejection of, all other religions. Monotheism allows no alternative.

Rejecting Judaism and converting the Jews represent the very foundation of Christianity. The apostle Paul said so in so many words: "If righteousness comes through the Torah, then Christ died for nothing" (Galatians 2:21). As University of Rochester Religious Studies Professor William Scott Green writes: "Christianity began as a kind of Judaism. The conflict between what became two religions began as a quarrel within Israel. . . a family feud about God's will for Israel and about the definition of Israel itself."

To object to the Southern Baptists' initiative is to reject the Christianity of nearly 20 centuries. Anti-Judaism is what makes Christianity Christian. Not only so, but the persistence of Judaism--and that means the vitality of the religious practice of Jews--calls into question the integrity, indeed the very point, of Christianity.