CHRISTIAN ANTI-SEMITISM: (original) (raw)
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Both "Replacement" Theology and Dispensation Theology make the assumption that at the time of the cross, or shortly thereafter, God discontinued His relationship with the Jews and "favored" the Church instead. Not only does the Bible fail to support this assumption, the reader will discover that the Scriptures speak to the contrary. Although the errors of mainstream Christian thought are too complex to unpack in this introduction, the main fallacies about God's relationship with Judah stem from the following: 1. Ignoring the difference between the House of Israel and the House of Judah. 2. Applying verses about God's rejection of the Northern Kingdom (Israel) to the Jews. 3. Assuming that "all Israel" was cut off, rather than restored, by the New Covenant. 4. Assuming that Messiah's mission had to do with choosing/favoring a new group of people and forsaking those whom He foreknew.
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There is, in principle, a fundamental difference between Nazi racial antisemitism and the traditional anti-Judaism of Christianity. The church's official view has been that conversion transforms a Jew into a Christian, whereas the Nazi view was that a Jewish convert to Christianity remained a Jew. Nevertheless, the distinction between racial and religious antisemitism has often been less clear-cut than is often claimed by those who claim that Christian churches bear no responsibility for the Holocaust. That is not to say that it is illusory, just that it has often been less clear-cut than is often claimed. During the Holocaust and the decades that preceded it, Christian clergy often stressed the same themes as the Nazis, notably with respect to the Jews being "parasitic" capitalists exploiting Christians, as well as communists seeking to overthrow the governments and traditional Christian values of Europe (Passelecq and Suchecky 1997, pp. 123-36). We shall see that these clerics often also spoke of Jews in racial, as well as religious terms. Conversely, the Nazis often exploited traditional Christian themes, such as the diabolical nature of the Jew, the image of the Jew as "Christ-killer," and the contrast between "carnal" (materialistic) Judaism and spiritual Christianity. In other words, the Nazis effectively exploited two millennia of Christian demonization of the Jew. Most scholars who have studied the role of the Christian churches during the Holocaust are well aware of most of these facts Ericksen and Heschel 1999a;. Yet many comparative studies of religion and violence ignore the role played by Christian churches during the Holocaust-apparently on the assumption that the most horrific mass murder in human history was a purely secular phenomenon. In fact, some prominent scholars, including the best-selling authors Karen Armstrong and-incredibly-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, go so far as to attribute the Shoah to the demise of religious values in Europe (Armstrong 2014; Sacks 2015)! This article is an attempt to correct these mistaken assumptions.