I’m writing this post a week after Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM), the annual gathering of Quakers in Britain. BYM is a time of fellowship and discernment and took place over a long weekend both in London and online. The focus of the Yearly Meeting was peacebuilding, and I understand much of the gathering was spent forging an excellent statement on the crisis in Gaza, which I hear was an intense and tiring process. With Friends having worked so hard on this statement, there was perhaps little energy left for perfecting the Epistle. The BYM Epistle is a letter that attempts to capture the essence and important themes of the gathering. The Epistle is sent to many other Quaker groups around the world, and is often read aloud in local Quaker meetings throughout Britain.
I want to remark on one sentence of the Epistle: ‘We are reminded that the central message of the New Testament is one of love.’ This statement may seem incredibly innocuous, or so obvious as to need no further comment. But this sentence needs our attention, as I think it’s haunted by the ghost of Judeophobia. It’s ironic that such a sentence could slip by the attention of the Yearly Meeting, when the statement on Gaza takes antisemitism so seriously. In making this criticism, I don’t want to detract from the hard work of Friends at BYM. I couldn’t attend myself, and I’m grateful for all those Friends who gave their time and resources to the strenuous task of discernment on my behalf. I offer these comments in the hope of raising Friends awareness of theological Judeophobia, beliefs which can lurk beneath the surface even as we attempt to address other forms of antisemitism.
So, why is the sentence ‘the central message of the New Testament is one of love’ haunted by Judeophobia?
The New Testament is only one half of the Bible, or more accurately, one quarter. The other three quarters, generally known as the ‘Old Testament’ but better designated as the Hebrew Scriptures, consists of texts that Christians share with Judaism. To say that love is the central message of the New Testament implies the same cannot be said about the Hebrew Scriptures. This sentence has a shadow side, that the central message of the Hebrew Scriptures is something other than love.
You are probably familiar with the ghost summoned by this sentence, the idea that the Hebrew Scriptures are concerned, not with love, but with dry legalism and irrelevant rituals. The God of the Hebrew Scriptures is thought of as vengeful, judgmental and wrathful, quite different from the God that Jesus speaks about. I often hear Quakers refer to ‘the angry God of the Old Testament,’ but it’s worrying to find this idea implied in a Yearly Meeting Epistle. I’ve been told the draft Epistle originally referred to the central message of the Bible, so there was a deliberate change from ‘Bible’ to ‘New Testament.’ This removal of the Hebrew Scriptures from the equation suggests that ‘angry God of the Old Testament’ thinking was at work.
We need to remember that Christianity began as a Jewish sect. Jesus was a Jew, as were his first followers. Jesus was understood by his followers to be the long awaited Jewish Messiah. Jesus’ message was seen to be in complete continuity with the Hebrew Scriptures, which were the Bible of the early church. Just look at how keen the Gospel of Matthew is to show this continuity. The God of Jesus was the God of the Hebrew Scriptures.
But throughout the history of Christianity, various Christian groups have forgotten the Jewishness of Jesus and claimed that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures is different from the God of the New Testament. Mainstream Christianity considers this claim to be a heresy, known to theologians as Marcionism. Marcion was an influential Christian in the 2nd century who taught that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures was an inferior, immoral deity, such that the Hebrew Scriptures represented a corruption of the Christian gospel. Marcion wanted to rid Christianity of Jewish influence, dispensing with the Hebrew Scriptures, plus anything in the New Testament that felt too Jewish. In the same century, a man named Valentinus taught a form of Christian Gnosticism which said the God of the Hebrew Scriptures was the imperfect creator of the material world, and that Jews were inherently unspiritual.
Attempts to jettison the Hebrew Scriptures from Christianity continued in the modern era. The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that Christianity and Judaism were essentially unrelated. Jesus taught a universal message of love, whereas Judaism was concerned with the laws and history of a particular people. Christianity would be better if it rid itself of the Hebrew Scriptures altogether, so Kant thought. Similarly, Friedrich Schleiermacher, the founder of liberal Protestant theology, thought that the Hebrew Scriptures were redundant, and that Jesus’ Jewishness was ultimately of no importance. Theologian Adolf von Harnack, whose thinking was much admired by Quakers in Britain at the beginning of the 20th century, saw Jesus’ Judaism as a husk to be shaken off, having only the loosest of relationships to Jesus’ universal message.
So when Quakers say ‘the central message of the New Testament is one of love’ we draw on and strengthen a thread of Judeophobia that weaves its way through the cloth of Christianity. We repeat the trope, however unintentionally, that Christianity offers a message of universal love, whilst Judaism is concerned with legalism and worships an angry God.
Yes, there are aspects of the Hebrew Scriptures which are difficult to reconcile with our understanding of a loving God, but the New Testament contains such passages too. What are we to make of Jesus’ words that ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 14:26)? Or how about ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ (Matthew 10:34)? Or what about God’s smiting of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11)? What are we to do with the hyper-violent imagery of the book of Revelation?
You do not have to look far to find love in the Hebrew Scriptures. This is a God who ‘is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them with food and clothing.’ (Deuteronomy 10.17-19). This is a God whose prophets say ‘let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ (Amos 5:24), and requires us ‘to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God’ (Micah 6:8).
Instead of saying ‘the central message of the New Testament is one of love,’ the Yearly Meeting would have been wiser to quote 1 John 4.8: ‘God is love.’ If God is love, then this is what the whole of the Bible, Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament, points towards. Quakers believe that the scriptures can only be interpreted correctly with the help of the Spirit who inspired them. If that Spirit is the Spirit of love, then any reading of the Bible which takes us away from love must be a mistake. In this we find ourselves in agreement with the 4th-century bishop Augustine of Hippo who wrote: ‘Whoever, then, thinks that they understand the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbour, does not yet understand them as they ought’ (On Christian Doctrine I.40).
[Featured image photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash]
Jolly Quaker 
This column is of great importance, Mark. I hope to persuade members of the Friends of Christ in the UK to read it, and to remind themselves that we Christ-centred Friends are but members of a sect of Jews that has accepted the new covenant promised in Jeremiah 31:31 and opened its membership to gentiles, and that the old covenant also commanded love for the neighbor, the orphan, and the alien, such as the people of Gaza.
I have tried to send you a reply about typology
I’m sorry not to be able to read your comment. Thanks for trying!
Thanks for this posting and for picking up on this. Leonora
Thanks for reading Leonora 😊
It is true to say John, that some of Christ-centred Quakers / Conservative Friends (to use the American term for those who seek to conserve the early traditions and most importantly teaching of the first and second generation Quakers) do advise folk to set aside the vast majority of the Old Testament. I do so myself (and this does not make me Antisemitic or Judeophobic). In fact I unashamedly gave that advice today in Ministry. Why?
Because Jesus himself did so. He hardly quotes from it. Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the Son of the Living God who we strive to follow, instead did indeed give us a new commandment: “Love one another just as I have loved you” (John 13:34). This referenced Leviticus (19:18) but set it (and Torah more broadly) in a New Light and New Love. The Light and Love of Christ and the Mercy and Suffering of God.
People are rejecting God entirely, not least because of the impression of a revengeful, wrathful God. To read Torah and not come away with such an impression is difficult. I’d even go so far as to suggest it requires special training in Torah to avoid it. This is training that I do not have.
Jesus did have it. Purposefully setting aside most of the Old Testament did not and does not make Him an Antisemite or Judeophobic. The Abba that He knew, as a Jew, is the very same Abba that He calls us to know through Him as the Risen Christ ‘come to teach the people Himself.’
Jesus can Teach and Counsel us to read the Old Testament correctly, with His hermeneutic. But to do so, we need to turn to His still, small voice, to rest in the Living God, so that His Light illuminates it for us. If people are rejecting God, they’re not turning on the Light…
Thanks for reading my post Mark. I find the claim that Jesus set aside the majority of the Hebrew Scriptures highly implausible. Jesus claims to fulfil the scriptures, not set them aside. The claim that Jesus brings a new teaching of love that is distinct from the HS is very much part of a Judeophobic hermeneutic with a long history. I highly recommend “The God of Israel and Christian Theology” by R. Kendall Soulen for an excellent explanation of this problem. Yes, the Hebrew Scriptures require careful handling, often with expert help, but so do many texts in the New Testament. And we can’t lose site of God’s wrath and vengeance, which is present in the NT too. Theologians such as James Cone and Miroslav Volf have made very convincing arguments that God’s wrath and vengeance are important aspects of God’s solidarity with the oppressed and approaches to Christian nonviolence. We need a God who is angered by injustice and who relieves us of the cycle of violent revenge.
Hello Mark,
I wrote my reply, and write this one too, as someone who believes most earnestly that the Jewish people have a right to a country of their own, where they can practice their Faith and worship their God – the same God I worship – in peace and without fear of persecution or hatred or violence or death. I want the same for them in every other country too, wherever they live. This is not the wish of someone who is Antisemitic or Judeophobic. To argue that I am, some would suggest, is Anti-christian or Christophobic.
None of these labels help us.
Our Lord fulfills Scripture, singular. Not scriptures. His coming is prophesied, as you and I and all Jews know, throughout the scriptures. He is not fulfilling all that is written in Torah; much of it is not about Him. But He IS the Law of Moses. And He suffers. The Messiah turns suffering to Ultimate Good. Torah speaks of this ability in Him.
The concept of a god ‘making a list, checking it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty or nice’, and then sweeping certain peoples into oblivion as a result doesn’t relieve us of the cycle of violent revenge. It reinforces it. Surely the endless wars in Gaza show us that!
God is our fellow sufferer, who Understands. This Quaker faith of ours is an ‘experimental’ faith. The closest to wrath I have ever experienced from my Inward Guide, Teacher, Counselor, Priest, Prophet and King is mild exasperation. Well, ahem, perhaps moderate exasperation very occasionally. But nothing more: The Living God is ‘bigger’ than that.
On the contrary, vengeance and wrath are just precisely ‘small’, violent responses. Righteous anger does not produce vengeance and wrath. No, righteous anger reveals truth and yields mercy – and thereby reconciliation. Vengeance and wrath do not accord with the supremely non violent example of Jesus Christ’s way, truth and Jewish life.
Jesus is the Messiah, the one predicted in Torah. Messiah had to come before AD70. Many Jews are recognising this. The recognition and the grasping of its implication does not in any way stop them being Jewish, or diminish their Judaism. The precise opposite is surely the case. It enhances it; it gives it New Life, New Light. The very last thing Jesus wanted was for His New Life and New Light, His New Commandment, to create yet another wretched religion!
It would have been much better if what had happened was that Judaism had undergone the correction Jesus was highlighting the need for. But I will continue to advise people (Gentiles, those I encounter like myself without that deep, deep understanding of Torah) to ignore the vast majority of the Old Testament.
Why? Because I want people to step out in trust, to experience the God of Love and Truth I know. Jesus’ Abba – the God who has not failed. To live a life as in tune with Our Lord as best they can, moment-by-moment, and to have Christ gently tune-up any gap that remains.
George Fox urged us in his epistles to “sit down in Christ… sit down with Christ.” We can experience the Fruits of the Spirit that Arise as a result. Only this personal relationship matters. Nothing else. Certainly not labels…
In Christ’s Light,
Mark
Thank you Mark. Useful, if sadly a bit too late! Susan
Thanks for reading Susan.
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