Imagine if a Jew and a Christian took off in the TARDIS to the year 2023 BCE to preach their faiths. As there is no such thing as Judaism or Christianity at this time, our Jew and Christian would have an identical pitch to any person they met. There is one God, who created the world. You need to get rid of all of your idols and worship just him. In addition, you should commit yourself to an ethical way of life, which you can learn more about by finding the appropriate pre-Abrahamic sage who is alive in this generation.
Admittedly, our Jew and Christian would have to acknowledge that their pitch has a limitation that has no solution at this time. For the Christian, the problem is that our 2023 BCE person is not yet in a position to accept Jesus as their savior as Jesus has not yet come to Earth to die for their sins. At best, our person can hope for some sort of pre-faith in Jesus so that Jesus will take him out of Hell when he descends there after the Crucifixion. For the Jew, the problem is far more minor. However sincerely our person comes to believe in the one true God intellectually, it is going to be very difficult to pass this belief system onto their children. This is going to trap us into a situation where individual ethical monotheists are going to have to constantly reinvent the wheel all by themselves, figuring out that God exists and that their parents were wrong to worship idols. An example of this is the midrashic Abram, coming to believe in God and then smashing the idols that his father, Terah, sold in his store. That being said, preaching ethical monotheism is still a worthwhile endeavor as all the good monotheists you create will be right with God.
Step forward in time to 23 BCE and the basic pitch remains the same even as there is now a solution to the Jew's problem but not the Christian's. Obviously, as there are now Jews, Jews need to believe in the Jewish God and practice Judaism. Our non-Jewish person still needs to get rid of their idols and worship what one we might now call the Jewish God, but who has always been the God of the entire world. That being said, there is a way to radically increase the odds for our non-Jewish ethical monotheist that their children will also be ethical monotheists. Our person can convert to Judaism and take on the full array of Jewish practices such as observing the Sabbath, kosher, and circumcision. Even if they do not convert to Judaism, there is still a benefit to becoming a God-Fearer, a non-Jewish supporter of the ideals that Jews are supposed to stand for. The fact that their children will now know that Judaism exists and have interacted with Jews will increase the odds that they will become ethical monotheists as well. Obviously, our non-Jewish monotheist does not have to actually convert to Judaism as there were people who were perfectly fine when there was no Judaism to convert to.
Our Christian is in a bit of a bind as he agrees with the Jew in 2023 and 23 BCE. It is only when we come home to 2023 CE that there is meaningful disagreement. The Christian has agreed with the Jew all along but believes that the Jew's picture of reality is incomplete in that it leaves out Jesus. The burden of proof is on the Christian here to make the case that Jesus adds something that Judaism cannot account for otherwise Christianity becomes an added complexity that can be rejected on the grounds of Occam's Razor.
The Christian response to this needs to be depravity. Specifically that humans are not capable of getting right with God without Jesus. This is presumably because Original Sin has tainted the human will so that we can never properly fulfill God's commandments or that it has even tainted human reason so that we could never form proper beliefs about God on our own. If humans could never choose to follow God when taught about him or even when given commandments to be passed down to one's children and made to serve as the basis for a people, then perhaps what is needed is for God to come down in human form and die to fix whatever is keeping people from God.
In Romans 4, Paul attempts to use the example of Abraham against Judaism, arguing that Abraham had faith even before works. Obviously, Abraham was righteous in God's eyes before he was circumcised. In truth, Abraham is a far bigger problem for Christians as they have to explain how Abraham could have faith nearly two thousand years before Jesus. What did Abraham have faith in besides for the one God who created the world? The fact that Abraham was righteous before his circumcision is not a problem for Judaism as Judaism does not believe that one needs to be Jewish. Abraham did not need to be circumcised and was free to eat pork to his heart's content much like it was ok for Judah to sleep with someone he thought was a prostitute. Judaism with its commandments is not an end in itself; it exists as a means to pass on the belief in ethical monotheism to one's children by being part of the sanctified body of Israel.
No comments:
Post a Comment