Month: August 2017

The terms “Judeo-Christian tradition” and “Judeo-Christian morality” are wrong and misleading. They are a slap in the face of all the great Jewish teachers throughout history, whose responses to today’s moral questions would in no way resemble those of the Vatican or of the Christian Right, and whose attitudes toward sin, physical pleasure, human dignity, and the earth differ vastly from those of Christianity. The Christian faith is entitled to its doctrines and world outlook, but it is not entitled to its claim of kinship with Judaism, neither theologically nor cosmologically. At least during its centuries of barbarism and savagery against Jews and other non-Christians, Christianity was authentic enough not to associate its theology with that of Judaism. In our current age of openness and ecumenism, it ought to remain at least as authentic and not attempt to heal it’s wrongs against Jewdom by claiming retroactive fellowship with Judaic theology and cosmology. This is only a further wronging of the Jewish heritage and its way of life by a religion that has already wronged it enough.