I can accept Friar Ted’s allegiance to the Jews for Jesus. It’s his membership in the Dopers for McCain that make me rescind his invitation for my Annual Masqued Garden Party and Cat Fight Extravaganza (proceeds and remains from the cat fight going to various medical charities for pizza delivery people injured in the line of duty).
[bolding mine]
BAND NAME/REALITY SHOW TITLE!
Christians believe there is one God in the exact same way as Jews and Muslims. The Trinity is a mystery, but not a form of polytheism. God is not divided for all the Christians I am aware of.
Christianity and Judaism are not imcompatible because of the doctrine of the Trinity other than that nobody understands the mystery of the Trinity. It’s neither magical nor logical for believers. I like to compare it to quantum physics: it makes no logical sense, it isn’t magic, but it exists. Christians believe that Jesus was the prophesied Messiah and that he was God incarnate. Jews believe neither, nor that the Messiah need be divine other than sent by God.
Yep, and it still isn’t a “triune God”. Not as far as I am aware, but perhaps Tomndeb or Polycarp know otherwise for their branch of the religion. They seem to be knowledgeable about theology.
And the Christianity I was raised in does not consider this a division of any sort. The doctrine of the Trinity is a Mystery, and Jesus is the Father and the Son, God incarnate. And no, it makes no sense in a formal logical way. But hey, religion isn’t really about logic, now is it?
Frankly, I’ve never heard the phrase “triune God” outside the context of someone suggesting that Christianity is polytheistic and not monotheistic.
As for Judaism not being compatible, that’s fine with me. I’m not busy trying to convert Jews, I’ve always been happy to have them as friends, neighbors and relatives (my Dad’s an atheistic Jew and so are his siblings.)
I don’t know sqaut about Kaballah except that the pop star Madonna has said it’s Jewish mysticism. I no more think that she is Jewish in a traditional sense than she is a member of the Roman Catholic College of Cardinals. But she seems fairly harmless and kooky.
I attended a talk about 25 years ago by a guy who, IIRC, said he founded Jews for Jesus. The talk was sponsored by my main stream Presbyterian congregation. I wasn’t impressed. My recollection is that he claimed he was raised Jewish and found Jesus and wanted to convert other Jews. He didn’t respect the Jewish religion or Jews in my opinion. Me made some crack about Judaism being about “Holy grudges”. I was offended enough to remember this a quarter century later. On another occasion (when I was in college) I attended a service that turned out to be people who claimed to be converted Jews. They did not claim to be affiliated with Jews for Jesus. I wasn’t impressed. The weren’t disrespectful of either religion, but went on about abortion being a sin far too much for my taste. I really have no patience with fundamentalism and I loathe having to sit through such a service.
And the insistence that it is a “division” of any sort, or polytheism of any sort isn’t correct doctrine. I don’t understand it, but we are monotheists too. And the claim that we aren’t is pretty damn annoying. I’m going to try to explain it by analogy, and it probably won’t work, but here goes. Sometimes John McCain wears his Republican hat and sometimes his American hat, and sometimes his Maverick hat, and sometimes his Keating 5 hat. Neither he nor his supporters seem to understand that these are incompatible because we give them the benefit of the doubt that they are sincere people. If God wanted to, he could wear different hats too. I’m of the opinion that if God wanted to he could both exist and not exist at the same time.
In short, I don’t have any problem with Jews believing that their religion is incompatible with Christianity. What gets under my fingernails is the suggestion that someone is out their saying we are some sort of polytheists or have three gods.
Yes, and Christianity has been very bad to the Jews over the millenia in part because of this kind of thing. Jews are not going to willingly convert, or at least not true Jews. A bit of the no true Scotsman fallacy, but more a matter of belief than Scottish birth. It’s my opinion that organized Christianity, after they got done being persecuted in the time of Constantine, scapegoated the Jews as official doctrine, and Martin Luther, after he failed to convert Jews, wrote some truly horrible things in retaliation for the failed conversion that built on existing Antisemitism and eventually led to the Holocaust. Religious hatreds are very damn dangerous.
Evangelicals and fundamentalists are two different sets of people, and some of them overlap. Evangelical means we are supposed to proselytize and convert people. Fundamentalism, I believe, but will defer to an actual fundamentalist, means that the followers allow for no interpretation other than the plain meaning of the text, which for protestant fundamentalists in this country means the King James Version. Or at least my fundamentalist friends say so. (It’s my favorite translation too, but for poetic reasons.)
Mainstream Protestants technically have an obligation to convert non-Christians. But we don’t do much about it. Most of us figure that living by example is good enough. I suppose I’ll have some ‘splainin’ to do when I meet my maker.
This is simply untrue. The truth is that under Jewish theology, it would be an impossibility for God to have a Son, for instance. It’s just a fact. It’s not that Jews ‘believe’ or ‘think’ that their theology is incompatible with Christian theology, it’s that their theology is incompatible with Christian theology.
I’ve never called it polytheistic. You are fighting a strawman and getting annoyed at me for an argument I have specifically not made.
I’ve referred to The Trinity, correctly, as being a triune God. God. Singular.
And you can call it a mystery or an enigma or a divinely complex riddle, but for someone who doesn’t share your faith, or your theology, Father, Son, Holy Ghost are three items, not one.
And for Jews, God is singular and a unity in whom no division is possible.
You can ignore that all you want, but it won’t change facts; Jews cannot be Christians. If a Jew converts to Christianity, he is no longer a practitioner or believer in the Jewish religion. That you claim it is a NTS fallacy shows that either you are ignorant of Judaism, or do not understand the No True Scotsman fallacy.
A Jew can no more follow Christian theology than a whale can breath water.
You are free to rationalize or define or justify via faith or whatever you feel like, but yet again, to someone who does not share your faith (e.g. a Jew), saying that God not only had a Son, is simply theologically incompatible. Even the concept of the Skekhinah relates to God sanctifying something such as the Sabbath, not God existing as an avatar known as the Sabbath Bride.
Accept it or deny it, but the fact of the matter is that Judaism does not, and can not, contain a concept of a triune God. Even if you claim that your triune God is a “mystery” that “nobody understands”.
Then you don’t know the definition of the word. The claim that a God that is ‘three in one’’ is not triune is false. Nor is it at all controversial to say so. Evangelicals say so. Catholoics say so. Lutherans say so. The Church of England says so. Etc, etc, etc.
The Christian conception of God is a triune God. The Jewish conception of God is not.
You are resiting grokking my point.
I do not care, at all, what your doctrine is. That is irrelevant. Because, obviously, it is your, that is Christian doctrine. For someone with a different doctrine (e.g. a Jew), the claim that God exists as a triune God is simply antithetical.
Try to see past your doctrine far enough to understand that someone with a different doctrine would find the ‘mystery’ of your faith to simply be outside of the realm of their theology. That is, not ‘mysterious’ but simply ‘false’.
Your entire argument is circular. It boils down to ‘Christianity is not incompatible with Judaism because if Jews were Christians, they’d accept Christian theology.’
I’m certainly no scholar on the matter (though I have read a lot about various religions) and this may be an odd forum to ask it in, but…
The understanding I get reading about God as interpreted by Jews and Muslims is that He’s more like a super sentient version of… Gravity, or TimeSpace, or the Earth itself (none of which you could ever imagine producing a son). A self-aware and powerful concept more than a humanoid. Does this sound at all correct?
Which brings me to a question: this being the case, what is meant by “created man in His own image”? I’ve never thought it meant “two arms/two eyes/one heart/four limbs/” etc., but this is the way it’s usually interpreted. (It always begged the question of “If He has a body then does He eat and breathe and excrete and the like? Is He hairy or bald? Does He eat? Is He more like pygmies or Asians or white or black? What about Siamese twins or people born without limbs- are they in His image?”
So what is meant by the “in His image” line?
I’m not disputing your claim that they are incompatible, that much you seem to understand. It is not a “fact” that God cannot have a son. Neither God nor Son are “facts”, they are beliefs that religious people elevate to facts. My understanding is that all Christians understand that Jews do not believe God had a Son. I couldn’t say what people believe about what Jews believe about whether he could have a Son. We understand that this is incompatible between the two ways of thinking.
You are insisting that for your purposes they are three, and you can mock all you want, but you have an opinion about Christian beliefs and its just wrong. Your opinion of our beliefs is based on refusal to accept that we believe that the Trinity is one, and your insistence that because you can separate out the words that you are entitled to deny that we are monotheistic. You certainly implied that it is polytheistic and continue to do so. You are certainly welcome to believe that it is polytheistic, but to go around and say this out loud, which I suppose is your legal right, but it is akin to Mark Twain’s observations that Jews first believed that Jews shall have no God before God, then believed that Jews shall not worship other Gods, and then that no other Gods existed. That might be humorous in the right context, but offensive in others.
I’m not disputing what you believe about your religion. I know dozens of people who claim to be Jewish who do not practice or believe in Judaism. NTS is a form of begging the question, and I think I grasp it. I am indeed somewhat ignorant of Judaism. I am less ignorant about Christianity, but my understanding is also limited there.
Do you mean “follow” in the sense of adhere to, or understand? I fully accept that a Jew cannot be a Christian and be accepted as a Jew. If you mean understand, I beg to differ. I know a good many Jews who understand Christian theology, but do not accept it.
And you are free to follow your conscience. I would suggest, however, that Christians consider themselves fully monotheistic without rationalization and that suggesting otherwise is what is regarded as rudely mocking another’s religion and might engender people to hate those who do so. If you want to go around accusing Christians of blasphemy, that’s your business. Most Christians understand that Jews and Muslims are anywhere from puzzled by the Trinity (most Christians are too) to the point that they say Christians worship multiple (three) Gods. We do not. I don’t know anything about Skekhinah or the Sabbath Bride and have said nothing about either. Perhaps you were responding to another poster.
I don’t dispute that Judaism does not accept it.
I don’t think you read those cites. None of them say the Trinity is divided, at least the Catholic one makes a point of saying that it is not. You keep using the word divided and I am offended by that. It is offensive because it accuses Christians of blasphemy. Nice people among Christians don’t go around telling people in other denominations that they are going to hell, not because we don’t believe it, but because it is rude. When you repeatedly say that we “divide” God into three, you may truly believe that is a thing we are doing, but it is as rude as if some looney Protestant stood up at a Catholic wedding and raving about the Whore of Babylon and how all Catholics are going to hell. Christians no more divide God into three than Schrodinger’s cat is either alive or dead.
No, I got your point the first time that Jews don’t believe you can have a Trinity. I don’t have a problem with that. My argument is not circular because I haven’t argued that. I can’t see why Judaism wouldn’t consider Christianity incompatible. I have a problem with you calling my concept of God divided.
Nice people don’t go around calling other people’s religions “false”. We get it that you think that Christianity is a false religion. It was really rude to say so out loud, more blatantly so than claiming that Christians have a divided God.
I’d say that’s a fairly good approximation for Judaism. I can’t speak to its accuracy for Islam.
Weasel Answer One: tbh, before answering any questions about semantics and the Torah, I’d always prefer to have someone who speaks Hebrew fluently answer it. I’d echo your sentiment, and I’m curious what the semantic value of the word that was translated as “image” is, in Hebrew.
Weasel Answer Two: at least according to what I’ve gathered from all the Reform Rabbis who I know/knew, the concept is that humans are God’s partners in Creation, as Creation is ongoing and not truly finished. And, that our responsibility is Tikum Olam (roughly, “healing the world”). As such, we are “in God’s image” as we are creators of God’s world, in our own way.
Weasel Answer Three: that, to a degree, early interpretations of this tenet may very well have been influenced by Jewish Gnosticism, and humanity’s potential for Knowledge and Connection to Creation (geeeez, lots o’ caps) would be, in and of itself, a set of divine components. Although, of course, later interpretations were quite probably shaped by an opposition to Gnosticism.
Weasel Answer Four: Judaism, despite certain sects which cling to traditions from various time periods, has evolved considerably over the millennia. What Jews living in the Babylonian Exile understood by that phrase is undoubtedly different from how we would now understand it.
Wait a minute. Bricker’s Jewish?
As are all the Christians who I just cited who correctly note that Christians worship a triune God? They’re mocking their own beliefs?
You have a nice persecution complex going, though, I’ll give you that.
I have now, numerous times, pointed out that I have said nothing of the sort. I have said so, specifically. Not only that, I have pointed out, numerous times, that of course you believe that The Trinity is one, as that’s your doctrine.
Your English teachers should all be lined up against a wall and shot.
Yes, that’s why I specifically said that I wasn’t saying Christianity was polytheistic. Crafty motherfucker that I am, I emphasized that I was talking about a triune God, singular, just to throw you off the scent.
Ahhh, condescending, ignorant and stupid. The trifecta!
Or if you prefer, you are a triune idiot.
Good. You go be offended. After you’re done being offended, you can probably go fuck yourself, just to be on the safe side.
And, you’re lying.
I used the word “divided” a total of one single time, in soft quotes, in a context that made clear I was approximating a meaning. The Vatican approximates the same semantic value as “distinct from one another” and, lo and behold “triune”. Schmuck.
Funny… since I didn’t.
But I’m sure you’re not a Janus-faced dissembler, and since Jewish theology says that Yoshua Ben Yoseph wasn’t the messiah, that you cannot say that claim is anything other than true, since you wouldn’t say that Judaism is a “false religion”, since you’re a “nice person”, eh? So, if you’re not a hypocritical fuck, you’ll come right out and say that the Jewish belief that Yoshua Ben Yoshua was just an ordinary Rabbi is true, right? After all, a nice person wouldn’t say that such a claim is false, right?
Sorry mouthbreather. Many religions can, and do, disagree with theological claims made by other religions without saying that those are “false religions”.
Look how stupid you are.
FinnAgain, Jews who accept Jesus as Messiah may, to you & your fellow Jews, become apostates & “meshumeds” (sp?), but ethnically they remain Jews. They do not become Gentiles. Hence “Jews for Jesus”, “Messianic Jews”, etc. are perfectly valid terms. Martin Meyer Rosen is ethnically Jewish, raised IIRC in a secular home, and became an evangelical Christian at age 17. Unless you can prove he is not ethnically Jewish, he was & is a “Jew for Jesus”.
I hope you get as irate at the secularism, assimilationism & intermarriage in the Jewish community as you do about “Messianic Judaism”. The former are the much larger threat to Jewish survival.
eleanorrigby- First, it’s “the Book of Revelation”, not “Revelations”. And no, the idea of a Jewish turn to Christ before He returns doesn’t come from there. In the NT, it is implied by Christ (“You will not see me again until you are ready to say ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’”) but most fully developed by Paul in Romans 9-11.
I know this is an aside; most likely a whoosh, and mostly not very constructive and etc, and I may deserve a flaming for this, but…I guess we are all better off if we make our own mind and tries not to make up others’ mind for them.
Just my two cent worth.
Technically, a Jew who accepts Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior is now a Christian. “Jews For Jesus” and “Messianic Jews” are advertising slogans. If it actually did not matter what the person’s background was before conversion, which I’ve been led to believe was a central Christian tenet (no gentile, no Jew, no woman, no man, no slave, no freeman), then there would be no need to point out the ethnic Jewishness of those people.
Jews who convert to Christianity - and that includes Jews for Jesus and their ilk - are Christians with Jewish ancestry. Nothing more.
It doesn’t mean His physical image. It means that He gave man a soul, the ability to think conceptually, have a creative sense, be a moral agent, and so on. That’s also why in Genesis, it’s man who names the animals, and why God gives man domination over the earth and the things on the earth.
And yet, I count three times.
‘division’, undivided and ‘divided’
I am sure that you can now see how someone would think you’ve emphasized divided when you’ve repeated the forms. If you weren’t so busy using English teachers for target practice, they would have lived long enough to teach you that repeating a word or a variation of its form is a way to call special attention to it. You did just that, and it appears to have been intentional. It’s like saying I only said something offensive about blue people once and put it in soft quotes and I had no idea turquoise people would get offended.
Yes, without qualification. As to the main point. My agreement has nothing to do with hypocrisy or fucking or fucking hypocrites or my status as any of the above. Never disagreed with that point.
So if you aren’t an Easter bunny, you’ll come right out and say that the Christian belief is that the Trinity is not divided. (That’s sarcasm, you’ve already said that.) What you said that was offensive was
We do not slice the Trinity. We do not divide it. We are monotheists. It’s like saying the Column of Smoke, the Column of Fire, the Burning Bush, the Presence in the Holy of Holies, The God of Abraham, The God of Moses, I Am etc. are divided and sliced up and regarded differently. These are all the same divinity. The same divinity that is worshiped by Jews, Christians and Muslims, and all monotheistic in all respects.
I don’t think so. I’m a Christian, and my father was born to Jewish parents who are buried in a Jewish cemetery, married in a Jewish ceremony, etc. That doesn’t make me Jewish despite the fact that if I wanted to fill out the forms and possibly fudge the truth a bit, I could get Israeli citizenship. Jews follow the laws of Moses, including dietary laws and circumcision, etc. Christians do not follow those laws in those forms. We don’t follow the dietary laws, and we don’t do religious circumcisions. (I’m circumcised, but it was a medical procedure that most boys in major US metro areas underwent in the early 60s. It did not have a bris.) And if you don’t follow those laws in those forms you are not a Jew that Orthodox, Conservative or Reform Jews would consider Jewish. (I’m not sure how Kosher the Reform branch keeps, so that’s a caveat.) In short, Christians with Jewish ancestry are not Jews and Jews do not consider them Jews. Jews for Jesus is regarded with deep suspicion by Jews, and in my experience, with pretty good reason.
Ahhh, dishonesty, then.
As I just got done explaining to skippy, it’s not a matter of “to me and my fellow…”
It’s about how the two belief systems are completely and totally irreconcilably different.
You are, of course, acting rather dishonestly. JfJ does not go out of their way to show that their cult is compatible with ethnic traditions, but with the Jewish religion. If it was just “ethnic”, then they wouldn’t go about corrupting Jewish High Holidays.
Something tells me you’re not really foolish enough to believe that their conversion efforts are aimed at people whose mother’s mother’s mother once lit shabbat candles while eating a Friday night dinner.
Your pablum about how I should be upset about intermarriage also aggressively misses the point. I have pointed out, numerous times, that what I object to from those cultist freaks is their dishonesty. If a Jew feels like marrying a Christian or converting to Christianity, that’s his business. If a Jew is tricked into believing that a bunch of evangelical Christians are really Jews, and that their brand of Christianity is compatible with Judaism? Well, that’s another kettle of fish.
Are you also as bothered when atheists of Jewish ancestry call themselves “Jews”?
Jews are Jews are Jews. They may be religious (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform), they may be secular, they may be Christian- but all they remain Jews. Their DNA does not change if they depart from traditional Judaism.
And I’ve never seen any claims that “Messianic Judaism” is consistent with Rabbinic Judaism, but with Biblical Judaism. I’ve read lots of JfJ & MJ literature that fully acknowledged the opposition in the Jewish community at large to MJ.
OK, I know we totally disagree here but here’s my take on history-
We have Jews scattered among Gentile cultures, the dominant one at the time being the Roman Empire. Up rises in Judea & Galilee the “Messiah Yeshua/Iesous Christos” movement. As it spreads out into the Empire, mainly through the disciples traveling to the Jewish communities throughout, there is also an influx of Gentile “God-fearers”/Noachides. The Jerusalem Priesthood and many Rabbis throughout the Empire oppose the MY-JC movement and cast adherents out of synagogues. The MY-JC movement created its own ekklesias/churches, which in that first generation kept Sabbath & the Festivals but added on a Sat eve/Sun morn service to share the Eucharist/celebrate the Resurrection, and accepted in more & more Gentiles, only requiring that they adhere to the Noachic Law.
Then came the Roman siege of Judea & the destruction of the Temple/Priesthood,
the surviving Jewish authorities strove to reorganize their faith & communities to be Synagogue/Rabbinical-centered instead of Temple/Priesthood centered. One of the things done to preserve cohesion was to totally expel & repudiate the MY-JC group. By that time, the churches were dominated by Gentiles & the first generation Jewish leadership was dying out/being killed off, and replaced by mostly Gentile leadership.
Add 250 years of Greek/Roman philosophers becoming Christians & writing about how JC ended the Old Covenant and estasblished the New Covenant, and of Synagogue-Church animosity (on both sides), and top it off with the conversion of Constantine and the Nicene Council, which to me rightly decided the Trinity/Deity of JC issue but very tragically wrongly “Gentilized” the Church by now forbidding Sabbath & Festival-keeping, and anything else that could be considered “Judaizing” practices.
So in my view, modern Messianic Judaism is an attempted reconstruction of first generation Christianity (although it also retains traditions & rites developed in the past 2000 years of Jewish history), and the ethnically-Jewish Christians who got it going may have been secular Jews who came to the Christian faith, but then rediscovered their Jewish heritage in light of that faith.
Despite your absurd evasions, JfJ does not use the term in its cultural or ethnic sense, but in its religious sense. And not, as you so dishonestly claim, in a ‘biblical’ sense either. They’ve even sought to incorporate the Bat Mitzvah into their charade. Please explain where that is in the Bible, or genetics, or a Jew’s ‘ethnic heritage’. If you’re not simply a lying apologist, please do explain how co-opting an event which first occurred in America on March 18, 1922, has to do with anything other than subverting the modern Jewish religion.
But we both know you can’t do that, and you’re merely using the fallacy of equivocation to shill for these revolting sons of whores, eh?
These scumfucks aim at deceiving Jews into believing that the modern Jewish religion is compatible with Christianity. You aim at helping them lie.
The fact that you’re reduced to talking about ‘Jewish Baptist Ministers’ should be a big ol’ clue. Especially since your definition of “Jew” would include virtually the entire Arab world. Or anybody with any “Jewish DNA”, whatever the fuck you think that is.
And by the way, by definition a Christian is a gentile and not a Jew. Your absurd obfuscation of claiming that a Jew who converts to Christianity is not a Gentile unless I can prove that his family wasn’t ethnically Jewish, is shameful.
Take your Jew-poaching cult of liars and your apologia, and shove 'em up your ass sideways.
I have a question (well, two, actually). First, IS there a sect of Christianity, that IS called “Christians”, who include traditional Jewish law? (Say, “Kosher Christians”, or whatever). And is the word “Gentile” meant to be derogatory?
Thanks.