Christian Anti-Semitism: Ignatius

Ignatius Bishop of Antioch (98-117A.D.) – Epistle to the Magnesians

For if we are still practicing Judaism, we admit that we have not received God’s favor…it is wrong to talk about Jesus Christ and live like Jews. For Christianity did not believe in Judaism, but Judaism in Christianity.

Ignatius of Antioch, was the third Bishop of Antioch, and was a student of John the Apostle.  En route to Rome, where according to Christian tradition he met his martyrdom by being fed to wild beasts, he wrote a series of letters which have been preserved as an example of very early Christian theology. Important topics addressed in these letters include ecclesiology, the sacraments, and the role of bishops.

Abraham J Heschel on Anti-Semitism

"Our era marks the end of complacency, the end of evasion, the end of self-reliance, Jews and Christians share the perils and the fears; we stand on th bring of the abys together.

Nazism has suffered a defeat, but the process of eliminating the Bible from the consciousness of the western world goes on.  If is on the issue of saving the radiance of the Hebrew Bible in the mindsof man that Jews and Christans are called on to work togetrher.  None of us can do it alone.  Both of must must realize that in our age anti-Semitism is anti-Christianity and that anti-Christianity is anti-Semitism.

[What unites Christians and Jews:]  A commitment to the Hebrew bible as Holy Scripture.  Faith in the Creator, the God of Abraham; commitment to many of His commandments; to justice and mercy; a sense of contrition, sensitivity to the sanctity of life and to the involvement of God in history; the conviction that without the holy the good will be defeated; pray that history may not end before the end of days; and so much more."

Quoted in "Beyond Contempt:  Removing Anti-Jewishness from Christian Worship" by Tony Stroobant.  Published by the Faith and Order Committee, Methodist Church of New Zealand, 2009, pages 13-14.

Logos 5 on Windows 8.1

I've been using Logos 5 on a Windows 8.1 ThinkPad convertible since October.  All good except that the handwriting input panel doesn't work for directly entering text into Notes anymore.  However it does work when entering text into the input boxes for command lines, topics and bible references.

It's just inconvenient to have to write notes in OneNote and then have to transfer them to L5 later on.

With the latest crop of Windows Tablets out, it would be an ideal companion for looking up references offline while listening to a sermon in church. 

Two covenants, one Torah

I came across this while researching a piece on Christian Anti-Semitism:

But Christians and Messianic Jews should understand that everyone under the New Covenant has the Torah to observe. That is the plain sense of the phrase, “I will put my Torah in their minds and write it on their hearts.” It is not some new Torah, different from Old Testament Torah. It is the one and only Torah, understood in the spirit of the Messiah, “as upheld by the Messiah” (Ga 6:2&N; 1C 9:21&N). Christian theology all too often tries to escape or water down the plain sense of what is said here, so that what is required is very little, usually a vague “sensitivity to God’s will” that becomes impossible to pin down. Not infrequently the motivation for devising such theology has been to portray or create separation, spiritual distance and invidious comparison between the Church and the Jews. But other Christians have had a correct understanding, for example, A. Lukyn Williams:

“God’s words through Jeremiah do not announce the coming of a new Law, but of a new principle of keeping the Law, according to which God forgives the sinner, writes the Law on his heart, brings him into a new relation to Himself, and makes Himself known to him.” (Manual of Christian Evidences for Jews, London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1919, I:184.)

Stern, D. H. (1996). Jewish New Testament Commentary : a companion volume to the Jewish New Testament (electronic ed., Heb 8:6). Clarksville: Jewish New Testament Publications.