The Concept of a Chosen People in Judaism and Christianity
James Parkes
Historically both Christianity and Judaism stem from the experience of the people of Israel, as it developed from the time of the call of Abraham, through the experience of Sinai, down to the Herodian period. For both religions the books in which this experience is embodied are “Holy Writ,” whether with the Jews we entitle them the Scriptures, or with Christians, the Old Testament. But we interpret them differently, and it is from our different interpretations that arise the profound and fascinating differences between our two faiths, as they have developed and been moulded by nearly two thousand years of history.
The centuries in which the religion of the Synagogue took its definitive shape are identical with those in which the Church also was assuming its distinctive theology and institutional forms, that is from the first through the fourth century of the Christian era. Moreover, they were centuries during which mutual relations between the two religions became almost non-existent.
The Christian, viewing the experiences of the Israelite or Hebrew nation, sees a gradual but narrowing development from the call to the whole people at Sinai and the giving of the Law, to the concentration on the faithful remnant spoken of by Isaiah and other prophets, and so to the individual Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. Then comes the Church, the New Israel, in which the divine call broadens out again to assume world wide dimensions. The Christian contrasts the large element of ritual and ceremonial in the Law with the call of the prophets to “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.” He notes the continual rebuke and rejection of the nation with which the writings of the prophets are filled, and he contrasts the sinful nation with the righteous remnant, the servant expiating the sins of his people. Likewise his interest in the Messianic prophecies is concentrated on the person of the Messiah and the new summons to the Gentiles, while he relegates the Messianic Age of universal righteousness and peace to a distant future, or even to another world.
The first point at which the Jew would express his disagreement lies in the word “Law.” Even if the Christian is aware that the Hebrew word “Torah” has a somewhat wider meaning than the modern world “law,” yet law seems to him to give an adequate description of what is to be found in the first five books of the Bible. He is satisfied to accept the prophets as critics and successors to the lawgivers, whether he attributes all the law to one period or regards it as having been continually edited by another class whom he willingly contrasts to their detriment with the prophets, that is the priests.
But to the Jew, the word Torah does not mean law, but something very much fuller and deeper, and unless we can understand this Jewish meaning of Torah, we shall never understand Judaism. The great American scholar, George Foote Moore, speaks thus of Torah (Judaism, Vol. I, 163): “It is a source of manifold misconceptions that the word is customarily translated ‘law,’ though it is not easy to suggest any one English word by which it would be better rendered. ‘Law’ must, however, not be understood in the restricted sense of legislation, but must be taken to include the whole of revelation—all that God has made known of His nature, character and purpose, and of what He would have men to be and do. The prophets call their own utterances Torah, and the Psalms deserve the name as well … In a word, Torah in one aspect is the vehicle, in another and deeper view it is the whole content of revelation.” Another scholar, Travers Herford, says bluntly: “It does not, and never did, mean law. It means and always has meant ‘teaching.’ ” (Talmud and Apocrypha, p . 7.) If we think of the way in which human societies have evolved, we shall see that these two statements are not so disparate as they appear.
In the gradual evolution of social order men first learned to obey taboos, because they were told that these were of divine origin—whatever the concept of divinity involved. The same divine sanction remained, as taboo came to have an ethical content, and as the religious myth and legend which were intertwined with the origin of taboos were woven into the lengthening histories of human societies. The transmission of this corpus of experience and interpretation of the nature and meaning of life, and of the way in which to please divinity, was an essential task of each generation. Hence the emphasis on teaching in the definition of Travers Herford. Thus, as the people of Israel gradually came to the belief in One God, whose sway was universal, who was the Lord of history, and who had comprehensive moral demands to make upon His children, so the totality of this belief and its consequences was embodied in the one word “Torah.” It was at once the content, the vehicle, and the transmission from generation to generation, of a complex unity of divine truth and inspired interpretation.
From this standpoint the whole of the Scriptures are concerned with Torah. There is no antithesis between “law” and prophets. Prophet and priest alike are, just as are lawgivers, interpreters of Torah. But likewise from this standpoint there is no narrowing down from a national call to a faithful remnant. Throughout the Scriptures, the whole people is involved, just as in the Messianic prophecies the personal Messiah is inseparable from the Messianic Age involving all peoples.
We can, of course, reject both views as superstition. But if we accept that the Christian interpretation is a legitimate one, then I find it difficult, especially as a historian, to deny equal validity to the Jewish. They differ, but they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The history of the two religions reflects the natural consequences of the two interpretations, but if the hand of God is in the one, it is equally clear in the other.
Both religions draw from their interpretation belief that God has chosen from humanity certain men as vehicles of His universal purpose and design. Neither—at its best—considers the choice a privilege; both regard it as a responsibility. If the weaker brethren have at times tended to regard those outside the choice with disdain, this is also true of both religions. But for our purposes we can ignore these evidences of human weakness, and attempt to see both religions at their best, and accept for our purposes the deepest and most spiritual interpretation of this divine choice, as it is expressed in each. But, since Christians are apt to think that the Jewish conception of being a chosen people sets Jews apart, and narrows their religion down to tribalism, it is perhaps well to emphasize that the original word for the Church, the Greek word ecclesia, means those who are called out from among others, or chosen, and that the Latin word, electi,the elect, a favorite title for a Christian community, means just the same thing. Christians, as much as Jews, believe themselves subjects of a divine choice.
Christianity, however, sees the divine choice enshrined in the Biblical story narrowing down to the single figure of Jesus the Messiah, then, after His Incarnation, it sees this same choice widening out again to embrace mankind, without distinction of Jew or Greek, bond or free, or, one may add, white or colored. But within boundaries limited only by mankind, it still holds that only some are chosen, chosen as the “elect from every nation,” to receive the mystery of salvation, and to become, in the words beloved of St. Paul, “new men in Christ,” the new Israel, the new chosen people.
To Judaism it is the whole of one people which is chosen for a divine responsibility, chosen as it now is, in its present condition, with its imperfections and its good and bad members. This is not tribalism as opposed to universalism; for the choice is to responsibility not to privilege, and is related to the same assertion of the universal dominion of God, and of the ultimate responsibility of those He has chosen towards the whole of His creation.
Both religions, then, rest on the idea of choice. Both see that choice within a universal framework. But the result of these two different conceptions of the nature of the choice has been quite naturally and logically to make the two religions differ in almost every conceivable emphasis and interest.
Both religions started with the acceptance of the divine authority of certain written Scriptures, but their differences begin in the two attitudes developed to these Scriptures. The Judaism which survived the destruction of Jerusalem, of the Temple, and of the whole apparatus of sacrifice, drew its inspiration from the Pharisaic doctrine of interpretation—a doctrine most frequently misunderstood by New Testament scholars. The rabbis, who were the successors of the Pharisaic scribes, saw in the written Torah the focusing point through which the infinity of God’s wisdom and design in creation reached out to meet the infinity of men’s needs as generation succeeded generation in a never static world. Each generation had the task of interpreting it anew, in terms of its own needs; and an interpretation once accepted by the scholars of a generation had the same divine authority as the original. In a sense it had more, for they regarded it as a greater sin to deny that God was continuously speaking to man, than to deny that He had once so spoken at Sinai.
Christianity made a sharp distinction between the Old and the New Testament, and interpreted the former only in terms of its fulfillment in the latter. The main interest in the Old Testament of the Church Fathers was as a quarry of proof texts that Jesus was the Christ foretold by the prophets. They had no conception of its unity comparable to the Jewish doctrine of Torah, and no doctrine of its interpretation. Where they used it, they used it in its literal sense, often with unhappy results, especially on the development of law and the justification of wars. From a doctrinal point of view the only sphere in which they regarded it as a focusing point between two infinities was in the development of Christological doctrine. And here we must come back to the two conceptions of a chosen people.
The development of Judaism was determined by the belief that a divine way of life was set before a whole people, here and now; and that its primary mission, and its primary contribution to mankind, was to explore, understand and express in every aspect of its daily life that divine plan for a whole community. In the literature of rabbinic Judaism there is to be found practically no interest in theological speculation, and nothing which could be called a systematic theology. Having accepted the existence and the unity of God without hesitation, the rabbis concentrated all their practical interest on His activities in creation, as they were to be embodied in the living of the chosen people. A number of consequences flowed from this determination of interest.
In the first place it demanded a strong emphasis on education, for understanding occupies in Judaism the same key place as faith in Christianity. In the second place it put an end to the reasons for the existence of a clerical or priestly hierarchy. The priesthood disappeared with the Temple, except for some trifling concessions to past prestige. The Judaism which grew in the second century was a religion of educated laymen. Moreover, it was a religion whose details were worked out by men following every occupation open to the community. The rabbis of the Talmudic period were not merely priests: they were not even in the modern sense “professionals.” If some gave almost the whole of their lives to study, they did it for love of Torah, not because they were salaried or held official posts. Some were wealthy landowners, some mere merchants, some were artisans taking only such time off from their studies as would ensure the most meager and frugal existence.
Because they represented every aspect of the life of the community, they dealt freely with every aspect. Their discussions of education, of economics, of agriculture, of family life, of social relations, of communal responsibilities, in spite of the curious techniques which they employed, were infused with an astonishing realism, just because they knew what they were talking about from experience. This realism reached its culmination in their conceptions of the functions of a law court, since it was an obligation of a scholar to be ready to judge in disputes. It is important to emphasize this point, since Christian scholars are so apt to assume that “Jewish” conceptions of justice are still based on the more primitive sections of the Pentatench. I have again and again seen Christian and Jewish attitudes compared by contrasting “the law of love of the Gospel” with “the Jewish belief in an eye for an eye.” In fact, it is only in some parts of the Christian world, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that Christian justice has begun to approximate to the sensitivity and compassion of Jewish rabbinical courts fifteen hundred years earlier.
Finally the rabbis, in their perpetual concern with interpretation, were constantly conscious of the fact that it was a whole community, not a select body of saints with which they were dealing. This concern is charmingly illustrated by a Midrashic interpretation of the reason why, at the Feast of Tabernacles, Jews hold a sweet smelling citron, and wave the lulav, a nosegay with twigs of palm, myrtle and willow (Lev., xxiii: 40 in Midrash Rabba on Lev., xxx: 12). “The fruit of the Hadar tree symbolizes Israel: just as the citron has taste as well as fragrance, so Israel have among them men who possess learning as well as good deeds. Branches of palm tree too applies to Israel: as the palm has taste but not fragrance, so Israel have among them such as possess learning but not good deeds. And boughs of the thick trees likewise applies to Israel: just as the myrtle has fragrance but no taste, so Israel have among them such as possess good deeds but not learning. And willows of the brook also applies to Israel: just as the willow has no taste and no fragrance, so Israel have among them such as possess neither learning nor good deeds. What then does the Holy One, blessed be He, do to them? To destroy them is impossible. But, says the Holy One, blessed be He, let them all be tied together in one band, and they will atone, one for another. And in that hour the Lord is exalted.”
This tenderness for “the willow in the lulav” runs all through their activities. They were concerned with the attainable. They certainly did not make Judaism a soft religion, but they were concerned that men should not fail and fall away through despair of ever attaining a loyal conformity to the will of God for their lives; and to this end they made “a fence about the Torah” by which men could be aided in their daily loyalty. Sometimes the fence may seem to us too high, or the bricks of which it is composed too small; but its provision was, in modern terms, good psychology and wise therapeutics. For Christendom and Islam saw to it that a Jew should have every temptation to be disloyal, and to desert his ancestral faith. The fence was not the core of Judaism, but it kept the core inviolate through nearly two thousand years of unparalleled external pressures.
The Christian conception of a chosen people was no less profound than the Jewish, no less universal in its implied responsibilities, but it rested on the idea that men were chosen individually and personally to receive salvation in Christ without regard to their race or status—without regard indeed even for their family ties. As the Church soon discovered, once the apostles had begun their preaching, this conception could easily be abused. Men could and did arise, falsely proclaiming that they held the key by which the longed for salvation could be assured. Men could and did so fashion Redeemer Christs that they fitted into the pattern of every Eastern mysticism and occult cult. The insistence on the finality and fullness of the divine choice could lead to even darker consequences; and men could proclaim a rigid predestinarianism, and even that, once saved, there was no indulgence of the flesh which need be avoided, since to wallow in sin only exalted the divine mercy and the wonder of the choice. In such a situation Christianity emphasized the unattainable as rightly as Judaism was emphasizing the attainable. To human duty to love God and to love men, neither religion set any limits. But a religion calling on men to be “saved” had always to remind them that salvation was a beginning not an end, lest they should believe that no further spiritual growth was required, or that faith had no further experience to offer.
This totally different picture was reinforced by the fact that, while Judaism was coping with the appallingly difficult problem of finding a new centre for the survival of a people whose every natural insignia—government, land, public religious centre—had been destroyed, Christianity, proclaiming that the saved were from every people and nation, had to struggle to maintain its proclamation in competition with the religions, philosophies, temptations and peculiarities of every people and nation. And so it became an intensely theological religion. It created, and strictly determined, its official interpreters in a clerical hierarchy geographically covering every Christian community. Above all, it built around the person of the Redeemer and Savior a fence of Christology as high, and with bricks as small, as that of the rabbis about the Jewish way of living; and with the same justification, and the same vindication by history.
It is only as we contemplate the task which was set to the Christian Church by its chosenness that we can understand sympathetically the bitter heresy hunts, the condemnation of men of the most upright and sincere belief for false views on what may seem to us academic trifles, and the long story of schism and excommunication which mars Christian history. For, just as the rabbis knew that it was vital to safeguard their way of life, so the theologians knew that it was vital to safeguard the historic Jesus of the Gospels, the historic crucifixion and resurrection, against interpretations which might deny the unity of God, or the true humanity of Jesus, which might take Jesus out of actual history or God’s activity out of the world He had created. Credal definition and credal conformity had as natural a place in Christianity as the Sabbath and Kashruth in Judaism. Christianity was as naturally a faith directed by educated clergy as Judaism a practice directed by educated laymen.
It has already been said that in each religion the belief that God had chosen a certain group out of all His children for a special relationship with Himself was accompanied by the recognition that this choice involved obligations to the whole of humanity. It is, of course, true that there is plenty of evidence to be culled from either religion of intolerance and disdain towards those outside, and of narrowness and self conceit in the assertion of privileged position. Since both religions dwell in an imperfect world, this is to be expected.
At a deeper level, we must not expect an immediate or early recognition on the part of either religion that all men will ultimately achieve the perfection for which God designed His creation. In fact, universal salvation is not yet an official doctrine of any Church or Jewish congregation. Both are willing to believe that ultimately some substantial portion of humanity will be denied ultimate bliss. On the whole, the Christian record is the more gloomy one. While Judaism contented itself with denying the ungodly a place in the world to come, some Churches, modern as well as medieval, have delighted to paint the terrors and pains of Hell, and even to make them an exemplary part of their preaching. But this again can be explained by the different emphases of the two faiths. Judaism has always been mainly interested in the fulfillment of God’s will in this world, while not denying the world to come; Christianity has placed its centre in the future life, while not denying that Christians have duties here “below.”
Apart, however, from differences of attitude towards the destiny of those outside the divine choice in the world to come, the two religions differ to such a degree in the form of missionary activity natural to their particular responsibilities that most Christians, and even many Jews, are convinced that Judaism is not a missionary religion at all. A monotheistic religion must be either a missionary religion or perish of degeneration and atrophy of the soul. There is no responsibility to the world outside, choice becomes privilege, and God, from being universal, becomes tribal. But it still remains true that the form in which Judaism naturally and properly expresses its missionary responsibilities is quite different from that equally natural to Christianity.
From the very earliest days of the Church the vocation to go out among non-believers and bring to them “the new life in Christ” has received the highest honour. A Church which has no mission is a dead Church. But it is a mistake to assume that this is the only way in which a missionary obligation can be met. As the Christian community seeks to win men outside its fold to surrender to Jesus Christ, so the Jewish community seeks to bring its non-Jewish environment one stage nearer to the concept of the righteous community embodied in the Torah.
The missionary enterprise in Judaism is communal and social. Only in small measure has it been actually concerned to bring Gentiles within the covenant relationship by circumcision and full admission to the Jewish congregation. But wherever it has had the opportunity to do so it has been active in bringing men within the influence of Torah, and in bringing before societies in which Jews are allowed to exercise the responsibilities of citizenship, the challenge of ever deepening and broadening mutual responsibility, justice and righteousness in the whole life of the community.
There is no subject on which a Christian should speak with more restraint and delicacy. For we must remember that the first law of the Roman Empire in which we can trace the influence of the Christian Church is a law of Constantine which attached the death penalty to conversion to Judaism, and a like penalty to the Jew who did the converting. The last man to die in England for his religion was burnt because he proclaimed the truth of Judaism. Fourth century Christendom deprived Jewry of the power to exercise any influence on its environment, and Islam followed suit. It was only the secular ideology of the eighteenth century which led to the emancipation of the Jews. But looking before and after this long and tragic period, we should remember that the Gentile Church itself was built on foundations laid by the synagogues of the Hellenistic world, and that in the 19th century those countries in which Jews were citizens will find among those prominent in every endeavour for liberalism and democracy, for deeper social justice, better education, more humane public health services, Jewish names out of all proportion to their number in the community. These are the ways in which Judaism exercises its mission, and history has not yet given any evidence that Jews have abandoned it.
This conception of the Jewish mission as a continuing and gradual process of permeation by ideas which slowly change society is in its nature appropriate to the conception of history which underlies every aspect of the Jewish consciousness. It is generally recognized that Christendom owes its sense of the meaning of history to Judaism, and not to either Greece or Rome. But Christianity has absorbed the sense of the reality of history into its being to a far lesser extent than Judaism, while, on the other hand the Johannine concept of the unity of the here and the hereafter is peculiar to Christianity.
In the period before the separation between the two religions, Judaism contained a number of apocalyptic sects, sects which in one way or another expected the present divine activity in creation, as well as the present “earth,” with its present values and disciplines, to be replaced by a “new heaven and a new earth.” It is interesting that the whole of the extensive literature of these Jewish sects has been preserved by Christian Churches, and not by Judaism. For rabbinic Judaism rejected this development, and restored history to its place as the scene of the working out of God’s purpose in creation. Though from time to time, and under the stress of persecution, apocalyptic re-entered Judaism, and produced a number of false messiahs, yet basically Judaism never accepted the easy alternative which apocalyptic offered. It was in history, and not in the overthrow of history, that God’s design would ultimately be manifested.
It was in history, therefore, that the judgments of God’s moral order were perpetually manifest, and God’s moral laws were perpetually operative. To an astonishing extent Jews regarded even the most brutal and unjustified sufferings inflicted by Christendom or Islam upon them, as God’s legitimate punishment for their lack of faith in Him, and their failure to live according to His divinely revealed pattern of life. They did not take the facile line of escape of proclaiming that the world itself was evil, or under the power of evil, a temptation into which too often Christian Churches have fallen, and, indeed, are falling in our own day.
In the basic Christian tradition God’s judgment is revealed only at the end of time; and Christians, conscious of how far short this world has fallen of what it could have been, have always pictured that final consummation in words of gloom and terror. A synonym for the last judgment is “doom.” The most famous liturgical hymn describing it opens with the words Dies Irae—Day of Wrath. In every medieval church, worshippers were confronted, every time they entered the building, with a horrific picture. It was in the most prominent position in the church, that is, over the arch separating the congregation from the sanctuary. In the center was a stern Christ sitting in judgment. On the left were the happy souls—often few in number, being received by angels into eternal bliss. But on the right was the open mouth of hell, through which horned and tailed devils of horrific appearance were shoveling an innumerable host, including popes, kings, bishops and monks, into the flames of eternal punishment.
Jewry, by contrast, held firmly to the conviction that they were passing through the fires of judgment all through their long and painful pilgrimage within history, and so they pictured its consummation in terms of reconciliation, of justice and of peace. No body of men has ever chastised the sins of their contemporaries with such vigor or such insight as the Hebrew prophets. Yet, even when they told them that all that they could expect to survive would be comparable to the fragments of its victim which could be rescued from a bear or a wolf, they were still convinced that at the end there would be reconciliation, justice and peace.
It is in this belief that Jewish messianic hopes are firmly grounded. Traditionally, Judaism certainly believed in a personal Messiah, and there were many interpretations of his role. Today, because many Jews have abandoned that belief, Christians are apt to assume that they have automatically abandoned their Messianic hopes. But this is not so. For, even where belief in a personal Messiah was held, the Messiah was inseparable from the Messianic Age. He was its herald. After the loss of the land of Israel, his function was almost wholly confined to the task of restoring the Jews to their ancient home from all the corners of the earth to which they had been exiled. But the central core of the belief was nothing comparable to the Christian doctrine of a Savior and Redeemer from a sinful world. That central core was the consummation of history, the Messianic reign of righteousness, justice and peace—the three ideas on which creation itself rested, and which it would then see fulfilled. Only after its fulfillment within history did creation pass from this world to the world to come.
That world to come, and its implications in personal immortality, Judaism has, since the disappearance of Sadducism, universally accepted. But it has played very little part in shaping Jewish life or thought, nothing certainly comparable to the proportion which it occupies on the Christian canvas; and this again is to be expected when we consider the implications of the two ideas of chosenness which underlie the growth of the two religions, and have shaped their characteristics. The mutual relations of a community are more visibly of this world than the short life of an individual person.
It is time to sum up. Within the compass of a single lecture I have inevitably spoken of the two religions in monolithic terms. I have traced what seem to me the central lines of development which sprang naturally from the root ideas from which each religion grew. The belief in a chosen people had consequences as inevitable as the belief in a new people—a church—chosen from among all peoples. There were differences in the nature of the choice, and in the understanding of the purpose of the choice.
From the Christian side, I believe that the central consequence of what I have been saying, if it is accepted as broadly true, is the abandonment of the belief that Judaism existed merely as a preliminary to Christianity; or just exists side by side with Christianity, exhibiting in incomplete form qualities whose full expression is only to be found within the Christian Church.
Here let me repeat what I said earlier. It is, of course, possible to dismiss both religions as superstition, as merely milestones on the path to human control of human destiny, and human perfection achieved by human means. But if we accept the belief of a God working in history, then I cannot see any basis on which we can claim that He has worked in the one and not in the other. Every argument we could adduce to exemplify the truth of our own faith is equally applicable as an argument for the truth of the other. Either both religions carry into the life of men a divine imperative and a divine power, or neither does. If history shows the hand of God at work in the one, it is equally at work in the other.
The acceptance of such a belief does not of itself indicate a line for the future. It would mark the end of an epoch; it would not determine the character of their future relations, and I would not here presume even to suggest what they might be. But one thing is, I believe, mandatory upon me, speaking as I am from the Christian standpoint, and that is to urge that in the present situation the initiatives of understanding are due from our side. Persecution and misrepresentation came from our side. From our side came, in our own lifetimes, the deaths of six million Jews, two-fifths of all the Jewish people in the world. Let Jewry breathe for as long as it needs the atmosphere of acceptance and equality. Only then will it be time for Jews also to examine the implications of our twin growth from a single stem.
“The separation of Judaism from Christianity was a schism which, like all schisms, left truth divided.”
William Temple, late Archbishop of Canterbury
James Parkesis a front ranking British scholar on Jewish matters. Ordained in the Church of England, he has devoted his life to Jewish-Christian relations. His books, published by Putnam & Co., London, include The Jew and His Neighbor; Jesus, Paul and the Jews; The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue; God at Work. Under the pen-name of “John Hadham” he has written several Penguin books (the best known was Good God) on the situation of the world in relation to ‘real, practical and active’ God.
This article is derived from a speech delivered as the Charles W. Gilkey lecture under the auspices of the University of Chicago and the Hillel Foundation, at Chicago, April 5, 1954. Abridged and reprinted by kind permission of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, New York.