Resting in the Hands of a Loving, Sovereign God
Caleb, Joshua, Ruth, Hannah, Samuel, David, and others are shining examples of obedience and blessing. Their amazing stories point to God’s infinite wisdom and sovereignty in lovingly working out his redemptive plan for Israel and the world. But none of these stories occurred in a vacuum of trouble-free bliss. Each of these characters struggled with his or her own sins and the sins of others, sometimes with great obstacles to overcome, yet God faithfully continued to work out His plan for them as individuals and for Israel as a whole.
What do we do when we receive the phone call about cancer or health problems—problems of your own or that of a friend or family member? What about when your life is thrown upside down because of unexpected events? Or when you hear heartbreaking news about someone? Or when your day or week doesn’t go as planned, making it hard to recalibrate and function?
I’ve had some phone calls like that recently, and my family’s regular routine has been a bit jumbled for various reasons. In thinking about and responding to scary health news, heart breaks, and waylaid plans and routines, I’ve meditated on God’s sovereignty.
In Daniel 4:34–35, Nebuchadnezzar makes the following conclusion about God’s rule:
His dominion is an everlasting dominion,
and his kingdom endures from generation to generation;
all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing,
and he does according to his will among the host of heaven
and among the inhabitants of the earth;
and none can stay his hand
or say to him, “What have you done?”
Is Nebuchadnezzar’s conclusion correct? Are we inhabitants of the earth accounted as nothing? Does God just do whatever according to his will? Can none of us stop him or question what he has done?
My thoughts moved next to Psalm 138:8:
The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever. Do not forsake the work of your hands.
Nebuchadnezzar emphasizes the unquestionable nature of God’s sovereignty, and the Psalmist adds to it: The Lord fulfills His purpose for individuals, not as a careless Sovereign, but as a Sovereign with steadfast enduring love for us.
As I contemplated these passages, I was assured of their trustworthiness. I’ve experienced these truths to a degree in my own life, but what settled me most is seeing them played out in the Bible. The stories of the Old Testament in particular have grounded me firmly in God’s steadfast, loving endurance to his sovereign plan.
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Augustine and Antisemitism
Written by James R. Wood |
Monday, December 4, 2023
Augustine never promoted a Jewish state, but rather expounded the theological significance of Jewish scattering. However, one wonders if he might support such a state as a way to protect Jewish lives and practice in light of the antisemitic hostility that we have seen simmer over the centuries, erupt in Western nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and remain an ever-present threat in relation to Islamic extremists who now have the sympathy also of Westerners. This is speculative, but one can imagine it as a post-Holocaust extension of Augustine’s basic teachings on the Jews. And to extend his logic in this way does not require one to embrace dispensational Zionism.October 7th forced the West to face up to some grim realities. One is that we remain in history, and our intractable political conflicts have not been resolved by liberal nation-building. Another is that antisemitism remains with us and afflicts a variety of tribes, both political and ethnic, both at home and abroad. This animosity is evident not only in Hamas and Hamas-friendly Palestinians, but also progressives in Western nations who have come to classify contemporary Jews and the state of Israel as privileged oppressors. At the other end of the horseshoe, there is also an emergent strain on the new Christian right that winks at Jew-hatred while it seeks to curb what it sees as Western over-commitment to the modern state of Israel. Much of this is explained as a correction of sloppy post-War geopolitical thinking, which linked up with the dispensational theology that led many Western Christians to uncritically support Israel, and Zionist Jewish leaders in Western nations. This has led to a supersessionist backlash that seems to sanction hardened attitudes toward Jewish suffering in Israel and hostility toward Jews in the West.
Some form of what has come to be called “supersessionism” is the majority report in church history. Supersessionism broadly posits that Israel has been replaced by the Christian church, and that Jews who do not believe in Christ are no longer to be identified with God’s chosen people. According to this traditional belief, Jews lost the rights to the covenant promises in their rejection of Jesus. Dispensationalism–a more novel theology, and one not uninfluenced by the astonishing founding of the state of Israel in 1948–is adamantly opposed to this reading, presenting Israel and the church as two distinct peoples of God, with two distinct plans of salvation. Dispensational theologians strongly emphasize the irrevocability of the promises to national Israel; this leads many to view the modern state of Israel through a prophetic lens. Dispensationalists and those unknowingly influenced by this theology tend to be those most sensitive to the plight of Jews in our day, while supersessionist theology has been weaponized in service of hostility toward Jews, and those who adopt the supersessionist framing tend to struggle to articulate anything positive about the perdurance of Judaism and contemporary Jews. This is exacerbated by the very common pattern of people who have grown up in dispensationalist circles finding more classical Protestant theology, stumbling upon Luther’s floridly antisemitic comments, and as a result reacting against their enthusiastically Zionist upbringing (and parents) by embracing a maximally antisemitic read of the Reformers.
This essay will investigate how Augustine’s theology relates to all of this. What I will argue is that Augustine’s “witness doctrine,” while it certainly cannot be categorized as a species of dispensationalism, does not fit neatly in most expressions of supersessionism either. Augustine, while presenting the Christian church as continuous with Israel and as the fulfillment of Old Testament promises, and while being fervent about the need for Jews to repent and believe in Christ, also provides a positive account of Judaism. Working from within the contra Iudaeos stream of patristic rhetoric and theology, Augustine added a somewhat revolutionary contribution.
Background: Contra Iudaeos
Early in the church’s history, a form of supersessionism developed that viewed the Jews as rejected by God for having rejected Christ. Much of this tradition employed an allegorical reading of Esau and Jacob as prefiguring Israel and the church, inspired by similar interpretive moves in Paul’s writings. Already by the second century, theologians and Christian apologists began to present opposition to the gospel as a permanent feature of Jewish identity and Jewish-Christian relations.[1] Such Christians devised arguments to explain why Jews were seemingly incapable of perceiving that Christians had the true understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures. As Paula Fredriksen explains in her important work on Augustine and the Jews, the rhetorical force of these arguments was exacerbated by the failed Jewish revolt led by Bar Kokhba in AD 132-135. “Gentile Christians,” explains Fredriksen, “viewed the earlier, first-century destruction of the Temple through the prism of this bloody second-century defeat.”[2] Christians linked these two failed Jewish revolts (i.e., AD 66-70 and AD 132-135) with the New Testament predictions of the destruction of the Temple and the latter’s relation to Jesus’ death. This all served to confirm the idea that the Jews killed Jesus, and thereby surrendered their special covenantal status. Christian thinkers increasingly developed the “trail of blood” motif that associated the Jews with Cain, arguing that just as the Jews killed the prophets, so they killed Christ, and thus they remain ever hostile to Christians.[3] Interestingly, the term “Jewish” was employed in various theological treatises, sermons, and debates to apply to any heresy or enemy of Christian truth. Christian theology was tempted at various points to disparage the Old Testament and “fleshly” religion. By the time of the late fourth century, rhetoric contra Iudaeos had come into its own.[4]
Augustine’s thought is somewhat unique in this context. His conception of the Jews and Judaism is marked by two poles: one more comfortably in line with the contra Iudaeos tradition, seen in his presentation of non-Christian Jews as judged and humiliated,[5] and the other a revolution within that rhetorical tradition exhibited in his doctrine of positive Jewish witness.[6] For the purposes of this essay, we will simply look at the key aspects of his witness doctrine and his reasons for espousing it. There is a strange ambivalence in this doctrine for Augustine, for it simultaneously conceives of the Jews as judged and protected, as humiliated and preserved.[7] But this ambivalent Augustinian doctrine might offer something to our contemporary debates.
Early Developments in Augustine’s Doctrine
To introduce Augustine’s “witness doctrine,” I will provide an overview of the main images employed by Augustine at each stage in his development of this theme, and then conclude with a summary of the key tenets of his mature thought on the topic.
Augustine begins to approach the witness doctrine in his early battles against the Manichees, particularly Faustus,[8] and his debates with Jerome. Here a key image is flesh. Faustus appropriated the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the day, but directed it at the catholic church. The Manichees espoused an extreme Law-Gospel contrast and pitted the Old Testament and “fleshly” faith against true “spirituality,” the latter being most purely expressed by the Manichees. Much of the early contra Iudaeos tradition was based on a derogatory dichotomy of flesh vs. spirit; true Christianity was “spiritual” and heresy was “carnal,” rhetorically rendered as “Jewish.”[9] Faustus went even further by arguing that sacrifice and “bloody” religion were inherently wrong.
Augustine made the case for the positive theological status of flesh against Faustus and the Manichees, but, in so doing, also supplied a defense of Judaism. He was helped by the writings of the Donatist theologian Tyconius, something evident in On Christian Doctrine, which Augustine began writing in 396-397. With the aid of Tyconius, Augustine began to rethink how to read the Bible and the Church’s relationship to Judaism.[10] Tyconius helped Augustine conceive of a positive understanding of the Law and of continuity between the Old and New Covenants.[11] The Law is good, and so was the Jewish understanding of the Law and Israel’s traditional practices. Christ did not abolish the Law, but revealed its depths and telos in himself. In Answer to Faustus, a Manichean, written in 398-400, Augustine argued that bloody, fleshly sacrifice was needed to point to Christ, to prepare the way for the incarnation and crucifixion–which were fleshly and bloody.
This leaves open the question about ongoing Jewish cultic practice after the coming of Christ, something which leads us to Augustine’s debates with Jerome, which are found in Augustine’s letters 40 and 82, from AD 396 and 405, respectively. These debates centered on Jerome’s interpretation of Galatians 2, but were ultimately about the truthfulness of God’s Word and the role of post-apostolic Jewish practice. Surprisingly, Jerome had argued that the debate between Peter and Paul in Galatians 2 was not genuine, since it made no sense that a Christian leader would be confused about or tempted by Jewish practices after Christ.
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The Biblical Responsibility of Christian Parents
Children need regular biblical teaching just like adults do, and the fact is that children can often grasp more truth than we give them credit for. Certainly some deeper theological truths may be challenging for a child to comprehend, but we must teach the core truths of Scripture to our children from the earliest ages so they will come to truly know God.
Do you have a mission statement for your family?
Every successful business has a mission statement that carefully articulates the company’s central vision and primary objectives. Yet the mission statement does not exist simply to be placed in an employee manual or on a plaque in the conference room. It exists to set the parameters for the structures and methodologies the company employs in pursuit of that mission.
In a similar way, to determine what is best for our children, we need to begin with consideration of our end goal. Every family needs a mission statement.
All Christian parents want to rear children who trust Christ for their salvation and live lives committed to him. Every church wants to disciple children who grow to be faithful servants of Christ. Yet to establish the best way to accomplish these goals, we need to have a sound biblical picture of what we are trying to accomplish.
Perhaps the best place to start is with the core confession of faith God gave to his people in the Old Testament. Known as the Shema, from the first word of the confession in Hebrew—“Hear”—this statement encapsulates a valuable model for what it means to be a true follower of God:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.
(Deut. 6:4–6)
To Know God
The Jewish confession begins with a requirement to believe certain things. The first of these affirmations is that the Lord, the God of Scripture, is our God. We believe in him, we affirm him as our God, and we trust in him. But then Moses adds an additional qualification. Not only is the Lord our God, he is the only God. There is one and only one true and living God. In other words, only one being in the entire universe deserves to be worshiped. The one true God is the Lord, the God of the Bible.
At the core of our desire for our children is that they truly know this. We want them to know God, to believe in him, and to trust him. We want them to know that he created them and what he has done throughout history. We want them to know he requires perfect obedience and does not tolerate sin. This very desire informs our intent to give them biblical teaching so they can understand truth about God.
The New Testament, of course, adds the complete revelation essential to salvation, and that is that Jesus Christ is “the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through [him]” (John 14:6). Jesus is both God and man, and thus knowing him is the only way to truly know God. Our children need to be taught that since sin deserves everlasting judgment and prevents us from having fellowship with God, they must come to God through Christ, who died to pay the penalty that sin deserves. We need to teach them that those who repent of their sins and trust in Christ alone for their salvation will be forgiven of their sin and given everlasting life.
This is why the Word of God must be prominent in the lives of our children from the earliest of ages. This was true of Timothy, to whom Paul says, “From childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15). Timothy’s grandmother and mother had faithfully communicated truth about God from the Scriptures to him as a child (1:5).
Children need regular biblical teaching just like adults do, and the fact is that children can often grasp more truth than we give them credit for. Certainly some deeper theological truths may be challenging for a child to comprehend, but we must teach the core truths of Scripture to our children from the earliest ages so they will come to truly know God.
To Obey God
The immediate context of the Jewish confession in Deuteronomy 6 is the giving of the law to the people of Israel, the “statutes and the rules” God gave to Moses. God required certain things of his people, and their adherence to those requirements resulted in either blessing or curse. In verse 3, Moses told them to be careful to obey these things.
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Some Conflict is Healthy
Over time, division in healthy churches produces unity, not division. Don’t let the good fruit of conflict silence the apostle’s clear charge: “I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you.” Christians don’t aim for conflict; we aim for agreement and harmony in Christ. We can’t let the usefulness of divisions make any of us divisive.
In most cases, cruelty — not wisdom — would have told them to cut the baby in two. How many kings in history would have had the sword brought, not to draw out the true mother, but to violently end the matter? Who would have imagined that thousands of years later, we’d still hold up such a brutal scene as a beautiful model to imitate — as a masterclass in conflict resolution?
Two women came to King Solomon, like so many others, to settle a dispute. They were both prostitutes, so deciding whom to trust wouldn’t be easy. Both had recently given birth to sons, within just a few days of each other. One boy was now dead because of a horrible accident. His mother woke to find she had smothered him while the two were sleeping. Can you imagine the horror when she realized what she had done?
Desperate, she added horror to horror. She took the living son from her roommate’s breast, and laid the cold body of her carelessness there instead. She stirred the heavy storm of guilt into a hurricane. When the other woman woke up, she found the child at her side was dead. After examining the baby more closely, though, she discovered what evil had happened (like any mother would). But how could she prove it? She couldn’t; they “were alone” (1 Kings 3:18). So the two went to court, both declaring, “The living child is mine, and the dead child is yours” (1 Kings 3:22).
We know what the king does next — the jarring way he uncovers the truth. Who would have guessed he’d threaten to have the child cut in two? When Israel heard of the judgment Solomon rendered, they stood in awe of him, perceiving that the Spirit of God was in him (1 Kings 3:28). Can you explain, however, why he was wise to reach for a sword?
Needful Conflict
We might say Solomon was wise because it worked. The true mother proved herself by pleading that the boy be spared, even if that meant he would be raised by another woman (1 Kings 3:26). Likewise, the selfish response of the other woman exposed her treachery. That it worked, however, doesn’t explain why the king was wise (only that he was). Surely the same strategy would have failed in lots of other crises.
What made Solomon wise, in this case, was that he knew to lean into the conflict between them to prove who was who. He pressed on the sensitive issue at hand until each woman revealed what kind of woman she really was. The apostle Paul offers a similar piece of wisdom to the church when he writes,
When you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you. And I believe it in part, for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized. (1 Corinthians 11:18–19)
There must be factions among you. In other words, some conflict is necessary for churches to remain healthy. Why? Like Solomon with the prostitutes: to prove who is who. Who’s really here to worship, obey, and enjoy King Jesus — and who’s here for some other reason?
Isn’t Division Bad?
Aren’t all divisions in the church to be avoided, though? After all, the apostle himself says (earlier in the same letter, even),
I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. (1 Corinthians 1:10)
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