Christianity, which began its life as one of several reform movements within
Palestinian Jewish society before becoming a separate and primarily gentile
religion in the Roman empire, developed its own understandings of what the
Jewish people were and what constituted the salient characteristics of their
religion. Some of these early Christian definitions are to be found in the
writings of the apostles known as the New Testament; others in the work of
the Church fathers. All of them were the result of controversy and tension,
if not conflict.
The Church did not develop conceptions of Jews and Judaism by chance. On
the contrary, these definitions were necessary for the Church's understanding
of itself. Precisely because it had emerged from the Jewish people, it was
essential for the emerging new religion to differentiate itself from the
religion of Jesus of Nazareth.
Despite the passage of centuries, what the Church is and what it does continue
to depend upon its definitions of Judaism, but only in the later years of
the twentieth century has the critical significance of those definitions
begun to be recognized.2 An attempt will be made in the pages that follow
to examine the definitions of the Jewish people that were operative within
a particular Christian ecumenical movement--the International Missionary Council's
Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews (IMCCAJ). At least two fundamental
questions will be asked: (1) How did the understanding of the Jewish people
by the IMCCAJ affect the missionaries' attitude and action toward and/or
relation with Jews and Judaism? (2) How did those definitions of the Jewish
people condition their understanding of the Church?
The Ecumenical Movement
"The Ecumenical Movement of today is a movement, not a single organization.
Many different agencies give expression to the movement or contribute to
it. No organization is its exclusive instrument or holds monopoly rights
in it," Norman Goodall wrote in 1960 when he was secretary of the Joint Committee
of the World Council of Churches and the International Missionary Council.
But he wrote at what may well have been the end of the ecumenical movement,
for the IMC was soon to become part of the World Council, which had been officially
created in 1948 by union of the movements for Faith and Order and Life and
Work. The WCC definitely was an institution and, moreover, of quite a different
character from the movement bodies that preceded it.1
"Ecumenical" is a word with a long history. Willem Visser 't Hooft, first
General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, noted seven meanings:
"(a) pertaining to or representing the whole (inhabited) earth; (b) pertaining
to or representing the whole of the (Roman) Empire; (c) pertaining to or
representing the whole of the Church; (d) that which has universal ecclesiastical
validity; (e) pertaining to the world-wide missionary outreach of the Church;
(f) pertaining to the relations between and unity of two or more Churches
(or of Christians of various confessions); (g) that quality or attitude
which expresses the consciousness of and desire for Christian unity." His
own usage, which he assumed was commonly accepted, was "that which concerns
the unity and the world-wide mission of the Church of Jesus Christ."
This meaning incorporates the two most significant aspects of the ecumenical
movement in the twentieth century: unity and mission...of the Church. It does
not include the Jewish people (or those of any other religion, for that matter)
and was not intended to do so; the ecumenical movement was a Christian movement
by definition. And it was a movement engendered by and dedicated, first
and foremost, to mission, particularly mission understood as evangelism.
"The ecumenical movement was in large part the outgrowth of the missionary
movement. Throughout its course it has been closely related to the world
mission of Christianity, both in continuous service in countries in which
Christianity has long been potent, and in countries where it has been recently
introduced...," Kenneth Scott Latourette wrote in 1954. "That the ecumenical
movement," he continued,
"should have been so intimately connected with the missionary outreach of Christianity
is not surprising. The strong current which in the 19th and 20th centuries
drew Christians of many communions together in a unity more inclusive than
had ever before been known paralleled the greatest geographic expansion of
the Faith that had yet been seen. In the 19th and 20th centuries this extension
became for the first time literally world-wide. In western Europe it endeavored
to reach the populations of the industrial and commercial cities whose rapid
growth was one of the most marked features of the period. In the Americas,
Australasia, and South Africa it sought, with amazing success, to hold to
the Faith the vast immigration which poured into these regions from Europe
and the British Isles. It also won a large proportion of the non-Aryan peoples
of these lands--the Indians and Negroes in the Americas, the Aborigines in
Australia, the Maoris in New Zealand, and the Bantus in South Africa. Through
Student Christian movements it reached out to the intellectuals. It also
touched, in many places with striking results in the emergence of younger
Churches, almost every country and tribe in what are commonly called the non-Christian
countries of the world."
The Missionary Movement
But let us go back some years to set a context for what was to become an extraordinary
episode in ecclesiastical history. Professor Johann Heinrich Callenberg of
the University of Halle had founded, in 1728, what was perhaps the earliest
institution devoted to training missionaries to Jews. His Institutum Judaicum
provided education in advanced Hebrew, Yiddish, and rabbinics for young
men training for the Christian ministry and who, subsequently, felt a particular
calling to "work among the Jews." But the Protestant missionary movement,
strictly speaking, is usually considered to have begun in 1792, when William
Carey, under the auspices of the newly formed Particular Baptist Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel amongst the Heathen, sailed from England
to India. Carey, John Thomas (who accompanied him to India), and others at
the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century who
set out for foreign lands, did not operate in a vacuum. They were preceded
by missionary endeavors flowing from the "Great Awakening" in the early eighteenth
century--when, for instance, John Wesley, after traveling with a group of
Moravians on his way to bring the gospel to the American Indians of Georgia,
returned to find his heart "strangely warmed" at Aldersgate--and by continental
missionary efforts in the Netherlands, Germany, and elsewhere. Already,
in 1719, Isaac Watts had written "Jesus shall reign where'er the sun." In
the main, however, these missions had not ventured far beyond their own
national borders. The world-wide missionary movement lay in the future.
Known in England as the "Evangelical Awakening" and in America as the "Great
Awakening," this generally pietistic impulse was a Christian response to
the "rationalism of the Enlightenment [that] proved a destructive acid to
Protestantism and Roman Catholicism alike." Nevertheless, it would have
been totally inconceivable had it not been for the Enlightenment conviction
that every individual person had the freedom and right to believe as they
chose to believe. No longer was religious adherence something dictated by
a prince or duke or king--all individuals could choose for themselves. It
was a fantastic freedom, virtually unknown through all the years of the the
Middle Ages and Renaissance. It was not the Middle Ages from which the eighteenth-century
pietists awakened, however, but the rationalism of the Enlightenment.
And yet--it was the Enlightenment that made everyone's belief everyone's
personal choice. And after the passage of many years, it created the climate
that allowed for the advent of the modern missionary movement. By the end
of the nineteenth century, the slogan inspired by John R. Mott, "The Evangelisation
of the World in this Generation," had become the watchword of all but countless
missionaries and missionary societies, dedicated to the holy task of spreading
the gospel to the "heathen." The fervor, the passion, the driving conviction
of being sent by God, and the urgency with which the missionaries were imbued
may be difficult for some late twentieth-century people to understand,
much less feel. Nevertheless, as was said of William Carey, "The thought
of millions without the knowledge of Christ haunted [them]."
These nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestant mission societies
were established and maintained by individuals and groups, not churches.
Though some of them held strong denominationally-grounded theological positions,
in most instances the urgent necessity to ensure that every single individual
in the "whole inhabited earth" be offered the opportunity to accept Jesus
Christ took precedence over historic doctrinal differences. It was inevitable
that frequently their work would overlap and, in some instances, come into
conflict with one another--thus the need for "missionary cooperation."
As Latourette reported:
"Once transported from the setting in which the inherited confessional loyalties
seemed an accepted and immutable part of the religious landscape, more and
more missionaries came to believe that divisions among Christians were a
scandal, a denial of the Faith. As they joined in travel, in summer resorts,
and in the growing co-operative enterprises, they found joint worship possible,
even imperative, and grew in sympathetic understanding of one another and
in appreciation of the convictions and practices of confessions other
than their own. In many aspects missionary conferences proved to be pioneers
in methods which later have become classical in all ecumenical work."
The culmination of this cooperation was the great missionary conference of
1910, held at Edinburgh, which led to the creation, not only of the International
Missionary Council but also of Faith and Order and Life and Work and, eventually,
of the World Council of Churches.
A curious feature of Edinburgh 1910 was the complete absence of any consideration
about mission to Jews. Strategy, tactics, and theology of missions to Hindus,
Buddhists, Muslims, Sikhs, and virtually every other world religious group
were discussed at length, but not Jews. We might well wonder why, for societies
devoted to "Jewish mission" had existed since the early years of the nineteenth
century.
In the vast literature of the missionary movement very little mention is
made of missions to Jews, apart from an occasional reference to a Jewish missionary
society, and that usually contained in a list of other mission activities.
Indeed, "There is not the same interest and activity in missions to the Jews
as in foreign missions generally." Were Jews being neglected intentionally
? Was it assumed they did not require evangelizing? Was it taken for granted
that they would not be receptive to the gospel and, therefore, scarce resources
could be expended better on Hindus or Muslims?
None of these suggestions supply the full explanation, though each of them
was an influential factor from time to time. The basic fact was that missions
to Jews were a special category--because Jews were a special category. In
later years there was considerable grumbling on the part of some Christians
because other Christians kept talking about the "special relationship" of
Christianity to Judaism, but that "special relationship" had always been
there, even when it was not consciously recognized or acknowledged. As far
as the majority of nineteenth-century missionaries were concerned, though,
there simply was no time (or money) to worry about the tiny Jewish population
(which existed, moreover, in the midst of Christendom) when the vast "pagan"
world was ripe for conversion.
The Evangelical Awakening in England, with its anti-intellectual fear of French
rationalism (and its concomitant, revolution), had produced a genuine back-to-the-Bible
movement in which none of the centuries-earlier reluctance to acknowledge
the authority of the Old Testament was in evidence. On the contrary, the
Old Testament was considered fully equal to the New Testament. A consequence
was that belief in Old Testament prophecy, coupled with that of the New Testament,
resulted in the conviction that the Second Coming required the conversion
of the Jews and, further, their restoration to the Land of Promise. Biblical
faith and not rational thought guided both the political and religious leaders
(often they were the same) of the early nineteenth century. And that, according
to Barbara Tuchman, "explains how it was possible for the Evangelicals to
waste so much energy and good will on the delusion of converting the Jews.
More intellect and less soul would have shown the project to be of doubtful
success." Be that as it may, the London Society for Promoting Christianity
Amongst the Jews ("Jews Society"), the earliest of the Jewish missionary
societies, was founded in 1809 and immediately gained immense social prestige
and political patronage.
After that, Jewish missionary societies and organizations began to proliferate.
Indeed, in 1927 one compilation of such organizations counted: one each in
South Africa, Switzerland, and Australia; two each in India and Holland; three
in Germany; four in Scandinavia; fourteen in Britain and Ireland; and eighteen
in North America.
There were an estimated 15.5 million Jews world-wide in 1927 (a figure roughly
approximate to the number in the 1990s), concentrated overwhelmingly in
eastern Europe. Poland and the Ukraine alone accounted for 5,245,000 (about
equally divided between them) and, when 2,600,000 more were added in Czechoslovakia
(360,000), Hungary (500,000), Yugoslavia (65,000), Bulgaria (40,000), Rumania
(950,000) Russia (785,000) and the Baltic states (460,000), the total of 7,845,000
comes to almost exactly half of the world's Jewish population. Of the remainder,
more than half (4,085,500) were located in the Western Hemisphere (principally
the United States of America; 3,750,000) with the balance thinly scattered
throughout Asia, Africa, and Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.
When this population distribution data is set next to the countries in which
the Jewish mission organizations were based, it becomes obvious that, for
the most part, those with the burning zeal to evangelize Jews did not live
where Jews did. The exceptions were the North Americans, who did concentrate
on the sizable Jewish populations in their major cities. The English and
Scottish had work at home but also set down "stations" in various parts of
the empire and elsewhere. Missions to Jews overwhelmingly were organized
by English-speaking people, whereas the Jews they hoped to bring to Christianity
largely spoke Slavic languages and Yiddish, a fact that was true even in
cities such as New York and London. It is little wonder, therefore, that
many of the reports of conferences and minutes of various societies dwelt
on the need for proper missionary training and literature, as well as on missionary
methodology.
But these societies were almost a parenthesis in the missionary movement as
a whole. Whereas agencies such as the Church Missionary Society in Britain
and the myriad missionary societies on the continent and in North America
established missions to the "heathen," such as Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims,
indiscriminately, the Jewish societies concentrated exclusively on Jews.
As well as the geographical and sociological factors already noted, there
was a theological reason for this separation of responsibility. Jews worshipped
the same God as did Christians, and, moreover, St. Paul, in his letter to
the church at Rome, had made a distinction. "For I am not ashamed of the
gospel," he wrote, "it is the power of God for salvation to every one who
has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek" (1:16). "To the Jew first"
became a motto for the Jewish missions. Their relation to the other missionary
societies might be compared to the division of labor between the Jerusalem
church and Paul's gentile mission. Each of them proclaimed the gospel, but
they did so to different audiences, with different assumptions about who
those audiences were, and those assumptions, in turn, affected the way the
gospel itself was understood.