Some Thoughts on Ann Coulter's Comments in Reverse: Would Most Modern Christians be More "Perfect" by Becoming More Jewish?
As many of you know well by now, Ann Coulter touched off another heated and polarized/polarizing debate a few days back when she said that Jews need to be perfected by becoming Christian.
I'm not one to give Coulter's words/thoughts much credence, much less to assess them at a rationalistic level, to say nothing of theology. But sometimes the most ridiculous comments can, at least, frame the parameters of a discussion even if they add nothing of substance to that discussion.
And the question that struck me when I heard about Coulter's comment was "Do we, as Christians, perhaps need to examine the issue the other way around?" In other words, would most modern Christians benefit, be more "perfected," by becoming more Jewish?
In other words, more like Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph, the first century Jew, whose worldview was so clearly and so thoroughly Jewish?
Would most modern Christians benefit by recapturing the Jewish Jesus' vision of the nature of the One to whom He referred as Abba, the Creator God who made the world and remains in loving interaction with it, ceaselessly at work to rescue it from the mess that we've made of it? The Redeemer God who is interested not in throwing away His good creation and started all over but in rescuing it, making all things new? Do most modern Christians have a worldview that is "too Christian," too contaminated with thoughts of a distant, angry God who lives far off in a place called heaven and who occasionally intervenes miraculously with His creation? Too muddled by a "rapture theology" that imagines that God wants to do away with that which He created, and one day will, such that it doesn't really matter what we do with the creation now? Too tangled in a dualistic framework of material/spiritual to take seriously the Jewish Jesus' critique of power and empire, or even to view it as "un-Christian"?
Just a thought. Thanks, Ann, for the frame.
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
I'm not one to give Coulter's words/thoughts much credence, much less to assess them at a rationalistic level, to say nothing of theology. But sometimes the most ridiculous comments can, at least, frame the parameters of a discussion even if they add nothing of substance to that discussion.
And the question that struck me when I heard about Coulter's comment was "Do we, as Christians, perhaps need to examine the issue the other way around?" In other words, would most modern Christians benefit, be more "perfected," by becoming more Jewish?
In other words, more like Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph, the first century Jew, whose worldview was so clearly and so thoroughly Jewish?
Would most modern Christians benefit by recapturing the Jewish Jesus' vision of the nature of the One to whom He referred as Abba, the Creator God who made the world and remains in loving interaction with it, ceaselessly at work to rescue it from the mess that we've made of it? The Redeemer God who is interested not in throwing away His good creation and started all over but in rescuing it, making all things new? Do most modern Christians have a worldview that is "too Christian," too contaminated with thoughts of a distant, angry God who lives far off in a place called heaven and who occasionally intervenes miraculously with His creation? Too muddled by a "rapture theology" that imagines that God wants to do away with that which He created, and one day will, such that it doesn't really matter what we do with the creation now? Too tangled in a dualistic framework of material/spiritual to take seriously the Jewish Jesus' critique of power and empire, or even to view it as "un-Christian"?
Just a thought. Thanks, Ann, for the frame.
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
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