{"id":718,"date":"2024-06-18T15:14:05","date_gmt":"2024-06-18T15:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2024\/06\/18\/jews-and-christians-together\/"},"modified":"2024-06-18T15:14:05","modified_gmt":"2024-06-18T15:14:05","slug":"jews-and-christians-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2024\/06\/18\/jews-and-christians-together\/","title":{"rendered":"Jews and Christians Together"},"content":{"rendered":"

A reader of this blog recently opined<\/a>, "And there isn't any "Judeo-Christian" anything: there is just Christian and Jew, and ne'er the twain shall meet." This provocative comment ignited some animated push-back from other commenters. And so it was serendipitous that I should stumble this morning upon Jews and Christians Together<\/a> by Ian Speir. If my reader seeks to decouple the Christian from the Hebraic, Speir and those he quotes aim to bring them together, but in a way that seems to favor the Hebraic over the Christian. Here is a taste (bolding<\/strong> added):<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Those ideas and values\u2014mediated through the Bible, accelerated by the rise of the Christian West, and strained through the filter of the Reformation and the Enlightenment\u2014found good soil in America. They are at the root of some of our country\u2019s most fundamental convictions, like [such as]  human dignity and ordered liberty, the necessity of freedom of conscience, and the insistence that the common good is best secured when men and women are free to pursue lives of virtue. <\/span><\/p>\n

These civilization-shaping ideas do not depend upon the Constitution; they predate it. The Declaration calls them rights\u2014though they are equally responsibilities<\/em>\u2014that are \u201cendowed by [our] Creator.\u201d They are more than a frame of government or a social contract. They form a civilizational covenant, transcending the ebb and flow of history and the politics of a particular moment. <\/span><\/p>\n

At times these values have been called \u201cJudeo-Christian.\u201d The better descriptor is \u201cHebraic,\u201d a term that simultaneously captures their worldview significance and their biblical source. <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In his lecture, Cohen insists that the \u201cHebraic spirit\u201d of America and of the West is now at stake.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I will leave it for you to decide whether the thought in the bolded passage goes too far in  the direction opposite to that of my reader. <\/span><\/p>\n

How should we characterize the spirit of America and the West? Off the top of my head, here are four options that may serve as a menu for further rumination:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

a) The spirit of America and the West is not Hebraic but Christian with Christianity decoupled from Judaism. (The extreme  view of my reader which is nonetheless useful as a foil against which to contrast more plausible views.)<\/span><\/p>\n

b) The spirit of America and the West is Hebraic-Christian with primary emphasis on Judaism. (This seems to be the view of Speir and those he cites.)<\/span><\/p>\n

c) The spirit of America and the West is Hebraic-Christian with primary emphasis on Christianity which, while in continuity with Judaism,  supersedes and perfects it.<\/span><\/p>\n

d) The spirit of America and the West is the spirit expressed in (c), and thus the spirit of Jerusalem but a Jerusalem supplemented and where necessary corrected and held back from fanaticism and 'enthusiasm' (Schw\u00e4rmerei<\/em>) <\/span>by the enlightenment values of Athens (philosophy) both ancient and modern.  (This, I want to suggest, comes fairly close to the classically liberal spirit of the Founders who were men of the 18th century Enlightenment.)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This schema does not cover all the options, but may be of some use.  Of the four, I prefer (d).<\/span> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A reader of this blog recently opined, "And there isn't any "Judeo-Christian" anything: there is just Christian and Jew, and ne'er the twain shall meet." This provocative comment ignited some animated push-back from other commenters. And so it was serendipitous that I should stumble this morning upon Jews and Christians Together by Ian Speir. If … Continue reading “Jews and Christians Together”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[331,363,137,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-athens-and-jerusalem","category-jewish-question","category-political-theology","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}