Many Christians would say they are part of spiritual Israel (or spiritual Jews). I don't think its unfair to pair them together like that. Christians just believe in the New Testament and that Jesus Christ is/was the prophesied Messiah from the old Testament.
It would be if it wasn't for Jesus Christ, but then being a Christian wouldn't make any sense at all.
From a Christian point of view – see Romans 11:11-31 – the Jews/Israel is seen as the cultivated olive tree, and all Christian Gentiles – i.e. all Christians that are not Jewish – are seen as "a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree" i.e. the Jewish/Israeli tree (Romans 11:24). So as a Christian Gentile you therefore take part in God's words and promises to the Jews/Israel as a grafted olive tree.
But Jesus Christ brought something completely new to the table. He say about Himself that He came to fullfil the Law and the Prophets of the Old Testament (Matthew 5:17-20). He also said: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6).
In this way Christianity is not Judaism stripped for export, Jesus Christ is the culmination of all that was said in the Law and by the Prophets.
I'm an evangelical Christian myself, and I think I understand why you characterize us this way, but it's not accurate based on what I know.
Along with those I associate with, I support Jews (and to a lesser extent the nation of Israel) only because I serve the God who made the sons of Jacob into a nation in the first place. They're not perfect and my support for being their ally isn't unconditional. It also has nothing to do with end-times (except maybe for the fact that they exist as a nation, which is interesting but mostly inconsequential in terms of religion).
In terms of end-times events, the rise of widespread hatred for my religion is a far more reliable indicator of their proximity...
While this is mostly true, it is worth noting that Christians believe they worship the same god as Jews (even if Jews don't believe what Christian's believe).
This is important because there is a strong fundamentalist Christian lobby group in the US that supports Israel politically for these religious reasons.
Do Catholics or Rastafarians call themselves Jewish?
If a group self-identifies as Christian, they're probably Christian. At the very least, they're much more Christian than all the people that don't identify as Christian.
If a religious group is based on following the teachings of Jesus Christ, and claims to be Christian, I don't see how you could ever claim they're not without going full No-True-Scottsman.
I was reading this essay nodding, until the revelation: the author isn't Christian at all. He's raised in Judaism. My knowledge of religion (despite being born and raised in a Catholic country) is entirely intuitive, but Judaism and Christianity seem pretty different religions, and the Old and New Testament contain different teachings and a different worldview. At the very least it could be lexical sloppiness (Christianity as a catch-all term for the three Abrahamic religions, since he mentions mosques too at some point). Curious.
I guess this confusion between Christianity and Judaism is pretty typical of American culture. For example, this is an interesting article from the Jerusalem Post about the progressive Judaization of US's Pentecostals:
I think part of the problem is that there is no clear tradition of “cultural Christian” like there is for “atheist Jew”. I don’t believe in God. I love the high church and choral traditions. I attend a church where the minister feels the same. Am I a Christian? No. And yes.
It's exactly that. Christianity was historically born out of Judaism but (to simplify) in opposition to it. Any belief of Judaism that is not already included in Christianity is not part of the West's cultural heritage, and often in opposition to its values. Supersessionism was challenged only very recently, and out of purely political, not religious or cultural, reasons.
Claiming Judeo-Christian roots is a bit like saying that you're genetically the product of your father AND of your paternal great parents- pretty pointless, especially when you fail to mention the maternal contribution.
This comment is sort of funny because the term Judeo-Christian gained prominence is the 1940s as a political tool to unite christians and jews in America (forget all that historical baggage you guys are on the same team!), and here you're essentially doing the same. Maybe good intentioned, but still similar.
I'm surprised that this revelation comes as a surprise to you.
The core problem is that anybody can call themself a Christian. Anybody can say that they're following Christ's teaching, living a Christian life, etc - regardless of how closely it tracks with the things that Christ did or said.
(By "can", here, I mean can in a practical sense. I mean that these things occur. I do not mean that any of these things are approved of by any particular natural or supernatural being(s).)
By extension, anybody can hang up a shingle and call themselves a Christian church. As a result, you have thousands of Christian sects. These sects exist within a spectrum ranging from somewhat pro-semitic to rabidly anti-semitic.
Even within sects - especially the largest - you will find that adherents are scattered over a pretty broad range of that spectrum.
So, yes - there are a fair number of anti-semitic Christians. Their existence should not come as a surprise to anyone.
You can't really say they're united by Christ when they can't agree on the nature of Christ (man, god or both?) and have frequently fought over the particulars.
About the only way you can group all Christians together is that they believe a Christ of some form existed. But that definition is loose enough to include atheists, muslims and others.
I was raised in one of those places where Old Testament beliefs are still championed and they believe in a literal bible. They absolutely believe as I described it, though they would not connect those beliefs together like I did.
There are millions of Christians like this in the US alone, let alone the rest of the world. I'm not sure what you're trying to push with your interpretation of christianity, but it's certainly not common, given that it assumes their god doesn't exist.
Christianity is both personal and communal, and ultimately traces historically back to the nation of Israel, the person of Jesus, and the teachings of the Apostles. Someone claiming Christianity as a personal identity which does not correlate to the communal and historical understandings of Christianity is, at best, using a label in a misleading fashion. (They may be lying, they may be confused, they may genuinely disagree, but ultimately they're using the word in a confusing way -- claiming membership in a community and participation in a history which they reject.)
The "big three" splits in Christianity can all be traced to genuine disagreements while retaining major agreement over key points. Orthodoxy and Catholicism split over the authority of the Roman leader (the Pope) as either equal to the leaders of the other main centers of Christianity or as supreme over them. Catholicism and Protestantism split over the authority of the Bible relative to the authority of tradition and contemporary church leaders. Various denominations within Protestantism split from each other over disagreements ranging from how baptism should be performed (dunking vs sprinkling) to whether women can be ordained as pastors. But through it all, there is a broad set of agreement -- that Jesus is God (connected to Trinitarian Monotheism), that the Bible is foundational for Christian belief, that fellowship with other believers helps refine and center Christians (consider phrases like "the body of Christ" and repeated references to "The Church" within the New Testament), and the centrality of grace/repentance/forgiveness to life as a Christian. While uneducated laymen from these groups might not recognize one another, among educated laymen, scholars, and theologians, there's like 99% agreement that they're all the same basic religion.
There are fringe groups that don't follow this pattern. Mormonism is one of them -- at its founding, its "prophet", Joseph Smith, claimed that all of Christianity was an abomination, and that he alone held the keys to "Restored Christianity". He introduced three new foundational books which are treated with higher reverence than the Bible (the Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price). These books introduce "alternative history" -- the new people, events, cities, and technology found in the BoM have no historical or archaeological grounding. And these books (mostly D&C) introduce new beliefs and doctrines that are not found anywhere within Christian history, not in either mainstream or fringe groups. As such, Mormonism is rightly considered to be a new religion. (As an interesting aside, most Mormons did not consider themselves to be Christian up until the last few decades.) Likewise, Joel Osteen is broadly considered to not be teaching Christianity -- he might personally be a Christian, but he doesn't teach the stuff that every major branch of Christianity agrees is critical for being a Christian, like the need for repentance and forgiveness. The same can be said of various other fringe groups, televised preachers, etc.
This matches up pretty well with the above comment about self-identifying as a scientist. The word actually has meaning beyond personal identity. It implies things about your community and about your beliefs/approach to knowledge meeting the standards of that community. And while there are always people on the fringes who claim the label, and always gray areas, you can get a pretty good read by going to a known-good source and then building a sort of network of trust from there.
Maybe this is a dumb question (having had no religious instruction) but do all modern Christians (except, I guess, some fundamentalists) understand that the Old Testament doesn't apply to them? If that's so, it seems like that stuff should be flagged somehow, to avoid misunderstandings.
Or do some modern gentile Christians perhaps go further, and believe that the old Jewish ritual law was a misunderstanding, and not an accurate statement of God's will? And if so, who are they?
Also, who are the modern non-gentile Christians?
I found a site that explains some of this,[0] but have no clue about its reliability. The root is here.[1]
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