Many Christians, many of us, and many of our constituents, act and think as if the seed of Jacob is a nation like any other, and Judaism a religion like any other religion, except for Christianity. This attitude is a legacy from supersessionism, infused like dye throughout the warp and woof of much of our theologizing. According to such assumptions, Jews no longer enjoy the status they once did now that Christ has come “and his own received him not.” (John 1:12)

Of course, we would protest that the Jews remain a unique and chosen people, referencing numerous texts highlighting the unique status of the Jewish people.1  No doubt all of us here avoid this particular category mistake: we see the Jewish people as still a unique and chosen people.

Yet many of us make the same kind of category mistake whenever we feel and think of Judaism as being a religion no different from other religions, and by extension, Jews who do not believe in Yeshua as no different from other people when it comes to knowledge of God, spiritual experience, status, and salvation. In feeling, thinking, speaking, and writing, many view the Jews as simply non-Christians, categorically bound for hell, without hope and without God in the world, effectively pagans, even if religious ones. Whenever we do so, we slot the Jewish people into a category Paul applied not to Israel, but to Gentile pagans.

Still, some regard Judaism as a fruitless religion, no different categorically from Hinduism, animism, or Buddhism. They consider Judaism to be a dead, false religion, devoid of the Spirit, and its practitioners, wasting their time on a religion that can neither save them, commend them to God, nor mediate to them any measure of true knowledge and experience with Him. This negation of Jewish religion is axiomatic for some of us, and woe to the person who questions such a position or takes an opposing stance. He or she is sure to be regarded as deviant, dangerous, and at best, confused.2

But something is very wrong here. Judaism is not a religion just like all the others, any more than Israel is simply a people like all the others. Just as the Jews remain the chosen people, Judaism remains the context of this people’s trans-generational communal devotion to the God and Father of our Lord Yeshua the Messiah, and their covenantal bond with him.3  Can this be said of any other people and their religion? Of course not! No, the Jewish people are in a different category from any other people, and their religion is not simply just another non-Christian religion.

John Howard Yoder helps us here, correcting our category mistake and that of Christendom, by referring to Judaism as “a non-non-Christian religion.” 4  We are not speaking here of a two-covenant theory, or of the alleged impropriety or superfluity of gospel proclamation to this people.

When we say that the Jewish people are a non-non- Christian people, we correct the category mistake of simply thinking of Jews as non- Christians and Judaism as a fruitless and fundamentally false religion, equivalent to any other world religion one might name.

Paul was closer to the truth, speaking to Herod Agrippa the Jews and Judaism as his own people and religion:

My manner of life from my youth, spent from the beginning among my own nation and at Jerusalem, is known by all the Jews. They have known for a long time, if they are willing to testify, that according to the strictest party of our religion [not their religion] I have lived as a Pharisee. And now I stand here on trial for hope in the promise made by God to our fathers, to which our twelve tribes hope to attain, as they earnestly worship night and day. (Acts 26:4-7)

How many Jewish mission newsletters would publish articles categorizing religious Jews as “earnestly worshipping [God] night and day?” How many would refer to the Judaism practiced by other Jews as “our religion.” None, I would imagine. And this is because our categories have changed. But if we would rightly commend the gospel to the Jewish people we must repudiate the colossal category mistakes of ham- fistedly thinking of the Jews as just like any other non-Christian people, and Judaism as no different from any other non-Christian religion. Although most Jews are not categorically Christians, Judaism is a non-non-Christian religion, and we might even term Jews “non-non-Christians.” To paraphrase the Prophet Balaam,

“Ours is a people . . . and a religion . . . that dwells apart, that shall not be numbered with the nations nor with pagan religions.” (Nu 23:9)

1  See Deuteronomy 7:6, 14:2, 32:8; Psalm 33:12, 147:19-20; Isa 43:20, 65:22; Amos 3:2; Romans 3:1-2, for example.
2  One does not have to look hard or long to find explicit, bald and strident statements from within the Jewish missions and/or Messianic Jewish world denouncing Judaism as categorically no different from other non-Christian religions. Thus, one missionary to says this on his website, “Rabbinic Judaism is a false religion. The synagogues of today are deceptions, which lead Jewish people away from the way of salvation into a system that rejects Torah, substitutes Torah with human tradition, and leads them into destruction. Rabbinic Judaism is as much a false religion as any other false religion” (Reference available upon request).
3  Along with Mark Kinzer, I believe Judaism to be a house still inhabited by Yeshua even though he is yet to be recognized and explicitly honored by the majority of those living there.
4   John Howard Yoder, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, ed. Michael G. Cartwright and Peter Ochs (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 147-159.

Post-Enlightenment individualism corrupts our relationship with our people and our understanding of their status. Such individualism, endemic in our time, blinds us to the communal context of our gospel proclamation. Bosch strikes a necessary balance here, and we need to hear his critique of how individualism corrupts our perceptions and activities:

The gospel is not individualistic.

Modern individualism is, to a large extent, a perversion of the Christian faith’s understanding of the centrality and responsibility of the individual. In the wake of the Enlightenment, and because of its teachings, individuals have become isolated from the community which gave them birth. *

How many of us are isolated from the community which gave us birth? And how many of us preach a gospel which isolates Jews from the Jewish community? While at first we recoil from the suggestion, further thought should leave many of us shuddering with recognition.

We need to recover again or discover for the first time a deep sense of communal identity and responsibility, and of the communal nature of God’s eschatological purposes for Israel and the nations. This sense of the Jewish communal context is summarized nicely for us in Ezekiel 37:21-28, where five facets of God’s eschatological purpose for the Jewish people are named. In these times of transition, we can only faithfully serve God’s purpose among the Jewish people by treating each of these facets as a non- negotiable priority. Notice that they are all communal—good news for all Israel, not as individuals, but as a whole, communal good news.

Ezekiel lists the facets of this good news in this order: 

    ✓     The regathering of the Jewish to our homeland, Israel (thus,               Aliyah)
    ✓    The restoration of the unity of the people of Israel
    ✓     Repentance-renewal for the people as a whole
    ✓     Messiah reigning in the center of this gathered people
    ✓     Torah living as the communal life of this people

God is to be praised that each of these priorities is being widely reflected in the Messianic Jewish movement, although, in most cases in an inconsistent and rudimentary manner. Yet for others, this is no description of their current mentality, practice and message because they are infected with crypto-supersessionism and individualism. In broadest outline, this is the kind of gospel we should be proclaiming to the Jewish people, seeing Yeshua in his reigning role, bringing communal blessings to the whole people of Israel.

And God is calling us, infused with his Spirit, to vigorously, joyously and communally incarnate and serve these synergistic priorities. Anything less and anything other than this is at best someone else’s gospel.   Our people will rightly continue to find an individualistic message of soul salvation which fails to highlight God’s continued commitment and consummating purposes for the community of Israel to be stale, irrelevant, and foreign—far less and far other than God’s invitation to participate in the anticipated vindication and blessing of the seed of Jacob. We must repent and return to this perspective.


* David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992),184-5.

Because our sojourn in Christian space, particularly the evangelical camp, affects all our missional thinking and doing, we must recognize how Christendom has not

presented the gospel as good news for all Israel since the end of the first century, and what this should mean for us now.

In the famous Christmas story, we read words so familiar we miss their import. They provide a core insight we must embrace if we would be faithful messengers:

And in that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear. And the angel said to them, “Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who Christ, the Lord. (Luke 2:8-11)

Notice the phrase, “good news of a great joy which will come to all the people.” It is too easy to misread the reference as “good news of great joy which will come to all the peoples of earth,” but that is not the referent here. The context speaks of one people in particular, the Jewish people.

Many will recoil from this aspect of our text due to reflexively regarding the Jewish people as fundamentally spiritually lost, eternal losers, and the coming of Christ as not being good news for the Jewish people, but at best, good news only for some Jews, exceptions to the rule.  Although this is the position most of us adhere to, it raises problems. Let one suffice for now. The year before Yeshua died and rose, faithful Jews needed only seek to live faithful to God, trusting in His faithfulness to Israel and in the provisions he had made through the Temple sacrifices. Under such an arrangement, certainly there must have been tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of Jews whose status with God was assured, in this life and the next. But with the coming of Christ, all that changed. Now, according to the prevailing paradigm, all of these Jews were fundamentally lost, unless and until they accepted Christ as their personal Savior.

Is this the kind of gospel we preach? And if so, how is this gospel good news for all Israel rather than for a spiritually enlightened elite minority? It will not do to respond that Yeshua is good news for all Israel, as a medicine might be for seriously ill patients, who must take the medicine if they would recover. To speak thus is to read back into the context something which is not there: the angelic messenger assumes the gospel to be good tidings for Zion for whom the triumphant and vindicating reign of their God is becoming evident in the birth of the Son of David. (See Isa 52:7)

Terrance Tiessen reminds us that holding to the evangelical paradigm that salvation is a matter of one-by-one destiny, with no salvation except for those who accept Christ as their personal savior, means the coming of Jesus was bad news for the Jews of his generation, as myriads of formerly saved Jews and perhaps God-fearers slipped into perdition or least into eternal jeopardy, because the basis of salvation had changed and narrowed with Yeshua’s incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, or ascension, take your pick. *

This is like your car warranty becoming invalid because the warranty holder went out of business, with you needing to buy a new warranty involving new stipulations and costs if you want coverage. Is this good news for you? And is the one-by-one gospel good news for all the people of Israel? Hardly. 

Donald Anderson McGavran, founder of the Fuller Seminary School of Intercultural Studies, took as his watchword “π•ντα τ• •θνη — panta ta ethne,” all the

nations. Today I urge that we take as our own a neglected biblical mandate, παντ• τ• λα•--panti tow laow, all the people of Israel.

As will become clearer in later posts, we have cropped and narrowed the gospel message due to our focus on individual soul salvation.  The eternal lostness of those who fail to accept our “medicine” is always the backdrop of our presentation, even if not stated. This means that the message we deliver to a Jewish “contact” is not only of the opportunity for him or her to be “saved,” but also of the certain perdition of the vast majority of the descendants of Jacob, likely including fifty generations (two thousand years) of his or her family. How is such a message “good news of a great joy which will come to all the people (of Israel)?”

Years ago, Mark Kinzer made an off-hand comment, the seed of what I am saying: 

“I just think that somehow the coming of Yeshua the Messiah must have advanced the condition of the Jewish people.” 

Do we believe that with the coming of the Messiah, the condition of the Jewish people as a whole took a great leap backward? It is an interesting question, don’t you think?

I am suggesting that our paradigms and presentations of the gospel are imbalanced and misshapen. Part of the problem is that our gospel is shrunken and distorted.

* Terrance L. Tiessen, Who Can Be Saved? Reassessing Salvation in Christ and World Religions. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 199. Tiessen will argue for “accessibilism,” which asserts “God does save some of the unevangelized, but he has not raised up the world’s religions as instruments for achieving this” (Tiessen, 47).