Reddit mentions of Faith and Fratricide

Great post. I would definitely agree that the anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic streams of thought in Christianity predate Luther, although tracts like On the Jews and Their Lies were really something else. (For the uninitiated: Critical introduction and excerpts here; the whole shebang here.) Attempts by influential albeit heretical teachers in the early Church, like Marcion, to treat the God of the Old Testament as being different from the God of the New come to mind, not to mention the propagation of supercessionism as an official, strategic response to the non-believing Jewish community by Church fathers from Irenaeus to Clement to Tertullian to Origen to Cyprian--the idea being that the crime of the Jews rejection of Jesus was so heinous that God had rejected them and replaced them with the Church.

While there are problems with the text, I felt that Ruether's Faith and Fratricide did a pretty good job of at least identifying several of the potential causes of the theological reification of anti-Semitism. From my research, it's not really until Karl Barth that we wind up with a fully world class theologian who attempted to embrace the Jewish particularity of Jesus in a way that was not also dismissive of the Jewish people; an excerpt from Church Dogmatics IV/1, 166 illustrates this pretty well:

> The word did not simply become any "flesh," any man humbled and suffering. It became Jewish flesh. The Church’s whole doctrine of the incarnation and the atonement becomes abstract and valueless and meaningless to the extent that this comes to be regarded as something accidental and incidental. The New Testament witness to Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, stands on the soil of the Old Testament and cannot be separated from it. The pronouncements of the New Testament Christology may have been shaped by a very non-Jewish environment. But they relate always to a man who is seen to be not a man in general, a neutral man, but the conclusion and sum of the history of God with the people of Israel, the One who fulfills the covenant made by God with this people. [Note: for a great assessment of Barth's position towards the Jewish people, check this out.]

To this day, even churches who do not officially espouse a hostile position towards the Jewish people often struggle to create the sort of community that effectively accomplishes discipleship for Jewish seekers, let alone Jewish followers of Jesus. In these cases where a functional if not intentional anti-Judaic atmosphere persists, there is not only great harm done to Jews but also to everybody in the Church. A church who has lost the concept of particularity that you are helping to identify here is one that has also lost a robust understanding of grace, a point Paul is careful to fortify across the whole of Romans 11.

So now I have to ask: Where have you witnessed something like a solution for all this? Where have you witnessed people not only understanding but truly living a better way?