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Ten New Christian* Convictions About Jews and Judaism

  1. Jews remain in a covenantal relationship with God.

  2. Anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism are sins against God.

  3. The Christian tradition has contributed to historical anti-Semitism. Certain New Testament texts pose difficulties in this regard if improperly understood.

  4. There exists a divinely-willed ongoing relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Judaism has its own distinctive purpose in the divine plan that goes beyond mere preparation for Christianity.

  5. Jesus was and always remained a Galilean Jew; he can only be understood from within that cultural and religious matrix.

  6. Christians must learn to understand and affirm Jewish self-understanding of their own religious experience. This includes a respect for Jewish attachment to Eretz Yisrael.

  7. Christians can learn more about God and relationship with God (and about Christianity) from the traditions of Judaism over the centuries and from the living faith of contemporary Jews.

  8. The Hebrew Scriptures (TaNaKh) have their own spiritual value as revelatory texts independent of the Church’s retrospective christological reading of them.

  9. Earlier Christian understandings of the relationship between the "Old Testament" and the "New Testament" in terms of promise and fulfillment need to be expanded with a futurist eschatology. In other words, what has been promised remains to be completely fulfilled.

  10. Jews and Christians both have the covenantal responsibility to prepare the world for the Age to Come.


* The following churches are among those that have issued official statements that articulate most or all of these ten points: American Baptist Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church USA, Roman Catholic Church, United Church of Christ, United Methodist Church, and the World Council of Churches. This list is by no means exhaustive. It should be noted that these statement have different degrees of authority within their respective traditions according to the polity of each community.