Big Fat Sinners, All of Them

Dear Ehud,

In my last letter, I addressed (and answered) the belief that some Christians have had that consigns Jews to the status of “Christ-killers.” That is a very specific issue, and one relatively easy to address from Scripture with texts that are very much on the nose. What I want to address now is downstream from that. What is the biblical response to those Jews who have hardened in their unbelief because of the treatment they have received from professing Christians? And more to the point, why should you refuse to participate in that hardening?

What I want to do in this letter is zoom out a bit first, and talk about the tendency that all ethnic groups have to despise other “out groups,” a tendency that is shared by Gentile Christians and Jews alike. In that despising, we tend to keep a record of wrongs, and when you are dealing with centuries it can become a significant pile of wrongs.

Human life in the old Adam is a life that is prone to biting and devouring. This is the human condition. No one group is living in Eden, with the enemy outsiders serving in the role of marauders. This is a foundational tenet of the Christian faith . . . all of us are a piece of work. As Chesterton notes, original sin is the one doctrine of the Christian faith that can be empirically demonstrated.

The only way out of this trap is to be born again into the new Adam, into the Lord Jesus Christ. But in order to do this it is necessary to take the name of the Lord Jesus upon you actually—genuinely and sincerely—and not to settle for wrapping His name around your neck, like it was a scarf or something.

So remember the human condition—being hateful, and hating one another.

Now in the Christian era, Jews and Gentiles have a long history with one another, and in this fraught relationship, each group has a tendency to remember the sins and offenses of the other, and to allow the memory of their own misdeeds to retire gracefully into the background. This is the nature of sin. It accuses and it rationalizes. It accuses the other of misdeeds, remembering them all, and rationalizes its own misdeeds, forgetting them all.

But in the meantime, the apostle Paul will have none of it. The foundation that he pours for the entire book of Romans is a foundation that is made up of this basic point. In his first chapter, he is at pains to describe how bad the Gentile pagans were. Really really bad.

Someone might object and say that he is talking about Gentiles before they came to Christ, which is quite true. I will get to that shortly. It is an important point. But for the present, note that all these future Christians come from really bad stock.

In the second chapter, Paul turns his attention to the Jews. It turns out that they too are really bad. They are also a mess. Despite centuries of God’s covenant kindness to them, they have nevertheless made a hash of it.

Having identified Gentiles as big fat sinners, and Jews as big fat sinners, he then moves on in chapter three to show that they are the same kind of big fat sinner. Everybody, absolutely everybody, is in the same boat. When he says “all have sinned” (Rom. 3:23), he is talking about Jew and Gentile. All of them. Both groups. Everybody’s a mess.

So for one ethnic group to glory over another in this regard is like rooting for your contestant in the swimsuit portion of the Miss Leper Colony Contest. It maketh no sense, man.

Now when ethnic strife breaks out, the other group can’t do anything right, and moreover, never did do anything right. Not only so, but in a stroke of great fortune, your side, the side with the right skin tint and the aquiline regal noses, hasn’t done anything wrong in the whole history of this unfortunate business, at least not to speak of.

But in all the tension-ridden centuries of Jewish/Gentile strife, there has always been more than enough sin to go around. We are not just talking about the garden variety sin that we find within every human culture, we are talking about the ethnic sins of each against the other. Being hateful and hating. In the first century, the Jews were the persecutors of the Christians. After Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, it started to go the other way. In seventh century Antioch, rioting Jews murdered the Patriarch Anastasius II. In the middle ages, various pogroms were launched against the Jews of Europe. Take the massacre of Jews at York in the twelfth century for a horrendous example. And it is not like all of this evaporated just because the modern era arrived. Menachem Begin, future prime minister of Israel, began his career as a terrorist leader of Irgun, using tactics that appalled mainstream Zionist leaders—which I read about in a Zionist biography entitled Churchill and the Jews.

But before everybody rushes to the ramparts to defend “their guy,” my central point is simply this. Mankind, all of us, have a radical problem with sin. Paul’s claim is that Jews and Gentiles alike have the same problem, and they have it bad. And we don’t get to justify ourselves by comparing ourselves to another group that we claim is worse. At the Day of Judgment they might turn out to have been worse, but that is not our business. God does not grade us all on a curve. None of the goats get to go with the sheep because they were a nicer sort of goat. All the goats are rejected, Jewish goats and Christian goats alike.

Wait. Christian goats? You might be wondering at this. If I hold to some form of replacement theology, i.e. that the Church is Israel now, how can I say that there are Christian goats? Aren’t the Christians are supposed to be sheep?

Well, yes, they are supposed to be sheep, but not all of them are. If the Christian Church has now assumed the role of Israel, that means that we have to make a distinction that Paul made concerning the Jews.

If the Church is Israel now, we also must insist that he is not a Christian who is one outwardly, and baptism is not that which is outward in the flesh. The true Christian is a Christian on the inside, and baptism is of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter. His praise is not from men, but rather from God.

So I said earlier that I would get back around to the point that the Gentiles in Romans 1 were pagans, and the Jews in chapter 2 had been God’s covenant people for centuries. And isn’t it true that “to whom much is given much is required” (Luke 12:48)? Wouldn’t that place the Jews in those chapters under greater condemnation? Yes, it is quite true that the indictment of the Gentiles was of pagan Gentiles. And it is also true that the Jews that Paul indicts in chapter 2 were sinning against much greater light. This is how Jesus put it.

While they were just carrying on the traditions of their fathers, their sinfulness was not fully revealed. That had to wait until their Messiah came. When He did come, they killed Him.

So it is true that the Jewish leaders of the first century were sinning against a very great light. And it is also true that pagan Gentiles who had received the message of Christ were grafted into the olive tree. As soon as they were grafted in, and they saw Jewish branches cut out, it became possible for them to be tempted to commit the very same sin that had caused the Jews to fall away. A certain spiritual loftiness crept in. Paul saw it taking shape, even then in the first century, and he issued a solemn warning about it.

I know that you have been reading some of the “based” right wingers, who claim to be in the tradition of the Crusaders, and who have nothing but contempt for all things Jewish. In your last letter, you asked me if I had anything in common with them. Yes, we are part of the same covenant . . . but only in the way that John the Baptist and Caiaphas were in the same covenant. Peter and Judas were both apostles, remember. True Christians are the ones who a Christians on the inside, and they are the ones who are willing to worship a Jew.

Hearkening back to John 15, the arguments only seem based until you try to imagine Jesus Christ among them. If Christ were to come down among them, it would reveal their sin instantly, just as it did for the Jewish rulers of the first century. And the reaction would be the same—they would try to kill Him. Dostoevsky’s instincts were true when he put Christ on trial before the Grand Inquisitor.

What all of this means, bottom line, is this. In order for you to come to Christ, in truth, the only sin you can bring to Him is your own. The sins of Caiaphas and Torquemada are a testimonial to the sinful nature of mankind, but their individual historical sins are of no concern to you. Take the worst Jew-hater in all of human history . . . you have the same bent nature that he had, and you will stand before God to give an accounting for it. He will answer for his evil heart, and you will answer for yours.

At the Day of Judgment, when the crowd of humanity is standing before God, absolutely no one will be craning their necks to see what is happening to that “other guy.” Every sinner will have other things to think about.

Cordially in Christ,

Douglas Wilson