Bridging Identities: A Scholarly Look at Jewish and Gentile Roles in Christianity, with Jen Rosner

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I feel like it’s this stripping away and healing of this unhealthy colonialist endeavor whereby we go and take kids in Kenya and make them look like little Westerners. And so I feel like that needs to connect up with these conversations about Jew and Gentile because what it looks like for me as a Jew to follow Yeshua authentically is not the same as what it’s going to look like for you or for people in South Korea.
Welcome back to another episode of the Covenant and Conflicts podcast. We have today my favorite TKU Professor, the King’s University, Dr. Jen Rosner. She’s with us from the beautiful state of California. Thank you for being with us. We’re so happy you’re here.
Thank you, David. It’s an honor to be with you.
I say one of these days you’re going to have to come down to Dallas, but there’s not much that we can bribe you with coming from Northern California.
You know what? Just hanging out with all of you is gift enough.
There you go.
It’ll happen eventually.
That’s all we got. All we got. It’s you can see us.
It’s plenty. It’s great. You
Can’t see anything beautiful in nature, but you can see us. We’re excited that you’re here. You are a professor at the King’s University, but that’s not nearly the only thing you do. You’re a prolific author in the Messianic Jewish space. You’ve helped us with language and theological concepts. You’ve dove so deeply into this world, but tell us a little bit more about what you do.
Yeah, so I am an author. I’m currently working on a new book that actually deals quite a bit with Jew and Gentile identity in Messiah. So I do write, my last book was called Finding Messiah, which was kind of part memoir, part Biblical Theological Historical Reflections,
Kind
Of geared towards a broader audience. I teach for TKU, which I love. I also teach for a number of other schools, including Fuller Theological Seminary
And
Azua Pacific University, as well as Messianic Jewish Theological Institute, which is another Messianic Jewish educational institution. So I wear lots of hats and I do most of it from my home office and I consider it a privilege to be able to speak into and engage in these kinds of conversations.
That’s so good. Well, we need you to wear as many hats as possible because we need this message to go out to as many people as possible. Will you tell us a little bit about just your story? I know that was kind of what your most recent book was, was kind of how you found Yeshua. Can you give us a little synopsis of what your life was before that? Were you traditionally Jewish customs, the high holidays, or was it more of just a cultural thing?
Yeah, so I was born and raised in a Jewish home in Lake Tahoe, California, which is where I am after sort of a long circuitous route. I’m back in my hometown now, which is a bit of a trip, but also a gift. And so both of my parents were raised in the Jewish community in Los Angeles, kind of different iterations of that. My dad was raised in the conservative Jewish community. My mom was raised in the reform Jewish community. They got married and kind of wanted out of the big city, and so they got married and moved to Lake Tahoe where they have been ever since.
And it’s interesting, my dad saw a lot of hypocrisy and kind of shallowness in the Jewish circles that he was raised in, so he kind of moved away from that, but he also had this sort of deep abiding faith in God looking back on my childhood, I would call it non-con contextual monotheism. He didn’t have much use for Judaism, but he instilled in my brother and I, a very deep faith in God. That was sort of an anchor in our lives. And my mom was still very attached to, she was the Jewish camp counselor growing up and she loved Jewish culture, Jewish ritual, Jewish tradition. And so she tried very hard to keep that alive in our home. So we were not part of a synagogue community growing up. At the time, there was only a reform temple in Lake Tahoe and my parents just didn’t find it to be a good fit. But we did practice Judaism in the home, so we would have a Passover Seder every year. We would light Hanukkah candles every year. I would say I had a fairly strong sense of Jewish identity as a kid, but I also wasn’t totally sure what to do with that. There weren’t a lot of Jews in our community. We didn’t have a lot of Jewish friends. So it was kind of this isolated part of my identity
That I was aware of, but not as I said, I didn’t really know what to do with it. And so I went away to college to a large public state school in California called Cal Poly. And it was a really interesting, informative season of my life because it sort of just so happened that all of my friends as a college freshman were Christians. And it was a really interesting time at this particular school where I sort of just said God was on the move. There was a lot of Christians there and the Campus Crusade, which is now called Crew at my college campus went from 30 kids to 500 kids in a five year period. And that’s when I was there. So there was a lot going on. There was a lot of energy. My kind of randomly assigned freshman roommate was a Christian. My next door neighbor in the freshman dorms was a Christian who she became my best friend. So it was for me, and this is so crazy looking back because I did have Christian friends growing up, but it was the first time as a college student that I ever heard the gospel that I ever knew who the person of Jesus was.
And like I said, that’s crazy to me that I never really knew who Jesus was before that, even though I had a Catholic friend growing up, and I went to mass with her a couple times, but I never knew what any of it was about until I was in college and had all these Christian friends and they thought that it was really special that I was Jewish. And they would say things like, oh my gosh, God’s chosen people 144,000. And I was like, whoa.
Of course they’d bring revelations into it
And I did not know what to do with that, but I was kind of intrigued by them and their faith. And it’s funny because it wasn’t a religious school at all, but I didn’t like being the only kid in the dorms on a Sunday morning because so many people in my dorm were Christians and went to church. So I started going to church with them. I started going to Campus Crusade with friends. And so college for me really became a searching time of who is this person? Jesus, and does that matter to me?
And I just remember being deeply impacted by sermons and conversations with friends. And so by the end of my undergraduate program, I threw a interesting set of circumstances, came to a place of faith. I think that this person, Jesus is who he said he was. And I think that does matter for me and for everyone else. But at that point, I had no idea what to do with my Jewishness. I had no model for how to be a Jewish follower of Jesus. I didn’t know, I didn’t even know of anything called the and Jewish movement, Jews for Jesus, nothing, had never heard of anything. I had Jewish friends in college, but they were all completely secular. And so for a while I just kind of put my Jewish identity on a shelf and I kind of went wholesale into the Christian world. I became a follower of Jesus in the context of a vineyard church.
So I to this day, am deeply impacted by vineyard theology. And then I was a political science major in college planning to go on to law school. And once I became a follower of Jesus, I was just hooked. I just wanted more. And so I scrapped my plans to go to law school and instead I went to divinity school as someone who didn’t know anything about anything pretty much. But I took a year off after college and I read through the whole Bible and read every book I could get my hands on. And then I went to Yale Divinity School and I was a kid in a candy shop for three years of an MDiv program, just taking biblical languages and church history and systematic theology and
All these classes. And it was actually there after kind of bouncing around in a number of different Christian denominations that through an interesting set of circumstances, the Jewish piece of my identity began to kind of clamor for attention again. And I sort of realized that I had left something really fundamental behind and that there was a reason I wasn’t finding a denominational home in the Christian world because that wasn’t my home. And so I finished up my MDiv, I came back to California and started a PhD program at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. And it was my first year at Fuller that I was introduced to Mark Kinzer, who is a very influential voice in the mess Jewish movement. And he very quickly became a close friend, mentor, now colleague to me has been ever since. And so it was really through meeting Mark and lots of people through him connected to him that I began to sort of wrestle with what does it look like to follow Jesus or Yeshua as a Jew, which was a totally new, these were these two separate worlds for me that I never knew what to do with that. And so I feel like both my personal and professional life ever since has been asking and wrestling with that question both in our family as well as in my scholarship and teaching. It’s really neat for me that my story gets to overlap so closely with my vocation. So
That’s kind of a snapshot of the story, and I would say it’s very ongoing depending on where we live, what our community is, what our context is,
And
What it looks like for us to kind of navigate that piece. Yeah,
It’s so good. And it reminds me, you’re talking about your journey and what you’re saying is your journey is not over. You’re still on this journey. And I was talking to probably 30 or 40 staff members at Gateway just about, I talked about the three pools of the Jewish plunge is what I called it, and it was replacement olive tree or one law and how one law and replacement are the ends of the spectrum. There’s softer versions of them. And then we’re all trying to get to this olive tree, which is we’re a part of Israel, but we’re not Israel. We’re adopted into the family. So we’re in the family, but we are different. And male and female, there’s a distinction, but there’s still desire to be unity, but unity doesn’t mean uniformity. So there’s all this constant nuance that we’re all on a journey. And I was talking to someone yesterday and they were kind of saddened because they had jumped into what I call the Jewish plunge. They jumped into the Jewish stuff and started doing all of it and then realizing, well, do I need to be doing all of it because I’m a gentile? And then they came to this place. Well, being a gentile sucks.
Yes, yes.
We can’t do anything. We’re not even cool anymore. But I saw echoes of my own journey of being like, yeah, there’s like you go into this Jewish world and you realize so much of what you had understood about the Bible is either false or it’s just much deeper.
And
So then you want to latch onto it, but then the enemy finds his way anywhere, whatever path we take, it’s like he finds his way to then get us to latch onto this identity so strongly that as David Rudolph, who I know you also know and love, he says, the one law is one new Gentile and the replacement is, or no replacement theology is one new Gentile and one law is one new Jew. Either way, there’s not one new man. So you’re someone that we’ve used many times to help explain what it means to wrestle with Jewish identity and Jewish observance. Because at the church, and for most Gentiles, the Old Testament is old, it’s done away with, it’s spiritual, it’s figurative, it’s an analogy. But as a Jewish person, that’s your roots and Jewish identity continue. So can you talk a little bit about what does it mean to live a Jewish life and to maintain Jewish identity while following Yeshua, which makes sense, the Jewish Messiah, and maybe how you’ve had to wrestle with that over the years and kind of where you’re at now on this journey.
Yeah, it’s a good question. I feel like there’s so many layers to what you’re talking about, and I have seen so many times what you were describing this conversation with this other person where, and we can get to this, I know it’s a little bit far off from where we are right now, but in this conversation, but where gentiles are made to sometimes feel less than, and that’s something that just really grieves me. It’s actually the main thing that I’m trying to get at in my next book because I feel like it’s not necessarily something that the Messianic Jewish movement intentionally perpetuates, but it’s a subtle message that I think it comes across pretty strongly in certain circles and communities that I’ve been a part of. And I just don’t think that’s right. I don’t think that’s what we see in the New Testament. You used probably drawing from Paul Galatians 3 28 where he talks about Jew and Greek. We could sort of extrapolate Jew and Gentile as a putting up against male and female. And it is kind of the same thing if women were to feel less than, you know what I’m saying? There’s something that’s amiss there if that’s where we end up.
And yet it’s not all that surprising because the Messianic Jewish movement is a relatively new movement. For much of the history of the Christian Church. Jews who entered the church had to renounce all aspects of Jewish identity. It really wasn’t an option. I mean, we see this in the testament, the first centuries after the coming of where you have this kind of community where at least according to I would say the New Testament seems that Jews are living as Jews. Gentiles are not required to do that, but that becomes an impossibility pretty quickly whereby one has to then choose which community to be a part of. And so it makes sense that in the latter half of the 20th century with the emergence of the modern Messianic Jewish movement, there’s all of this kind of reclaiming of what it means to be a Jewish follower of Messiah. Again, mark Kinzer’s work, lots of these messianic Jewish pioneering thinkers have worked so hard to carve out space for how we as Jewish followers of Messiah ought to and can live. And I feel like there’s been so much said about that, and I can actually answer your question and talk more about what that looks like for us.
But I feel like what hasn’t been said, there’s so much emphasis on Jewish followers of Jesus reclaiming this space, that there hasn’t been a lot said about what does that mean for gentiles? And I think it, again, it perpetuates however unintentionally this notion that, oh, it’s a little bit second class to be a gentile in the family of God. And I just think that’s so opposite of what the New Testament is saying that I really desire to increasingly speak into that space.
Yeah, it’s so good.
So yeah, I mean to actually answer your question, it has been a journey to figure out what that looks like for us. And the sort of part of my story that I didn’t share is that after I finished my PhD at Fuller, I met my husband who is also a Messianic Jew, and he had made Alaya to Israel after high school. So we met in Israel. He had been living in Israel already for a decade, and we dated long distance for a year, got married, spent the first two years of our marriage in Israel where it looks very different to live as a Jewish follower of Yeshua. It’s just kind of going with the flow to observe Shabbat and Jewish holidays. We were a part of different messianic groups, but we also just worshiped it traditional Jewish synagogues where there’s one on every corner.
And
So I think for us, the context that we’re in has really made a difference in terms of what that looks like and what is even realistic. We don’t drive on Shabbat, and what that means is that it’s very hard for us to fellowship with a Messianic Jewish congregation because the closest Messianic Jewish congregation to where we are right now is two hours away. So unless we carve out a whole weekend and go there, which is not always feasible financially and in terms of other
Constraints.
So I feel like as I said earlier, it’s an ongoing journey in terms of what does this look like and what do we need to be flexible with and what are foundation cornerstones? We have kids now, so we’re trying to instill in them this identity. And it’s tricky. It’s tricky to navigate. And in some ways in Israel it was much easier to do that because there’s not baseball games on Shabbat. We’re having to navigate a lot of these things with our kids now, and it’s far from straightforward. But I think there’s something about that that also feels very rich to me. We’re finding our way on a path that’s largely unchartered. There’s not a lot of precedence of how to do this. And so there’s something that also feels very meaningful as we have these conversations about how to navigate all the tensions that exist.
It reminds me of a story, I think it was a man who Jewish believer in Yeshua wrestling with what it means to be Jewish now because you kind of have two sides pulling at you. You have the church that’s telling you to be more like the church and be more gentile essentially. And then you have the traditional synagogue pushing or pulling on you to reject that and be more Jewish. And in this wrestle, I think he was wrestling about whether to wear a kippah or not, which we can get into because you have these commands that are extra biblical. They’re not in the Bible, but the Jewish community at large has embraced them and what authority do those rabbis have?
And I believe where he ended was I’m going to put the kippah on, it’s not as a biblical command, but as an expression of Jewish identity and my heritage. And he said, the wrestle is what makes me Jewish. And then it was this moment of realizing, well, Israel wrestle with God. So what makes me a part of Israel, it is that I’m wrestling. And it’s almost the idea that if we stop the journey, if we stop wrestling with it and we make it this finite decision, this is it. This is what Jewish life is and this is what Jewish life is and we’re done, then we might singly stop being part of Israel because we stopped wrestling, we stopped wrestling with this issue. I don’t know if you’d agree with that, but I thought that was helpful for me and frustrating. Then you realize you’re never going to necessarily have all the answers,
But I feel like Jews careful are much more comfortable with not having the answers in Christians are. Right. Christian theology over the centuries has been so kind of obsessed with nailing down correct doctrine. This is why we have creeds and councils, and I feel like Judaism has always been more comfortable with tensions, and I think that it can be frustrating. But one of my favorite quotes, and I don’t have it in front of me, so I’m probably going to misquote it, is from a woman named Blue Greenberg who she was kind of one of the first women to be navigating a different tension, which is the tension between Orthodox Judaism and feminism, which is, we’re not talking about that, but gosh, are there some tensions there? And there’s been a lot of people who’ve come after her who are wrestling with similar tensions, and she wrote a quote again, we can post it somewhere because this isn’t going to be exact, but she said something like, there’s a thousand tensions that I wrestle with every day, and I’ve come to realize that those are a sign of my strength, not a sign of my weakness, and that they’re a sign of the richness of my life, not of its disorderliness.
And so it’s just this whole idea of embracing the tensions and sort of just living with them and not even necessarily seeking to nail it all down and resolve everything, which for me is very much how I approach theology in general. I don’t think the goal should be by the end of this class or by this book, we’re going to nail it all down. I think there’s something to be said for just embracing the tensions and just sort of living in that place and realizing that it is a sign of the richness of our identity, whatever, whether that’s gentile identity, Jewish identity, just to sort of embrace the tensions as opposed to see them as some kind of threat or something to be conquered. That’s been a huge kind of paradigm shift for me that I think really influences also because I think it gets away from the, there’s one right answer for your friend that you were talking about. Maybe there’s seasons where he will wear a kipa and seasons where he won’t, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe there’s not about finding the exact right expression or outward appearance type, whatever. I think there’s just freedom to say these are hard tensions. There’s not a lot of people who’ve gone before us. And so that’s really helped me as I continue to wrestle with so many tensions.
That’s so true. And what you’re saying about the church, I think that’s something that I’ve seen. I was a youth pastor for seven years. I think the next generation is, if we’re going to put it aggressively rejecting, if you put kindly, maybe just questioning if is the arrogance of many church leaders to say, this is the right way and every other way is wrong, or I’m going to read this Bible verse and here is the interpretation, not the interpretation that I believe has the most valid arguments. And because what it does is, especially when you’re young, it paints this picture that there is a black and white in all
Things.
And last thing, there’s not black and white. We clearly know there are certain things that are right, wrong, black, white, but so much of it is in this area of tension, and we actually do a disservice to the next generation
When
We don’t provide the kaleidoscope of commentaries and scholarship that’s been done on these issues because when you grow up and then you feel like you’ve been fed a lie, like, oh, well, I was told this was the only right way. And I remember the first time I experienced that was it in Jewish ministry, when I get around, whether it was Jewish believers or Orthodox or even Christians in the Jewish Christian space, you go to Israel and they’d be like, yeah, there’s a lot of scholarship that leads us to believe that right around this general region, this is where, and you’re like, whoa, I thought you were the expert. I want to know exactly where this happened. And it’s like, oh, we can’t do that. That was 2000 years ago. And you’re like, oh, well my western bubbles pop because I thought if you’re an expert, that means that you had every detailed answer they ended up, but there was freeing.
It’s interesting. I teach also at Fuller Seminary, which I mentioned, which is Christians, most of them preparing for ministry or already engaged in ministry. And I teach a class on Judaism and Jewish Christian relations, which is so fun because it’s the only class at Fuller that exists of its kind. And I recently was teaching this class and I assigned an essay for them to read by Jonathan Sacks, who was the chief rabbi of Great Britain. He’s like one of the 20th century’s most beloved Jewish thinkers
Passed away kind of during Covid. And I was having them read this chapter of one of his books, the chapters called Faith as Protest, and he talks about how that’s always been. He connects this sort of the heart of Jewish faith with what it means to be a Jewish parent. And it’s honestly, I’ve read a lot of parenting books and this one chapter from Jonathan Sachs has been more influential for me as a parent than any parenting book I’ve read because he says that to raise a Jewish child is to raise a child, to question and to challenge and to confront and to sort of always be not in necessarily a disrespecting of authority kind of way, but always like why is it this way and not this way and why inquisitive? Exactly. And what was so interesting to me is that my Christian students, multiple students remarked about how that’s so different than spiritual formation for children in a lot of church settings where there’s so much just kind of rehearsing, reiterating, almost like in some cases, like regurgitating, this is what we believe, this is what we believe, this is what we believe.
And there isn’t always that room to kind of, why don’t we believe this? And I get it, you do want to give your child and your students and whoever it may be a firm foundation, but I agree with you that
We sort of do a disservice when we don’t. And it’s interesting as a Jewish person being in settings where I think about my who, that’s a whole other story. We haven’t talked much about my parents, but she went to a Christian bible study with a women’s Bible study at a church, and she just was like, what? She had so many questions and they were just so threatened by that. And as a Jewish woman, she’s like, what? This is what we do. And there just wasn’t space for that. And so I think creating space for the wrestling and just kind of honoring it is, I think it’s very, as you’re saying, very fundamental to Jewish thought and Jewish identity. And I think it’s something to kind of press into.
Yeah, I use this term a lot and whether it’s theologically accurate or not, we can talk about, but it’s wholly discontent, which is righteous anger. It’s been labeled. It’s this thing that you’re like, oh, this makes me so upset, but hopefully in a righteous way, something’s off with the church or something’s off with God’s people and we need to realign. And so I’ll have different seasons where I’m like, oh, this is really what I’m angry at right now, or this is what I’m really trying to wrestle with. And for me right now, I call it milk-based Christianity, and it’s just this idea that we give young Christian children or youth a very watered down message because we want to lay, like you’re saying, we want to lay a foundation and we want to make it simple so they can grasp it, and then we never add onto it. We never come back around and say, Hey, when I told you Trinity three and one, it’s actually a little bit more complex than that. Let’s talk about the divinity of Jesus and praying to Jesus and what it means to pray to the Father. And where Jesus sits in that unity of Father Son Holy Spirit, and Christians are like, stop. Jesus is God. And you’re like, yes. So let’s talk about that. What does that mean? But we’re actually setting them up for failure because they’re going to start to ask these questions eventually, unless they’re shutting themselves out from those conversations and then they don’t have answers for it.
And then they feel like the church did them a disservice or the church lied to them, or they can’t trust the church. And so we’re actually creating our own problem. But I say that to say what is on your heart right now when you look at the Jewish Christian world, the Jewish Christian relationship, the Messianic world, what is your kind of righteous anger right now that you’re like, oh, we need to get clear on this that you’re spending a lot of time thinking and praying about?
Yeah, no, it’s a great question and I do resonate with what you shared as well. I think I take a lot of comfort in the fact that God is leading and guiding the church as well as leading and guiding the Jewish people, even in the midst of their schism from one another, which sort of could circle back to the authority of the rabbis kinds of questions. But I think for me, it’s something that we’ve already talked about. It’s this notion because I find it so exciting. I find what we’re seeing in our day so exciting in terms of the rebirth of the Messianic Jewish movement and a lot of scholarship that isn’t Messianic. We could talk about the Paul within Judaism School of Pauline Scholarship, all of this New Testament scholarship, biblical scholarship that is really, I think it’s an incredible era that we’re living in.
And the thing that makes me the most frustrated is when gentiles feel less than. That’s the thing that really, again, it grieves me so deeply because I don’t think as I read the New Testament, Yeshua came as a light, as a light to the nations as a way by which those from the nations can enter covenant relationship with God alongside the people of Israel as the nations. And that’s exactly what makes it so remarkable to have Jew and Gentile worshiping side by side in the body of Messiah is that we remain different, just as you brought up earlier with the marriage analogy that I think Paul uses very intentionally. And so we could talk about one law and Hebrew roots and the different ways that that’s gone, but I really want to see Gentiles embracing particular Gentile identity. And so it’s fascinating to me because this actually parallels what we’ve been seeing in the missiological world, the world of sort of Christian missions where there’s been this radical shift over the last 50 years from western colonial missions where people from the west or the north go to the south and the east and they sort of export Christianity alongside western culture and commerce and all of these
Really ugly colonial things.
And what we’re seeing is contemporary missiology is all about helping the gospel to find unique expression in every culture that it encounters. And so there’s just so much richness to that. Again, I feel like it’s this stripping away and healing of this unhealthy colonialist endeavor whereby we go and take kids in Kenya and make them look like little westerners. I feel like that needs to connect up with these conversations about Jew and Gentile because what it looks like for me as a Jew to follow Yeshua authentically is not the same as what it’s going to look like for you or for people in South Korea. Do you know what I’m saying? Yeah,
Totally.
I want to see us kind of raising the theological profile of gentile identity. God didn’t make a mistake, just like he didn’t make a mistake in creating men and women. There’s a reason why there’s Jews and there’s Gentiles. There’s a reason why there’s all of these, the nations that we see all throughout the Bible, the nations still exist when we get to revelation. You have people from every tongue and every tribe. There’s something about God’s intentionality with the diversity of human identity. And so it just really saddens me when the story that you shared earlier about gentiles who sort of feel drawn to Judaism because they feel like it’s more authentic or it’s more like what Yeshua was about or it’s closer to biblical practices or whatever. And then maybe realizing, wait, that’s not for me, but then I’m just like, what’s left? It’s just kind of boring. It’s not cool anymore to be a gentle No. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so I just feel like there’s so much there to unpack, and as I mentioned earlier, I feel like it’s kind of the flip side of what Messianic Jewish theology has been hammering on for probably the last 20 years, which is like, no, as Jews, we need space to live as Jews, but nobody’s talking about how does all of that transfer, especially as it goes hand in hand with new trends in biblical scholarship, et cetera. What does that mean for gentiles?
That’s really what I want to press into because it saddens me to see this almost unspoken two class society in some of these circles, it seems like it’s a little bit cooler to be a Jew or you’re a little bit closer to God, and I’m like, no, no, no, let’s unpack that and let’s undo that thinking because I don’t think that’s at all what we see in the Bible as a whole and certainly not in the New Testament.
So
That for me is kind of what keeps me up at night these days.
Well, and there’s so much that I am still confused about when it comes to the nations because that word is so all encompassing, but what I do see in scripture is God constantly trying to bring diversity,
And
It seems like God’s trying to send his people out and go and have different culture and tongues and worship me in your individual cultures, in your diversity.
And we always want to come back together and rebuild this tower of Babel where we’re same language, same culture, one size fits all, and God’s constantly like, no, go back again. And it seems like we’re doing that, and I think we did that with the church being the one big building that we’re going to all come around the same language and same culture. And now in this world, the messianic world, it can be this, we’re all going to be Jewish together and we’re all going to come back to the roots. So most of our listeners are probably Gentile, as is most of the world is Gentile. So what would you say are maybe helpful steps that they could do as they wrestle with what does Gentile identity mean to follow Jesus? In my culture, in my context, without stiff arming anything Jewish, obviously not the answer and not spiritualizing everything. So what can people do? How can people
Start? Yeah, no, it’s a great question. I think it’s important to kind of map the spectrum as you did a little bit earlier. On one hand, you have the kind of Hebrew roots, one law, everybody should just be Jewish kind of thing. And on the other hand, you have this kind of replacement theology. We’re done with Judaism, we’re done with the Old Testament, out with the old and with a new. And what’s interesting, I was speaking a moment ago about this whole sort of missiological paradigm where it’s all about bringing the gospel to the nations and these unique incarnations of gospel expression, and that world has tended to be very replacement theology. Israel doesn’t matter anymore. And so I think
Again, it’s kind of trying to avoid these extremes. And like you said earlier, and David Rudolph has written about trying to find this sort of olive tree like Jews and gentiles together. So I think that I always get asked, should Christians have past crusaders? That’s such a pressing question for people who are concerned about honoring Yeshuas Jewishness and that God’s covenant with Israel and understanding that. And so I think that it’s always trying to avoid these two extremes. And I think what really is at the heart of that is honoring difference. Again, as you do come back a lot to the sort of marriage analogy. So what does it look like for Gentiles from the nations, whatever that might be like in Dallas, Texas or in South Korea or Kenya or wherever that might be. I would want to ask, what does it look like to honor one’s unique? And that’s where I say particular gentile identity because gentile identity is not a monolithic thing. That’s the whole point. It’s this very exquisite tapestry of difference that is how God intended it. So what does that look like? And this is where I think we can learn a lot from Christian missions, from Christian missiology in the last 50 years of trying to figure out
There’s all these fancy terms like contextualization and enculturation and all of these ways.
What does it look like for the gospel to encounter these different cultures? But what I would want to say is you’re still being sort of grafted into this preexisting covenant that God has had with Israel. So how does that bear upon, and this is all pretty theoretical, how does that bear upon Gentile identity thinking that Gentiles are now grafted in to this Jewish treat, to this Jewish root? So I think it’s another one of these tensions, but I think the first thing that I would want to tackle is the language that creates a kind of less than mentality. Let’s go there first. What is it that I would say the Messianic Jewish movement unfortunately, and I would say unwittingly has perpetuated in terms of making Gentiles feel like their identity is somehow less in the kingdom of God. Let’s talk about that. Let’s read our new testaments and see what they have to say about that. Because I don’t think that’s what’s going on in the New Testament. In fact, I think it’s this great kind of miracle, this work of God that those from the nations are following Messiah without becoming Jewish. That was the miracle of what
Yeshuas ministry was all about.
Totally.
Let’s kind of go back to that and sort of imagine, and obviously you can’t rewind history. We don’t live in the first century context, and so there’s going to have to be a lot of cultural translation. But I think where I would start is trying to dismantle that language and the ideas behind it whereby it does even subtly seem like there’s kind of this two class society, because I think somewhere we’re misreading our Bibles if that’s what we end up with. So that’s not super practical, but I think it’s a huge topic and something that I hope to increasingly be unpacking in my own work because I think in these circles that you and I speak into, it’s a really big issue.
Yeah, that’s so good. Well, hence there’s going to have to be a part two to the interview. There are questions when you begin to try and translate or recapitulate or even bring in a modern context in ancient scripture, then you start wrestling with, well, spirit of the law, letter of the
Law
Because that’s its own spectrum. Jesus washing the disciple’s feet. Should we be washing people’s feet or was that just an ancient way of bringing yourself down to serve and we can find things in our modern context. So that’s another tension that we’ll have to manage. I’d love to talk with you about is letter, the law, spirit of the law. Assuming as a Jewish person, you probably dive in that pool more so than we do in the church of what does it mean to actually follow that specific command or the rabbi’s interpretation of that command versus what I think it means in spirit that can be a dangerous ground. Is that something that you’ve run into as a Jewish follower of Jesus?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it’s another one of these tensions, and I would say it’s one that even in our family, my husband and I are kind of constantly navigating. And so far we haven’t talked much about this issue that’s kind of looming in the background of rabbinic authority. What do we make of rabbis and Jewish tradition? And I mean, I see it as this continual act of navigating and negotiating. And like I said, I think that used to feel really kind of daunting and very exhausting for me.
And it doesn’t so much anymore. I see it as we’re seeking to honor God, and these things are not straightforward. It’s not straightforward. This tension between spirit of the law, letter of law, it’s not straightforward how first century practices translate into our context. So I actually feel like it’s a great honor to be wrestling with these tensions because it feels so meaningful to me. And again, I just feel a certain freedom not in the sort of free from the law sense, but freedom that God is with us as we wrestle. And as I said earlier, it’s not like I’m going to land on something and necessarily never change for the rest of my life. And I think that’s okay. I think it’s okay that we wrestle and even to some extent wander a little bit, try this on and see how that feels. And I think especially as a parent, I have to have that or I’m going to just die of fear of failure.
You know what I’m saying? Totally. There just has to be freedom to be like, okay, we’re going to let you play baseball on Shabbat and we’re going to see how that goes. And if that doesn’t work, then there’s just too many things to navigate that I think I’m trying to move into a place of this is sort of what God has placed before us and with his wisdom, we’re going to try to navigate through these things. And I think as you said, there’s enough kind of nuance and variety and different opinions and Jewish tradition that it seems like we we’re on kind of solid ground if we’re not on solid ground. You know what I’m saying? That’s a little bit what Judaism’s always been about, and I think I hope that that can be a refreshing message to the church that it’s not always going to be airtight and as much as we want it to, we’re going to be always having to
Adjust
And negotiate. And that’s part of the calling that we have is to figure these things out as best we can and admit when we shifted course and say and all those kinds of things. So there’s a lot there for sure.
Well, as you were speaking, you reminded me of a book that you wrote. So I’ll give people a practical next step, which is at the foot of the Mountain, two views of Torah and the Spirit.
And
So this is an interesting read, not necessarily for gentiles who are trying to sift through this gentile particular Gentile identity, but it’s such a great book because it was written by you, and I believe it was your brother-in-law, both Jewish following Yeshua, but have different views on how orthodox or how observant we should be with certain Jewish customs or commands and what takes precedent, which I think is a very Jewish thing. It’s like Rahab lied. She was like, I ain’t got no Jews in here. And you’re like, well, she just broke one of the commands. You’re like, yeah, but there’s a grader,
There’s
A greater command. You’re like, well, that’s a nuance that I don’t feel like wrestling with right now. But that’s a great book on figuring out that wrestle. And as you said, like a parent, I remember having that moment as a parent where I said, if you do X, then your consequences will be Y. And I just laid it down and then I was in a circumstance where one of my daughters did X and I was getting ready to do Y, and her heart was so soft, it was so heartbroken. She was so repentant it. She was just like, I’m so sorry. You’re totally right. I deserve it. I shouldn’t have done it. And I was like, dang it crap. And I’m wrestling with God Now, do I still, because I have to be a man of my word. If I don’t do, why then am I breaking the trust that I have that she can take my word, but at the same time, if her heart is soft, does that negate? And then I had this moment with the Aurora where I was like, or I really felt like he told me in the moment I was airing on, I’m still going to give her the consequence. That was where I was airing in the moment. And the Lord said, well, sometimes I change my mind.
And I was like, oh, well then just throw everything out. And what I said in response, which was cheeky, was So I have to be spirit led for every decision I make as a parent, which I think the answer is yes. But in that moment it was like, well, I don’t have the energy for that. I just give me the playbook. And then realizing that I think we’re never going to find the playbook. We’re going to have to be spirit led with the word.
That’s right. That’s right. It’s so funny just speaking of parenting, because I can’t tell you, especially when my kids were little or how many times I took away their treat because of actually I never took away their, that’s the point of the story. I would threaten to take away their treat and then I dunno, it is just a whole thing. Then they would always have the chance to earn it back. I don’t know what sort of theology I was perpetuating here in my parenting, but let me just tell you 100% of the time my kids earned back their treat because there’s no playbook. I think we have to be spirit led in all the decisions. And I think parenting has been so instructive for me in terms of being a theologian and a parent. I would say that those are very mutually informing. I’ve learned a lot from my kids about theology. Yeah,
Totally. Well, thank you for starting this conversation and allowing us to all wrestle. But I think like you said, there is a freedom in realizing, oh, I don’t have to have it figured out. It’s not the freedom that you mentioned of freedom, like we’re under grace now so I can do whatever I want, which is actually torture, but a freedom that says I don’t have to have it figured out. All right, now I can be on a journey towards the right direction. I think it was Jean Edwards. No, what’s his name? The guy that wrote the message translation.
Oh, Eugene Peterson.
Eugene Peterson. Long obedience in the same direction. In the same direction. It’s like as long as we’re heading towards the Lord, we’re all on a journey. So thank you for allowing us to wrestle through that and we’ll definitely need you to come back on. I have way more
Questions. Sounds great. Sounds great. We can only tackle so much in one show, so that sounds good. There’s a lot to unpack and it’s really meaningful to sort of process and have the conversation with you. So thank you.
Thanks for being here and we’ll see you next time.
Sounds great. Thank you.