Baptist Scholar Terms Christian Anti-semitism ‘manifestation of the Pagan Spirit’

A Baptist theologian said today that religious motivation is at the root of most contemporary anti-Semitism as it has been throughout history. Dr. Eric C. Rust, professor of Christian Apologetics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, spoke at a three-day interfaith dialogue being held at the seminary. The event is sponsored jointly by the Southern Baptist Convention and the interreligious affairs department of the American Jewish Committee. It is the first to bring together Jewish and Baptist theologians and Biblical scholars.

Dr. Rust, who spoke on the Jew in Christian thought and practice, said “anti-Semitism as practiced by so-called Christian civilizations is a manifestation of the pagan depths in the human soul, even when it has been superficially Christianized.” He said the pogroms of Czarist Russia and the Nazi Holocaust “sprang from a seed which the Church itself sowed in the early days of its history.” He said the Roman Church, in acknowledging its guilt, “challenges all Christian men to stand by its side.”

CHRISTIANS MUST UNDERSTAND MEANING OF HOLOCAUST AND ISRAEL TO JEWISH PEOPLE

In a companion paper delivered at the same session, Rabbi Marc H. Tannenbaum, director of the AJ Committee’s interreligious affairs department, said that the Nazi Holocaust and the meaning of the State of Israel to the Jewish people and to Judaism were the “two decisive events of contemporary Jewish experience” that “must be taken into account in any effort to understand the interior life of the Jew today.”

Rabbi Tannenbaum maintained that it was impossible to understand Jews or Judaism today without understanding “the impact on American Jews of the Arab-Israeli war of June, 1967.” He said Arab threats to destroy Israel and annihilate its population drew “a response of Jewish unity, of Jewish solidarity, and of a new consciousness of interdependence in fate and destiny that is literally unprecedented in the last 2000 years of Jewish history.”

He said that response stemmed in part “from a still deep psychic reaction to the Nazi holocaust of the 1930s,” from a “preoccupation with Christian silence in face of Nazi barbarism” and from feelings of guilt over the silence and inadequacy of the Jewish response.

Rabbi Tannenbaum said the fact that Israel became a haven for the Jewish survivors of the holocaust was one reason for its importance to Jews today. “An equally important fact is that Israel is the only place in the world where Jews have created, out of the distinctive Jewish ethos and their own intellectual, spiritual and moral resources, their own economic, military, political and social institutions.”