Advice to Converters

"Till the conversion of the Jews" was Poet Andrew Marvell's way of indicating an immeasurably long period of time, and throughout history Christians have taken pains to hasten the day--from plain torture to the gentler persuasion of the American Board of Missions to the Jews. Such efforts are a grave mistake, writes Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the C.C.A.R. Journal, a quarterly of the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

"The problem of the Christian majority, particularly in America," says Niebuhr, "is to come to terms with the stubborn will to live of the Jews as a peculiar people, both religiously and ethnically. The problem can be solved only if the Christian and Gentile majority accepts this fact and ceases to practice tolerance provisionally in the hope that it will encourage assimilation ethnically and conversion religiously." Disappointment of such hopes has produced violent reactions in the past, Niebuhr points out, as when Martin Luther "thought that the Jews had refused to become Catholic but would undoubtedly accept the purer Protestant version of the Catholic faith."

Ethically, Christians must learn to recognize in the Jews "a superior capacity for civic virtue which the Gentile majority rather flagrantly overlooks." Theologically, adds Niebuhr, Christians would do well to analyze the areas of divergence between the two faiths. He finds the differences less extreme than is generally supposed. "From the standpoint of the Christian, the doctrine of grace is the most significant distinction between Christianity and Judaism." But in the practical world, Niebuhr finds, a religion of grace does not always yield superior results: "The fact that Jews have been rather more creative than Christians in establishing brotherhood with the Negro may prove that 'saving grace' may be rather too individualistically conceived in Christianity to deal with collective evil."

Christian attempts to proselyte Jews are not only futile, argues Niebuhr, but wrong, because the two faiths are "sufficiently alike for the Jew to find God more easily in terms of his own religious heritage than by subjecting himself to the hazards of guilt feeling involved in a conversion to a faith, which, whatever its excellencies, must appear to him as a symbol of an oppressive majority culture. Both Jews and Christians will have to accept the hazards of their historic symbols. These symbols may be the bearers of an unconditioned message to the faithful. But to those outside the faith they are defaced by historic taints. Practically nothing can purify the symbol of Christ as the image of God in the imagination of the Jew from the taint with which ages of Christian oppression in the name of Christ tainted it."

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