Religion: Making Jews Christians

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Do not try to convert Jews, said Protestant Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to Christian evangelists (TIME, April 21, 1958). Jews may find God more readily in their own faith than in Christianity, he maintains, especially because of the guilt they are likely to feel if they become Christians. Since when, replies Presbyterian Minister George E. Sweazey in this week's Christian Century, should a Christian "inquire into a man's ethnic origins before deciding whether to be concerned about his religious state? Who is my neighbor? If a person in spiritual need is of Hebrew ancestry, shall we pass by on the other side, hoping that a rabbi will chance to come along and care for him?"

There is plenty of spiritual need among U.S. Jews, says Presbyterian Sweazey, chairman of the National Council of Churches' new department on the Christian approach to the Jews. Even those with a strong sense of their Jewish tradition are inclined to hold it as a kind of "super-intense patriotism" rather than a religion. "What Christians desire for their Jewish brethren is not so much conversion as continuation, a building onto their heritage, not a break with it. Religiously we all are Jews. It is intolerable that we should abandon those to whom we owe so much just at the border of our Promised Land."

To lead them across the border, Sweazey recommends personal friendship without the usual treatment of religion as an embarrassing subject. As the result of such tiptoeing, "many Jews know only a grotesque caricature of Christianity, compounded of a three-headed divinity, salvation by being dipped in blood, a slighting of rationality and ethics, and a dependence on gross wonders." As Jews and Christians become closer friends, Chairman Sweazey hopes, "Christ will become better known and loved on both sides."