spiritual hunger. There is an opportunity, brothers and sisters, for
the preaching of the gospel and that opportunity is ours by the
grace and by the sovereignty of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Modern American Judaism is embroiled in a massive debate over
the meaning of “Jewishness” and the question of Jewish identity.
This is a flash point in Israel as well as in our own land. Perhaps
a majority of American Jews define Judaism more as a tribal
identity than as a theological truth claim, but there is judgment
upon the Christian Church here. Soon after World War II, there
developed in certain theological circles in the precincts of liberal
Protestantism and then in Roman Catholicism, a two-covenant
theology. This is a slander against the gospel. It emerged on the
liberal side of Christianity because it takes nothing less than the
deliberate repudiation of God’s revelation and His inerrant word
to reach such a conclusion.
The two-covenant theology was taught and promoted by persons
like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. They said that God had
one way with Israel and another way with the Gentiles, with the
Church. This is a hermeneutical leap of the imagination that has to
ignore the Bible itself and the very substance of apostolic preaching.
In keeping with the liberal accommodation of the gospel to the
spirit of the age, liberal Christianity has been too theologically
compromised to bear the scandal of the gospel. Instead, it has
simply developed a theological fig leaf to cover their theological
nakedness. But we need to be honest. We need to say that
among evangelical Christians today, this same theology is taking
root. This same two-covenant notion is being heard. We must
confront it for what it is, which is a repudiation of the gospel and
a slander against the Cross of Christ.
Some years ago, one of the best selling books in America was
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews—A History by
James Carroll, a Roman Catholic. It purported to be a history
24 | To the Jew First