3.2.3 Messianic Jews - A Postponed Fruit of Renaissance?

Ad fontes, back to the sources, the motto of the renaissance, associated with Greek and Roman ideals. Reformation adopted this motto. Luther regarded the study of the Latin Scriptures as fishing in muddy waters. Greek and Hebrew were to him clear wells. To the Protestant Austrian culture-historian Fridell the Reformation was the „Sündenfall der Kirche”. For this, he referred to the ongoing Protestant splitting ever since. Pietism, reacting against stiffened Protestant orthodoxy, stressed religious individualism. Rooting in Protestant Pietism, the Messianic Jewish movement stresses personal conversion, for individual, national and universal redemption, but distinguishes itself from a gentilised belief in Jesus and the Bible.

Employing a metaphor, one could maybe say that the Reformation movement went back to the sources, while the Messianic Jewish movement aspires to go back into the sources, in as far as they are Jewish. So, we could view the rise of the Messianic Jewish movement as an untimely late fruit and consequent wing of Reformation. As such, the renaissance motto, ad fontes, appears to lead with delay beyond Luther's clear brook, the Hebrew language, also to Hebrew culture and religiosity, back to the synagogue. In the last century only a few individuals dared to live out what today thousands of Messianic Jews do (Kjær-Hansen 1995). The process of transition of the movement appears irreversible. The rebirth, the renaissance of the Jewish nation Israel may have accelerated the „leap backwards through time” (Weiner 1961: 115).

We can regard the cultural and social-structural re-judaisation of Christianity to have begun, to close an ancient circle, as advocates of the movement claim. The churches have a new and distinguished Jewish entity to talk to. In a dialogue between Judaism and Christianity, the particularity of Messianic Jews may be that they are not „only” Jews, but that they also believe in Jesus as their and the church's Messiah, although in a Jewish way. In my view they understand both sides best. No wonder then, if some aspire even to become a catalyst factor for the abolition of the „great schism of church and synagogue” (Miskotte 1966: 110, English ed.)? The abolition of the abyss between the older and the younger brother may open a religious landscape yet unperceived on both of its sides (Weiner 1961: 310). In a historical retrospective Schoeps concluded that before World War Two „it did not come to talking conversations” (Schoeps 1970: 226). Today, this debate has started on various levels between various Christian and Jewish bodies, and surely, but not only, also within the Messianic Jewish movement.