In our ongoing conversation, Scott writes (again, with permission to post):
What troubles me about that unanimity is the almost complete rejection (a sort of pseudo-Marcionism) of Jesus’ Jewishness. I think I can accept that the influx of Gentiles post-70 AD would lead to a “Greekening” of the Church. And certainly historical events and the free choices of the actors on the stage did much to sever any hope of a relationship between followers of the Messiah and their non-believing brethren or cousins, the fall of Jerusalem being the heaviest straw and the Bar Khoba rebellion perhaps being the last straw.
What I struggle to understand is how so thoroughly the Church abandoned her Jewishness. The Apostles most certainly kept the great Feasts of Judaism (both the Biblical and the non-Biblical). I believe it would be safe to infer that the first generation after the Apostolic one would also have kept the feasts. Why did the Gentile church not keep them?
This is not, pace Council of Jerusalem, a plaintive cry to become Jews. Rather, it is about the significance in salvation history which those feasts signify.
There is no excuse for how thoroughly the Church forgot her Jewishness. I am not speaking about the abandonment of many of the ceremonial aspects of Temple worship, such as animal sacrifice and the Great Feasts. There is ample good explanation for that abandonment in the fact that animal sacrifice was fulfilled once and for all in the great sacrifice upon the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The same is true of almost all the Great Feasts, they were antitypes, they were shadows, that were fulfilled in Christ.
Having said that, St. Paul drew a careful line between being allowed to keep the Old Testament feasts and having to keep the Old Testament feasts. When we read Acts 16, we see that St. Paul took St. Timothy to be circumcised in order to not offend. We also read in the early chapters of Acts that the Church in Jerusalem apparently kept the feasts. The Old Testament feasts truly pointed to Our Lord Jesus Christ. Provided you interpreted that feast through the lens of the Great Mercy that the Father showed us in His Son, you could actually keep that feast, at least at the beginning. [Note: under no circumstance and under no reasoning was animal sacrifice allowed to be kept, that would be to violate the New Covenant]
However, the line that St. Paul drew was between being allowed to keep the Old Testament practices, if you were of Hebrew descent, and being forced to keep the Old Testament practices, particularly if you were of Gentile descent. At that point, St. Paul insisted that we could not be forced to keep Old Testament practices that had been fulfilled in Christ.
Some will conclude that this means that St. Paul was against feasts and practices. However, there is evidence that this was not his attitude. Regarding the Lord’s Supper, St. Paul writes to the Corinthians insisting that they must keep the Traditions as delivered to them and no other way under possible penalty of either “sleeping” or being “sick.” In the latter part of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, St. Luke writes that St. Paul wished to visit the Ephesian elders in order to keep Pentecost with them. Given his strong arguments a few years before about forcing the Gentile Church to be “Jewish,” many have concluded that he is speaking about a New Testament feast, which has taken over Pentecost and redefined it with the events of Acts 2. If we go to writings such as the Didache, we see further evidence that there were, from the beginning, Christian feasts.
Nevertheless, what Scott is talking about is forgetting that we were grafted into the tree of Abraham, as St. Paul says in Romans. And, and, uhm, no, I have no reasoning to give you. We have often sinned in Church history, in forgetting where we came from and into what we have been grafted.
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