“Rabbi Fuller is such a great and cool guy! His conversational tone and sense of humor made him the best speaker we had. He didn’t leave us drooling from boredom. Too bad he is going to hell!”1 So wrote one college student after hearing Rabbi Fuller speak for the first time.
Gordon Fuller is an American-born (Detroit) rabbi who served for eleven years at a Conservative synagogue in Waco and is now in Columbia, Maryland. Chris van Gorder is an American-born (Pittsburgh) professor who is also an ordained American Baptist minister attending an African American church. In 2004, we met to discuss how the rabbi could help teach students about Judaism in van Gorder’s World Religion courses at Baylor University, a Baptist institution located in Waco, Texas. The two of us worked on that project for over ten years. Before that, van Gorder taught at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania. At Messiah, van Gorder taught Jewish-Christian Relations with Dr. Howard Kenig who was from the Community Relations Council of the Harrisburg Jewish Community (part of the Jewish Federation of Greater Harrisburg) along with Rabbi Carl Choper of the Harrisburg Reconstructionist community and Rabbi Chaim Schertz of the Harrisburg Orthodox community. Unless specifically cited, all student responses described in this book spring from our work together in the classroom at Baylor.
We are writing this book to share our experiences and relate how misconceptions by some Christians about Jews and Judaism can be addressed. Each chapter will focus on specific and common “problem areas” in the multivalent interactions between conservative Christians and Jews. Ours is a reflection (not an empirical evaluation) that springs from our experiences with college students at a Christian university. Most Baylor students participate across the wide range of conservative Christianity and this book responds to their frequently expressed statements about Jews and Judaism. We are not social scientists and do not provide a definitive analysis of these students’ perspectives. Instead, we will introduce the broad themes that repeatedly occur in our classroom encounters when we discuss Judaism. We make no claim that our students represent the hundreds of millions of Christians around the world, who are as different as can be imagined.2
Baylor University, chartered in 1845 while Texas was still an independent nation, boasts of being the world’s largest “Baptist and Christian university.” Its motto, Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana, emphasizes a distinctly Christian way of engaging the world. For many conservative Christian parents, it is a place where they can send their children without much fear that they will lose their faith due to confrontative ideas, such as those expressed by other faith-traditions. As it relates to other traditions, Baylor’s Religion Department, with over twenty full-time faculty members, but only one in World Religious studies, makes few efforts to promote theological reflection about how the Christian faith relates to other faiths. Graduate students in the religion department, for example, are eligible to receive a master’s or a doctoral degree without ever once being required to study or read about other faith traditions as part of their final exit examinations.
Specifically, as it relates to Judaism, there are five courses within the undergraduate religion department that frame the pre-rabbinic Jewish Scriptures in course descriptions as the “Old Testament,” a term originating in the Christian Orthodox and Catholic traditions. This contested term, according to Walter Harrelson, should be rejected because to do so expresses a “contemporary commitment to avoid pejorative references to the sacred writings of the Jewish people.”3 Harrelson prefers terms such as “Hebrew Bible,” a term frequently used by mainstream Protestants and Catholics (even though some of the text is in Aramaic).
Baylor at present (2020) holds a policy of hiring only faculty who are Christians, with the significant exception of Jewish scholars, who can be hired, though not in the Religion Department. In fact, the first non-Baptist Christian professor was in that department just a few years ago. Buddhists, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Baha’i, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Unitarians, Taoists, and Rastafarians need not apply. Why is it, then, that Jews are welcome to work at Baylor? Because it has been concluded that Judaism holds—through the shared legacy of the “Old Testament”—a unique connection with Christianity. At the time of this writing, there are six Jewish faculty at Baylor in a wide range of Institutes and various departments.
The first Jewish faculty member to be appointed, Professor Marc Ellis, was also the founder and first director of the Institute of Jewish Studies (now defunct) at Baylor. Dr. Ellis, citing suppression of his academic freedoms, left Baylor in 2012. Although the contentious nature of his time at Baylor would seemingly merit a further explanation about why and how he left the university, this is a labyrinthine topic well beyond the scope of our study. On the positive side, since 1992, at least ten other scholars from Jewish backgrounds have taken teaching positions at Baylor.
Students in REL3345—World Religions come from a broad range of religious perspectives.4 Because this is a survey of all religious traditions, Judaism is not discussed until near the end of the fifteen-week semester. The broad and generalized survey approach of the course brings with it its own challenges as we try to avoid promoting misconceptions that can easily congeal into a “gumbo” of confused generalities. This kind of broad overview, of course, is exactly how countless collegiates become familiar with the world’s religions.
Since this course is not a university-wide requirement, most students graduate and enter their hectic worlds in business, professional, or social services without any introduction to the world’s religious traditions. Of course, in some surveys of world history and world cultures, various traditions may be discussed in passing. While two Christian religion courses are required of all undergraduates (Introduction to Christian Scriptures and an Introduction to Christian History), there is no required world religion (or multireligious) component within either of these two required campus wide courses.
Baylor presents itself as a Christian university, yet several students have no religious orientation at all and would describe themselves as agnostics or atheists. There are also Baylor students that we have met who are Wiccan, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu, or even—once in a bright blue moon—Jewish. While the vast majority of the school’s undergraduates are from Texas—and often from tiny hamlets where religious difference means being Methodist instead of Baptist—it is also the case that there are students from all over the United States and from across the world. Most students are some variety of Christian. Many follow a deeply cherished version of conservative Christianity that assumes that, based on their understanding of John 14:6 (“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No man comes to the Father except through me.”), they themselves hold the only salvific truth about God (see also Acts 4:12).
What is Evangelicalism? The term “evangelical” is a widely contested term that comes from the commonly used Greek term euangelion, which means “gospel” or “good news.” As a movement, it is both a status-quo majority and a crusade convinced that it is marginalized and persecuted within North American society. Evangelicalism is one of the largest conservative Christian movements within North American Protestantism, spanning a wide range of denominations. As many as fifty million North American Christians call themselves “Evangelicals.” It is a largely conservative movement, socially and politically, with roots in the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the early twentieth century. One often hears about “Evangelicals” in the popular media whenever election pollsters are examining voter backgrounds.
One key idea commonly held is the conviction that the Bible alone presents universal truth. Biblical revelation is central for conservative Christians. Claims about the nature of biblical authority are framed considering divine revelation. Not to accept the authority of the text means that one is rejecting divine truth: there is no middle ground. Conservative Christians’ views generally offer little breathing space for a nuanced appreciation of other faiths or the merits of those faiths’ scriptures and practices. Paul Holmer joked that North American Evangelicals “look marginal if you are churchly, intolerant if you are ecumenical, and anti-intellectual in their belief that everything is systematic and settled.”5
For more than a decade, I (Fuller) have met with van Gorder’s students to introduce Judaism and to address what I have observed are many students’ most commonly held misconceptions. At the start of class, I wrote my contact information on the board and invited students to reach out to me at any time