Judaism, Christianity, Islam-- and Israel

An excerpt from a mostly helpful/useful piece by Daniel Goldman in First Things...

Today, evangelical Christians form the strongest base of support for the State of Israel in America, stronger in some respects than the support of the left-leaning American Jewish community. Jews often misread Christian motivation for supporting Jewish survival. When Christian theology declares that the New Testament fulfills the Old, they mean in effect that the history of Israel is a map to the inner life of every Christian. And this history is not simply a record interred in a book. The history of the Jewish people is manifest in the life of the Jewish people, for we are our history: Every one of us stood with Moses to receive the Torah at Mount Sinai, and all who clung to YHWH are alive today, as we pray before reading the Torah in public. We, the living people of Israel, are a flesh-and-blood map to the salvation of every Christian....

In Christian theology, Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross is a new Passover, in which Jesus is the Lamb, while his Resurrection is a new Exodus from Egypt in which all humanity may join, and the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles at Pentecost is a new giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.

For Christians, it is not merely that God’s earthly incarnation was as a Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, or that God’s promise to the Jews stands surety for what Christians believe to be his promise to them. The Christian’s rebirth to citizenship in Israel demands an inner transformation. When Christians say that Jesus fulfills the Torah...

For that reason Abraham Joshua Heschel averred without a hint of exaggeration that the wise old men who lead the Catholic Church know that Israel is so holy that our disappearance would endanger the existence of the Church....

Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, and therefore himself, was the foundation of God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants. God’s love removes us from the altar; a ram substitutes for Isaac so that Abraham may live, and, in Christian doctrine, Jesus of Nazareth sacrifices himself for all of mankind so that mankind may live and be free from sin and death. To be a Jew is to continue the life of Abraham; to be a Christian is to be reborn in the spirit into the life of Abraham....

And then a comparison of Islam and Christianity in their relation to Judaism:

The gentiles recall the election of Israel in a benign way when Christians look to the living people Israel as a map of their own path to salvation. In a malignant way, it occurs when other nations, coveting election, seek to arrogate election unto themselves. This is most obvious in Islam, which insists that the Jews, like all other peoples, received the true revelation from Allah but intentionally perverted it. The Muslims claim to be in possession of the corrected, purified, and final revelation, of which the Torah is a fraudulent version. As long as Jews walk the earth, Muslims never can be quite comfortable in their proprietorship of the final revelation, and a Jewish commonwealth with its capital in Jerusalem constitutes a perpetual affront against the authority of Islam as the final revelation.