In the third decade of the Common Era, the preaching of a young Rabbi known as Yeshua, Jesus, in the Galilee, brought new converts to Judaism by teaching and preaching this change in focus and stressing the prophetic core of Judaism; the passion for justice, the reverence for humility, the unwavering advocacy of ways of gentleness, kindness and peace.”(Agus p302)And after his death, the Apostle Paul preached far and wide about this man called Christ. This new sect, that came to be known as Christianity, espoused the morals, values and ethics of the Jews as revealed by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to the greater gentile population around the Mediterranean Sea. The Hebrew Bible, filled with these teachings, and The Gospels, the New Testament, make up the backbone of the Judeo-Christian ethic as practised today in the Western world.
Ethical monotheism has evolved and continues to evolve over time. Biblical Judaism made no room for feudalism, social hierarchy, no chauvinistic nationalism, no caste spirit or privileged classes, rather it taught the laws of ethical monotheism; rules by which to live in a compassionate society. In order to become closer to God, the people needed to follow His laws. Behaviour mattered. The prophets then preached the importance of internalizing these laws by circumcising your hearts with them. Jesus, a Rabbi, preached the importance of the laws.
”Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to complete them. In truth I tell you, till heaven and earth disappear, not one jot not one tittle, is to disappear from the Law until all its purpose is achieved.” (Matthew 5:17-18)
But, more than that, he wanted his flock to love the Spirit of the law as much as the letter of the law. Jesus wanted the people to learn that their thoughts and feelings played a role in their behaviour. It isn’t enough to do what you are told; you have to internalize it so that it becomes a part of the soul. And that, to me, is the definition of Faith.
Why is it important to know the origins and meaning of ethical monotheism? Here, in the Western world, Judeo-Christian ethical monotheism is fundamentally related to Western civilization and society.
In 1999 Pope John Paul ll explained the importance of the Judeo-Christian ethic:
“Those who are convinced that they know the truth and firmly adhere to it are considered unreliable from a democratic point of view, since they do not accept that truth is subject to variation according to different political trends. It must be observed in this regard that if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.”
This ethic has survived through the millennia while other cultures and religions have faded away. The Judeo-Christian ethic, the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, are with us today because they have bequeathed to us a culture that prioritizes freedom, justice, the fullness of human dignity, and free will that requires of us that we balance rights and responsibilities with compassion, the policy of law with the attitude of mercy and love. Unfortunately, like fish in the sea, we have taken our life-giving, life-sustaining surroundings for granted, and now the ideologies of secularism, agnosticism, atheism, fundamentalism and political correctness have been elevated to espousers of objective truth that will somehow protect us from intolerance, war and all the other evils impugned to religion.
Too many of us no longer know or understand the meaning of ethical monotheism and the Judeo-Christian ethic and how it transformed the whole organization of humanity. We no longer teach these concepts in school even though they are the foundation of our society. It is as if we assume that our children will learn about their culture through osmosis. They won’t. Our culture will only survive if ethical monotheism and the Judeo-Christian ethic are taught. One does not need to be Jewish or Christian to live in a culture that is informed by those teachings.
Isaiah offers the vision of universal peace; “…the mountain of Yahweh’s house will rise higher than the mountains…Then all the nations will stream to it, many peoples will come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the God of Jacob that he may each us his ways so that we walk in his paths”(Isaiah 2:3)
And Micah 4:5 “For let all people walk everyone in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever.
Winston Churchill wrote that the Bible gave us: “a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together on that system and by that faith. There has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilization.”
