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Judaism and Christianity: The Same and Different

of describing God in essentially human terms without falsehood, which were held on to in the teeth of the evidence, and refined almost unbearably by constant prophetic denunciation of almost every conceivable expression of them as a new idolatry. The analysis of the relationship between God and man at which Israel had arrived is extraordinary in its subtlety, and in its insistent holding together of apparently contradictory truths which the history of the nation had forced on its attention: but the contradictions reach no final resolution. Israel's religion 'hangs' in Austin Farrer's words 'suspended between incarnation and idolatry': possessing any number of images in which to represent God's presence with his people, and anxious never to deny it, yet unable to affirm the images too wholeheartedly for fear of tying him down, making him a mere idol, a projection of human desires. To say that Christ fulfils the hopes and needs of Israel is to say that in him the dilemma is resolved by the taking of a human life into God, so that the images may be affirmed and denied at once with equal fierceness, and no anxiety; that monotheism may at last become fully personal, and particular election may no longer compromise divinity. Christianity both springs from and replaces the ancient Jewish tension. The contradictory hopes for a future king, who should be more than a king, inside history and yet outside it, merely human yet a true type of God's rule over his people, begin to find their resolution. There is a rabbinic saying that wherever in Scripture you find reference made to the greatness of God, there you "till also find mention of his humble condescension; as it says in Isaiah 'I dwell in the high and lofty place-with him also that is of a lowly and contrite heart'. The irony here is almost painful for the Christian who cannot but feel-and God save us from pride-that he has seen what many rabbis and wise men desired to see but did not: God dwelling among men, and becoming obedient even to death on a cross.