David Novak
David Novak
David Novakis a Jewish theologian, ethicist, and scholar of Jewish philosophy and law. He is an ordained Conservative rabbi and has also trained with Catholic moral theologians. Since 1997 he has taught religion and philosophy at the University of Toronto; his areas of interest are Jewish theology, ethics and biomedical ethics, political theoryand Jewish-Christian relations...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTheologian
CountryUnited States of America
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The shortcoming of purely political discourse between Christians and Jews arises from the fact that it is largely built upon the perception of a common enemy.
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Unlike the issue of messiahhood, which arose when Jews and Christians were members of the same religio-political community and spoke the same conceptual language, the issues of the incarnation and the Trinity divide people who are no longer members of the same community and who no longer speak the same language.
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The theological contacts between Jews and Christians during much of the premodern period are best characterized as disputations. Even when not engaged in face-to-face argumentation, Jews and Christians spoke about each other in essentially disputational terms.
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Although most Christian churches advocate some sort of mission to non-Christians, no Jewish group advocates a mission to non-Jews. Proselytization seems to be foreign to Judaism.
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Jews have long experience with Christians who have tried to help us in putting our Judaism behind us.
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It has always been inevitable that, living as a small minority among a Christian majority, some Jews would convert to Christianity.
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Christians and Jews alike are the new exiles of the contemporary world, struggling with how to sing the Lord's song in a strange land.
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In a very real sense, Jews have to believe that Christians have missed the point about how to wait for the end, and Christians have to believe something quite similar about the Jews.
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The common moral praxis of Jews and Christians is most definitely theologically informed by the doctrine we share in common: The human person, male and female, is created in the image of God.
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All modern secularity requires is that our public norms and the arguments for them not presuppose common acceptance of Jewish or Christian revelation, even if these public norms are consistent with a particular community's revelation and the authoritative teachings it derives from that revelation.
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The right to privacy has both positive and negative connotations for those who consider themselves part of the natural law tradition.
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During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity.
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Perhaps the main stumbling block to a better, and more fruitful, theological relationship with Judaism and the Jewish people has been the tendency of many Christian theologians to see the Christ event as the end of history.
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A religious commitment coupled with theological awareness gives Jews a much better way to answer the claims made upon us by missionaries representing other religions than do the rather weak political and cultural arguments of the secularists.