Episode 188: The Scandal of a Divine Messiah with Brian Crawford

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Today Counts Show Episode 188

Preview

Brian: Why is Hamas fighting today? It’s because they’re angry that they lost the war in 1948. They are still angry that they lost the war back then. It is an old, bitter hatred that there are any Jews in the land. If you read Hamas’s charter from 1987, you can find it online. Hamas’s basically constitution. It calls for the genocide of Jewish people all over the world in plain language.

It is their constitution. Hamas exists for the purpose of killing all the Jews in the land of Israel. And the Palestinians were not the same thing as Hamas because Hamas, they are the extremist terrorist organization that is hellbent on—

Appreciation of our Supporters

Winston: Hey, before we jump into the podcast, we want to thank all our donors and supporters who make the Today Count Show possible. It’s through your generosity that we’re able to shape leaders through this content and this podcast. And be sure to like, subscribe, and follow wherever you find yourself coming across this content.

All right, let’s get to the podcast.

Introduction

Jim: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Today Count Show. This is your host, Jim Piper. If you are troubled or you’re interested or you’re confused or all the above about this whole America-Israel-Hamas, the events that seem to always, it sure seems like always coming from the Middle East. If that’s something that bothers you or that you’re interested in, this is a podcast for you.

So sometimes you tune in because you want some pragmatics, you want some hows. This probably isn’t that podcast. This might be one in which we take in, we soak in, and we do some learning.

The Scandal of a Divine Messiah

Now, I say this all the time, but I really mean this. I’m very excited to introduce to you Dr. Brian Crawford, who has written a book entitled The Scandal of a Divine Messiah. The Scandal of a Divine Messiah. I’m going to take my own shot at a subtitle. It’s not what Dr. Crawford has chosen, but I’m going to just call it Making Sense Out of the Divide Between Christians and Jews, not to mention the rest of the world.

Hey Brian, great to meet you today. Welcome to the show.

Brian: Thank you so much for having me on, Jim. Hey, I’ll take your substitute subtitle. It works for me.

Jim: Okay, good, because probably the reason why I did that is because I’m not even sure I can pronounce the two words that you have on here, and I’m sure we’ll hear those words here in a little bit.

Brian: Sure. You want me to read the actual subtitle?

Jim: Yeah, do that.

Brian: A Response to Maimonidean and Kabbalistic Challenges to the Incarnation referring to—

Jim: I don’t know why that scared me. I use those words all the time.

Brian: All the time. You’re always talking about the Kabbalistic thought and Maimonidean. You know, you just read them over breakfast, right?

Jim: Yeah. Oh man. So, you earned your doctorate at Talbot. Is it seminary?

Brian: Talbot School of Theology.

Jim: Yeah. Okay, Talbot School of Theology. And is that in Brea or La Habra? I always forget where that’s at.

Brian: La Mirada in the LA area, connected with Biola University.

Brian’s Journey

A Question That Sparked the Story

Jim: Gotcha. Well, let’s start with some easy questions first, and we’ll dive into these quickly so that I can bring about some of the things that I’d really like to talk about that I think will be of interest to our listening audience. But what in the world were you doing research on this topic and writing this book? Why?

From Engineer to Evangelist

Brian: I know it’s crazy. Why? I ask the Lord that oftentimes. Why in the world was I the guy to write this book? Jim, I had never planned on being the one to write this book. I’m not Jewish. I grew up in an evangelical-loving Christian home, came to faith as a teenager, was planning on being an engineer for the rest of my life. I was studying structural engineering, and I was going to be in my cubicle with a graphing calculator, and I was going to design buildings for the rest of my life. And I had a great plan for my life.

A Heart Broken for God’s People

And then I went to Israel with my church as a 20-year-old kid, and God just totally broke my heart for the salvation of the Jewish people. I was exposed to some of their theological objections, their scriptural objections, because we didn’t just see the sites in Israel. We actually talked with living, breathing Israelis.

And it really shocked me because I had always been told in the churches that I went to growing up that the Jewish people are God’s chosen people. But then I’m talking with these Israelis and they don’t care about Jesus. They don’t care about the New Testament. They think he’s not for them.

And so that really rocked me. Like why is it that the majority of Jewish people don’t believe in Jesus today? And how can I be a part of sharing the good news with them?

Called to Serve and Defend the Faith

And so, to make a long story short, the Lord totally redirected my path after that trip to Israel, and I’ve been serving now with Chosen People Ministries for 15 years, serving as an evangelist and apologist to the Jewish people.

Jim: That’s amazing. You know, I would call your book, your work, first of all, excellent, and I’m not quite done reading it yet. I think I’m about 40%. So that’s not quite, although I did notice that a lot of the book towards the back are the notes and bibliography, and you have done just a ton of research, which I appreciate. I really don’t like the research part and that’s why I didn’t finish my doctorate.

The Jewish Divide: Maimonidean vs. Kabbalistic Thought

Walking Through the Front Door of Theology

But what I’d like to do is I want to walk in the front door. I know, you know, to me what this book does is it gives us an understanding of how we got to where we’re at. That’s how I would say it. And so I know you’re going to want to back up. You’re going to want to back up the truck to help us with that. But before you do, let’s take the topic head-on.

Now, here’s what I mean. Let’s walk in the front door this way.

The Christian Understanding of God

Now, Christians—and of course, when I speak of Christian, I’m going to say the orthodox straight down the middle people who claim to be Christians—would say even if they just went to Sunday school for a while, they would say that Jesus is the Son of God. And if they hung around for church long enough, they’d be introduced to this idea that the Bible doesn’t use the word Trinity, but in our systematic theology, we get this pretty clear idea that God is made up of three persons but one essence. There’s all kinds of different ways to say it, but that’s one way.

And then Jesus is, of course, wrapped into this idea of what we call the gospel, the good news. And as good as news as it is, there’s a lot of people in this world who don’t see it as good news. They see it as narrow and hard because Jesus kind of did that to us in a sense because if you take Jesus at face value, the way that we come to know God is through Christ. Now, that’s a problem. That’s a problem for a lot of people, and the Jews are one of them.

So now let me pivot and ask you this question and add whatever you want to the Christian definition if you’d like.

So, who is the God of the Jews from a Jewish perspective or case in point that your book unfolds perspectives?

Two Streams of Jewish Thought: Distant and Near

Brian: Yeah. There is no one answer to that question. And a big part of my book is explaining how within Judaism there are two major streams of theological thought that do not agree with each other. One side is Maimonidean rationalist thought saying that God is infinitely far away from us. He doesn’t interact directly with the universe at all. He kind of sets the world in motion and governs with providence, but he governs from afar and never does anything directly in the world, say showing up in physical form or doing miracles directly in your life. It’s always through his servants. It’s always through angels or through the forces of nature and physics.

So, Maimonideas—his vision of God is distant, unknowable, infinitely far away. And you know, you listen to that as a Christian, you think, “Oh my goodness, that’s not how I read the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. I see a God who is intimately close and near to Israel and showers her with mercy and love and an outstretched arm and rescues her and is active in the world.” Well, Maimonides does a really good job of trying to distance scripture’s descriptions of God from who God actually is.

And then you’ve got the other side of the spectrum, which is Kabbalistic thought, and that’s Jewish mysticism. And instead of God being infinitely far away, God is infinitely near. He’s literally in everything. I have divine sparks in me. The computer screen that I’m looking at right now, it has divine sparks in it. Everything is divine. We are just this outworking or this stream of divinity coming from God at all times. God is speaking the world into existence at all times, and he infuses his divinity into everything.

The Philosophical Transformation of Judaism in the Middle Ages

And that’s the exact opposite of what I just shared with Maimonides. Where are they getting these ideas? They’re not getting them from scripture.

“Everything Is Divine”: The Kabbalistic View

Jim: Yeah. Let me ask you this on that last statement you made. So instead of philosophically saying that everything that we see and experience is in one way or another comes from God, that’s not what they’re saying. They’re saying that literally the computer screen that I’m looking at–

Brian: Is in God. It’s in God. There is nothing that exists except for God. Everything is divine. Nothing else beside him.

Jim: So that’s a pretty cool sci-fi right there.

Brian: Yeah. Seriously, all kinds of great ideas could come from that.

Jim: Anyway, I interrupted you. Hopefully, I didn’t mess up your stream of consciousness.

Jewish Theology and the Absence of the Trinity

Brian: That’s fine. So these ideas, they are the lifeblood of the thought, the theology, the practice, the prayers of so many religious Jewish people. And I do want to preface this: everything that I just described there, this is for religious Jewish people who actually care about theology in Judaism. Most American Christians, they’re very secular and they don’t really care about this kind of stuff. They can be agnostic or atheist even.

But when we’re talking about actual, like real Jewish theology, the answer to your question is that there are two major streams of theological thought, and neither of them have any place for the Trinity or the incarnation.

When Christianity and Judaism Shared a Table

Jim: Now, when we read the New Testament, particularly the book of Acts, and we have some worthy study guides of history and culture, and we kind of add that to season our understanding, you know, the view that I get is that people of the Way, the original term for Christians, they were attracting Jews in massive numbers. And that the synagogues were kind of like church/synagogue or synagogue/church. Their conversations were dynamic and open to not only who Jesus of Nazareth was or where he came from and what his ministry was, but ultimately who he is and why he came.

As I was reading through your book, that kind of got nipped. Am I reading that right?

Brian: Yeah. 100%.

Jim: Okay. So, was it more of a slow evolution? Or, you know, in the rabbinical tradition, did it get swept through that channel? How did it actually occur? Some dude just didn’t get up and start a different way of thinking. Maybe it was combined with some previous pagan thought that had already entered Judaism. I don’t know. Your study—you’ve done the study, so I’m looking to you.

From Shared Faith to Separation

Brian: Yeah, great question. How did Judaism get from point A to point B? And you’re right to say that Judaism in the first century was much more friendly to the New Testament’s theology of the Trinity and the Incarnation. And that’s why so many Jews came to faith in Jesus as the Jewish Messiah.

Christianity began as a Jewish movement from Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the mother church headed by Jesus’s brother James. And so it was a Jewish movement. If you read Second Temple Jewish works, you will find that so many Jewish people were playing around with ideas that are very similar to the Trinity and the Incarnation.

And so then Jesus comes on the scene, and he’s doing all these miracles and he’s saying that he’s the Son of Man spoken of in Daniel 7. And they say, “Oh, okay. Well, this fits our theology.” And so that was true in the first century, but it’s not true anymore.

Jewish people today don’t see the Trinity and the Incarnation as being friendly with Judaism at all. And the real reason is because those two schools of thought that I just explained to you, Maimonides and Kabbalah, they came about in the Middle Ages. So they’re only about a thousand years old, 800 years old.

And before that, the Trinity and the Incarnation were more friendly in Judaism. It was an idea that was kind of percolating, that was possible. But after Maimonides and Kabbalah in the 1100s and 1200s, then Christian theology just becomes totally not allowed for Jewish people.

Aristotle’s Influence on Religion

The main reason why this happened in the 1100s and the 1200s is because there was a philosophical movement, this total revolution in the Middle Ages, when the Muslim world rediscovered Aristotle and they translated him into Arabic. The Jews who were living in Muslim lands started reading Aristotle in Arabic, and they realized, wow, this guy’s brilliant, and we have never heard of this stuff before.

And so then Muslims first, and then Jews second, started integrating Aristotle into their Islam and their Judaism. But they also integrated a bunch of other works that they thought were written by Aristotle, but they weren’t. And that’s where you get these really mystical ideas coming in. And so that’s called Neoplatonism.

A Philosophical Turning Point in Faith

And so both of those religions went through this transformation in the Middle Ages. And Christianity had its own somewhat transformation about a hundred years later when you’ve got Thomas Aquinas, who is rediscovering Aristotle and integrating it with Catholicism.

So all three of the Abrahamic religions went through a real philosophical transformation in the Middle Ages. But in Judaism in particular, before the transformation, Judaism didn’t really have good defenses against the Trinity. And after the philosophical transformation, now the Trinity—they have all kinds of arguments and reasons why Jews can’t believe in the Trinity.

God’s Chosen People and American Support for Israel

Jim: You know, you answered that question before I even asked it. It was going to be, so what opened the door to that? And that really helps me. Thank you for that.

Help our listeners with this too. It’s a common phrase. I have a couple common phrases I want to share with you and ask you to comment on. And one of them you’ve already mentioned—that the Jewish nation is the chosen people of God. What does that mean, Brian, and why are they the chosen people from what our Bibles teach us?

God’s Pattern of Choosing — Kings, Covenants, and a People

Brian: Yeah, great question. So God does a lot of choosing in Scripture. He is an active God. He has his will and his desires and his purposes and his plans and his promises all throughout Scripture.

And so you can talk about a chosen king like Cyrus or David because God has appointed that person for a particular role. And it’s not that God doesn’t love other people who are not David or not Cyrus. It’s just that God had a particular plan or a purpose for King David that was different than the others. And in David’s case, he made a covenant with David saying that this is an unbreakable promise that I am making with you—that you will never fail to have a king on the throne. And of course, we know that that is fulfilled in Jesus our Messiah.

God’s Covenant and Israel’s Ongoing Calling

So that same idea of choosing David, or election—God electing David—is what God did to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all of their descendants. He chose a particular people group descended from those forefathers and all their children to be in a covenant relationship with him. God made a covenant with Abraham, and he said that he would never change it. And he reaffirms the covenant with the fathers all throughout the Old Testament.

And we see that the covenant is actually reaffirmed as unchanging and unbreakable in Romans 11, where Paul says about unbelieving Jewish people who are descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that the gifts and the promises of God are irrevocable. We read that in Romans 11:29.

Chosen, But Not Yet Redeemed

So it doesn’t matter if they believe in Jesus or not. The blessings and the honor and the election or the chosenness of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob continue on with Jewish people today whether they believe in Jesus or not. That doesn’t mean that they’re saved, that they have salvation from their sins. That’s completely different.

If you read God’s promise to Abraham and his covenant to Abraham, it never says, “And I will forgive your sins and all the sins of your descendants.” So that’s not what the covenant with Abraham entails. They still need to believe in Jesus as the Messiah in the new covenant, but that doesn’t mean that simply because they don’t believe in Jesus that for some reason God divorces them or cuts them off from the covenants with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The Covenant’s Purpose Beyond Salvation

Jim: So what earthly good then would the covenant be? How would that be a valuable thing if it doesn’t guarantee my eternal place?

Brian: Right. So God has different purposes for the ways that he chooses people. And sometimes it’s choosing for salvation, and sometimes it’s not. He has other purposes. But God’s purposes are always for his glory and for his glory in the world—for his purposes to be made known in the world. And you read in Romans 9, sometimes he chooses people for good things and sometimes he chooses people for bad things, but in all things God is glorified.

And so God chooses the Jewish people to be his vehicle for bringing prophecy into the world, for writing Scripture, for bringing the Messiah into the world, for writing the New Testament. Yeah, Jewish people wrote the New Testament.

And we read in Romans 11 that God’s plan and his purposes for the Jewish people are not over yet because when Christ returns, there’s going to be a mass salvation experience of the Jewish people who will see Jesus as their Messiah, and all Israel will be saved.

So God’s story and his purpose of glorifying himself through his people didn’t end 2,000 years ago with bringing Jesus. God has great plans and purposes for the Jewish people still in the future.

God’s Strategy and the Witness of Israel

Jim: Yeah. I’ve always thought of it—if you embrace the idea of strategy—I’ve always seen it as God’s medium to introduce himself to the rest of the world, or at least in part, to be that way.

When we in the United States, and now it seems like this is at a heightened place, we don’t seem to be as unified as we once were as a nation in support of Israel. There does seem to be now still, I think, a minority, but a strong, loud, growing minority that really doesn’t understand, or even if they understand what you just said, they reject it. And many do not understand why the United States would stand with Israel.

What is your understanding of why, for the most part, the United States has stood with Israel?

Why America Stands with Israel

America’s Biblical Roots and Israel

Brian: The reason why the United States has stood with Israel is multi-faceted. The United States was founded by a bunch of English Puritans, many of them who were restorationists, which is the term for a Zionist back in the 1600s and later. They were premillennialists who believed that God was going to restore the Jewish people. He was going to save them all. And many of them came to the United States, and they founded institutions and colonies here.

Many of them also believed in freedom of religion, and so Jewish people were allowed to practice their religion freely here, and now it’s codified in the Bill of Rights.

A Haven for the Jewish People

When I talk to Jewish people today, they’ll say that the United States has been the most friendly place for Jews to be Jews for millennia. There’s no other place like this that gives them the freedom of religion to practice their own Judaism. So Jewish people have been allowed to thrive here. They weren’t shut off into ghettos like in France or in Italy. They were never oppressed in that way here in the United States because of freedom of religion.

Prophecy, Promise, and the American Church

But then also you had so many Christians who were reading their Scriptures literally, starting with the Puritans like I mentioned, but then later on these are premillennialists who read Old Testament prophecy literally. So that when it says Israel will be brought back to her land and Jerusalem will be restored, like it says in Ezekiel, like it says in Zechariah, like it says all over the place, they were reading that literally, which meant that no, we can’t throw out the Jewish people from our Christian theology. They still have a future and a purpose.

Institutions That Carried the Torch

And so the United States, definitely from the late 1800s forward, was a real bastion of explaining the role of Jewish people in God’s plan. And actually, my alma mater that we talked about before, Biola, was very much a part of that in the early 1900s. We have always been in favor of Jewish evangelism at Biola.

And you know, it’s amazing. I serve with Chosen People Ministries. We were founded in 1894 in this very time period I’m talking about. I teach at Biola. My doctorate is at Biola, founded in 1912. Both Chosen People Ministries and Biola have been a part of this movement of educating American Christians that we need to love Israel, love the Jewish people, support the Jewish people’s return to the land.

Why? Not because of politics, but because it’s what Scripture says when you interpret Zechariah and Ezekiel literally. So we’re really driven by what Scripture says about the future of the Jewish people.

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The Stumbling Block: History, Trauma, and Christian Anti-Semitism

Judeo-Christian Ethics and the Post–October 7 Shift

Jim: That’s good. You know your stuff.

So we have this phrase “Judeo-Christian,” and then you could add whatever. The word that comes to my mind most often that I hear is “Judeo-Christian ethics.” You wrote something that was interesting. I don’t think, is in your book, but you’re talking about the context—you’re talking about the October 7 attacks and the Israeli-Hamas conflict.

And then at the end of the paragraph, you say, and I quote, “When the Jewish people’s positive status in the eyes of God is devalued among Christians, even believers can fall into the anti-Semitic spirit of the post–October 7 age.” Can you comment on that a little bit more?

The Shadow of History on Jewish-Christian Relation

Brian: Sure. We have been very blessed, and the Jewish people have been very blessed in the last 80 years to have lived in a post-Holocaust world where previous anti-Semitic tropes and coercion against the Jewish people have been near universally spoken against in the Western world.

That’s not true in the Muslim world, but in the Western world, anti-Semitism has been one of the biggest evils that we have taught our children to not be a part of. We’ve taught our children in schools about Anne Frank and about the Holocaust. And we’ve also taught about how there was a road that led to the Holocaust.

Many Christians recognized how much Christian attitudes toward the Jewish people paved the way toward the Holocaust. And so there’s been this real humbling of Christendom, so to say, in the last 80 years because of the Holocaust.

The Return of an Old Hatred

But as the Holocaust fades, the old hatred is coming back. And yes, it is coming back in some Christian quarters, and it’s really, really sad to see. It shocks me. It saddens me.

But you get so many Christians who reject everything that I just said about reading the Old Testament literally, and they say, “No, all of these are allegories. When it says Israel, it means the Church. When it says Jerusalem, it means the Church. The restoration that is talked about in Ezekiel and Zechariah—all that is allegory. It’s just talking about a spiritual restoration.”

Erasing Israel from God’s Plan

So when you do that, you erase the Jewish people from God’s future plans if you were to read it literally. So you don’t read it literally, so there’s no future for the Jewish people. And then what you’re left with is a lot of frustration toward the Jewish people.

If you don’t counterbalance your frustration toward the Jewish people with what scripture says positively about them, then you’re going to focus on “They don’t believe in Christ. They reject the Trinity, they say things against Christ. And they don’t want to enter a church. They don’t want to do this, they don’t want to do that.” You’ll go down the rabbit hole about bad things in the Talmud. You will emphasize all the bad stuff, and you won’t have any counterweight.

Forgetting God’s Irrevocable Promises

And so we’re seeing that now—that there’s been a resurgence of Christians justifying their hatred of Jewish people on the grounds that I just shared and many more. And they’re not being pushed back by, say, Romans 11—that God’s plans and his purposes and his calling of the Jewish people are irrevocable, whether they believe in Jesus or not. That’s just kind of thrust to the side, and it’s really, really sad.

Heart and History — Why Many Jews Reject Jesus

Jim: I grew up with a family. They were Messianic Jews, and you might want to explain that here in a second too. Messianic Jews—and I believe he worked for Jews for Jesus. I don’t know if that still exists or not, that organization.

I remember even as a young boy, even though I probably couldn’t articulate it, one of the things I think is ironic, if that’s the right word to use, is that here is this rich history—the most important and the most in-depth history that we have of the human race—comes from the Old Testament. And we, the Jewish people, are the chosen of God, and I do believe scripture makes clear as to why. It wasn’t because, you know, my family—the Piper family—is better than the Smith family or anything like that, but simply because God chose them.

The Challenge of Reaching God’s Chosen

I would imagine that one of the issues of the heart that makes it difficult for Christians to have a kind and thoughtful conversation with a Jew who is dedicated to their faith is that who the heck are we to try to introduce them to a God that is so rich? But as you make very clear, Brian, in your work, this isn’t just a difference of opinion. This is absolute heresy to think that God could become a man.

But how much of the heart piece—what would I call it? I think you use the term—in their eyes, we are a foreign religion of some sort. We are pagans of a whole other set. It would be like someone coming against my family heritage. How much do you see the heart getting in the way as much as the head?

A History That Shapes the Heart

Brian: Yeah. The heart and history that motivates the heart are huge. It’s oftentimes bigger than the theological, the apologetic, the scriptural reasons. It’s the heart that is traumatized by what they have learned from the way that Christians have treated Jews in history. And that is a huge stumbling block for many Jewish people. They don’t want to read the New Testament because, one, their rabbis tell them not to, but second, their history or their memory is measured in centuries—even millennia.

A lot of Christians don’t know their history. You couldn’t ask most Christians, “Hey, what happened in the 9th century? What happened in the 12th century?” They wouldn’t know. But religious Jewish people, they know, and they know the way that Christians have treated Jewish people in the past. They see the Crusades, the Inquisition, the pilgrims, and yes, the Holocaust. They see what Martin Luther wrote at the end of his life against the Jewish people—really, really bad stuff.

Centuries of Coercion and Suspicion

So you’ve got Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants who all have really bad examples of practicing coercion, hateful rhetoric, and violence against the Jewish people—justifying violence, forced conversions, synagogue burnings, Talmud burnings—all of that kind of stuff. So when I say coercion, that’s what I mean.

And so Jewish people have grown up for centuries and millennia now seeing Christianity as the anti-Jewish religion. It’s the enemy. And that’s why Jewish people today—you know, if you were to poll American Jewish people today—you would find that many of them are secular, but many of them are into New Age or into Buddha or into this, that, or whatever. And they don’t get a whole lot of pushback from the wider Jewish world.

Why Jesus Is Singled Out

Sure, Orthodox Jews wouldn’t be happy with that kind of stuff—they would say it’s idolatry—but it’s okay, you know, “We’re just one big happy Jewish family.” But if you believe in Jesus, you’re out.

Why is Jesus singled out? It’s not because of Jesus. It’s not because they’re reckoning with the gospel. It is not because they’re reckoning with what the New Testament says. It’s because of that bad history—that trauma that they know their ancestors have been through at the hands of Christians. And so oftentimes they reject the gospel not because of Jesus but because of Christians. And that’s a really sad testimony.

The Weight of History and the Wounds of Faith

Jim: The past matters, doesn’t it? It really does.

Brian: It does.

Jim: This is just a perception that I have. Correct me, please. The Orthodox—might be still too broad of a term, I don’t know—but in my mind’s eye, I see the practicing Jewish community. You don’t just walk up next to those folks. It appears as though they live a pretty isolated life in the sense of who they do business with, who they fellowship with. And I mean, they’ll accept business from outsiders, but it’s transactional, and there wouldn’t necessarily be what I would perceive as open-armed and inviting me into their world.

So in your work—the work that you’ve given yourself to—evangelization, and “evangelism” is kind of a bad word, right?

Brian: Yes. They don’t like that. The word “missionary”, a bad word.

Jim: Right? Because that would be almost like someone trying to steal their children or something.

Brian: Right. And they associate me with coercive evangelism in the past—“Believe in Jesus and you can leave the ghetto and enter the university system. Believe in Jesus and the Church will give you money. Believe in Jesus and you can do all these things.” And so evangelism oftentimes was really polluted with that kind of manipulation—and worse, like I said, violence. So when I say “missionary,” I think one thing; when they hear “missionary,” they hear something completely different.

Bridging the Divide: Evangelism and the Future of Orthodox Judaism

Jim: Is there a different way to wordsmith our intentions? Is there a different way to—how do we gain access if someone has a neighbor? But again, at least the ones that I’ve been exposed to, those folks will even kind of reside and begin to populate a certain physical community to where until you walk through it or drive through it or ride your bike through it, you wouldn’t even know that. I just see so many challenges in what you’re doing.

I mean, your book lays out a big part, and if nothing else, your book educates in so many different ways, and that’s why I will finish reading this book.

Brian: I’ll hold you to it.

Jim: Oh, yeah. Please do. Please do. I thought I was going to get it done before the podcast, but it’s a book that, like I said, I had to really be disciplined to not highlight everything.

Immersing in Another World

Brian: Yeah. So this book is intending to be an immersion into a different world. It really is a different world. And I could not have written this book without having been immersed in the Orthodox Jewish world of Brooklyn, New York, for nine years. I’m living with Orthodox Jewish people. I’m talking with them. I am trying to talk with them about scripture, and we’re just talking past each other. I’m learning by failure. I’m out on the streets and not really knowing what I’m doing. And I’m thinking, “How in the world do I talk to these people?” And I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Communicating Faith Across Cultures

So the answer to your question—how can we actually relate to these people—is there’s no shortcut. I mean, if you want to go and do Muslim ministry in Iran, you can’t do that without moving to Iran and immersing yourself in their world. And so that’s what this book is attempting to do. I have multiple audiences.

I’m not writing to evangelical Christians, but I know that many evangelical Christians with a heart for the Jewish people are going to read this book. For evangelical Christians, this book is an immersion into the Jewish world so that we can have the means by which we can communicate with them about who God is, about who Jesus is, that we can talk about the Trinity in a Jewish way. We can talk about the Incarnation in a Jewish way. And it doesn’t sound like we’re a bunch of white-bread Gentiles who just don’t get Jewish people at all.

Navigating Modern Distractions

Jim: Right. Absolutely. I think it’s important. I think the book is important. Again, if for no other reason, if I don’t increase my understanding, I’m going to be misled. Convictions I once had will erode because, you know why? Because other than a sound bite—and we live in the world of sound bites—where now your sound bite can be easily conquered by a zillion other sound bites.

And I’m saying these things to ask you this other question too. I mean, the world has become so small because of technology and social media and all the forms of communication. And I would imagine that those are dedicated to their faith, whatever faith it is, have understood the wisdom to try to create boundaries with all the noise that’s out in this world. But I can’t imagine that they escape it all.

That must also breed difficulty in us sitting down and having a conversation. You’re seeing less and less of that, and social media has become a medium where people are throwing their grenade. They throw a grenade and disappear, and what can you do with it? Self-proclaimed theologians and philosophers and politicians.

I say all that to say this. So, as far as you know—and this might not be a fair question, Brian. If not, just say so. You know, we have ambassadors, and we have a whole ambassador sector. We have politicians. We have business people who relate to Israel every single day. What percentage of those people do you think understand what you have uncovered in your work, and how could this help them be more effective just in relating and understanding Israel?

Understanding and Respecting Orthodox Judaism

Brian: Yeah. So two-part question. I’ll handle the second one first. How this helps relating. They don’t expect you to understand Judaism. They don’t expect you to even know how to pronounce Maimonidean or Kabbalistic. No, they don’t expect that from you. But you come to them and you say, “Oh, yeah. I’ve learned some stuff about Maimonides and K and I know about his 13 principles, and I know how you pray these things in your synagogues every single day as a religious Jewish man.”

All of a sudden, they’re like, “Oh my goodness, how did you know this about us?” because they are used to either Christians not getting them, not understanding them, or being really standoffish and kind of frustrated at them rather than being sympathetic and actually speaking positively about their tradition.

And so part of what this book’s success has been for me personally is that even though this is an apologetics book where I am really criticizing Maimonides and Kabbalah very deeply, I do so with a lot of respect for them. I do so with good scholarship, I hope. And the Jewish people who I know who have read this book have said to me, “Brian, you presented us a real challenge, and we respect you. You are a respectable opponent because you understand us.” And that has actually opened doors for me in ways that if I had not studied and written this book, it never would have opened.

So that’s the answer to the second part of the question.

The Changing Jewish Landscape

First part of your question is how many people know this stuff? Well, probably between 15 to 20% of the worldwide Jewish population today is some kind of Orthodox Jewish person. But here’s the thing: with Orthodox Judaism comes a desire to fulfill the commandments. What is one of the first commandments in the Torah? Be fruitful and multiply. They are having lots of kids. And they actually have more theological reasons to have lots of kids. The average ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman has around eight children. That’s average.

Whereas the secular Jewish population, they’re either not getting married, they’re having one kid or no kids, or they’re intermarrying, and then their children and their grandchildren just turn into Gentiles. They just don’t have any Jewish tradition. And so the secular are slowly dying off, and the religious are coming up. Most polls, like with the Pew Research Center, are saying that by 2040 up to 40% of worldwide Jewish people are going to be Orthodox.

And so this book is trying to get ahead of that wave. Right now, we can get away with this in trying to share the gospel with Jewish people and not knowing these things because 85% of the Jewish world, they’re not religious Orthodox Jews. But that’s changing, and we need to be ahead of the curve.

Jim: I hope that your book gets into required reading for some of the classes in our schools around the country. I would think it would be extremely valuable. That to me would be a good business move on one hand, but on the other hand, I think it would be—I mean, I know that I would have benefited from this.

The History of the Israel-Hamas Conflict

Are you willing to comment on—I mean, you have in the document that you gave me—but are you willing to maybe add some more body to this whole conflict with Israel and Hamas? How it happened, why it happened, where we’re at. It seems pretty clear that Israel should be able to defend themselves. I’m not even considering their history. I’m just looking at it as one sovereign country or another. Of course, I realize sovereignty is an issue in this whole situation, but would you mind adding a little more body to that?

Brian: Sure. And of course, we are recording this just a few days after all the living hostages have been released by Hamas to Israel. And so, praise the Lord for that. The hostages’ nightmare is over, at least the ones who are living. And yet they now have the recovery of dealing with everything that they dealt with in the tunnels with Hamas for two whole years. It’s just crazy.

Jim: It’s unthinkable.

Ancient Promises and Exile

Brian: Yeah. So let me give you the bird’s-eye view of the conflict, how we got here. The Jewish people were covenanted by God through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to have a land. That land was given to them unconditionally. But then you have the Mosaic covenant where God says, “Hey, if you don’t follow my commandments, then I will exile you from the land.” And so the land is theirs, but it can be taken away temporarily based on whether they are following the God of Israel or not.

But then in Deuteronomy chapter 30, God says, “After I have exiled you to the far corners of the earth and after you’ve been a byword among the nations, I will bring you back.” So God prophesied that the exile would be reversed. The first exile was by the Babylonians and the Assyrians in the 8th century BC. Then you’ve got the second exile, which was by the Romans in 70 AD, just after Jesus and the apostles, during the middle of the writing of the New Testament.

From Ottoman Collapse to Zionist Vision

Basically, the Jewish people have been an exiled people since AD 70. And why are we talking about Israel as a nation today? It’s because Jewish people and many Christians were involved with this in the late 1800s and the early 1900s—were involved with the Jewish restoration movement called Zionism—saying, “Hey, the Jewish people have been treated badly. They have been treated horribly all throughout Europe, all throughout the world really. They deserve their own home. The Ottoman Empire is kind of collapsing. It’s on its last leg. I bet that we could actually buy a bunch of parcels of land. The Jews could buy a bunch of parcels of land and they could reestablish a homeland.”

The Rebirth of a Homeland: From Zionism to the British Mandate

So, starting in the 1880s, that’s what they did. They legally started buying parcels of land in what was then the Ottoman Empire. Then you have World War I. The Ottoman Empire loses. They were on the side of Germany and the central powers. They lose. The Ottoman Empire collapses. In that vacuum comes the British. The British won World War I, and they took control of much of the Holy Land. France took part of the Holy Land in Lebanon as well.

And so then there was this conversation: what should we do with this land? There’s no nation here anymore. The Ottoman Empire has fallen. There’s no nation called Palestine. It was the Ottoman Empire, and then it fell. And so now there’s this group of people living there, and many of them were Jews.

So the British, because they were run back then by evangelical Christians who were restorationist Zionists, said, “We are going to partition a portion of the land to be for the Jews, and another partition of the land called Jordan is going to be for the Muslims, and we’re going to have this multi-state scenario.”

The Jews said, “Yes, we love it,” and the Muslims said, “No, we hate this.” And so when it was clear that the Muslim nations, Muslim peoples, were not going to accept a Jewish state, the Jewish people declared independence. The United Nations—one of the only good things that, in my view, the United Nations has done—ratified and said, “Yes, Israel is a nation.”

And then all the Muslim nations around them tried to destroy and kill Israel, and they lost. They lost the war.

Hamas and the Legacy of 1948

Why is Hamas fighting today? It’s because they’re angry that they lost the war in 1948. They are still angry that they lost the war back then. It is an old, bitter hatred that there are any Jews in the land. They want to get rid of them all.

If you read Hamas’s charter from 1987—you can find it online—Hamas’s constitution calls for the genocide of Jewish people all over the world in plain language. It is their constitution. Hamas exists for the purpose of killing all the Jews in the land of Israel.

Jim: Their existence is their mission all in one.

Hamas vs. the Palestinian People

Brian: Yes. So before October 7th, sane people around the world recognized that Hamas was its own thing, and the Palestinians were not the same thing as Hamas because Hamas is the extremist terrorist organization that is hell-bent on exterminating all Jews.

After October 7th, you get all these people who are starting to think fuzzy, and they’re mixing Palestinian and Muslim with Hamas, and they’re seeing the cause of Hamas as the cause of the Palestinian people. And that is not the case. That is simply not the case. Most Palestinians do not want to have Hamas in charge. They’re terrified of Hamas.

I’ve given you a big-picture understanding there, but Hamas is not for the Palestinian people. No Christian should be in support of Hamas. If you believe in the rights of the Palestinian people, then you should be in favor of someone who actually gives rights and freedom to the Palestinian people, and that’s not Hamas.

Freedom and Coexistence in Israel

Actually, Israel is the only place in the Middle East where you have true freedom of religion, where you can do street preaching, where you can do open-air evangelism, where you won’t be killed if you switch religions and believe in Jesus. There are actually two million Arab-Israeli citizens in the nation of Israel with full voting rights. They sit in the Knesset. They’re on the Israeli Supreme Court. You never hear about them because they don’t fit the narrative.

These Arab Israelis love being Israelis. They want to be Israelis and they cherish their Israeli citizenship. They don’t want to be Jordanians, they don’t want to be Egyptians, they don’t want to be Lebanese. They’d want to be Israelis because they know the rights and the freedoms that they get by being citizens of Israel as Arab Muslims.

Jim: Brian, I think you have more books in you.

Brian: Yeah, the Lord knows.

Why Christians Should Read This Book

Jim: Hey, tell us just in closing, why somebody should invest in this book. I’m going to support you as much as I can in this, but maybe just a summary because we covered a lot of territory. Maybe just capsulize it for everybody and where they can pick it up.

Brian: Yeah, so you can pick it up on Amazon. It’s on Kindle. You can buy it in bookstores all over the place. You can buy it at brianjcrawford.com, my own personal website. But yeah, Amazon’s a good spot.

Why would someone want to read this? Well, your audience is mostly believers, Christians, and so I’m going to speak to you. Why would a Christian want to read this book about Judaism? Well, because Christianity is Jewish.

You’ll see as I read this book that I transition pretty smoothly from Judaism to the Trinity and the Incarnation, where I’m talking about the Nicene Creed and why that actually fits the Old Testament better.

If you want to have a better grasp of your own Christian theology—you believe in the Trinity, you believe that Jesus is God in the flesh—but you don’t know how to defend it, you don’t know how to articulate it, and you have a heart for Jewish people and want to be able to explain it to Jewish people, there’s no other book like mine.

You can read all kinds of other Christian theology books to learn about the Trinity and the Incarnation, but my book is unique in that it frames it within Judaism as a Jewish option that is a fulfillment of the Jewish Old Testament and the Jewish New Testament, and that this is actually a very Jewish thing to believe in.

Wrap Up: Gratitude and Future Conversations

Jim: Man, that was well said. That was absolutely well said. It was great meeting you today. Let’s not lose touch. I think we have some more conversations in our future.

Brian: Would love to, Jim. Thanks so much for having me on.

Outro

Winston: Hey, thank you so much for joining us on the Today Counts Show. We’ve got so much more planned for you, so stay tuned and stay connected on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and subscribe on YouTube. And remember, today counts.