The Concept of "Dual Covenant"

The better angel of Islam has a concept known as "Peoples of the Book", in which tolerance and even acceptance was extended to its two siblings among the Abrahamic Faiths: Christianity and Judaism. In certain times and places, Muslim-controlled regions exercised secular laws inspired by the Koran that protected not only religious liberty for the Peoples of the Book, but also gave them equal employment opportunities and equal protection in judicial cases. Omayyad Spain was most famous for this enlightened approach, and created a vibrant multicultural society of advanced civilization because of it. However, even the better angel of Islam fell short in not extending this notion of the Peoples of the Book to areas where they had Hindu subjects. After all, the Hindus had their books of moral enlightenment, including most famously, The Bhagavad Gita, which contained the Incarnated God Krishna's sermon on a morally responsible life and whose moral tenets Jesus, Jeremiah and Mohammad would have wholeheartedly agreed with. In the defense of the Muslims there were occasional Islamic regimes and rulers, such as the Mughal Emperor, Akbar the Great, who did extend civil rights, religious liberty and moral recognition also toward Hindus. But what of the Christians? That is a long and miserable story indeed, especially with regard toward their treatment of the Jews, who had to live among them in both Orthodox Eastern Europe and Catholic Western Europe. For a brief moment during the Reformation, there was a glimmer of hope: Martin Luther made common cause with the German Jewish community against their mutual oppressor, the Catholic Church, but when Luther got the spiritual support and political protection he needed from the burghers and the nobles, he then issued an ultimatum to his other key allies, the Jews: you can retain your liberty from Catholic oppression but you must convert to Lutheran Protestantism. The Jews, having a fully satisfactory moral faith of their own, refused, and so Luther became just like his Catholic enemies: he reintroduced an initial (and vengeful) reign of terror upon the Jews and then instituted a permanent state of social and political repression upon the Jewish community, which did not begin to lift until the German Enlightenment of the 18th Century. Today we have an interesting concept called "the Dual Covenant". This arose out of the broader feeling of positive association between Christians and Jews that began in reaction toward Naziism, which gave us the concept of "the Judeo-Christian Tradition". Basically the idea of the Dual Covenant is similar to the Koranic idea of the Peoples of the Book, but goes much farther. Christians who hold to the concept of the Dual Covenant do not view Jews as "second class coreligionists" but as fully equal in terms of the grace of spiritual salvation and without the requirement that Jews believe that the Jewish prophet and rabbi Yeshua ben Maria (Jesus) was the Moshiach (Messiah). What can help the Christian understand how this can be actually so rather than merely adopting it as an unthinking attitude of broad tolerance is a better understanding of Judaism as it developed in Second Temple Times and thereafter. Even while Herod's Second Temple still stood, there were many Jews who were dissatisfied with Temple-centered worship and the tendency of some toward attitudes of hollow attachments to ritual over moral introspection and social justice. The Books of the Prophets in what the Christians know as the Old Testament should be indicative that this trend for social justice began long before even that. However it did continue to refine and develop among Jews along similar yet separately evolving lines to what Jesus prescribed to his own followers. Indeed, Jesus and his teachings were part and parcel of a larger movement within Judaism, which included the non-hypocritical members of the Pharisaic movement, the Essenes, the Qumram separatists, and many other smaller and semi-forgotten groups. After the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, Judaism continued under the Rabbinical Movement, which gave them the Talmud, a moral interpretation and explication of the Mosaic Laws of Judaism. From then on, the remaining Jews (without a Temple anymore in which to practice expiating animal sacrifices) became a religion of moral contemplation and devout observance of moral-legal traditions and communal behaviors in daily, seasonal and yearly life. As an example of social justice, every Jewish community at least from Late Antiquity, through the Middle Ages and up through the Modern Era had a legally-mandated community chest and form of social mobilization to help those who had fallen into various kinds of misfortune get back up on their feet. The Jewish community continued to compose new holy writings by spiritually authoritative and morally respectable figures through the centuries, just as the Christians had their Fathers of the Church and later theologians and honored mystics from Ancient, Medieval and recent times. The progressive moral understanding of Judaism was and is congruent with that of the Christian, and the evidence of that parallel development is seen today by the fact that there are now women rabbis just as there are now women ministers. Of course, what I would truly like to see is something that builds upon this concept of Dual Covenant and creates a real sense of a Covenant of Moral Plurality (i.e., a religious alliance where there is a permanent pact of peace and mutual respect between not only Christians, Jews and Muslims, but also with other faiths committed to moral kindness and social justice, such as Krishnaism, Zoroastrianism, the Baha'i, the Sikhs, Buddhists, and "Great Spirit" aboriginal faiths, etc). If there was only one way to salvation, human beings would only have developed one culture, one language and one civilization, but the planet Earth is a vast world of varied ecological and topographical environments that shaped human life in different ways. Therefore, the reaching out to understand the moral will of the Higher Power had of necessity to take different forms. Now modern communications can give us an unprecedented means to understand people of other faith traditions. Please, let us heal ourselves of morally-occluding divisiveness and misplaced proselytism and respect and love one another as we differently are.