Thread by @JoelBaden

Here’s a hot take:

The oft-repeated claim that, despite our differences, Jews and Christians “all believe in the same god” is yet another ostensibly banal but actually deeply insidious token of Christian supersessionism.

Like “Judeo-Christian values” and much other “interfaith” language, it is designed to eradicate the ongoing distinctiveness of Judaism as a lived religion standing alongside, and separate from, Christianity.

It subsumes Judaism under a fundamentally Christian rubric of faith, relegating all of Judaism’s particularities to mere by-products of some essential core, which just happens to be identical to Christianity.

In short: stop it.

Well, this hot take sizzled a bit.

Let me add an idea:

God is a story - or, if you like, a character in a story. In theory, we can have divergent understandings of a character, even have them do different things in different stories, and be the same character.

But at a certain point, the basic character of the character changes so much that it’s not reconcilable with the base version. Or, better, two different versions of the base character diverge too widely from each other to be recognizably the same.

The deities of both Judaism and Christianity are, essentially, fan fiction about the character of YHWH in the Hebrew Bible. There comes a moment when their stories and characters are so different that it’s just the same name - they share almost nothing else.

So I’m not making an absolutist kind of claim that any different ideas about a deity mean that it’s not the same deity. But there’s a line - perhaps not easily defined - where it crosses from mostly commonality to mostly difference.

And, of course, none of that gets at what my main point was probably supposed to be, which is that, all else aside, the rhetoric of “the same god” is deeply problematic in its practical use, the same way that “Judeo-Christian values” is.

But this is the sort of thing I’m definitely not claiming. It’s a spectrum, people, and at some point the line is crossed.

https://twitter.com/jaredmithrandir/status/1386411902872522754

Come on - shared background doesn’t cut it. You have to artificially cut somewhere. The religion of the Hebrew Bible is fundamentally driven from Canaanite religion. Is Christianity the same as Canaanite religion? Why not, by the logic of the shared background?