Views On The Spread of Monotheism
Emden was a traditionalist who responded to the ideals of tolerance being circulated during the 18th-century Enlightenment. He stretched the traditional inclusivist position into universal directions. Believing, like Maimonides, that Christianity and Islam have important roles to play in God's plan for mankind, he wrote:
We should consider Christians and Moslems as instruments for the fulfilment of the prophecy that the knowledge of God will one day spread throughout the earth. Whereas the nations before them worshipped idols, denied God's existence, and thus did not recognize God's power or retribution, the rise of Christianity and Islam served to spread among the nations, to the furthest ends of the earth, the knowledge that there is One God who rules the world, who rewards and punishes and reveals Himself to man.
In a remarkable apology for Christianity, he wrote that that the original intention of Jesus, and especially of Paul, was to convert only the Gentiles to the Seven Laws of Noah and to let the Jews follow the Mosaic law. Emden praised the ethical teachings of the founder of Christianity, considering them as being beneficial to the Gentiles by removing the prevalence of idolatry and bestowing upon them a "moral doctrine." Emden also suggested that ascetic Christian practices provided additional rectification of the soul in the same way that Judaic commandments do.
Read more about this topic: Jacob Emden
Famous quotes containing the words views and/or spread:
“A foreign minister, I will maintain it, can never be a good man of business if he is not an agreeable man of pleasure too. Half his business is done by the help of his pleasures: his views are carried on, and perhaps best, and most unsuspectedly, at balls, suppers, assemblies, and parties of pleasure; by intrigues with women, and connections insensibly formed with men, at those unguarded hours of amusement.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,
To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,
To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
To strike his living hi and ho....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)