Hi there. My name is Robbert Veen, and I am a retired minister of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands and a former assistant professor of Christian ethics at the Free University of Amsterdam.
My main interest since my retirement in 2023 has been the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Over the past 20 years I came to the conclusion that Dogmatic Christianity, especially in its understanding of Jesus, has become antijudaistic to the degree of erasing the Jewish roots, the matrix of 1st century Judaism in which Jesus himself must have understood his mission and his role in history. The Apostolic Creed focusses on a Church doctrine that elevated Jesus into the Eternal Son of God, thereby coming dangerously close to polytheism.
I became more and more interested in the human life of Jesus. I believe now that he was a Jew who tried to bring salvation to his people by following the footsteps of the Messiah as he understood it, hoping that God would intervene as a response to his faithfulness. At the Cross however, he had to admit that that did not happen. The famous word he spoke in Greek: tetelesthai, meant “it has finished”, i.e. it has come to an end. God had not intervened to save His Messiah and His people, despite Jesus’s attempt to act like the Messiah in as many respects as possible. Later theology would interpret that as saying: now everything has been completed. I think however that more human and relevant explanation of these words imply Jesus’s recognition that God did not intervene.
The question is therefore relevant: why did God actually forsake him, as he prayed the words of Psalm 22. The unexpected outcome however of Jesus’s failure to be the messiah, was not accepted by his disciples. In a typical Jewish way of reversing tragedy into a new beginning and bringing hope out of despair, they imagined or experienced this new beginning as Jesus’s resurrection from the dead . That resurrection-experience restored the Messianic expectation of his disciples and brought the God of Israel to the masses of pagans that lived “without hope and without God in the world” – to quote Paul.
So what does that mean for contemporary Christianity? Should Christianity hold on to the dogmatic and superhuman Christ, the Son of God? Or should it re-invent itself on the basis of the Jewish faith of the real Jesus and his followers? Should it become more Messianic in its orientation and more inclined to use the Torah and the oral interpretation of it in Rabbinic theology, to establish its minority position in the world? Those are the questions I want to deal with on this channel.
And of course other interests are represented here too: Russian philosophy, hegelianism, Berdyayev, Shmuel Trigano etc. etc.
I hope you will find something that connects with your own interests here. And if you do so, please support this channel by liking it, and become a member of our growing audience. Thanks you for listening and layhitra’ ot.