Adam Kirsch reviews Walter Homolka's and Hans Küng's How to Do Good and Avoid Evil:
[A]fter listing the debts of Christianity to Judaism, [Küng] names three things that Judaism owes to Christianity. First is “universality of belief in God”: Christianity, we learn, rescued Judaism from “Pharisaism” and its “anxious and zealous fixation on the letter of the Torah,” thus making monotheism palatable to the whole Roman world. Then comes “the Jewish Enlightenment”: one might have thought that the Enlightenment was a secular movement, opposed to traditional Christianity as well as traditional Judaism, but Küng implies that somehow Christianity is responsible for “leading Jews out of their medieval ghetto … and into modern culture.” Finally comes “the Jewish Reform”: here the gift of Christianity was that “Judaism was now understood as a prophetic-ethical religion—a religion of justice, mercy, and unconditional love of humankind.”
Without Christianity, in other words, Judaism would be a pharisaical, provincial, benighted, and unmerciful faith; and classical German Reform Judaism represents the best form of Judaism because it is the least unregenerate, the least stiff-necked. In this way, it becomes clear how even well-meant ecumenicism can end up reinforcing the oldest stereotypes—and how the invitation to sign up for a global ethic can turn into pressure to disavow everything that separates a minority faith from the majority. There must be better ways to do good and avoid evil than this.
The Dish 