Mark Reasoner

The Japanese and the Jew

I was born in 1960 at the Seventh-Day Adventist Hospital in Tokyo, Japan. My parents were evangelical missionaries in Japan. They had a healthy appreciation for Japanese culture and language, which they passed on to their children. I remember my father telling me how the Japanese Buddhist priest Kobo Daishi (774-835) went to China to study Buddhism and returned to Japan with a Buddhism that contained a heaven, hell, and salvation through another's merit. Dad explained that this must have been because Nestorian Christian missionaries were in the same area of China where Kobo Daishi was studying. As a junior high student I remember hearing a lecture on how the finger positions of certain Buddhas matched portraits of Nestorian bishops and how the unpronounceable name of the God of Israel was probably written on the sacred mirror that is a Shinto treasure of the imperial family in Japan. Some time after this I remember hearing my father tell a story of how he once was passing a Japanese Christian pastor who was walking along a road. When Dad asked him if he wanted a ride, the pastor gave him a mini-lecture, based on the Buddhist doctrine of self-abnegation, that it was insensitive of my father to think that he, the Japanese Christian pastor, would have any wants! A best-selling book written in Japanese, The Japanese and the Jew, was popular in Japan while I was growing up there. I therefore grew up in an atmosphere where it was expected that people of different religions would dialogue and look for points of cross-fertilization between their religious traditions.

I had no intention of pursuing a degree in religious studies, and while I once considered specializing in Japanese culture and history, I chose to study New Testament in seminary and graduate school. When I began seminary I had no resources to pay for housing, so I found free lodging with a Jewish family in the Highland Park area of Chicago in exchange for baby-sitting and other chores. I learned how to use their dairy dishes for dairy meals and meat dishes for meat meals. I helped the children light candles one night while babysitting them during the week of Hanukah. When I first visited my landlords' synagogue, someone asked me "Are you here to convert?" One other Saturday I didn't go to synagogue, but chose to work on my Volkswagen SuperBeetle. Our neighbor, the synagogue's cantor, came walking home from the synagogue, and saw only my legs protruding from underneath the car. He didn't chide me for not observing the Sabbath, he only asked, "Are you all right?" I thanked him and assured him that I was fine. In seminary I began to read Targum Neofiti and the medieval Jewish commentator Rashi with my friend Joe Anderson and my teacher John Sailhamer. In graduate school I got to know Jon Levenson, a modern Orthodox Jew who used to listen to Moody Bible Institute's radio station on his way into class at the University of Chicago, and then comment on what he had heard on the radio. I got to know his student Joel Kaminsky in my first quarter of seminary in our Aramaic class. My doctoral research focused on the book of Romans, and this book explicitly addresses the question of Christianity's relationship to Judaism. These circumstances have contributed to an interest in Judaism that is both academic and personal.

While I'm interested in comparing religions and learning of all religions, I'm now more interested in Judaism than I am in my Shinto and Buddhist roots in Japan. This is because I am a Christian and I think everyone should learn from one's own mother. Rabbinic Judaism, which is sometimes considered sterile or useless by Christians, is the main vehicle through which God's people continued to worship God as they were commanded for a millennium and a half, without land or temple. Rabbinic Judaism is thus a wonderful gift to the world. Of course Judaism as a way of life is much wider than rabbinic Judaism. In the Judaism class at Bethel College, we will encounter this wide spectrum as we follow how Jews across time and space have lived out their calling to be God's chosen people.

Mark Reasoner
January 27, 2004