As an Iraqi Christian immigrant to the United States, I journeyed through several Western Christian denominations in my attempt to answer two questions that have plagued me since the first night my feet touched American soil. What does it mean to be an American? And what does it mean to be a Christian? I have spent the years since that night ruminating on them, and early on I realized that the two questions are tethered to one another.
Eric Cohen and Jonathan Silver’s prophetic call to covenantal renewal, set forth in their masterful essay “America’s Hebraic Awakening,” faces two near-insurmountable obstacles as applied to American Christianity. The first is the de-Hellenization of Christianity since the Protestant Reformation, and its fallout; the second is the doctrine of the Fall of man. Both of these are connected to what my friend Joshua Mitchell calls “Hebraic Christianity,” and it is these two points of contention that cause so much dysfunction in our religious, cultural, and political life as a society. While the Hebraic awakening and renewal Cohen and Silver call for requires working past both stumbling blocks, in what follows I will focus on the second.
Read the full essay at Tikvah Ideas.