User:SkyWriter/GlossaryArchive

The following is a parallel glossary of terms commonly used by Christians, Jews, and Messianics. These terms often arise in interfaith dialog and have sometimes caused confusion. When Jews and Christians discuss religious and theological ideas, they often use the same words, but in different ways. For example, the Vatican has credited differences in the Jewish and Roman Catholic meaning of the words "Mission" and "Evangelization" to explain why Jewish leaders feared that the September,2000 Vatican declaration Dominus Jesus was a renewed endorsement of Christian proselytizing of Jews. The Archbishop of Canterbury has also addressed the problem of language in interfaith dialog, saying,"we are all painfully capable of reaching for the easiest language, the language that fits our own individual experience, when speaking of God, and fail to compare notes with each other or to submit what we say to an acknowledgement that the scale of what we’re talking about should teach us some        caution....So quite a bit of interreligious encounter, historically and at the casual level, tends to settle for this basic idea, that the representative of another faith is really, as it were, speaking the same language but making appalling mistakes which render proper communication in the language impossible."

In recent years historic and longstanding differences between Judaism and Christianity have been further complicated by the presence of Messianic Jewish communities. Term and symbol confusion created by Messianic Jewish groups were the subject of joint Jewish statement supported by all major US streams of Judaism: Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism. The statement decried the fact that Jews for Jesus "deceptively uses the sacred symbols of Jewish observance ... as a cover to convert Jews to Christianity".

Term and symbol confusion have also been the subject of a condemnation issued by the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington:"We condemn proselytizing efforts which delegitimize the faith tradition of the person whose conversion is being sought ... by celebrating Jewish festivals, worshiping on the Jewish Shabbat, appropriating Jewish symbols, rituals and prayers in their churches, and, sometimes, even calling their leaders 'Rabbi', they seek to win over, often by deception, many Jews who are sincerely looking for a path back to their ancestral heritage. Deceptive proselytizing is practiced on the most vulnerable of populations - residents of hospitals and old age homes, confused youth, college students away from home. These proselytizing techniques are tantamount to coerced conversions and should be condemned."

Messianic Jews maintain that Jews are being assimilated into secularism at a high rate, and they are following the example of Jesus to reacquaint such lost and disenfranchised Jews with traditional Jewish religious practices.

Glossary Table
The following sets of tables list several terms that are likely to cause confusion. The definitions are not to be understood as statements of ultimate truth, but examples of perceived meanings in each group.

The glossary is in alphabetical order, and the groups are listed in alphabetical order.