Time & Perspective Quote by Kenneth Scott Latourette

Latourette is doing something more careful than the blunt line people reach for in interfaith arguments: “Christianity comes from Judaism.” He starts with that proposition, then immediately revises it. “Or rather” is the tell. As a historian of Christianity writing in an era when many church histories still treated Judaism as mere preface, he narrows the claim to a “persistent strain” within Israel’s religion. That phrase matters: it lets him argue continuity without pretending the whole of ancient Israel was secretly Christian-in-waiting.

The intent is both scholarly and theological. Scholarly, because he’s marking Christianity as historically intelligible only against Israel’s texts, symbols, and long moral imagination. The subtext is a warning against simplistic genealogies: Christianity didn’t pop into existence as a free-floating idea, but neither is it licensed to annex Judaism wholesale as its property. By singling out a “strain,” Latourette acknowledges plurality inside Judaism (law, temple, wisdom, prophetic critique, apocalyptic hope) and claims that Christians have selectively read certain threads as converging on their faith.

“Preparation in history” carries the freight. It’s salvation-history language smuggled into historical prose: history as staged, meaningful, directional. Latourette grants Christians the right to see Israel as formative, yet his wording also exposes the asymmetry that has often fueled supersessionism: Judaism risks being framed as valuable mainly for what it leads to. In mid-20th-century Christian scholarship, that tension was live and combustible, sharpened by modern biblical criticism and, soon, post-Holocaust reckonings. Latourette’s sentence tries to balance reverence, rigor, and restraint, even as it reveals how hard it is to describe origins without implying ownership.