Daily Inspiration Quote by Lionel Blue

Lionel Blue lands the line like a quiet indictment delivered with a pastoral steadiness: if you want to find Christian anti-Judaism, you don’t have to dig in the gutters of history. It’s sitting in the marble-and-oak canon, in the “respectable” shelves. Aquinas and Luther aren’t fringe cranks; they’re load-bearing pillars for huge swaths of Western Christianity. By naming them, Blue punctures the comforting story that prejudice is an accidental stain on an otherwise clean tradition.

The sentence is carefully engineered. “Can be read” softens the blow just enough to keep it from sounding like a prosecutorial brief, while still insisting the evidence is in plain sight. The pairing is also strategic: Aquinas represents scholastic authority, Luther the fiery populist reformer. Different temperaments, different centuries, same target. Blue’s subtext is that anti-Jewish ideas were not merely tolerated; they were intellectualized and preached, migrating from the study to the pulpit, then into civic life.

Context matters: as a Jewish-born clergyman who moved between identities, Blue speaks from inside the religious world, not as an outside scold. That insider status makes the critique harder to dismiss as hostile. The intent isn’t to “cancel” theologians so much as to force institutional honesty: repentance can’t begin with myths about isolated bad actors. It begins by admitting the harm was, at times, authored by the very people Christianity taught generations to revere.