Politics & Power Quote by Lionel Blue

Blue is betting on something rarer than interfaith niceness: the idea that Christians and Jews can meet as fully empowered minorities of conscience rather than as victor and victim in a long, bruising European story. The phrasing does quiet work. He doesn`t say doctrines will reconcile; he implies theology is almost a distraction from the real terrain, the lived "experience" of being formed by scripture, ritual, memory, and communal survival. Experience is where habits live: how you read a text, what you fear, what you forgive, what you refuse.

The conditional is the tell: "If this open society continues". That is not sentimental optimism; it`s a political warning delivered in pastoral cadence. Blue knows that Christian-Jewish "encounter" has historically been shaped by power, not curiosity. A liberal democracy that keeps anti-Semitism out of mainstream politics is the precondition for sincerity. Otherwise, dialogue becomes window dressing, a polite performance staged over structural threat.

"Deeper than any theology" is both invitation and rebuke. It suggests that what has most damaged relations isn`t only dogma but the culture built around it: triumphalism, the urge to convert, the habit of casting Jews as a theological foil. Blue, a rabbi turned Anglican minister, is also writing himself into the sentence. He embodies the exchange he advocates, proposing not a blended faith but a mutual education: Christians learning Jewish seriousness about law, text, and peoplehood; Jews encountering Christianity not as persecutor but as a tradition wrestling (sometimes belatedly) with its own history.

The intent is pragmatic moral repair. The subtext is stark: without political safety, spiritual depth is impossible.