This year's Mini-Course brought together approximately one hundred Jews and Christians to discuss the question: "Do Jews and Christians Worship the Same God?" Is it possible to deter-mine or make judgments about the dynamics of another community's worship? What difference does it make if we don't worship the same God? These are some of the questions that the ICJS scholars addressed over the course of four two-hour sessions.

For Christians, the question cuts to the heart of their most fundamental affirmations about Jesus Christ. For centuries Christians have maintained that the Jewish people cannot know and worship God apart from faith in Jesus Christ. History tells us that such an ideology sanctioned contempt for Judaism and heinous mistreatment of Jews. Of late, many Christians have come to recognize that they cannot enter into a rela-tionship with the God of Israel without reckoning the ongoing and irrevocable covenant between the people Israel and the God of Israel. But what does it mean for Christians to say that God has never revoked the covenant God made with Israel on Sinai, or that God has never abandoned the Jewish people? What, indeed, are the implications for Christian claims about Jesus Christ?

The issue is different for Jews, but no less problematic. What are Jews to make of the Christian concepts of Incarnation and Trinity? Do such Christian claims about the nature of God compromise the integrity of monotheism and lapse into a fun-damentally pagan perspective? Must the Jewish tradition reject all other competing assertions about the nature of God? Are Torah-observant Jews obligated to conclude that Christian understandings of God are not only unintelligible, but also false?

Mini-course participants discovered that Christians and Jews are far more distinct than we often acknowledge. Yet our common study also illuminated points of intersection and shared conviction. Here is a question of enormous importance that cannot be answered easily by either Christians or Jews without a great deal of study -- both of their own tradition and of the tradition of the other.