Bridge Builders: Interview with Rev Dr Geoffrey Ready

1. What inspired you to get involved with your work in challenging and combatting anti-Judaism and antisemitism?

Part of the answer is theological, and it goes quite deep. I came to my work as a liturgical theologian, and liturgical theology is, at its core, a form of narrative theology. The conviction behind it is that human beings are not primarily idea-holders or rule-followers, we are story-dwellers. We become who we are by inhabiting narratives: the stories that tell us where we come from, what we are for, and where we are going. There's a whole tradition of moral philosophy (associated with thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre) that makes this case rigorously: that virtue, character, and identity are only intelligible within the context of a story, a tradition, a community of practice that carries that story forward. You can't know what a good human life looks like without first asking: good within which narrative?

For a Christian, and especially for an Orthodox Christian formed by liturgical life, that question has a clear answer. The most important story, the one that gives everything else its meaning, is the story of God and Israel. It is the story that the scriptures tell from beginning to end: a God who calls, who covenants, who is faithful even when faithfulness is not returned, who acts in history for the sake of the world. Every Christian claim about Jesus, about salvation, about the life of the Church, is a claim made within that story, as a continuation and a fulfilment of it, not as a departure from it or a replacement of it.

Once I saw that clearly, I couldn't unsee it. And with it came the inescapable corollary: if the story of God and Israel is my story as a Christian, if it is the narrative I inhabit, the one that tells me who I am, then the Jewish people are not strangers to me. They are, in the most theologically serious sense, my own. Which means that antisemitism is not just a social problem I should care about. It is a betrayal of the story I claim to live inside.

That's what drew me in. And the more I've pursued it, through scholarship, through dialogue, through friendship, the more convinced I've become that this isn't a niche interest for specialists. It's close to the centre of what Christian faithfulness requires.

Rev Dr Geoffrey Ready

2. What role do you believe interfaith relationships play in addressing antisemitism?

They're irreplaceable, but I'd want to be precise about why. Antisemitism thrives on abstraction: on "the Jews" as a category, a symbol, a projection screen. Real relationships destroy abstraction. When you've sat with Jewish colleagues and friends and wrestled honestly over texts and history and the present moment, the antisemitic imagination simply has nowhere to land. Beyond that, I think non-Jewish communities need Jewish partners who will tell them the truth, who will say, "that theological position, however traditional it feels to you, has consequences for us." That kind of honest friendship is what genuine dialogue makes possible.

3. What work, initiatives, or relationships are you most proud of?

I chair an organisation called Orthodox Christians in Dialogue with Jews, and the work I'm probably most proud of is the sustained academic consultation we've been running between Orthodox Christian and Jewish scholars. What makes me proud isn't the scholarly output, though that matters, it's the quality of the honesty. These are conversations where people are willing to name things that are uncomfortable, including things that are uncomfortable about their own tradition. That's rare, and it's the only kind of dialogue that actually moves anything.

Closer to home, I think about the students I've taught in courses like "Salvation Is from the Jews" at Trinity College. Forming the next generation of clergy and lay leaders with a different theological imagination — one that doesn't treat the Jewish people as a superseded chapter — feels like some of the most durable work I do.

4. What are some of the most significant challenges you've encountered and how have you navigated them?

Two come to mind. The first is internal to Christian communities: there is a version of interfaith work that is really just mutual affirmation, where everyone leaves feeling good but nothing has actually been examined. Pressing past that, helping Christian communities see that their own theology may carry antisemitic freight, requires a kind of pastoral care and persistence. People don't usually receive criticism of their tradition well, even when it's offered with love.

The second is the challenge of the present political moment, which has made some conversations harder. Questions about Israel and Palestine, for instance, can generate real heat in interfaith settings. I've tried to hold to a principle: our primary commitment as Christians in dialogue with Jews is to the Jewish people and their safety and dignity, not to any particular political programme. That's a distinction worth defending, even when it's uncomfortable.

5. In today's climate, what concerns you most about antisemitism — and what gives you hope?

What concerns me most is the normalisation, the way antisemitic tropes have re-entered mainstream discourse and found defenders across the political spectrum. It's not confined to the fringes anymore, and that's genuinely alarming. I'm also concerned about the isolation many Jewish communities feel: the sense that people they considered allies have gone silent or, worse, have found reasons to make exceptions.

What gives me hope is the response I see from people of genuine faith who take this seriously. Not as a political statement, but as a moral and theological obligation. When a congregation or a diocese or an interfaith organisation decides to do the hard work of examining its own history and its own theology, that's real. That changes things slowly, but it changes them.

6. What insights have you gained through your work that others might not immediately see or understand?

That antisemitism within Christian communities often doesn't look like hatred, it looks like theology. Supersessionism, the teaching that the Church has replaced the Jewish people in God's purposes, is the most important example: it's been mainstream Christian teaching for most of Christian history, it's not usually experienced as hostile, and yet it has provided the theological infrastructure for centuries of persecution. You can't address Christian antisemitism if you're only looking for people who actively dislike Jews. You have to be willing to examine the ideas that make antisemitism feel theologically legitimate.

Rev Dr Geoffrey Ready

7. Is there a story or experience you can share that captures why this work matters and how it can make a difference?

One of the most moving experiences I have, and it happens repeatedly, is watching students encounter Jesus and Paul as if for the first time, not because the texts have changed, but because the frame has.

Most people who come to Christian theology, whether they've grown up in the church or arrived at it later, carry an assumption they've never quite examined: that Jesus was somehow working against Judaism, or at least at its margins, a radical who broke with his tradition, or whose significance lies in transcending it. And Paul is usually read as the one who completed that departure, the former Jew who left Judaism behind and founded something new.

When you set that aside and read carefully, when you let Jesus be who he actually was, a first-century Jewish teacher whose every word was in conversation with Torah, the prophets, and the wisdom tradition, something remarkable happens. The Sermon on the Mount stops being a new law that replaces the old one and starts sounding like the heartbeat of everything Israel's tradition was reaching toward. The parables stop being illustrations of abstract spiritual truths and start sounding like precisely the kind of teaching a master of the Jewish imagination would offer. And Jesus stops being a figure who rescues people from Judaism and starts being the one in whom the whole story of God and Israel comes into sharpest focus.

And Paul turns out not to be a convert from one religion to another. He is, to the end, passionately committed to the God of Israel, wrestling with how the nations are now to be drawn into the covenant story. His letters stop being a systematic departure from Judaism and start reading like the work of someone consumed by the question of what it means that Israel's God has acted for the whole world.

I watch students sit with this and you can see something shift. There's often a kind of quiet astonishment, not that their faith has been undermined, but that it has been given back to them with deeper roots. And then comes the harder question, which they usually arrive at themselves: if this is what we should have been reading all along, why has the church so often read it the other way? Why has so much Christian interpretation set Jesus over against his own people?

That question is where the work of confronting antisemitism begins. Not in hatred, but in a misreading, a long, consequential, catastrophic misreading, that has had real victims. When students feel that, they don't just have new ideas. They have a different kind of responsibility.

8. What is one thing you wish more people understood — or one step they could take?

I wish more Christians understood that engaging seriously with Judaism is not an add-on to Christian faith, it's an act of theological integrity. The scriptures we read, the God we worship, the categories we use to understand salvation... none of it is intelligible without Jewish context. Once you really see that, the Jewish community is no longer "other." They're the people without whom your own tradition doesn't make sense.

The one step I'd suggest: start with your own tradition. Before you look outward, ask what your own community's history and theology say about the Jewish people. That's the honest starting place, and it's often more challenging, and more rewarding, than people expect.