To speak of Jewish-Christian relations at the present time requires one to immediately recognise how different these relations are in this more secular period of the history of Western Civilisation than they were in earlier, more religious periods of that history. Jewish-Christian relations today are certainly different in character from the way they were during much of the past two millennia, when ‘Western Civilisation’ was very much a ‘Christian’ civilisation. Throughout this very long, earlier period of history, Jews related to Christians as the masters of the world in which we were continually struggling to survive and maintain our communal life.

As the Millennium approaches, there is considerable interest in the Old Testament idea of Jubilee, but the New Testament application is unexplored. The Jubilee is a key element in understanding both the ministry of Jesus and Palestine in the first century CE.

In his wonderful book, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience, Michael Ignatieff observes that the process of healing the wounds of the past is the most mysterious process of all. Yugoslavia, Rwanda, South Africa are names that remind us that the past continues to torment us because it is not the past. ‘These places are not living in a serial order of time but in a simultaneous one, in which the past and the present are continuous, an agglutinated mass of fantasies, distortions, myths, and lies.’

It is an honour and a delight to be this Society's President and I am immensely grateful for the privilege. I have been coming to the Society's Annual Meetings for about twenty-five years and I owe it more than I can express. It has acted as a basic network of colleagues which I have valued more and more as our conversations have been renewed year by year. It has been my main theological community beyond my church and the institutions in which I have studied and taught: it has been so good to have this broad, ecumenical intellectual community. It has offered a rich theological life, a diversity of theological positions and arguments, and a place where I have regularly engaged with the different generations in our field.