In many corners of the world these days the climate of hostility hangs over any overt Christian faith commitment. Any kind of Christian commitment is now assumed to imply intolerance and often prompts reactions that range from a low-grade hostility and exclusion in the West to the vicious and murderous assaults on Christian believers in Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, Syria and Iraq and elsewhere.

Such issues are not new. Christians have faced them ever since Nero's lions, and even before that. Jews also have faced the same questions all through their history, most...