Scholars' Corner
Toward a Jewish Theology of Christianity
Michael S. Kogan
Republished with permission from the Journal of
Ecumenical Studies, 32:1, Winter 1995
CONTENTS
Precis
I. The Dialogue So Far
II. Self-Affirmation and
Self-Transcendence
III. The Abrahamic Model
IV. Jewish and Christian
Fulfillments
V. From Mutual Respect to
Mutual Influence
VI. One More Step: Re-examining
Christian Claims
VII. Conclusions
Endnotes
About Michael S. Kogan
Precis
Since Vatican II, Catholic and mainstream Protestant churches have been rethinking their positions on Jews and Judaism. Former supersessionist views have been replaced with acceptance of the Jewish claim that the Covenant between God and Israel is still in force and is, in fact, eternal. In recent years, Jewish thinkers and at least one branch of Judaism (Conservative) have responded with limited reevaluations of Christianity. The time has come for Judaism to look into its own texts so as to achieve a deeper self-understanding by developing a new and positive approach to its sister faith. This essay presents Christianity as the breaking open of the Covenant to include gentile peoples. God has brought this about through the work of Jesus and his interpreters. If this is so, then Judaism, viewing Christianity as a divinely intended movement, will be led to reevaluate its truth-claims. This in no way compromises the truth of Judaism but will cause Jews to understand their own faith more fully by locating it in the larger context of God's universal redemptive plan.
I. The Dialogue So Far
Nearly thirty years have passed since the Second Vatican Council undertook its epoch-making work. This revolutionary Roman Catholic reevaluation of Jews and Judaism opened up a wholly new era in Christian-Jewish relations. Since then, the views of the Council have been explicated and in many ways enlarged by additional Vatican statements on how to deal with Jews and Judaism in the interfaith dialogue.[1] This theme is further expanded in the new catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, released in English translation in 1994.[2] Article 121 states: "The Old Testament is an indispensable part of Sacred Scripture. Its books are divinely inspired and retain a permanent value, for the Old Covenant has never been revoked." Elsewhere in its text the catechism returns to old notions of Israel's story as preparatory for Christianity and its Sacred Scripture as essentially typological. This is, from the Jewish point of view, a less than satisfactory approach. However, the catechism is consistent in its affirmation of the continuing validity of God's covenant with Israel and even goes so far as to state that the church has much to learn from the ongoing religious and liturgical practices of the Jewish people.
Since Vatican II, in a truly astonishing series of developments, mainstream Protestant churches in America have issued comprehensive statements on Jews and Judaism.[3] All of them agree to the central proposition of the Jewish faith that God has entered into an eternal covenant with the people Israel and that the Torah- centered way of life is a fully valid way of living with the Creator and Redeemer of the world. This remains as true after the "Christ event" as it was before. As these remarkable statements have appeared, individual Jewish theologians have responded with new evaluations of Christianity.[4] Most of this work has been done in the past five years, demonstrating how long it has taken for Jews, even as individuals, to respond theologically to what has been going on in the churches for three decades.
It is certainly understandable that Judaism would be a bit slow in responding to what is, after all, a totally new attitude on the part of Christianity. The church had been denying the ongoing validity of the "Old Covenant" after Calvary so insistently and for so long that Jews needed some time to absorb the enormity of the change taking place in our time. It is also true that the task of reevaluating Judaism is easier for Christians than reevaluating Christianity is for Jews. For, even though the church has viewed the Jewish Covenant as obsolete, the "Old Testament" has been preserved and revered by virtually all Christians following the rejection of the Marcionite heresy. By incorporating Jewish Scriptures into its own canon, the church had maintained quite properly that its own validity rested on the prior validity of the faith of Israel. The only question was how to evaluate that faith in the post-Easter world. So, the church has a sacred text to deal with in their "Old Testament," a text that is available to them from inside their own tradition now that they seek to interpret it anew.
However, in seeking to reevaluate Christianity, Judaism must go beyond its own sacred texts into what must be, for it, the unexplored territory of the "New Testament." Having rejected it as sacred literature for so long, it is not easy for Judaism to look again, as it must if it is to see Christianity in a new light. I will hold in this essay that, while Judaism's reevaluation of Christianity will eventually lead it to examine the New Testament record, this reassessment cannot begin with a text outside our own tradition. We must begin with our own text; then, led by our text, we move on to examine how that text functions in world history. Finally, having discovered Christianity in that history, we can attempt a rereading of Christian texts in light of our own. As stated above, the past five years have seen the publication of a number of statements on Christianity issued by individual Jewish theologians. Most are interesting and provocative, but none has gone beyond saying that Christianity is a "divinely intended outreach, and Jesus...God's instrument for bringing many--but not all--Gentiles into partnership with God to perfect the world."[5] Even this statement has not been developed or explained satisfactorily. I will attempt to do that below and to take the next step beyond this acknowledgment. It must also be noted that many Jewish theologians have said much less than this, holding that the highest level of Jewish response to the Christian faith is that we can come to "understand" what Christians are talking about.[6] Others hold that Christians and Jews can work together on ethical and social concerns but have little or nothing to say to each other religiously.[7] Barren ground for a dialogue, indeed! While individual Jewish theologians have been struggling with their reevaluations of Christianity, at least one official Jewish body has produced a statement on behalf of its clergy and laity. In 1988, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism issued its statement of faith, "Emet ve-Emunah:"
As Conservative Jews, we acknowledge without apology the many debts which Jewish religion and civilization owe to the nations of the world. We eschew triumphalism with respect to other ways of serving God. Maimonides believed that other monotheistic faiths--Christianity and Islam--serve to spread knowledge of, and devotion to, the God and the Torah of Israel throughout the world. Many modern thinkers, both Jewish and Gentile, have noted that God may well have seen fit to enter covenants with many nations...
Theological humility requires us to recognize that although we have but one God, God has more than one nation. Our tradition explicitly recognizes that God entered into a covenant with Adam and Eve, and later with Noah and his family as well as His special covenant with Abraham and the great revelation to Israel at Sinai. It is part of our mission to understand, respect, and live with the other nations of the world, to discern those truths in their cultures from which we can learn, and to share with them the truths that we have come to know.[8]
While this statement is helpful as far as it goes, it seems to me that the multiple-covenant model is not suited to explicating the special relationship existing between Judaism and Christianity. A single-covenant model is to be preferred, because it reflects more faithfully the events through which the covenant between God and Israel was broken open by Christianity to include the nations of the world. The multiple-covenant concept is also suspect because it opens the way for a Jewish approach to Christianity based upon the tradition of the so-called Noahide Laws. This tradition has often been invoked in Judaism's less-than-successful attempts to deal with gentiles who happen to be Christians, rather than with Christianity. The Noahide tradition first appears in the Tosefta, a commentary of the second century C.E. Extrapolated from the story of Noah and his sons, the Noahide Laws codified God's expectations regarding gentile conduct. All human beings were required to observe six prohibitions and one requirement. Forbidden to all were homicide, robbery, incest, idolatry, blasphemy, and cutting a limb from a living animal. In addition, all were required to live only in societies with functioning legal systems. It must be stressed that these laws were for all gentiles. Christians were not mentioned. They were ignored as a group, as Judaism had consistently tried to ignore the new religious movement once it had moved beyond the borders of Israelite faith.
To appeal to the Noahide Laws in dealing with Christianity today is evidence that the Jews who do so continue to ignore Christianity as a distinct movement. No Christian can recognize herself or himself in this limited list of minimal requirements for civilized life. To hold that this is all that God expects of Christians is profoundly insulting to the moral and ethical system that is the fruit of Christian faith. Paul van Buren has recognized the inadequacy of this approach and has stated that Judaism must find a way less "off to the side" than the Noahide Laws for dealing with Christians and Christianity.[9] Unless we do so, we are effectively pushing Christianity off to the side as well. Such a condescending attitude will make authentic dialogue impossible. Christians must be addressed as Christians, not simply as gentiles.
II. Self-Affirmation and Self-Transcendence
It has become a commonplace of postmodern thinking that everything that human beings can legitimately say about their worlds must be said from a particular location in time and space. There is no neutral place from which to speak or even on which to stand. Every time and place is, by definition, particular and unlike any other. All of us speak out of presuppositions and prejudgments. These are usually communal sets of presumptions that shape our thinking, our seeing, and our speaking. Every language is an interpretation from a point of view; every perception is shaped by the geography, history, and social context of the perceiver. If we try to step out of that given context, we merely step into another set of assumptions. Even our claim to be autonomous, independent, rational individual thinkers merely reflects the leftover intellectual assumptions of the European Enlightenment.
All of this makes a valid point about the undeniable contextual quality of human life and thought, and yet it poses certain vexing problems for interfaith dialogue. It is true that Jewish and Christian participants come to the dialogue as spokespersons for the respective traditions that have shaped them, not as atomistic individuals who just happen to find themselves connected (and none too closely) to this or that faith community. Dialogue is not only a conversation between individuals but is also a meeting of belief systems: in this case Judaism and Christianity. As an individual I am free to assent to any creedal formula or item of faith, but as a Jew or a Christian I must be conscious of the parameters of my tradition, its integrity, and its particular self-definition.
The problem is that, if we carry this too far, interfaith dialogue can never get beyond the stage of an exchange of views leading to mutual respect. For many that is enough, and it is already beyond the stage at which many Christians and Jews presently find themselves. But, is this really the final goal of interfaith dialogue? Can we not imagine moving beyond mutual respect to mutual influence and, ultimately, to mutual enlightenment? Can the insights of one tradition help expand and deepen the self-understanding of the other? Some interpretations of the postmodern school seem to uphold what might be called a balkanization of thought in which whatever I can appreciate of the other's thinking turns out to be merely a reflection of ideas taken from my own tradition.[10] In such circumstances does not the other become no more than an image of myself? Is true growth beyond my own perspective possible if I cannot understand anything beyond the limits of my own current position?
It is true that religious traditions must engage in self- affirmation, but it is also true that applied religion, both for the individual and for the group, must contain an element of self- transcendence. Heidegger spoke of the human being as "thrown projection."[11] Our thrownness is our facticity, our placement in a particular position in the world where we must take our stand, but the essential structure of thrown human beings is self- projection, being-in-the-world among other beings also in the world. What we are--what we become--is as tied to that projection, that freedom, as it is to our thrownness.
Martin Buber pursued this idea and, stressing self-projection into the world, concluded that there is no self, no I in isolation, but only the I of the I-it relationship or the I of the I-thou relationship. The former is a stunted I that is unable to realize itself because it denies the thou of the other. By reducing the other to an it, a means, not an end, the I loses itself together with its calling to affirm, to respect, to love the thou. The I fails to understand itself in failing to give full recognition to the other as thou.[12]
So it is with religious communities as well as individuals. To be all they can be they must live in a self-transcendence arising out of full self-affirmation. This is our starting point in our attempt to construct a theology of Christianity, our partner in dialogue, out of the self-understanding of Judaism. It is my contention that the absence of self-transcendence impoverishes our self-affirmation; specifically, we cannot understand ourselves fully as Jews without taking note of and affirming the work of Christianity in the world. In so doing we can accept the perspectival insights of postmodernism but still insist that we must allow our thought to be led by our own tradition beyond its parameters, so that dialogue may be a true experience of learning and growth.
III. The Abrahamic Model
Now the Lord said to Abram, "Get you out from your country and your kindred and your father's house, and go to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation...and in you shall all the fmmilies of the earth be blessed." (Gen. 12:1-3; my translation)
Here we begin. Here the Holy One calls Abram our father to God's service and calls all Israel along with him. The language is of self-transcendence, of projection from where one is to a new place. The one who is mired in facticity--unable to move, to see beyond the givenness of his or her particular situation--is as one dead. Thus, God commands, "Get you out," from smallness to greatness, from stasis into possibility, from here to a place as yet unnamed. Israel, never great in numbers, is ever great with promise. It is great because it carries a great truth. As the finite bearer of the infinite life of God, Israel is a witness- people ever en route to the Kingdom. This people, hidden in Abram's loins, will, in its divine-human life, turn the leap of faith into a walk through history. "Get you out," God commands, into a future only dimly glimpsed, if at all, at the time of this calling.
However, Israel is not pure projection. It is a concrete entity headed for an earthly place, a new facticity, "the land that I will show you." This land represents all the particulars of Jewish life: peoplehood, culture, law, and Zion itself. All these are crucial to the self-definition and self-affirmation of the people called by God. That call is echoed in the Sinai Covenant with which the Holy One seals an eternal compact with the people. As they were called by grace, so are they now sustained by Torah, the divine constitution of the holy community. If Israel bears God into the world, the Torah is its vehicle for doing so. It is the narrative of call and obedience that defines the life of this people, the love story of God and Israel that binds Lover and beloved to each other and Heaven and earth into eternal intimacy.
What is the end toward which all this tends? "In you shall all the families of the earth be blessed." The last word is universal blessing, blessing for all peoples through the particular call of Abraham and his seed. There is no denying this: Israel is not called for its own sake alone. It is created and continues to live as God's instrument for the universal blessing of all humankind. Its call as a witness-people assumes this. From the very beginning, Israel's mission is clear, and it is one of self-transcendence growing out of self-affirmation. At different periods of our history, one or the other of these themes is stressed, sometimes almost to the eclipse of the other, but always the balance is reestablished: "a great nation...a blessing to the world," a single calling, a dual vocation.
Out of what I believe to be this authentically Jewish interpretation of what it means to be a member of the holy people of God, we come to the Jewish-Christian dialogue. Abraham's call leads us to it. Since Abraham, we Jews have looked for and found the purposes of God in the ongoing flow of historical events. The God of Israel is the God of history. Through our history the Lord has ever made known the divine will for us and for all peoples. God brought us from slavery to freedom to promised land and out into the world. God refined us through suffering and redeemed us time and again, once needed lessons had been learned. God sustained us "through fire and water," ever deepening our understanding of the divine purpose and of our calling. History has been for us a vehicle of instruction as we learn from our God and seek to bring the knowledge of God's faithfulness to all peoples in accordance with Abraham's commission--and this is why we cannot avoid dialogue with Christianity.
IV. Jewish and Christian Fulfillments
The plain historical fact is, and is likely to continue to be, that the vast majority of those who know the God of Israel do so through Christian interpretation. "For from the rising of the sun to its setting my name is great among the nations..." (Mal. 1:11). This prophetic utterance, questionable in its time, is true today through the agency of Christianity. This is a truth, but an awkward truth for Israel. We received the divine commission, and we believe that we are custodians of the original and purest form of ethical monotheism. In accordance with that belief, our people have gone to their deaths or have lived under horrific persecutions "for the sanctification of the Name." It was we who were called to give blessing to the world, and we have done so. Both in the promised land and in the lands in which God has caused us to dwell, we have sought to witness. Jews are to be found in every movement for human dignity, cultural excellence, and social justice. We have worked to enrich human experience with that transcendent dimension that expresses itself in the deepening of God-consciousness and in the search for spiritual meaning, intellectual vitality, and the aesthetic sublime. At times, some of these efforts have seemed to take Jews far from the original religious terms of their calling, but the ennoblement of human life is the end, and, if that is so, then the faithfulness of Israel has been notable.
This does not mean that all are faithful. God's call is to the people as a collective individual, and so are God's promises. Single individuals of the stock of Abraham have often strayed and have sought to break their ties with their people or their God or, rather, to allow them to dissolve by neglect. The prophets called our ancient renegades to repentance, and renegades and prophets are with us still. However, despite the total failures of some of us and the partial failures of all of us, the people Israel sustains its witness in many ways and in many places. Of course, those of us more closely in touch with the original specifically religious terms of God's call consider that these are and remain the defining elements of Jewish life. To be a Jew is to be an upbuilder of God's Kingdom on earth and to call all peoples to a sanctified life of obedience to God's sovereign will. Our success in fulfilling this essential condition of our corporate life has been real, but it has been mixed.
What has all this to do with Jewish-Christian dialogue? Just this: We are no longer alone in performing our central task of religious witness. Christians stand today by our side as upbuilders of the Kingdom. They have spread the knowledge of Israel's God across the Western world and beyond. How did this happen? What does it mean for the world and for us?
First of all, it is difficult today to hold that the conversion of the Western world to the worship of the God of Israel was some sort of gigantic mistake. After all, Jewish religious authorities and theologians have long acknowledged that Christians are not idolaters but believers in the one true God. They have further affirmed that Christianity has brought God's Torah, albeit differently interpreted, to the peoples of the world.[13] These views tend toward the conclusion that Christianity is a God- inspired movement out of core Judaism into the gentile world. It is true that the gentiles could have converted to Judaism, an event that would have been welcomed by Jews, but that did not happen very often. Another entirely unexpected event took place. Jesus of Nazareth appeared, and through him and his interpreters God's covenant with Israel was dramatically broken open to include the gentile peoples.
Abraham's seed was to bring blessing to all nations. In Christianity we see a partial fulfillment of this summons. We have referred to Israel's role as witness-people as also fulfilling the Abrahamic call. We therefore stand before a double realization. Who could have predicted it? The ancient prophets would have been flabbergasted; the contemporary Jews "were astonished;"[14] the early Christians themselves only reluctantly came to acknowledge that something quite new was afoot. Once they realized how new it was, however, they soon came to misconstrue it. For them Jesus became the replacement for Torah, and the new people of God (the church) became the replacement for the old (Israel). The Jews were seen as cut off, and Torah was denigrated as an inadequate guide to full spiritual life.[15] The claim was made that the gospel was brought to the Jews first; only when they refused it, was it presented to the gentiles.[16]
That Jews perceived these new theories as threats is certainly understandable. Christians seemed to be attacking Torah while, at the same time, making claims about the man Jesus that seemed extravagant to most Jewish ears. Traditional Judaism was clearly facing a serious disruption. But, as the Jewish-Christian promulgators of the new teaching reluctantly began to turn their attention to the gentiles, the threat to Judaism faded, and the ancient faith returned to its several traditional paths.
At the time, Judaism was hardly in a position to include Jesus in its faith tradition. He taught with individual authority; he attacked the temple polity; he presumed to forgive sins; and he was hailed by his some of his followers as the Messiah for no particular reason that most Jews could figure out. Had he been a bit more circumspect in his teaching and had his followers made more modest claims, Jesus would probably have been incorporated into Jewish faith as at least a noted rabbi or at most an eloquent prophet of a compassionate God. He is certainly the great Jewish figure of his age, standing far above his contemporaries in the clarity and compelling beauty of his words and in the even more compelling pathos of his life and death. He is a giant of Jewish religious history. Martin Buber's famous words ring true in many Jewish ears today:
From my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother...and to-day I see him more strongly and clearly than ever before.
I am more than ever certain that a great place belongs to him in Israel's history of faith and that this place cannot be described by any of the usual categories.[17]
Jews were unable to see this or to say it at the time and in all the times since, during which Christianity was battering away at us to give up the life of Torah and accept Jesus as a new vehicle of God's grace. Today, however, the dialogue has opened the way for a new Jewish appreciation of our "great brother." No longer do the mainstream Protestant churches deny the ongoing validity of our covenant with God. No longer does the Roman Catholic Church consider the continuing life of Torah-centered Judaism to be anachronistic. These churches today affirm the central propositions of our Jewish faith: the permanent election of Israel, the ongoing efficaciousness of the covenant, the continuing validity of Torah life and worship. As interpreted by our Christian partners in dialogue, Jesus is no longer to be used by the church as a threat to us, as one who calls us to abandon our faith and our way of life.
The issue of who the Messiah is remains an awkward one. From the Jewish standpoint, Jesus did not fulfill the prophetic expectations of the Messiah. He was certainly not the Messiah Israel had been awaiting. The Jews remained in subjugation to Rome, and war, hatred, poverty, and disease continued to flourish; in short, the world remained unredeemed. But, if not Israel's Messiah, Jesus has proved to be the agent by which the gentile world has been grafted onto Israel as sharers in God's covenant first revealed to Abraham. While the church is probably not ready to take the suggestion of some[18] that it drop its claim that Jesus was Israel's Messiah, thoughtful, educated Christians should be led by the dialogue to recognize that, if they insist on using the title, they should make clear that they are defining it in an internalized and spiritualized way unknown to mainstream Judaism. But, is this issue really all that crucial? If we mean different things by "Messiah," then the question "Is Jesus the one?" can be answered (as I do when my New Testament students ask it), "Yes and no, depending on how you define the term." There is no conflict here. As to whether Jesus will return in triumph to fulfill scriptural prophecies of the messianic advent, how can we argue over a future event? When the Messiah comes (or returns), the event itself will settle the question, and one side or the other will reconsider its position. Until then, Jews and Christians are "partners in waiting."[19] However, there is no gainsaying the fact that, even if we are awaiting the same event, we are not awaiting the same person. In this particular, we will have to continue in a relationship of mutually respectful disagreement.
Putting aside the issue of Messiahship, can Israel accept another role for Jesus in its history and in the history of the world? I would answer "yes" on both counts. Surely, if the covenant has been opened to the nations, and if God has done this through Jesus, then a tremendous event in covenant--that is, Jewish--history has taken place. Viewed in this light, Christianity is not a worldly threat to Judaism but a Jewish outreach into the world, an outreach that has certainly brought "blessing" to its recipients who would otherwise be pagans. Through our "great brother," they have come to know Israel's God, and, finally, in these days of dialogue, they are drawing closer to the people and faith out of whose body and soul they have emerged. Can we not see in Jesus Israel's conveyer of the blessings of Abraham's calling to a waiting world? How can such a recognition in any way diminish us or our faith? Once Christians have given up the claim that Christianity is the one and only fulfillment of all that is Israel's, then we can find ourselves free to proclaim that sacred history does teach that Christianity is one fulfillment--alongside the Judaism of the past two millennia--of the promises to Abraham. If Christian claims to fulfillment are neither exclusivist nor supersessionist, how can they do anything but give us the sense of being part of what has become a larger redemptive work? Here is the impact of Christianity on Judaism. That impact is indirect but transfiguring. It is indirect because it does not in any way change the beliefs and practices of Judaism. We continue with our rich religious inner life and its outward manifestations of "Torah and commandments, statutes and judgments." However, if in this way Christianity changes nothing for us, in another way it changes everything. Our self-conception is altered because the context of our religious life is transformed. Now we pursue Torah and witness within an entirely new understanding of the surrounding world, for now we understand that in Christianity we have a partner in witnessing to, in building up, and in waiting for the Kingdom of God. We are servants together of the same Master and, whether mediated through Jesus and church or through Torah and Israel, the divine commission is the same.
Earlier we spoke of religious life as requiring both self- affirmation and self-transcendence. This is, I hope, what has been going on in the pages above. The burden of my argument has been that we Jews cannot understand ourselves and properly proclaim our sacred vocation (self-affirmation) without recognizing that another stands beside us (self-transcendence). This other (Christianity) is engaged in a similar vocation rendered sacred by the same calling (Abraham's) but mediated differently. We seek to be ourselves, to search our own textual resources, and thus to achieve a deeper self-understanding. But, perhaps to our surprise, we find that our self-investigation inevitably leads us from our own text (Gen. 12:1-3) into its partial fulfillment in what has traditionally been seen by Jews as "the other." At last, we find that the other is not as alien to us as we had thought. Here, as in every area of human life, self-understanding seems to be made up of closely related elements of self-affirmation and self-transcendence.
V. From Mutual Respect to Mutual Influence
All this certainly does not mean that Christianity and Judaism are the same. Their styles of thought and expression, their tones, their modes of worship, their forms of spirituality, their symbol systems, and their historic claims are partially or wholly distinct. Abraham Joshua Heschel was quite right when he stated that God probably wills this religious diversity. It certainly makes the world much more interesting, and it forces God's children to reach beyond narrow, parochial categories of self-definition in dialogue with each other. Recognizing this, the dialogue must explore some of the points of divergence, not to determine who is right and who is wrong but, rather, to enable each participant both to know himself or herself better and to profit from the insights of the other, insights that his or her own tradition may have missed or under-emphasized.
In the case of Judaism and Christianity, differences are often a matter of emphasis. It would be difficult to find in one system of thought an idea totally alien to or absent from the other. Interpretations surely do differ, as in the two views of Messiah referred to above. Combinations of ideas are different. Witness Christianity's re-visioning of Jewish ideas, such as the "suffering servant" of Is. 53, the afflicted Davidic heir of Ps. 89, and the redemptive suffering of the martyrs of 2 and 4 Macc. These concepts are brought together with the image of the "son of man" of Dan. 7 and Enoch in a combination unique to Christianity. However, all the component ideas are Jewish. Often the two faiths differ in emphasis. An idea that is present but buried in surrounding material or quickly passed over in Judaism will be picked up by Christianity and transformed into a central and essential motif--but more of that below.
Jews and Christians must explore together a wide spectrum of issues that we agree are important but that we conceive of quite differently. Can we Jews gain insight into the human condition by listening to what Christians have to say about human sinfulness? Have the Holocaust and the other horrors of this ghastly century made us more open to Christian ideas about "original sin"? Can Christians be helped to avoid obsessiveness about sin by exposing themselves to Judaism's more positive evaluation of human moral potentiality? Do Jews have something to learn about individual spiritual struggle from Christians, who seem more prepared than Jews to discuss this dimension of religious life? Do Christians need to learn more about religious community from a people that has lived it so richly for millennia? What can Christians discover in the Jewish tradition of moral protest before God, dating back to Abraham's plea on behalf of the doomed city of Sodom? What can Jews gain from the Christian stress on personal immortality? What can both communities teach each other about the relationship between faith and works or the ultimate vision of the Kingdom of God? Once we have recognized that we share in God's redemptive plan, we can begin to teach each other and learn from each other in a process of mutual enrichment. This is what I have meant in earlier essays by the phrase "mutual respect [leading to] mutual influence."[20] This interaction will lead each community to rediscover elements of its own thought that it may have underemphasized or overlooked. It can also--and this is of crucial importance--stimulate a new and intense God-consciousness among those in the dialogue affiliated with both groups who may have forgotten that religious faith and witness are at the heart of Jewish and Christian identity.
VI. One More Step: Re-examining Christian Claims
As was said above, the past quarter-century has witnessed a remarkable series of official and semiofficial statements by mainstream Christian churches that affirm the ongoing validity of the covenant sealed between God and Israel. All these statements consider Jews as partners in dialogue rather than as candidates for conversion. This means that these Christian institutions now endorse the central self-conception of the Jewish people as a witness-people of God. I have suggested that in developing a Jewish theology of Christianity we view the latter as a God-inspired ethical monotheistic movement out of Judaism into the gentile world. It seems to me that there are certain logical implications of this view of Christianity. If God is the author of the Christian faith as God is of ours, then we must ask this question: "Would God act in such a way as to bring the nations to know God by means of fraudulent claims?" If this is a legitimate question, then is it not time for us to follow up our recognition of the validity of the Christian witness with a readiness to reexamine those claims that make up the central proclamation of Christian faith?
At this point I recognize that I am venturing into territory many Jews will choose not to enter. To clarify what I am about to attempt, I hasten to stress that I envision absolutely no consequences for the faith and practice of Judaism from the approach to Christian claims that I will suggest. Christianity came not for us but for the nations. Our covenant with God is eternal and self-sustaining, and, as regards core doctrine and practice, it is self-sufficient. While we can and should deepen our self- understanding through dialogue with our sister faith, as discussed above, adoption of any part of the kerygma of Christianity would be for us as inauthentic as it is unnecessary. Judaism said "no" to this message 2,000 years ago as an act of fidelity to our God.[21] That "no" must be repeated today, as it has been down through the centuries, but this "no" was not meant to deny Christianity to the nations. For them it offers a path to the God already revered by Israel. To become a Christian is, as Paul stated, to become a child of God by adoption. Such a move makes sense if one is a spiritual orphan. However, if one is a Jew, a natural-born child of God, it would be redundant to apply for adoption by the One who is already one's natural Parent. By proclaiming that God's covenant with Israel is eternal and by giving up active efforts to convert Jews, the mainstream churches have come to accept, if not the form, at least the implications of this argument.
Aware of this and secure in its own faith, Judaism may now feel free to reexamine Christian claims in light of its own textual traditions. A comprehensive Jewish theology of Christianity can do no less. What are the central propositions of the Christian faith? I would suggest the following:
1. The incarnation of God in Jesus.
2. The vicarious sacrifice of Jesus for the sins of the world.
3. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
While these propositions do not speak to Judaism, they have spoken most eloquently to the nations and have, in fact, provided the symbol-system for conveying the knowledge of Israel's God to the world. However, these claims are more than symbols for most Christians. They refer to events by means of which untold millions have been brought close to God. My question is whether Jews, faithful to Israel's Torah, can find in that sacred text, first, a way better to understand these Christian affirmations and, second, a way to deal with them in a positive manner. I believe that, "while we cannot affirm the truth of these propositions, we need no longer insist on their falsity". We cannot affirm their truth because that can only be done from the standpoint of Christian faith, a standpoint we do not share. Nevertheless, we need no longer insist on their falsity, because their message is not now being used by mainstream churches to undermine our faith and because the logic of our view that the divine hand guides Christianity as well as Judaism leads us to entertain the possibility of their being true. If God has chosen to break open the covenant to include the nations and has done so through Jesus, then God may have determined to accomplish this by means of the events claimed by Christianity to have taken place.
The accounts of these events sound strange to Jewish ears, no doubt, but by examining our own Scriptures we may find that they are not as alien as we might have thought. This examination will require a much more comprehensive and lengthy study than the present one, but I would like to make a beginning here.
1. "Incarnation." While almost certainly not an element of the teaching of Jesus, rabbi and prophet of Galilee, the affirmation that God or God's "Word" took human form in the Nazarene became central to the Christian kerygma after Jesus' death. The vast majority of Jews at the time who knew of Jesus rejected this claim, probably because they found no particular reason to accept it. Jesus may have been a notable rabbi; he may even have been a prophet, as many apparently believed,[22] but there was simply no evidence for a claim of divinity. To Jews today this claim may seem utterly incredible, but the Torah may tell a different story. Gen. 3:8 tells us of "the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day"; Gen. 18:1 states that "the Lord appeared to him [Abraham]" in human form. This is not a vision. God, together with angelic companions, eats real food during this encounter. Gen. 32:24 reports that "Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him..." In verse 30 he concludes, "I have seen God face to face." Ex. 24:9-11 states, "Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up [to Sinai], and they saw the God of Israel; and there was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire...[and] they beheld God."
Now, I am aware of the commentaries that interpret some of these references to mean angels rather than God. Rashi took this approach with the Abraham and Jacob stories,[23] but he did not do so in the case of the first and last accounts. He accepted the plain meaning of the texts that tell of God's taking human form. Now, for Jews and Christians who read all these accounts and those of the incarnation in Jesus as metaphorical, there is nothing more to say. One tradition's set of metaphors is as good or as true as another's. However, for traditional believers the biblical narratives tell of events, real events, true events. They are "not historical events," to be sure, for historical events can be exhaustively described in earthly terms and are fully measurable in time and space. The events of religious narrative ("mythos") tell of the "intersection of the timeless with time," the inbreaking of the infinite into the finite. As such, they contain a central and irreducible element of objective uncertainty. This serves to intensify the believer's subjective conviction of the truth of the claim, a truth clearly visible, but only to the eye of faith.[24] What must be avoided here is the metaphorical approach to the sacred text, which trivializes and relativizes all truth-claims. Equally dangerous is its opposite, the fundamentalist-positivistic view with its false promise of certainty, which would destroy the faith it seeks to support. Religious narratives are made up of events in the sense described above. For Jewish believers, then, the thought may come to mind that, if God can take human form in a series of events put forward in one's own sacred texts, one would be unjustified in dismissing out of hand the possibility that the same God might act in a similar fashion in events put forward in another text revered as sacred by a related tradition.
Beyond this we can not and need not venture. What is proclaimed in the Christian doctrine of incarnation (in its several variations) is certainly not the same message we find in the Torah, nor are the accounts cited above central to Judaism in the way the "Christ event" is to Christianity. We do not claim that what is described in the Hebrew Scriptures is exactly the phenomenon at the heart of Christian faith. The appearances of God in human form referred to above are not identical to the Christian account of God's or God's Word's being conceived, born, and living and dying as a man. However, the similarities between Jewish and Christian accounts should lead Jews away from precipitous denial of the possibility of the latter. Again, I wish to emphasize that, whatever we make of the Christian claim, it can have no impact on our belief or practice. If it happened, it happened for the sake of the gentile mission of the church.
2. "Vicarious atonement." This interpretation of Jesus' death as an atonement for the sins of the world seems strange and foreign to Jews who believe that the problem of sin had already been dealt with in the Torah. Its text, together with later authoritative commentaries, outlines what is for us the proper path of life, the means of repentance, and the forgiveness of sins. As stated above, the gentile nations could have come to Torah by conversion to Judaism. Some did just that, and some among them continue to do so, but most have sought the forgiveness of Israel's God through another mediator--in Christian language, "Christ crucified." The vicarious sacrifice of Jesus for humanity's sins may seem strange to Jews, but it comes out of a Christian reinterpretation of verses in Hebrew Scripture, including the familiar words of Is. 53. We need only reproduce verses 4-6:
Surely he has borne our griefs / and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, / smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our / transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement / that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his / own way; and the Lord has laid on him / the iniquity of us all.
This suffering servant of God, whether interpreted as a single exemplary Israelite or as the collective individual, the people Israel, is part of Jewish tradition and Jewish faith. Most of us will read these lines as a poignant description of Israel's redemptive suffering, apparently for the misdeeds of others.[25] We can continue to maintain this interpretation that has such power for us as we contemplate our people's tragic and glorious history.
At the same time, and because of this self-understanding, we can also comprehend what Christians mean in holding that these verses present for them a vivid picture of the atoning work of Jesus. Once again, while it seems strange to us that one man should play this role for the nations, believing what we do about the meaning of these lines, we need not feel obliged to dismiss the Christian interpretation as inauthentic. Their view may not work for us; it may, in fact, be redundant for those who have been granted a prior and eternally efficacious means of pardon. Nevertheless, the nations have found in it the means of grace provided to them by Israel's God. We have no reason to deny its validity for them or to greet the news of it with anything but rejoicing.
Israel has suffered so often in its life of service to the Holy One and to humanity. Surely, we can recognize this redemptive pattern as it reappears in the Jesus story. In Chagall's great painting, "The White Crucifixion," the artist superimposes the icon of the crucified Christ, loins wrapped in a white and blue Jewish prayer shawl, over a background of images of pogroms, burning synagogues, and fleeing Jews--a fitting parallel, indeed, and one in which Jewish and Christian elements reinforce and illuminate each other.
3. "Resurrection." Once again, we must observe that most Jews of the time saw no reason to accept the proclamation that Jesus had been raised from the dead. All those who reported seeing the risen Christ were already part of his following. The New Testament text seems to be telling us that the resurrected Christ was clearly visible, but only to those who looked with eyes of Christian faith. Paul was perhaps the exception, but he had a vision, a religious experience quite different from the resurrection appearances described elsewhere. True, he lists it together with them as one of a series of apparitions, but his description of what he saw reveals the special nature of his experience. Visions are certainly valid for those who have them, but, by their very nature, they cannot demonstrate their validity for others not privy to them.
The important thing to remember is that the majority of Jews could not have rejected the news of Jesus' resurrection because they found the very idea of it preposterous. Resurrection of the body had been affirmed by the Pharisees for many years as part of their apocalyptic hope. Late scriptural and intertestamental books refer to it.[26] As far as we know, only the Sadducees explicitly denied its possibility. What most Jews rejected for lack of evidence was not the possibility, even the ultimate certainty, of physical resurrection but the claim that the man Jesus had, in fact, already been raised.
Today, there is no more reason for Jews to accept as true the news of the resurrection than there was then. However, faced with this claim, and affirming as we now must the validity of the church's outreach from Israel to the nations, we Jews can no longer dismiss the Easter faith out of hand. Once we understand that this event in no way designated Jesus' Messiahship (indeed no prophecy of the Messiah even remotely hints at such a thing), why need we continue to deny its possibility? If such a thing took place far in advance of our apocalyptic expectations, it neither speaks to us directly nor threatens us in any way. It does, as its proclamation intends, astonish us that such a thing could occur in the ordinary course of time--but that is the way of miracles or of claimed miracles; they are astonishing. If this particular claim has come to be accepted by the nations as the ultimate demonstration of the truth of the other two Christian proclamations discussed above, so be it. Why should this trouble us? We need not share the resurrection faith (except insofar as we already do in our eschatological hope) in order for us to take satisfaction in its acceptance by those who so desperately need to hear it. In this proclamation the nations have come to know what we already knew, the faithfulness of God, who has raised Israel from death to life time and time again.
VII. Conclusions
I have not presented these arguments in order to show that Judaism and Christianity are saying the same thing; most emphatically, they are not. Nowhere in our religious texts is there any individual figure similar to Jesus, the Christ of Christian faith. Within Judaism there cannot be such a figure, nor need there be. Our faith teaches us that God has created a collective individual, the people Israel, to be the earthly redemptive agent whose task is to prepare the world for the Divine Reign. That being said, I have proposed that we reacquaint ourselves with elements of the Jewish tradition that can lead us to reconsider Christian claims in a new and positive way. I believe that this is the logical next step and one full of promise for both parties in the dialogue. On the other hand, a Judaism that holds Christian claims simply to be false has little reason to engage in dialogue. Why talk to people who are purveyors of what is at best an error and at worst a lie? A Judaism that accepts Christian claims as true for all peoples would cease to be Judaism. Why persist in saying "no" to a universal truth meant for Israel as well as the nations? However, Judaism can take a third path: It can hold open the "possibility" of the truth of Christian claims, including the three essential doctrines discussed above, as long as it insists that these claimed truths are for the sake of the gentile nations. Once this is understood, Judaism can endorse the Christian enterprise as mainstream Christian churches have endorsed the ongoing witness of Israel, the people of God.
This essay is part of a larger work-in-progress. Much remains to be done, but I believe that in these pages we have already taken some significant steps. Beginning with Abraham's call, we looked at history with Jewish eyes and saw that Christianity has brought central elements of Israel's faith to the nations. Viewing this development as a divinely ordained partial fulfillment of Abraham's commission, we were led to reconsider the truth of Christian claims as they apply to the nations. We found that, while rooted in Jewish ideas, they are new, yet not totally foreign formulations that Israel need not deny as valid for others.
This is not syncretism; Judaism, in its internal faith and practice, is not directly affected by this new evaluation of its sister faith. It does not affirm Christian claims for itself; it simply allows them to others. Judaism remains Judaism; Christianity remains Christianity. We do, however, discern the guiding hand of Israel's God in both. This is not relativism; there are not two truths here, but one: the God of Israel's redemptive plan differently mediated for different peoples. Christians and Jews who refuse to take each other seriously fail to understand the comprehensiveness of God's project and, therefore, fail to understand themselves, for each of them has a role to play in that overall plan. For Jews who do respect and regard as valid the redemptive work of our sister faith, the path sketched above can lead us to an authentic Jewish theology of Christianity.
Endnotes
[1] See the statements issued by the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews of 1974 and 1985, especially "Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church" (1985).
[2] "The Catechism of the Catholic Church" (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Co., 1994).
[3] In Helga Croner, ed., "Stepping Stones to Further Jewish- Christian Relations: An Unabridged Collection of Christian Documents" (New York: Paulist Press, 1977); and Helga Croner, ed., "More Stepping Stones to Jewish-Christian Relations: An Unabridged Collection of Christian Documents, 1975-1983," A Stimulus Book: Studies in Judaism and Christianity (New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985).
[4] Some of these responses are collected in Leon Klenicki, ed., "Toward a Theological Encounter: Jewish Understandings of Christianity" (New York: Stimulus Foundation, 1991).
[5] Irving Greenberg, "Judaism and Christianity beyond Relativism and Absolutism," "National Dialogue Newsletter" 7 (Fall, 1991), p. 8.
[6] Jacob Neusner, "Telling Tales" (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993).
[7] This was the well-known position of the late Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. See his article in "Tradition" (Rabbinical Council of America), Spring-Summer 1964.
[8] "Emet ve-Emunah" (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1988).
[9] Quoted in Richard N. Beruba, ed., "After 25 Years: Jewish-Christian Relations since the Second Vatican Council's 'Nostra Aetate'" report of a conference held at Saint Michael's College, Burlington, VT, in 1990.
[10] Neusner, "Telling Tales."
[11] Martin Heidegger, "Being and Time," tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
[12] Martin Buber, "I and Thou" (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958).
[13] Judah Ha-Levi, Moses Maimonides, Franz Rosenzweig, and others all held various forms of this position. Their views are summarized in David Novak, "Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
[14] Mk. 1:27, 2:12, etc.
[15] Jules Isaac, "The Teaching of Contempt: Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism" (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).
[16] Rom. 1:16.
[17] Martin Buber, "Two Types of Faith," tr. Norman P. Goldhawk (New York: Macmillan Co., 1951; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), pp. 12-13.
[18] Paul M. van Buren, "A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality," vol. 2, "A Christian Theology of the People Israel" (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 350.
[19] "God's Covenant with the Jewish People," Resolution XII, passed by the 114th Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, New Jersey, in 1988 (quoted in Michael S. Kogan, "Jews and Christians: Taking the Next Step," "Journal of Ecumenical Studies" 26 [Fall, 1989]. p. 706).
[20] See, e.g., Michael S. Kogan, "Toward Total Dialogue," "The National Dialogue Newsletter" 6 (Winter, 1990-91), p. 8.
[21] Van Buren, "A Christian Theology," pp. 268-294. The author examines the meaning of Israel's rejection of Christian claims that the world is already redeemed. He concludes that "Israel's 'No'" is a crucial witness against the triumphalism and complacency into which Christianity might otherwise fall.
[22] Mk.8:28; Mt. 21:46.
[23] Moses Maimonides, of course, went to great lengths to explain away all biblical anthropomorphism. However, as Michael Wyschogrod has pointed out, this reflects "a tendency to transform the God of the Bible into the God of the philosophers...This does not constitute a service to Judaism" (Michael Wyschogrod, "A Jewish View of Christianity," in Klenicki, "Toward a Theological Encounter," p. 114).
[24] Kierkegaard, "Concluding Unscientific Postscript" in Robert Bretall, ed., " A Kierkegaard Anthology" (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946), pp. 220-221.
[25] Accounts of individual martyrs whose deaths are seen as substitutionary sacrifices that atone for the nation's sins are found in 4 Macc. 1:11, 17:21, 18:4.
[26] Dan. 12:2; 2 Macc. 7:9, 11, 14, 23, 29; Acts 23:8.
Michael S. Kogan (Jewish) has taught at Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, NJ, since 1973, and chairs its Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. He previously lectured at Syracuse (NY) University (1970-73) and the New School for Social Research in New York (1969-70). He was also Editor-in-Chief of "Ideas: A Journal of Contemporary Jewish Thought" from 1968 to 1974. He holds a B.A. in philosophy and a Ph.D. (1977) in religious studies from Syracuse University, with post-graduate study at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Columbia University Graduate Faculty of Philosophy. He has been director of the School of Adult Jewish Education for Congregation Shomrel Emunah in Montclair, NJ, since 1977, and is a past president of the Congregation. He chairs the Interfaith Committee of Essex and was a founding member of "The Rainbow Group" (Jewish and Christian theologians). His articles have appeared in "Faith and Thought," the "National Dialogue Newsletter," "Journal of Ecumenical Studies" ("Jews and Christians: Taking the Next Step"; Fall, 1989), and a forthcoming anthology on the Abrahamic faiths (Paul Peachey, ed.) from Catholic University Press (1996).
Institute For Interreligious, Intercultural Dialogue Journal Of Ecumenical Studies--Center For Global Studies
Religion Department, Temple University,
Philadelphia, PA 19122
Tel: 215-204-7251 (off.); 477-1080 (home); FAX: 477-5928 or 204-4569
Leonard Swidler, Prof. of Catholic Thought & Interreligious Dialogue
Who
We Are
:: What We Do :: Events
Calendar
Clergy and Educators ::
Scholars' Corner :: Newsletter
Information Resources :: Get
Involved :: Home
