CHRISTIANITY IN
JEWISH TERMS:
A PROJECT TO REDEFINE THE RELATIONSHIP
by Peter Ochs and David Sandmel
The
time has come for Jews to learn about Christianity in Jewish
terms.
In September of this year 2000, an interdenominational group of
Jewish scholars and rabbis made public the fruits of several years
of work and two millennia of memories. They published a public
statement and an academic book, "Christianity in Jewish
Terms, possibly the first effort ever by a formal gathering
of Jews to initiate a Jewish theology of Christianity.(1)
In this essay, two of the project's editors introduce Cross
Currents readers to the purposes, hopes, and struggles that
lie behind this initiative.
Christianity in Jewish Terms is a theology offered
both about and in response to Christian theologies that themselves
arose from within, about, and in response to Judaism. It also
recognizes that, since the dawn of Christianity, Jewish theologies
have often been a response to Christianity. In the past, these
mutual influences have been obscured by a rhetoric of rejection.
It is only recently that scholars and theologians have become
aware of the almost symbiotic relationship between the two
traditions. This Jewish theology is offered, moreover, in response
to efforts by courageous Christians who, in the years since the
Shoah, have exposed those aspects of their tradition that helped
create Western anti-Semitism and who offered new Christian visions
that affirm the rightful place of Jews and Judaism in the cosmic
order. Our theological project has therefore been dialogic in
form, part of an ongoing history of responses to responses; in
keeping with that theme, we introduce the project here by
illustrating how our editorial group responded and to what we
responded, with what effects.
* * *
Bleak images before the eyes. We editors work, still, in
the shadow of the Shoah and the dominant images out of which this
project grew are terrible images. We were all children born into a
world of shadows as members of a traumatized people -- and
children of parents and grandparents whose memories and images of
Christianity were, to say the least, dark.
But there are also more recent, more positive images. We
were all educated, in part, in American universities, alongside
Christian students and teachers of religion and theology, some of
whom became friends and colleagues. And compatriots, too: fellow
students of scripture and history and philosophy and ethics. Each
of us had Christian colleagues whose concerns overlapped with
aspects of our own Jewish pursuits: our concerns, for example, to
nurture disciplines of reason as instruments of our religion and
to revitalize the role of biblically based studies as sources of
ethical thinking. We knew that Jews and Christians took different
approaches to Bible studies: our approach was rabbinic, theirs was
based on patristic and/or contemporary Catholic or Reformation
models of reading. But each of us found -- to our initial surprise
and against the expectations of other Jewish colleagues and
kinfolk -- that an expanding number of contemporary Jewish and
Christian thinkers adopted analogous strategies for defending
their biblical traditions against three common challenges.
One common challenge was the emergence of radically secular,
materialist, and relativist tendencies that diminished the
influence of any biblical religion in the contemporary West.
As our work in the university matured, we each discovered that we
shared with a circle of Christian as well as Jewish colleagues
some analogous strategies for recovering and defending the status
of biblically based modes of reasoning within the academy.(2)
For example, we all studied and practiced biblical and
post-biblical forms of interpretation as modes of reasoning rather
than as some extra-rational form of confession. We held these
interpretations to sophisticated standards of criticism, but we
also applied the same standards to our university colleagues'
studies of philosophy or literature or science. We argued that
these studies held no more privileged position in the orders of
being and reason and ethics than our religious studies. Even more,
we argued that, in this century of terrible destruction in the
West, the hegemonic traditions of modern humanism had to be called
to account for their ethical and political failings. And we were
no longer willing to be bullied by secular critics who preached
suspicion of biblically based ethics while protecting their own
vast assumptions from rational -- and moral -- inspection.
But another common challenge was the emergence of radical
religious fundamentalisms as reactionary bulwarks against modern
secularism. We found that our Christian colleagues also shared
with us comparable criticisms of the fundamentalist movements
within each of our religions. Our shared criticism was that
radical secularism and radical religious fundamentalism share a
comparable logic of either/or: the dichotomous reasoning that
enables individuals to imagine that they each, somehow, conceive
of the whole of things on heaven and earth and that,
whatever they believe to be true of this whole is true, while its
contrary is false. So, God is either this or that and each of us
knows which; Judaism is either this or that, and each of us knows which.
Along with our circle of colleagues, we judged this logic to
contradict our biblical teachings. This did not mean that we
affirmed some contrary position, as if to say that if we do not
individually know the whole then there is no knowledge of it and
we succumb to some nihilism. We all judged, instead, that this
logic of either/or simply fails accurately to represent the way
that knowledge works and that we work within traditions of
interpretation that represent knowledge appropriately.
There was, however, a third common challenge that gnawed at
our traditions from within: the implosion of religious faith and
confidence that has followed the Shoah. As Eugene Borowitz and
Elie Wiesel have written, we Jews did not lose faith in God during
the Shoah -- many had lost that faith already after the
Enlightenment and emancipation. What we lost was faith in humanity
-- faith in the humanism that for so many had replaced our
traditional religion. For many Jews, this humanism had already
appeared in Jewish dress as if it were our modern
Judaism, so that the loss of Jewish humanistic faith after the
Shoah did, after all, mean a crisis of religious faith.
It is not as if, now mistrusting secularism, Jews rush back to
some form of traditional Jewish practice. The crisis of Jewish
confidence is that many Jews do not have any strong idea about
what belief or knowledge or faith to adopt. This is the kind of
crisis that leads to moral and ontological enervation. And this is
a terrible problem for us.
While Jews and Christians face this same problem, it challenges
us in different ways. For Jews, the Shoah remains a defining event
of our collective existence. It means that humanity, Western
civilization, Christianity, and God all have some explaining to do
-- that our relationship with all of these begins with questions,
challenges, and uncertainties. And this means that, under the
surface at least, we do not assume that "existence," or maaseh
breshit (the order of creation), is fully ordered,
or rational, or even good. For many or perhaps most Jews, a part
of the darkness of being is displayed in the questionable behavior
of many Christians during the Shoah and in the troubling ways that
many forms of Christianity have, for two millennia, defined
themselves over against Judaism, as either critics of or
substitutes for Judaism.
We know that there are Christians for whom the Shoah appears in
no way to be a significant aspect of their religious identities.
But we judge that, independently of individual opinions, the Shoah
remains an irrepressible aspect of contemporary Christian
self-identity. This fact reconnects us to the circle of Christians
and Jews, mentioned earlier, within which we carry on our
theological work. The Christians in this circle share our judgment
that Christianity cannot define itself today without including a
serious response to the Shoah and the Christian failings that are
implicated in it. They have also introduced us to a broader
movement of Christian scholars who appear to think about the Shoah
as much as we do and who, with great courage, have worked to
revise the words of Christian liturgy, teachings, and doctrine
that underwrite Christian anti-Judaism and supersessionism.
Christian rescuers. We stand, perhaps, in the third
generation of Jewish respondents to the Shoah. The first
generation, in the numbing first decade after the Shoah, attended
for the most part to collecting testimonies and recounting the
horrible facts of atrocity. For the second generation, of which
Elie Wiesel's work is prototypical, the time had come to compose
fictional but historically realistic accounts of the victims'
suffering. While extending the work of the first two generations
to new media, primarily cinema, this third generation appears to
turn its historical gaze to rescuers (Christian rescuers in
particular), as well as to victims and oppressors. In other areas
of inquiry, philosophers now ask what lessons of ethics are to be
learned from these horrible years; psychologists examine the lives
of the children of survivors; humanistic scholars examine the
early history of Jewish memorializations of the Shoah. Theologians
ask what has happened to our relationship to the one to whom we
pray, what has happened to our covenant, and what do we have to
say, now, about Christianity -- the religion of some of our
rescuers as well as of our oppressors?
Popularly, "rescuers" refers to those Christians and
others honored at Yad Vashem and elsewhere for helping save Jews
during the Shoah. But it also seems appropriate for us today to
apply the label "theological rescuers" to our Christian
colleagues who seek and have sought to rescue Christianity itself
from anti-Jewish or supersessionist tendencies and expressions.
Scholars such as James Parkes, Edward Flannery, and Rosemary
Radford Ruether have honestly confronted the history of Christian
teachings about Jews and Judaism. More recently, A. Roy
Eckardt, Norman Beck, Paul van Buren, Clark Williamson, John
Pawlikowski and Mary Boys have offered theologies of Christianity,
grounded in the traditional Christian sources, in which Jews and
Judaism are sources of blessing. These scholars have been part of
the Christian Scholars Group that has been meeting for over
twenty-five years and has now become a program of the Institute
for Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, which also provided
the educational forum in which our project developed. In addition
to their scholarly accomplishments, the work of the Christian
Scholars Group has been effectively communicated to clergy and lay
leaders on the congregational level. Finally, official church
bodies, Catholic and Protestant, have publicly repudiated
anti-Semitism and the teaching of contempt as inimical to
authentic Christianity. The recent visit of the pope to Israel --
praying at the Kotel and offering a confession at Yad va-Shem --
symbolizes the courage of the theological rescuers and the
progress that has been made in the last fifty years.
Jews have been happy to assist Christian scholars in this work
and to further the efforts, as one Christian colleague puts it,
"to clean up our mess." And Jews have been quick both to
praise Christian efforts and to point out their weaknesses or
shortcomings. To this date, however, few Jews have grappled with
the question of how Judaism might respond in its own authentic
voice to the profound changes that have taken place in the
Christian world.
This is not an indictment of the Jewish community. The wounds
of the past are still healing; it is hard to overcome centuries of
distrust. Disillusioned with universalism and frightened by the
inroads of assimilation, Jews are turning away from the world and
into their own communities. Furthermore, the recent changes in the
Christian world are not universally accepted by all Christians;
missionary activity and anti-Jewish rhetoric are still integral to
sectors of the Christian community. Nevertheless, while we
recognize all the factors that lead to these reactions, we believe
that they no longer function as an effective means of responding
to today's challenges.
A New Response. We believe that, living as a minority in
a still largely Christian America and Christian West, Jews need to
learn the languages and beliefs of their neighbors. They need to
understand the meaning of what their Christian neighbors are
saying: about what modern society should become and about the
place of the Jewish people itself in that society. Jews need to
learn ways of judging what forms of Christianity are friendly to
them and what forms are not, and what forms of Christian belief
merit their public support and what forms do not. They need, as
well, to acknowledge the efforts of those Christians who have
sacrificed aspects of their work and of their lives to combat
Christian anti-Judaism and to promote forms of Christian practice
that are friendly to Jewish life and belief. They need to know
enough about Christian belief that they can explain their own
Jewish goals and ideals for society in terms their Christian
neighbors will understand.
For the past hundreds of years, when Jews have been taught
about Christian belief, it has been primarily in non-Jewish terms.
During the years of their residence in Christian Europe, Jews
learned about Christianity only through the untranslated terms of
a Christianity that separated itself from its Jewish roots. Then,
during the years that followed Emancipation, Jews learned about
Christianity through the equally non-Jewish terms of secular
European thought. This was often the most difficult kind of
learning, since secular European thought often treated
Christianity as a universal religion, as opposed to the
particularity or "tribalism" of Judaism. We believe it
is time for Jews to learn about Christianity in Jewish terms: to
rediscover the basic categories of rabbinic Judaism and to hear
what the basic categories of Christian belief sound like when they
are taught in terms of this rabbinic Judaism. This is to hear
Christianity in our terms and therefore understand it deeply,
perhaps for the first time.
If Christianity is changing in these years after the Holocaust,
Judaism is changing as well. During the past two hundred years,
Judaism has suffered from an increasing inner division, separating
the realms of science and reason on the hand and faith and
tradition on the other. It is as if the Jewish religion itself
spoke of an unbridgeable gulf between the human and the divine.
The editors of Christianity in Jewish Terms, however, are
animated by a different vision. The Judaism we editors encounter
in the Bible, Talmud, and our other classic sources has always
emphasized the partnership of humanity and God. We have therefore
gathered together essays that help us rediscover the power of the
classical sources of Judaism to heal the divisions from which we
suffer today: between human reason and Jewish faith, as well as
between Judaism and Christianity.
There are two main concerns at the heart of our book: how to
renew our understanding of Judaism today from out of the sacred
texts and, then, how to understand Christianity in terms of this
Judaism.
Our first goal is to educate American Jews about the
religion of their Christian neighbors. American Jews, proud of
their knowledge of so many things, know relatively little about
the actual theologies of Christianity. Too many Jews understand
Christianity only in oppositional terms that grossly oversimplify
or actually distort both traditions. Thus, many Jews believe that
original sin and incarnation are totally alien to Judaism, just
because they are emphasized by Christianity. Such misunderstanding
is also displayed in the commonplace Jewish assertion that
theology is a uniquely Christian endeavor. In addition, many Jews
-- including those who have no fear of everyday social interaction
with Christians -- fear that theological engagement with
Christianity will lead to weakened Jewish commitment and
intermarriage. We suggest, however, that ignorance of Christianity
leaves Jews ignorant of differences between the traditions as well
as of differences between either tradition and the prevailing
modern culture in which both Jews and Christians participate. We
hold that a sound understanding of Christianity is as essential
for Jewish survival as it is for mutual understanding among Jews
and Christians.
Our second goal is to explore and expand Jewish theology for
its own sake (l'shma, as we say). American Jews often
know relatively little about the theologies of Judaism as well! We
sense, in fact, that secular Jews' resistance to learning about
Christianity may, in part, reflect their resistance to their own
theological traditions. Our goal is to stimulate renewed interest
in the theologies of classical rabbinic Judaism and, then, to
extend Jewish theology to include theologies of
Christianity.
Our third goal is to contribute to the revitalization of
Judaism after the Shoah and in the face of modern secularism and
postmodern doubt. We turn away from the modern Jewish tendency
to cultural assimilation and reaffirm the enduring voice of the
scriptural and rabbinic sources in our daily lives and our
intellectual disciplines. But our turn is not antimodern. We
appeal to standards of reason that are irreducible to the
modern/anti-modern dialectic between "reason and faith,"
or "universality and particularity." Our reasoning is at
once hermeneutical, scientific (in the classical sense),
text-based, and responsive to the historically lived context of
all textual interpretation. Our scriptural and rabbinic
hermeneutic is therefore irreducible, as well, to the
modern/anti-modern dialectic between a wholly universalized
Judaism that is supposed to be identical to some universalized
Christianity and a wholly particularized Judaism that is
supposed to be incommensurable with any elements of Christianity.
Our Judaism is neither assimilated to the Western world nor cut
off from it. Reconnected to its scriptural and rabbinic roots --
but without losing its critical edge -- it is prepared to speak to
the world once again: reintroducing ancient teachings that can
offer renewed wisdom for a culture that has lost its bearings. And
it is prepared to enlist sympathetic Christians -- and Muslims --
as co-workers in the task of repairing a troubled Western
civilization.
Our fourth goal is to acknowledge and encourage the good
work of Christian theological rescuers. For Jewish scholars to
take Christian theology this seriously is to complement and
compliment the courageous work of the Christian scholars who have
sought to remove anti-Jewish and supersessionist language from
church teachings and practices. This work is two-fold: to let the
Christian world know that Jews are aware of and appreciate this
work and to let Jews know that this work is being done and needs
to be appreciated.
In closing, here are two brief illustrations of the
theological voice of Christianity in Jewish Terms.
On God.(3) The
name of God refers to the ultimate reason why we would write our
book like this. We write as members of a people pulled apart from
the world only because of our relationship to the one we call
creator of the world (bore olam), merciful father -- or
"womb-like father!" (av harachamim) -- the name
YHVH who cannot be spoken, our God (elohenu). While most
modern Jews do not often speak openly about their God, this
appears to be more a sign of unfamiliarity than of modesty or even
of protest against a God who would be God in this awful century.
The cross-cultural evidence is that most people in the world feel
comfortable talking about and to the one(s) they call
"God." It may therefore require more chutzpah for a
human being to claim to have no need for such a God than
to admit to participating in such an ordinary practice. As for
protest against God, throughout Jewish tradition this has been a
primary means of prayer.
Christians as well as Jews today may rely on the ordinariness
of talking to an extra-ordinary God as a shared resource in the
effort to reestablish moral and religious order after the Shoah
and after modernity. What, however, about the names of God that we
do not share? There is another surprising lesson to be learned
from ordinariness. It is in everyday religious practice that Jews
and Christians may sound most different, since everyday practice
is guided by the linguistic traditions of particular communities;
and since Babel we have found that social differences are framed
by linguistic difference. Trinitarian formulae of prayer are
decidedly not the same as rabbinic formulae. Nonetheless, it is
also in everyday practice that Jews and Christians behave in most
clearly analogous ways: in the general form and consequences of
their turning to a creator God who hears prayer and commands moral
action. The analogy that divides us on one level also unites us on
another; that is one reason that analogical thinking defies the
either/or logic that burdens modern culture.
Some Jews, of a more intellectual as well as religious bent,
may seek a bridge to understanding what is less ordinary in
Christian religious practice, such as philosophic theologies of
the mysteries of Trinity. Surprisingly, such Jews may find it most
helpful to begin with questions typically asked by Jewish skeptics
rather than by traditionalists. Imagine, for example, the Jewish
skeptic who asks the traditionalist: "How can you claim that
God speaks to us through words of scripture, when you admit that
you are finite and God is infinite? If God's word is finite, then
there would be nothing to distinguish it per se from
other finite words. Do you want to claim that God's word is
infinite?" Imagine that the traditionalist says,
"Yes." That answer alone, however we judge it, offers
sufficient entrée for Jewish study of Trinitarian speculations.
It is not odd for a Jew to conceive of asking this question nor of
answering it this way, and this answer leads to the speculation
that the word that God speaks and that mediates between God and us
may itself be infinite: a word that is at once "of God,"
in this sense, and also "of us." This is not Trinitarian
speculation, but a Jew who speculates this way can enter into
meaningful conversation with a Trinitarian philosophical
theologian. And that is what we mean by a "bridge to
understanding."
On Israel.(4)
Much of the tragedy of the relationship between Jews and
Christians can be traced to competing claims to be Israel, God's
covenant partner. Is it possible for both Jews and Christians to
lay claim to this name in ways that are not exclusionist? The
Jewish understanding of Israel consists of three aspects. First,
Jews are Israel because they are the descendants of a common
ancestor, Jacob, whose name is changed to Israel (Gen. 32).
Second, Jews as Israel are covenanted to the God of Israel at Mt. Sinai.
Finally, Israel is the name of the land which, according to Jewish
tradition, God promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel in
perpetuity.
The church also claims to be Israel, although its understanding
of what that means differs from the Jewish one. Christian
tradition speaks of a "new Israel" or a "true
Israel" consisting of those who recognize in the life, death,
and resurrection of Jesus Christ the continuation of God's
covenant that began with Abraham. According to this exclusionist
reading, the Jews rejected Jesus, the covenant, and God -- and so,
in turn, God rejected the Jews and established a new covenant with
the church. Christian self-understanding of Israel is not bound to
any one nation or nor does it privilege any particular geographic
location.
This exclusionist Christian understanding of Israel leaves no
possibility for Jews to be a people in covenant with God. In
post-Holocaust Christian theology, however, a new understanding of
the relationship between God and Israel, God and the church, and
the church and Israel is being articulated. Finding scriptural
warrant in passages such as Romans 9-11, the new theology argues
that God's promises are eternal -- and that, in particular, God's
covenant with the Jews continues and, more importantly, informs
and enriches the Christian covenant. Does Jewish tradition contain
a warrant for acknowledging Christian claims to be in covenant
with the God of Israel? While one starting point is the Jewish
concept of the Noahide laws, this is not completely satisfactory,
since it is largely a negative formulation and does not
specifically address the Christian claim to be in covenant with
the same God upon whom Israel calls. If we are serious about
developing a Jewish theology of Christianity, then we must admit
that this move by Christian theologians challenges the Jewish
community to find within its scriptural resources a way of
affirming Christianity's relationship with the God of Israel that
does not compromise Judaism's integrity.
PETER OCHS is Edgar Bronfman Professor of
Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia. He is
co-author of “Dabru
Emet”: a Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity.
Recent books are Reviewing the Covenant (with Eugene
Borowitz), and Reasoning after Revelation (with Steven
Kepnes and Robert Gibbs).
DAVID SANDMEL is the Jewish Scholar on the
staff of the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies. He is
coordinating National Jewish Scholars Project, a major
initiative to promote a new discussion within the Jewish
community and between Jews and Christians, the co-editor of Christianity
in Jewish Terms, to which he has also contributed an essay.
Notes
1. [Back to text]
Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Sandmel, and
Michael Signer, eds., Christianity in Jewish Terms
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000).
2. [Back to text]
Often Muslims shared in this circle as well; we attend for now to
the Jewish-Christian exchange that defines this particular
project.
3. [Back to text]
This paragraph paraphrases chap. 5 of the book.
4. [Back to text]
This paragraph paraphrases chap. 7 of the book.
