This is the second installment in a five-part series. Part 1 [November/December 2000], “Living by Law, Looking for Intimacy,” explored what Christians can learn from the debates that divide American Jews, taking as a point of departure Samuel G. Freedman’s book, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry. Next, part 3 will consider medieval anti-Semitism and the Eucharist (via Miri Rubin’s Gentile Tales). Part 4 will discuss German Jews, Edith Stein in particular. Part 5 will conclude the series with Messianic Judiaism.
Christianity in Jewish Terms edited by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Signer, Westview Press, 256 pp.; $30
For many, “Jewish-Christian dialogue” conjures up images of earnest, well-meaning folks in the 1970s, sitting around informally over cake and coffee: Jews and Christians who want to get people together and embrace. Reconcile. Make friends. See that the Jews don’t have horns or drink blood. See that the Christians aren’t going to shove tracts down your throat or kill you.
Jewish-Christian dialogue, as it has proceeded in the half-century after the Shoah, has been measured, judicious, exquisitely sensitive—but even those of us with a strong stake in the outcome have found the conversation rather stale. Christianity in Jewish Terms might be the book to reinvigorate the dialogue. The volume’s editors have gathered together 34 scholars, 23 Jewish and 11 Christian, to comment on ten theological themes: God, Scripture, Suffering, Redemption, and so on. Each chapter comprises three essays—a main piece by a Jewish scholar, and then two shorter responses, one by a Jewish scholar and one by a Christian.
The essays are governed by the prefatory “Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity,” which first ran as a full-page ad in the New York Times. Though that statement makes historical points (“Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon”) and normative assertions (“Jews and Christians must work together for justice and peace”), the heart of the statement is theology—bold, simple theology: “Jews and Christians worship the same God.” That opening salvo, and the theological structure of the book, promise to introduce theology into a conversation that has too long been dominated by Rodney King’s question: Why can’t we all just get along?
In the event, Christianity in Jewish Terms offers something more modest. Instead of doing theology together, most of the contributors use theological tools to accomplish a social project—implicitly conceding, perhaps, that a social project may be as far as Jews and Christians can go, that we need to play it safe: articulate each other’s beliefs, and revel in the family resemblances. But even that is no mean accomplishment, and some of the contributors clearly want to go beyond the social project to genuine theological engagement.
The strategy of Christianity in Jewish Terms is perhaps best exemplified by Elliot Wolfson’s essay on incarnation (or “embodiment”). The incarnation of God is, arguably, the Christian concept that seems most foreign to Jews. Many Jews assume that Judaism has no place at all for a doctrine of an embodied God, but Wolfson shows that
classical Jewish sources yield a philosophical conception of incarnation … that refers specifically to the imaginal body of God, a symbolic construct that allows human consciousness to access the transcendent reality as a concrete form manifest primarily (if not exclusively) in the sacred space of the two major forms of worship of the heart: prayer and study.
To be sure, there’s a sizable gulch between the “imaginal body” that Wolfson outlines and the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. But Wolfson’s demonstration that the Jewish God can be “experienced in a tangible and concrete manner” goes a long way toward fording that gulch.
This presenting of Christian concepts in Jewish terms is useful, but it is only the first step in the theological engagement that ought to follow as a consequence of the acknowledgement that Jews and Christians worship the same God. For implicit in the claim that we worship the same God is that we can learn from one another about how to worship that God. Most of the Jewish contributors here nod at certain Christian concepts, but don’t take the bold step of trying to learn from them—nor are the Christian authors too concerned with learning from Judaism. What is standing in the way? For Christians, the impasse is supersessionism; for Jews it is the person of Jesus.
Supersessionism, which comes from the Latin word to sit upon or to rule over, is the belief that, because the Jews were stiff-necked and hard-hearted and didn’t accept Christ, God canceled the covenant He had made with them, and the church replaced Israel as God’s one and only chosen people. Throughout the history of the church, many a Christian has embraced supersessionism, often quoting from the Gospel of Matthew, whose rendition of the parable of the vineyard (Matt. 21:43) says the vineyard will be taken away from the wicked tenants and given to other people. Augustine: “the church admits and avows the Jewish people to be cursed.” Luther, in order to show that God had replaced the Jews with the Church: ” ‘Listen Jew, are you aware that Jerusalem and your sovereignty, together with your temple and priesthood, have been destroyed for 1,460 years?’ For this year, which we Christians write as the year 1542 since the birth of Christ, is exactly 1,468 years, going on fifteen hundred years, since Vespasian and Titus destroyed Jerusalem, and expelled the Jews from the city.” Cranmer, making the same point: “Whoso listeth to read the histories of the heathen people and greatest idolaters, he shall not find among them all any region, people, or nation that was so scourged by God, so oft brought into servitude, so oft carried into captivity, with so divers, strange and many calamities oppressed, as were the children of Israel.” And Cranmer’s fellow English Reformer, Hugh Latimer: the Jews “were cursed in the sight of God. … Though Jerusalem be builded again, yet the Jews shall have it no more.” You get the idea.
Since the Shoah, many Christians have renounced supersessionism. In Nostra Aetate, issued by the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the Roman Catholic Church declared that “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed” by God, a theme taken up and emphasized repeatedly by Pope John Paul II. Presbyterians, in 1987, declared that “the church, elected in Jesus Christ, has been engrafted onto the people of God established by the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Therefore, Christians have not replaced Jews.”
The Christians in this volume are at pains to distance themselves from supersessionism. “God’s covenant with the Jews is unconditional,” says George Lindbeck. “The task of neutralizing supersessionist patterns,” writes Christopher M. Leighton, “entails nothing less than the reenvisioning of the Christian narrative. The challenge for Christian theology is to accept, perhaps even celebrate, the gaps, the silences, the distances between us Christians and Jews.” Indeed, contributors to Christianity in Jewish Terms show that Paul himself was not supersessionist: in Romans 11:29, he declares “The gifts and call of God are unrevokable.”
Lindbeck and others convincingly repudiate the technical meaning of supersessionism, but that’s all they do: they fail to convince that Judaism is a living, ongoing expression of God’s will. Not that any other Christian theologians have been more successful. It is hard to figure out a Christian argument for anyone’s remaining Jewish. Even the most sympathetic reading of Paul breaks down on this point. Paul wasn’t a supersessionist, but he was a Jew who embraced Jesus. He did so because he recognized Jesus was the Christ, and if that’s true, it’s better to be in relationship with him than not, even if your alternative is to be in an ongoing Jewish covenant with God.
Christians who led the way in Jewish-Christian relations in the 1970s—folks like Rosemary Radford Reuther and Paul Van Buren—resolved this tension by sacrificing the central and unique role of Christ in order fully to embrace Jews. In other words, they fudged on the very claims that got Christianity started in the first place.
As for Jews who are willing to say that Christians and Jews worship the same God, they too find themselves in a theological pickle. For Jews have to figure out what to do with the person of Jesus. Jews who don’t want to say, simply, “We’re right, they’re wrong” will try to make sense of Jesus through the covenant God made with Noah. Judaism teaches that the Noahide covenant is binding on all humanity, where as the covenants with Abraham and Moses are binding only on Jews. In order for a Gentile to be righteous, he need not convert; he simply needs to live in accordance with the covenant God made with humanity through Noah. For Jews, there is no conflict between God’s having made a covenant with them at Sinai, and God’s remaining in a different covenantal relationship with everyone else.
The first move the Jews in this volume make is analogous to the nominal repudiation of supersessionism; it is the repudiation of the idea that Christianity is idolatry. This is a key question, because one of the sheva mitzvoth b’nai Noach (the seven laws given to the descendants of Noah, that is, all of humanity) is a prohibition of idolatry. There has long been a debate in Judaism about whether Christians live in accord with that covenant. Though Maimonides and others suggested that Christianity, with its Trinitarian God, was indeed idolatrous, the rabbinic consensus today is that it is not. As David Ellenson notes in his essay, “A Jewish View of the Christian God,” Jews from the twelfth-century Rabbi Isaac to the nineteenth-century Frankfurt rabbi, Moses Horovitz, affirmed that Christianity was a form of monotheism, and hence not idol worship.
So far so good. Jews then could argue that God established Christianity as a means for the fulfillment of the Noahide covenant: Jews get to be in relation to God through the covenant at Sinai and the ongoing relationship of God in the lives of the Jews as recorded in the Torah, and Gentiles get to be in relation to God through the Noahide covenant and the ongoing relationship God has with Gentiles through the revelation of God-in-Jesus.
This is, more or less, what Irving Greenberg suggests in his essay “Judaism and Christianity: Covenants of Redemption.” God, Greenberg writes, always wanted non-Jews to be brought into a covenantal relationship with him. The group to “bring the message of redemption to the rest of the nations had to grow out of”—while not replacing—”the family and covenanted community of Israel.” This new covenant, which had to be a new religion, not too Jewish, says Greenberg, “was the expression of divine pluralism, God seeking to expand the number of covenantal channels to humanity, without closing any of them.” Early Jesus followers, in the wake of the crucifixion and “signal [of] an empty tomb” (Greenberg implies that Jesus’ resting place was disturbed by bandits, not that he rose again), began to spread their gospel. “Among Jews who were hearing other divine messages loud and clear, their preaching made little headway; among Gentiles, as was intended, it spread and spread.”
The problem with Greenberg’s solution is immediately apparent to Christian readers: it assumes that Jesus was a revelation for the Gentiles only, whereas Mark 7 makes pretty clear that Jesus came first for the Jews, and only secondarily for the Syro-Phonecians. It’s an argument about Christianity that would make sense on Jewish terms, but not on Christian ones. As R. Kendall Soulen puts it in his response to Greenberg,
Christians cannot yield easily on the idea that the resurrection of a crucified Messiah, if true at all, has significance for everyone. It would make little sense … for a Jew to say that God is Creator, but only of Jews. If God is Creator at all, God is Creator of Jews and Gentiles alike. Similarly, if Jesus inaugurates a new creation by his victory over death, then again he does so for all.
If he is the Messiah, then he is the Messiah.
But setting aside such Christian objections, why should a Jew bother to overcome his difficulty with Christianity’s inability to accept Judaism? Is it plausible, from a Jewish perspective, to think that Jews might learn something from Christians about God?
There are a number of potential resources for that theological imperative: the Jewish messianic vision, perhaps, or the Levinasian command to engage the other. To enact theologically the command to love one’s neighbor is to do theology with one’s neighbor. One doesn’t simply do theology alone with God. And Jews and Christians, those children worshiping the same God, are in the archetypal neighborly relationship.
Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, professor at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, is neighborly but not theologically so in her essay “Redemption: What I Have Learned from Christians”:
By Paul, I am reminded to maintain a healthy skepticism about all human projects. … [F]rom Benedict, the Mennonites, and other Christian critics of culture, I am reminded of how we sometimes need to step back from the culture in which we live and not identify ourselves too fully with it. … Moltmann and many political and liberation theologians remind me of the necessity to link theology to “helping bring the Messiah.”
Fuchs-Kreimer’s generous and humble ecumenism is to be applauded, but her approach is not adequate to the specific task of Jewish-Christian relations. She could have read Thich Nhat Hahn and Starhawk and written a similar essay. Fuchs-Kreimer fails to account for the claim that Jews and Christians—not Jews and Tibetan Buddhists—worship the same God. That claim asserts a particular relationship between Jews and Christians, a particular closeness that, say, Hindus and Shintos do not share.
For a glimpse of what real theological engagement between Christians and Jews might look like, turn to the contribution by David Novak, Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto and one of the co-editors of Christianity in Jewish Terms. Novak has previously argued (in Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification and Natural Law in Judaism) that shared ethics are central to the Jewish-Christian encounter. Because we stand in relation to God the Creator through the Noahide covenant, Jews and Christians share a capacity for natural law; we can discern good from evil. But we don’t share particularities of theology—Jews know about God because they took part in a historical event at Sinai, and Christians know about God because of a historical revelation in the person of Jesus. The unique covenantal communities can be bridge by Noahide law (which is natural law), but we should limit the Jewish-Christian encounter to ethical realm.
To this volume he has contributed an essay on “Mitsvah” (commandment). Here, he rehearses familiar themes about the primacy of ethics in the Jewish-Christian encounter. He focuses on three ethical claims that Judaism and Christianity share: “the prohibitions of idolatry, bloodshed, and sexual immorality.” But then, in the last paragraph of his essay, Novak makes a radical departure from his earlier work on Jewish-Christian relations. He writes that while the recognition of “ethical overlaps” provides “a starting point for a new relationship between Jews and Christians,” there is a
second way that Jews and Christians can begin to recognize and develop their partial commonalities. In this case, the task involves seeing analogies rather than making simple identifications. These analogies are mostly in the area of cult and ritual. … Here the commonalities involve those acts that have God as their direct object, like prayer and worship. In this arena, Jews and Christians cannot develop a common life without one side capitulating to the other or without sliding into syncretism. Nevertheless, we Jews and Christians can still learn something from each other’s “religious” beliefs and practices, something that goes far beyond the discovery of “interesting” similarities and differences between Judaism and Christianity. Such superficial similarities can be found between any two religions or philosophies. Jews and Christians, on the other hand, can learn much from each other, even up to the point of empathy, be cause our religious ways of life are both developments of God’s covenant with Israel. Throughout our historical interaction, Christians have learned significant things from Jewish piety and Jews have learned significant things from Christian piety. That is because we have been commanded by the same God. Thus it is the centrality of the mitsvah to us both that offers the greatest content and the greatest hope for our relationship in this world and the next.
In the past, Novak has argued that the basis for a Jewish-Christian en counter is Jews’ and Christians’ status as Natural Law Man, as members of the Noahide community. Presumably, Enlightenment deists and other non-idolaters living out the Noahide covenant can participate in that conversation, too. The basis for Jewish-Christian conversation is absolutely not a shared commanded-ness, for the commanded covenants made with the Jews at Sinai and with the Christians in the person of Jesus are untranslatable; it is dangerous, if not impossible, to talk about our individual covenants with God with one another.
In “Mitsvah,” however, Novak throws down a gauntlet: Jews and Christians, not Jews and any random Noahide folk, can enter into a conversation about not just ethics, but those religious acts that “have God as their direct object,” and we can learn from each other—not because we have a shared capacity for natural law, but because “we have been commanded by the same God.” In short, in learning from each other, we may well be able to learn about matters that are bein adam l’makom (between man and God) and not simply matters bein adam l’chavero (between man and his neighbor).
How might Jews and Christians be gin to respond to the challenge posed by Novak’s surprising conclusion and by the larger ambitions of Christianity in Jewish Terms? That is a question that the book doesn’t answer. But simply by putting the question on the table, where it demands to be noticed, the editors of this volume have performed an invaluable service.
NOTE: For your convenience, the following product, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase: • Christianity in Jewish Terms, edited by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Signer
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