Christ Jesus and the Jewish People Today: New Explorations of Theological Interrelationships. Four Perspectives - I

Source: Cambridge

Peter A. Pettit

Horizons / Volume 39 / Issue 01 / March 2012, pp 98 - 104 DOI: 10.1017/S0360966900008550, Published online: 10 January 2013 Link to this article:

Christ Jesus and the Jewish People Today: New Explorations of Theo- logical Interrelationships. Edited by Philip A. Cunningham, Joseph Sievers, Mary C. Boys, Hans Hermann Henrix, and Jesper Svartvik. Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans; Rome: Gregorian and Biblical Press, 2011. xxxii + 295 pages. $36.00 (paper).

FOUR PERSPECTIVES

I

I don’t think we’re in Christendom anymore, Toto. The consistently superb essays that have been produced by the project, Christ Jesus and the Jewish People Today (CJJPT), remove any doubts we may have had that the twenty-first century will challenge Christian theology in profound ways. The authors profile several of the challenges which have emerged in the Jewish-Christian encounter over the past sixty-five years, since the Shoah (Holocaust) made clear the church’s complicity in unspeakable horror and focused attention on the doctrinal formulations and ecclesial practices that could allow such a failure of faithfulness. They articulate theological responses, initiate probes into meeting those challenges, and lay the groundwork for an ambitious agenda.

These wide-ranging investigations share a central theme: the intel- lectual and spiritual hegemony which the Christian church claimed for itself through most of its first two millennia is neither necessary to the church’s identity nor an accurate account of God’s work in the world. Their common effort aims at sustaining the biblical and theological faithfulness of the Christian heritage while formulating central Christian claims in ways that do not depend on that hegemony and will not continue to impose its influence on further generations. Taken together, they set a demanding agenda and establish an impressively high base- line for those who will follow in developing their work more fully. This project is the effort of an “intercontinental partnership” of primarily Roman Catholic scholars, sponsored by the Pontifical Gregorian University, the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Boston College, Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Their aim is to explore the possi- bility of a consensus emerging in recent years on questions of “the relationships among Jesus Christ, the covenantal status of the Jewish people, and understandings of salvation” (xxi). Those questions are not in any way limited to Roman Catholic reflection or significance, however. Christians outside the Roman Catholic community will give weight to various confessional expressions and theological authori- ties in different proportion than these authors do, but the essential contours of the questions are the same for all Christians in this post- Christendom age. Seventeen papers are presented in the volume, growing out of the work of the partnership through a succession of meetings during 2006–2009. They address the central topic as it touches on issues of history, the Bible, Christology, Trinitarian doctrine, salvation, and ecclesiology. Each cluster of essays on one of these issues gains a response from a Jewish colleague, several of whom were present in the meetings as consultants. The volume is also enhanced by a capa- ble index, a foreword by Walter Cardinal Kasper, recently retired as President of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, and a dedicatory essay honoring post mortem Rabbi Profes- sor Michael Signer z”l, who had been “an energetic and vital partici- pant” in the study process (xxxii). One of the first things to recommend this work is the fine introduc- tory material, which includes a set of “principles when theologizing about the church of Christ and the people of Israel” (xxiii-xxxii). These in many ways set the leitmotifs for the more specific treatments of issues within the volume, as the editors note by identifying the essays related to each principle. At the outset, too, they address the centrality of God’s transcendence and freedom in all theological work, the char- acter of both the church and Israel as theological “mysteries,” the lim- itations of human language in expressing transcendent realities, and the necessity of theological humility in a world not yet brought to the fullness of redemption or revelation. These four principles echo the more restrained voice with which the church today addresses society and its own multiple expressions. Yet due respect for mystery, transcendence, linguistic limitations, and humility in no way lessens the quality of the essays; neither does it divert the (Christian) authors from the effort to “reaffirm our faith claim that Jesus Christ is the savior of all humanity” (xxii). Their effort, though, is framed within the pluralism of contemporary culture and is undertaken “even as we affirm Israel’s covenantal life with God” (xxii). This should not be mistaken for an easy accommodation of variety in human taste and choice, nor for casual relativism. This is a sustained and sophisticated effort to bring the certainty of faith and the acuity of intellectual inquiry to serve in the arena of postmodern realities. There is far more within it than we can comment on in detail here, and the following particulars are meant only to be exemplary of the rich fare that awaits all who enter into these much-needed discussions.

The background for any Roman Catholic approach to these issues must be, of course, the Second Vatican Council, with its framing of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium, esp. §16) and particularly its “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non- Christian Religions” (Nostra Aetate, esp. §4). John Pawlikowski draws out the implications of these documents for the indispensable place of historical consciousness in the task of theology. This is a key point in the advances that the Council made, and Pawlikowski accounts for much of the more recent controversy over Catholic-Jewish relations as a reflection of successive popes’ varying understandings of the principle. Whether history is an arena in which one gathers clues to articulating a timeless, ontological divine reality, or alternatively is the locus in which we encounter a personal and relational God sacramentally, determines in important ways the options one can entertain in doing theology. Pawlikowski lauds a number of Catholic theologians as pioneers in the effort to develop the latter approach and identifies Christology and eccle- siology as topping the list of candidates for doctrinal “rethinking.” Mary Boys’ essay is one of several that tackle crucial texts and images haunting the Jewish-Christian encounter through the centuries. Her tracing of the deicide charge—that “the Jews killed Jesus”—from the biblical figure of Judas through twelfth-century stigmas and into the Shoah demonstrates its consistent, powerful place in Christian ideation about Judaism and treatment of Jews. In light of this history, she calls for a more effective pedagogy regarding Christian culpability for Jewish suffering and offers a number of principles for the interpre- tation of biblical texts and images in contemporary settings. Tamara Cohn Eskenazi extends Boys’ contribution by pointing to both Jewish tradition and feminist hermeneutics as worthwhile resources for con- temporary biblical interpretation. Jesper Svartvik, one of two Lutheran contributors to the project and host at the Swedish Theological Institute in Jerusalem for one of its meetings, offers a re-reading of the seminal book of Hebrews, for which he claims far greater influence than a simple counting of verse refer- ences in theological works would suggest. The foundational framework of old/new covenant and a theology in which Christianity replaces or supersedes the people Israel as God’s chosen people both stem from Hebrews. Yet Svartvik suggests that a few uncontroversial insights of Bible study—the polyphony of the biblical witness, the intellectual background of Middle Platonism in the formulations of Hebrews, and the centrality of the pilgrimage motif in the book—all undermine the book’s conventional reading as anti-Jewish. Daniel Harrington illustrates the polyphony to which Svartvik points with broader analyses of three axes of New Testament literature, in which he finds three quite distinct representations of the relation- ship between Jews and Gentiles. The three axes are Paul’s early efforts to work out a Jewish-Gentile relationship within a single identity of “Israel,” Matthean and Johannine representations of “family feuds” following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, and the visions in Colossians and Ephesians of a church that transcends his- torical Israel and early Judaism as the body of the cosmic Christ. In them, Harrington shows that canonical Christian imagery already offers a plurality of understandings and calls into question any effort to define only one model of Jewish-Christian relationship as “biblical” or “authentic.” Each had its particular theological point in its context, and all lent themselves to later Christian triumphalism relative to Jews and Judaism, but Harrington argues that “history need not be destiny” (104). He points to the Pauline image of the Gentile olive branch grafted into Jewish stock as a helpful one for crafting “a new and more appropriate relationship” (104), noting that this image was chosen by Vatican II to do the heavy lifting of relational imagery in Nostra Aetate. Interestingly, in responding to Boys and Pawlikowski, Marc Saperstein cautions against a too-harsh assessment of the troubled his- tory of Jewish-Christian relations. For centuries Jews typically accepted the charge of deicide as historically accurate, he says, quoting the 1452 sermon of Joseph ibn Shem Tov on Avot 3:15–16: “our righteous ances- tors, basing themselves upon the Torah and justice, hanged him on a tree” (66). Yet the rabbi did not accept the Christian judgment that this is the cause of Jewish suffering. Rather, it was for him “an instrument” used by God to bring discipline on the Jewish community, through the Christians, for offenses against the covenant. Thus even an historically false deicide charge need not be inherently or unavoidably anti-Jewish, and an honest portrayal of the complex history of Jewish-Christian attitudes and relations is essential for future growth. Saperstein encourages the use of historical accounts depicting the considerable restraint the church exercised in dealing with Jews as positive models for the future, rather than dwelling so persistently on the baleful his- tory of abuse and persecution. Saperstein’s cautions and the collective insights of the Christian authors on history and the Bible lead to a further realization, which none of the authors specifically addresses. That is, the whole category of salvation history as a theological construct becomes problematic. The impression here, as well as in the subsequent essays by Elizabeth Groppe, Christian Rutishauser, and Philip Cunningham and Didier Pollefeyt, is that the salvation-historical narrative of Christianity has been misguided by an anti-Jewish animus and must be corrected.

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