A Thinking Reed

Category: Judaism

  • “Are you the one who is to come?”

    Tyron Inbody has a very interesting chapter on Christianity and Judaism in his Many Faces of Christology. With “post-Holocaust” theologies, he notes that the contention between Judaism and Christianity isn’t over Jesus’s teachings–which scholars now believe fell largely within the parameters of 1st-century Pharisaic Judaism. Nor is it over his death–which was not the fault of “the Jews” but of the Jerusalem politico-religious establishment and the Roman occupying government. It’s not, he contends, even necessarily over Jesus’s resurrection–resurrection was a core belief of the Pharisees, and Inbody cites the contemporary Jewish New Testament scholar Pinchas Lapide, who actually accepts that Jesus was resurrected. While this is obviously a minority view, Inbody argues that it shows that the resurrection as such is not incompatible with Judaism.

    But this also highlights where the true point of contention lies–in the messiahship of Jesus. Inbody points out that the resurrection does not per se prove that Jesus was the Messiah. Jews can, in principle, accept the fact of the resurrection. What faithful Jews deny, however, is that the world has been redeemed by the death and resurrection of Jesus. This isn’t, as Christians sometimes like to think, because Jews wanted a “political-military” Messiah and thus couldn’t accept a “spiritual,” nonviolent one. While this view is self-flattering for Christians, it misses the point. That is, for Jews, the advent of the Messiah is inextricably linked with the redemption of the world–that is, the end of violence and suffering and the establishment of God’s universal kingdom. 1st-century Judaism had a variety of concepts of what the Messiah would be like, and even varied on whether the Messiah should be indentified with a specific individual at all. But the consistent theme was that the messianic age would user in peace, justice, and wholeness for God’s creation. Jewish rejection of the messianic status of Jesus isn’t due to “stubbornness” or “blindness” as much Christian tradition has had it, but can in fact be seen as a faithful response to God’s promises as they were revealed through the Torah and Prophets.

    Inbody argues that Christians were able to identify Jesus as the Messiah only by reinterpreting the meaning of messiahship. Christians, if they’re being honest, must admit that the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus did not establish God’s kingdom. Rather, Jesus provides a “foretaste” of the kingdom, which will only be established in its fullness at the end of time. Somewhat paradoxically, this shows that Christians and Jews may be closer together than it at first seems. If Christians view Jesus’s messiahship in terms of prolepsis and promise, then they have much in common with Jews who still await the coming of the Messiah. Both are awaiting the same Kingdom–God’s universal reign of shalom. Whether or not Jesus is the one who will reign as Messiah in that kingdom is ultimately an eschatological question that we can’t definitively settle now–even if we agree that Jesus was resurrected!

  • The God of Israel and the King Jesus gospel

    Scot McKnight of Jesus Creed (the book and the blog) has a new book out called The King Jesus Gospel, which purports to recover the “original good news.” What does this mean? I haven’t read the book, but on his blog, McKnight says that the way we typically think about the gospel–as a scheme for individual salvation–is unfaithful to the witness of the New Testament. He calls this the “soterian” gospel. But the gospel as presented in the earliest preaching of the church is a “story gospel”:

    The soterian gospel and the apostolic gospel are framed differently; the soterian gospel frames everything by elements by elements in the doctrine of salvation. The apostolic gospel frames the gospel as Israel’s Story coming to fulfillment in Jesus as King (Messiah) and Lord who saves. Hence, one frames things as the plan for personal salvation; the other frames things as a Story come to its completion/fulfillment in Jesus who saves.

    The soterian gospel says that Jesus is fundamentally about how individuals “get right with God.” By contrast, the story gospel (which McKnight maintains is the original, apostolic gospel) is a more communal-corporate story about God’s plans for creation and how they’re fulfilled through the story of Israel; the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus; and the calling of the church as a corporate body to witness to God’s kingdom.

    What strikes me here is the similarity between what McKnight is trying to do and R. Kendall Soulen’s reconstruction of the Bible’s “canonical narrative” in The God of Israel and Christian Theology. Like McKnight, Soulen is trying to re-frame the gospel as a story about God’s program of blessing-in-difference for all creation–a story in which individual sin and redemption play a subordinate role. And both shift emphasis from a supposedly “universal” scheme of human sinfulness and the need for redemption to the particular history of God’s covenant with creation and specifically with the people Israel as the means through which God’s purposes are realized. I’d be interested to see if there are further parallels or if McKnight is explicitly influenced by Soulen’s work here.

  • God of Israel and Christian Theology: Wrap up

    Soulen is, in my view, largely persuasive in recasting of the scriptual meta-narrative as one of blessing and consummation, wherein sin and redemption plays a subordinate, though still important, role. Further, I think he’s right to avoid a certain kind of “Christocentric” reading of the Bible. If the churches are serious about overcoming supersessionism, then something like Soulen’s project seems to be necessary. He has demonstrated, to my satisfaction, that supersessionism isn’t simply an appendage that can easily be lopped off the main body of Christian tradition, but is more like a structural flaw in the foundation of the mainstream theological tradition. Of course, I’d already been largely convinced of that by Clark Williamson and Rosemary Radford Ruether. Soulen’s perspective also seems consistent with other recent trends in theology that have tried to emphasize God’s work as consummator of all creation and only secondarily God’s redemptive work. (I’m thinking of eco-theologies and some feminist theology.)

    Supersessionist readings of the Bible are deeply entrenched in the church, though, even among those who consciously reject supersessionism. It will take a good bit of detailed exegetical work, I think, to flesh this alternative narrative out and make it compelling. For instance, it requires a virtual paradigm shift in how churches have historically, and in many cases still do, read Paul on the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. (Although, if I’m not mistaken, some of themes of the “new perspective” on Paul seem like they might provide support to this kind of project.)

    More challengingly, perhaps, I wonder whether Soulen’s proposed reading of the canon is consistent with the church’s christological and trinitarian dogmas, at least as those have been classicly expressed. Does the canonical narrative as Soulen has presented it demand a “high” Christology in the way that the traditional sin-redemption schema seemed to? I gather that this may be addressed in his new book, but I think it presents a potentially thorny issue for any Christian theology that seeks to be “post-supersessionist.” In what sense is Jesus unique and uniquely indispensable to God’s economy of blessing? Can Christians affirm Jesus’ unique role in God’s plan of consummation-salvation without, implicitly at least, courting supersessionism and exclusivism?

    This brings me to another point. I wonder if the theme of mutual blessing-in-difference is portrayed too one-sidedly here? Although Soulen emphasizes that the blessing between Israel and the nations is mutual, his narrative assigns the Gentiles to a distinctly secondary role, religiously speaking. They seem to be little more than second-hand beneficiaries of God’s revelation to and covenant with Israel. But if God really creates for mutual blessing, might gentile religious wisdom not also contribute to the faith of Israel? In fact, historically we know that wisdom from Greek and other cultures was assimilated into biblical religion. This opens the possibility of a greater appreciation of broader religious pluralism. (I’m thinking along the lines proposed by Marjorie Suchocki.) An appreciation of pluralism need not entail a naively “universalist” standpoint but can be rooted in an affirmation of particularity.

    As far as church practice goes, it’s hard to imagine what a church that was open to Jews as Jews would look like in the 21st century. Even granting that most Jews will continue to decline the Christian invitation to join the church, how would church life be affected if we took seriously Soulen’s contention that Jews could (should?) continue to observe the tenets of Judaism as members of the church? There are “messianic” Jews who to do this, but this seems like something that would make most mainline churches deeply uncomfortable. And should churches require continued Torah-observance of prospective Jewish members or simply permit it? What would that look like? How might such a “mixed” congregation be reflected in worship? The concept of a truly mixed Gentile-Jewish congregation raises a host of interesting and potentially difficult issues, I think.

    All that notwithstanding, Soulen has written a fascinating and important book. Hopefully more Christians will start to grapple with these issues.

    Previous posts:

    Redemption for the sake of blessing

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    Supersessionism and the flight from history

    Blessing and difference

    The story so far

    Jesus and the gospel of God’s coming reign

    “There is neither Jew nor Greek…”

  • “There is neither Jew nor Greek…”

    Soulen’s interpretation of the gospel within the entire canonical framework allows him to characterize the life of Christian discipleship as cruciform–without negating the OT’s very this-worldly promises of blessing. “Jesus…frees his disciples to live in such a way that the blessing of others knows no bounds” (p. 167). This is consistent with the divine economy of blessing-in-difference, but in a world afflicted by sin, this lifestyle will inevitably invite suffering.

    Following Bonhoeffer, Soulen argues that the Christian doesn’t court suffering for its own sake. Rather, suffering is endured for the sake of the economy of mutual blessing. “The cross does not supersede the economy of mutual blessing; it establishes the outermost point of God’s fidelity to it on behalf of the estranged other” (p. 168). This is a healthy corrective to the sometimes morbid fixation on suffering as somehow meritorious in itself that characterizes some strains of Christian spirituality. God wants to deliver God’s creation from suffering, sickness, hatred, estrangement, and death. Moreover, Soulen says, the cross is not about “the denial or destruction of Israel’s national privilege” but is the means by which “God preserves the economy of mutual blessing through suffering love, to which Jew and Greek alike are called to be conformed” (p. 168).

    Following this, Soulen turns to the nature of the Christian community. The church is “the table fellowship of Jews and Gentiles that prays in Jesus’ name for the coming of the God of Israel’s reign” (p. 169). Soulen goes on to argue that the fellowship of the church “confirms rather than annuls the difference and mutual dependence of Israel and the nations” (p. 168). Rather than seeing itself as a “spiritual” fellowship that transcends “carnal” differences such as that between Jew and Gentile, the church should be “a table fellowship of those who are–and remain–different” (p. 168). He maintains that the distinction between Jew and Gentile is not erased, but realized in a new way, in the church. “What the church rejects is not the difference of Jew and Gentile, male and female, but rather the idea that these differences essentially entail curse, opposition, and antithesis” (p. 170). The church is the “social embodiment of the doctrine of justification”–the reconciliation between peoples. He notes that this view of the church is underwritten by the decision at the so-called Council of Jerusalem recorded in the Book of Acts. It was decided that gentile Christians were not bound to observe Torah, but that Jewish followers of Jesus would continue to observe it. “Hence obedience to Jesus is possible from either of two vantage points” (pp. 170-171).

    Further, the church must be mindful of its status as a provisional fellowship that anticipates God’s reign–it is not that reign itself. This is exhibited in part by the empirical fact that the church is overwhelmingly Gentile and that most Jews have declined the invitation to become part of the church’s fellowship. The church must simultaneously remember that it is a fellowship open to Jews and Gentile but also that gentile Christians do not have a mission to convert non-Christian Jews. This is a fine line to walk, but the church shouldn’t seek simplistic solutions as it lives in between the times.

    Finally, Soulen argues that Christians have no warrant for thinking that Jews will convert en masse to Christianity in some sort of end-times scenario, as is sometimes imagined. Citing Paul’s discussion of Israel’s destiny in Romans, he says that only a “trans-ecclesiological” free action of God will determine the final status of each person. The fate of the Jews is not mediated by the Church, but is rooted in God’s irrevocable promises.

    Summarizing, Soulen writes

    The unity of the Christian canon is not best unlocked by insisting that everything in the Bible points toward Jesus Christ. Such a construal of the canon’s unity systematically disregards Bonhoeffer’s admonition not to speak that last word before the last but one. What results practically is a Christian theology that is triumphalist in its posture toward Jews and latently gnostic in its grasp of God’s purposes for the earth and its history. More helpful for discerning the unity of the canon is the recognition that the Scriptures [OT] and the Apostolic Witness [NT] are both centrally concerned with the God of Israel and the God of Israel’s coming reign of shalom. (p. 175)

    I’ll save my own thoughts and questions for a subsequent post.

    Previous posts:

    Redemption for the sake of blessing

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    Supersessionism and the flight from history

    Blessing and difference

    The story so far

    Jesus and the gospel of God’s coming reign

  • Jesus and the gospel of God’s coming reign

    I’ve been sick for the past week or so, which hasn’t left much extra energy for blogging. But I want to get back to (and hopefully wrap up!) my series on R. Kendall Soulen’s The God of Israel and Christian Theology.

    Previously, we’ve seen that Soulen tries to re-cast the biblical narrative as one of blessing-within-difference. In creation and in the covenant with Israel, God’s will for creation is a differentiation of existence which leads to mutual blessing precisely through that difference.

    So how does the gospel about Jesus fit in to all this? Soulen notes that the gospel is meant to be news–good news–but news about what? His answer: it tells us something about God’s coming reign. “News about God’s coming reign is good or bad depending on the outcome of God’s work as the Consummator of creation (p. 157).” The fact of evil suggests that this outcome is not assured–that God’s intentions for creation could be severely hampered, or even undone altogether. Will the outcome be one of blessing or one of curse? Or perhaps blessing for some and curse for others?

    The good news then is God’s “present answer to the eschatological question of whether God’s work as Consummator will prove ultimately victorious on behalf of all creation over the powers that destroy (p. 158).” Faith in the gospel of Jesus is ultimately faith in “the ultimate victory of blessing over curse,” a faith that is manifested in “cruciform discipleship” (p. 158).

    In his life and ministry, Jesus bears witness to a certain understanding of what God’s coming reign will look like. He “trusted God’s reign to consummate the economy of mutual blessing that God had initiated long ago through God’s promises to Abraham and Sarah” (p. 160) but also that this consummation would include the nations. Secondly, he trusted that God’s reign would consummate creation “in a manner that reclaimed, redeemed, and restored the lost” (p. 161). In short, God’s reign will be marked by reconciliation for mutual blessing, not a zero-sum victory of one group over another. Jesus’ displays a trust in the ultimate victory of mutual blessing, even in the face of the forces of “curse, violence, and enmity” (p. 162). Hence his commands to bless and pray for one’s enemies, which give a cruciform shape to the life of discipleship.

    In following this path ultimately to the cross, Jesus “became wholly identified with the lost whose cause he advocated,” but in the resurrection, God “vindicates the economy of mutual blessing over against all the destructive powers of sin, curse, separation, and death” (p. 164). This throws a new light on the cross, which we can now see as his point of “utmost solidarity with the lost” for the sake of “the whole house of Israel and for the whole earthly economy of difference and mutual dependence” (p. 164). The resurrection appearances are marked by reconciliation, feasting, and sending, and the risen Christ becomes a source of “power among the living until the day of the Lord’s return (p. 165).”

    So, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God has provided a “victorious guarantee” of God’s “end-time fidelity to the work of consummation.”

    The gospel proclaims Jesus as victorious because through the resurrection God vindicates Jesus’ trust in the triumph of blessing over curse, life over death, communion over isolation. At the same time, the gospel proclaims Jesus as guarantee because while everything about Jesus pertains to God’s eschatological reign, Jesus himself is not that reign in its fullness. (p. 165)

    Jesus, then, is a foretaste, a prolepsis, of God’s coming reign. He is the down payment or promissory note that shows that the end will indeed be one of blessing, not curse. He is the sign that God’s program of universal blessing through the calling of Israel will be a reality:

    If Jesus is the proleptic enactment of God’s eschatological fidelity to the work of consummation, then Jesus is by this very fact the carnal embodiment of God’s end-time fidelity toward Israel and toward Israel’s future as the place of unsurpassable blessing for Israel, for the nations, and for all creation. By its very nature, then, Jesus’ resurrection from the dead anticipates a future event whose character as victorious fidelity can no longer be in doubt. That event is God’s intervention on behalf of all Israel in keeping with God’s promises, such that God’s final act of covenant faithfulness toward Israel redounds not only to the blessing of Israel but also to the blessing of the nations and all of creation. (p. 166)

    In the next post I’ll look at some of the implications Soulen draws from this for the life of discipleship and the shape of the church.

    Previous posts:

    Redemption for the sake of blessing

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    Supersessionism and the flight from history

    Blessing and difference

    The story so far

  • The story so far…

    In the eighth and final chapter of The God of Israel and Christian Theology, R. Kendall Soulen provides a helpful summary of the argument thus far, which I’m going to quote at length:

    The gospel is the story of the God of Israel’s victory in Jesus over powers that destroy. Just so, God’s victory in Jesus is the center but not the totality of Christian faith. Faith in the gospel presupposes the God of Israel’s antecedent purpose for creation, a purpose threatened by destructive powers but vindicated by God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

    Christians have almost universally assented to the truth of the previous paragraph. But, as we saw in Part One, they have commonly accounted for its truth by means of a construal of the Bible’s narrative unity that–paradoxically enough–renders God’s identity as the God of Israel and the center of the Hebrew Scriptures almost wholly indecisive for grasping God’s antecedent purpose for human creation. As an alternative to the standard construal, I have sketched in the previous chapters one way in which God’s identity as the God of Israel becomes decisive for grasping God’s antecedent purpose for creation. I have argued that God’s work as the Consummator of creation promises life and the fullness of life to creation and to the human family in and through earthly economies of difference and mutual dependence. In the context of God’s six-days’ blessing, God’s economy is embodied in the distinction and mutual relation of the natural world and the human family, of female and male, of parent and child, of one generation and the next. In the context of God’s crowning Sabbath blessing, God’s economy is irrevocably embodied in the carnal election of the Jewish people and in the consequent distinction between Jew and Gentile, between Israel and the nations. Furthermore, I have argued that God’s work as Consummator is oriented from the outset toward God’s eschatological shalom, where God intends to fulfill the economies of difference and reciprocity…in unsurpassable fashion to the mutual blessing of all in a reign of wholeness, righteousness, and peace. (pp. 156-7)

    In the next post I’ll look at how Soulen thinks the story of Jesus fits into this.

    Previous posts:

    Redemption for the sake of blessing

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    Supersessionism and the flight from history

    Blessing and difference

  • Redemption for the sake of blessing

    If the great theme of the Bible is one of blessing, it can’t be denied that sin, or curse, and redemption is an important sub-theme. The God who is Consummator is also Redeemer and Deliverer. So how should this theme fit into the canonical narrative that Soulen is proposing as an alternative to the traditional one?

    Soulen notes that

    the primeval history (Gen 1-11) knows nothing of a single catastrophic fall that introduces a major turning point into the biblical story. On the contrary…the central theme of the primeval history and of Genesis as a whole is the continuity, resilience, and growth of God’s work as the Consummator of creation. Nevertheless, the creation sagas are nothing if not utterly unsentimental about the seriousness of human sin and dreadful weight of the divine curse. The creation sagas trace the human family’s readiness to receive God’s blessing through a series of social pairs: male and female (Gen 2-3), brother and brother (Gen 4), comrade and comrade (Gen 11). In each case, the result is distressingly negative. (p. 142)

    Seen in this light, Soulen understands sin to be the refusal to receive God’s blessing as mediated through the other. This can refer to the divine Other, as in Adam and Eve’s failure to trust God as the source of their fullness, or it can refer to the human other, as in Cain’s refusal to accept blessing through his brother Abel. Instead of receiving God’s blessing “through economies of difference and mutual dependence” (p. 143), we try to secure our own blessing on our own terms. “Sin assaults the link that joins blessing and otherness. Sin seeks blessing apart from its source in the divine Other and apart from life with the human other” (p. 144).

    When humanity rejects the divinely ordained economy of mutual dependence, it invites the divine curse. In the story of the Exodus we learn of Egypt’s rejection of the mutually beneficial relationship it had established with the family of Jacob, turning instead to exploitation. In turn, God’s curse falls upon the Egyptians and God delivers the people that would become Israel. But lest this seem to be just national egoism on Israel’s part, the Scriptures speak just as if not more often of God’s judgment on Israel. “Like the nations, Israel is prone to forget that God’s covenant is the only trustworthy source of benediction for Israel and for creation” (p. 146).

    As we saw with blessing, redemption is ultimately oriented to the advent of God’s eschatological shalom. Both persecution by the nations and Israel’s own sin “threat[en] God’s intentions to bring Israel to final consummation” (p. 147). The Scriptures are ambivalent about whether this means simply judgment of the nations and vindication for Israel, or whether it means a restoration and final fulfillment of the economy of mutual blessing God always intended. This is a question Soulen returns to when considering the meaning of Jesus in the next chapter.

    For the time being, the key point is that redemption or deliverance is for the sake of consummation. In the Pentateuch, the story of deliverance is framed by stories of God’s blessing (in Genesis and Deuteronomy). There are hints in the Exodus story itself that Israel will be blessed in the company of the nations (Moses delivered by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised in Pharaoh’s house, Moses’ marriage into a gentile household, and the “mixed crowd” that escapes Egypt with the Hebrews). The institution of the Jubilee is another instance of redemption (forgiveness of debts) for the sake of blessing (a restored relationship with land and community), and the Scriptures’ eschatological hope is not just for deliverance from evil, but for the positive blessings of life and wholeness.

    [L]iberation from the powers that destroy is a matter of utmost urgency precisely because these powers threaten to cut off the human family from the arena in which God’s blessings are bestowed. The antithesis of sin and redemption is misunderstood if it is torn from its context in God’s work as Consummator and from the economies of mutual blessing that God establishes and sustains. (p. 52)

    It should be clear at this point that from this perspective redemption does not mean erasing the distinction between Jew and Gentile, as the church has maintained for most of its history. Rather it means forging a new community in which Jew and Gentile exist in a relationship of mutual blessing without ceasing to be Jew and Gentile.

    Previous posts:

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    Supersessionism and the flight from history

    Blessing and difference

  • Blessing and difference

    In the second part of The God of Israel and Christian Theology, R. Kendall Soulen provides the outline of an alternative framework for reading the Bible that, he argues, avoids the supersessionism inherent to the traditional canonical narrative.

    Key to this is a reorientation of the narrative away from the drama of sin and redemption. Quoting Bonhoeffer, Soulen notes that the religion of the Old Testament is not primarily a religion of redemption. Rather, he says, it is a religion of blessing. Specifically, God’s work as Consummator takes precedence over God’s work as Redeemer. The work that God is about is blessing through difference.

    In contrast to God’s work as Redeemer, God’s work as Consummator concerns not God’s power to deliver the creature from sin, evil, and oppression, but rather the ultimate good that God intends for human creation antecedent and subsequent to the calamity of sin. As represented in the Scriptures, God’s work as Consummator revolves around God’s blessing and its power to communicate life, wholeness, well-being, and joy to that which is other than God. (p. 115)

    This ultimate good is life and well-being in its most comprehensive sense, which entails difference and mutual dependence. In the act of creation, God brings into being that which is not God. This provides the occasion for mutual blessing between God and creation as creatures bless God through praise and thanksgiving. Further, the differentiation inherent in creation itself–between male and female, between humanity and nature, between the generations–provides further opportunities for mutual blessing-in-difference. “Economies of difference and mutual dependence” provide the form that blessing takes in God’s world.

    In this view, God’s historical covenantal acts are part and parcel of this mode of mutual blessing-in-difference. “Contrary to a common Christian assumption,” the calling of Abraham is not a response to the problem of sin. “To the contrary, God’s motive seems chiefly to be the sheer fecundity and capaciousness of the divine good pleasure” (p. 120). In establishing the covenant with Abraham and his posterity, God is establishing a new way of blessing the world. Hereafter, humanity is divided into Jew and Gentile, but this is not a division of conflict or opposition, where one benefits at the expense of another. Rather it is to be another differentiation of mutual dependence and blessing. “[T]he Scriptures view the distinction between Israel and the nations as a part of the abiding constitution of reality in God, anticipated from the beginning and present at the end of all things (p. 121).”

    In this scheme, Israel is blessed by being made a people and by receiving the Torah and the land. And Israel in return blesses God by praising God’s name before the nations. But this is not to be a blessing at the expense of the nations, but for their sake as well. “To be a Gentile is to be the other of Israel and as such an indispensable partner in a single economy of blessing that embraces the whole human family” (p. 126). Gentiles have a distinct, but still positive, role to play in God’s economy of blessing. This is symbolized by the story of Joseph in which Egypt and Joseph’s family are mutually blessed and enriched through their relationship, without ceasing to be distinct.

    This economy of mutual blessing is ordered to an eschatological end: the reign of God’s shalom in all creation. The Scriptures (i.e., the Old Testament) make it clear that this eschatological peace includes the well-being of both Israel and the nations (Gentiles). “God’s history with Israel and the nations is ordered from the outset toward a final reign of shalom in which the distinction between Israel and the nations is not abrogated and overcome but affirmed within a single economy of mutual blessing” (p. 132).

    The eschatological blessing has both a “historical” and a “cosmic” dimension: one referring to the climax of history (what we might call a this-worldly utopia) and the other to the establishment of the “new heaven and new earth” wherein God will dwell in glory with God’s people. This is the consummation of God’s work to bless creation precisely through the creation of fruitful difference rather than its abrogation.

    The next chapter puts the drama of sin and redemption into this framework, and the final one focuses on the work of Jesus Christ as the promissory note of God’s consummating work.

    Previous posts:

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    Supersessionism and the flight from history

  • Supersessionism and the flight from history

    R. Kendall Soulen brings the first, critical part of his God of Israel and Christian Theology to a close with two chapters on early modern and 20th-century theology, respectively.

    In chapter 3 he examines the thought of two influential thinkers who tried to reconcile the core of Christian belief with the worldview of the Englightenment–Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Both of these thinkers, in Soulen’s evaluation, did this at the cost of severing Christianity more profoundly from its Jewish roots than the traditional canonical narrative they inherited. This is because both emphasized, in different ways, the universal, ahistorical “foreground” of the canonical narrative–the arc of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation–to such a degree that the Jewish matrix of Christian faith becomes something to discard. For Kant, religion is to be understood “within the limits of reason alone”–which for him means the demands of morality understood as a rational, universal law. Jesus is an exemplar of perfect humanity because of his moral perfection, not because of anything having to do with his role in the ongoing story of God’s history with Israel. Similarly, Schleiermacher sees religion as an expression of a universal human consciousness of dependence. Jesus is the redeemer because he had a perfect “God-consciousness” that is transmitted to others through the community he founded, the church.

    In both cases, Soulen argues, the drama of redemption has been removed from public history to inner realm of experience–whether it be moral experience or religious experience. The result is that both Kant and Schleiermacher view Christianity as the universal, “spiritual” alternative to the particularistic, “carnal” Judaism. (Schleiermacher even goes so far as to suggest that the OT be relegated to a “historical appendix” to the NT!) For Soulen, supersessionism goes hand in hand with a semi-gnostic “flight from history.” God’s action is not defined by what God does in historical relationship with particular people; rather it’s shaped by an ahistorical template of providing a solution to a universal human problem (moral frailty or lack of God-consciousness). By transposing the divine-human relationship to this inner, ashistorical realm, Kant and Schleiermacher pry open the fissure that already existed in the traditional narrative between the “foreground” of creation-fall-redemption-consummation and the “background” of God’s dealing with Israel. Their God is a “Christian divinity without Jewish flesh.”

    Soulen then turns in chapter 4 to the two great “Karls” of 20th-century theology: Barth and Rahner. In different ways both theologians worked to ground God’s acts of redemption and consummation more firmly in history (both were influenced by and reacting to Schleiermacher). For Barth, forming a covenant relationship with humanity just is the point of creation. And God’s covenant with Israel is part of his work to consummate this relationship with creation; thus God’s very being is, in a sense, shaped by history. Rahner takes a very different approach, but tries to arrive at a similar conclusion. God’s self-bestowal on creatures is the point of creation, but this takes place in and through the medium of what Rahner calls humanity’s “supernatural existential.” This refers to a certain inner dynamism toward relationship with God that is a universal–although contingent–feature of the human condition–it is bestowed by God’s grace, not an inherent feature of human nature as such. Thus history is for both Karls the medium of God’s consummating activity in a way that it wasn’t for Kant and Schleiermacher.

    However, Soulen sees in both Barth and Rahner problems that recapitulate the supersessionist tendencies of their predecessors. In Barth’s thought, he says, God’s history with Israel is “collapsed” into the person of Jesus Christ. This is part and parcel of Barth’s effort to retrieve the “ec-centric” or “extra nos” aspect of the Reformer’s thought–everything is accomplished in Jesus and we benefit from it in virtue of its universal efficacy. History effectively “ends” with the resurrection and thus the ongoing history of Israel has no particular significance as part of God’s consummating work. For Rahner, the problem is that while formally his “supernatural existential” is a historical phenomenon, in practice it is utterly detached from historical events. It serves as a clever solution to an intellectual problem of reconciling grace and nature, but Rahner doesn’t tie this abstract historicity to the concrete history of God’s dealings with Israel. In both cases, covenant history is collapsed to a single point (the person of Jesus or the dynamism of the human creature), relegating God’s covenant-history with Israel to insignificance. What’s needed instead, Soulen says, is a view that sees God’s work as Consummator engag[ing] creation in the total, open-ended, and still ongoing history that unfolds between the Lord, Israel, and the nations” (p. 106). Outlining such a view will be the task of the second part of the book.

    Previous posts on Soulen’s book:

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

  • Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    I want to continue my summary of R. Kendall Soulen’s The God of Israel and Christian Theology (see previous post here). In chapter 2 Soulen looks at the traditional “canonical narrative” of Christian theology as it was formulated in the early centuries of the church and argues that it “inscribes the logic of supersessionism [i.e., replacement theology] into the deep grammar of Christian theology” (p. 49).

    Let’s recall that, for Soulen, a canonical narrative is a kind of high-order story that serves to construe the collection of books that make up the Bible as a single overarching narrative. Soulen examines the thought of two pivotal figures in the early church–Justin Martyr and Irenaeus–who were key in establishing the traditional narrative of Christian theology. In Soulen’s shorthand, the traditional canonical narrative is the story of “creation-for consummation, fall, redemption, and final consummation.”

    Justin Martyr, as an early Christian apologist, was eager to make the gospel intelligible for a largely pagan audience. Consequently, he emphasized the “cosmic” dimenions of the Christian story, portraying Jesus as the incarnate logos or wisdom of God. This “cosmic” version of the Christian story, however, has the unfortunate side-effect of “circumvent[ing] God’s identity as the God of Israel and God’s history with the Jewish people as related by the Hebrew Scriptures” (p. 36). For Justin, the Hebrew Scriptrues (which were, for him, simply the Scriptures since the NT canon hadn’t yet been established) are important primarily because they foretell the coming of Christ. He certainly saw the Christian God as the same as the Jewish God, but “God’s history with the carnal community of the Jews is merely a passing episode within God’s more encompassing purposes for creation, which are universal and spiritual in nature” (p. 37). The church–the “true,” “spiritual” Israel, replaces the “carnal” Israel in God’s plan for creation, and there is no positive religious significance to the ongoing history of the Jewish people.

    Irenaeus was the scourge of gnostics who probably deserves as much credit as anyone for firmly establishing the Jewish scriptures as part of the Christian canon. So you might expect that he’d take a more positive stance toward Judaism. However, Irenaeus vindicates his anti-gnostic argument “by building on Justin’s supersessionist reading of the Hebrew Scriptures, and indeed by extending it in order to provide a framework for reading the church’s twofold canon” (p. 41). Irenaeus follows Justin in organizing the Bible in light of four key events (creation-for-consummation, fall, redemption, and final consummation) and he also interprets the covenant with the Jews primarily as a perfiguration of redemption in Christ. According to Soulen, Irenaeus does modify Justin’s account of salvation history by making the election of the Jews more integral, but paradoxically inscribes supersessionism even deeper into the Christian story. For Irenaeus, the covenant with Israel is more central to salvation history than it is in Justin’s cosmic-logos account of redemption, and there is greater continuity in substance between the two “dispensations.” However, precisely because the covenant with Israel is a prefiguration or preparation, it is, by definition, obsolete when Christ comes on the scene. “The Old Covenant is fulfilled by the New Covenant according to its inner christological substance but superseded and displaced according to its outward and carnal form. Hence the whole economy of salvation is inwardly ordered to the eventual dissolution of Israel’s corporate life into the life of the church” (p. 47).

    The template established by Justin and Irenaeus went largely unquestioned for most of Christian history. The result, according to Soulen, is that the Christian tradition has downplayed or denied the significance of Israel and God’s history with Israel for shaping its theological commitments. In short, the Christian gospel as it is often presented is completely “detachable” from the Hebrew Scriptures and Israel. This leads to an ahistorical and individualistic reading of salvation that pays insufficient attention to public history and the “middle range” dimensions of life such as politics and economics, which are so important to the Hebrew Scriptures.

    One question in the back of my mind as I’m reading this (and this is only chapter 2) is how Soulen thinks we should hold together or relate the “particularist” and “universalist” poles of the Christian story. He is eager to recover the decisive role of God’s covenant with the particular people Israel for shaping Christian theology, but at the same time I take it that he still thinks Christianity has a universal and “cosmic” message that goes beyond the bounds of one people’s particular history. It’s not yet clear to me how you maintain particularism without sacrificing universal relevance. Hopefully he’ll address this at some point.

    UPDATE: Partly in response to Marvin’s comment, I wanted to add a little more about Soulen’s critique of Irenaeus, because it’s a somewhat subtle point that may not have come out clearly enough in my post. Here’s Soulen:

    In sum, Irenaeus sees God’s history with Israel as an episode within the larger story whereby God prepares a fallen humanity for the incarnation. Coming between Adam’s fall on one side and the incarnation on the other, Israel serves as a training ground for salvation.

    One of the most significan aspects of Irenaeus’ solution is the lucid account it permits of the Bible’s unity. On the one hand, a single economy of redemption underlies the biblical narrative as a whole from the fall to the end of time. On the other hand, this single economy is bodied forth in two asymmetrical forms, one temporary and prophetic, the other permanent and definitive. The Old and New Covenants … are one because they come from the same God and embody God’s one plan to redeem fallen humanity in Christ. They are distinct because they present the economy of salvation under different outward forms…. When the new comes, therefore, the old is done away with, not with respect to substance but with respect to outer form.

    […]

    Curiously, Irenaeus’ solution to the unity of the canon reinforces the logic of economic supersessionism at the same time that it underscores the continuity of divine purpose that unites Israel and the church, Old Covenant and New. Just as maturity is the goal of childhood training, so Christ and the church are the goals of Israel’s history from the beginning. The Old Covenant is fulfilled by the New Covenant according to its inner christological substance but superseded and displaced according to its outer carnal form. Hence the whole economy of salvation is inwardly ordered to the eventual dissolution of Israel’s corporate life into the life of the church. (pp. 46-47)

    Soulen refers to this as a double movement of “fulfillment and cancellation”: Israel is “obsolete” because its purpose was chiefly background preparation for redemption in Christ. The irony is that this obsolescence is a result of Irenaeus’ efforts to more deeply integrate Israel’s history into the Christian account of God’s plan of salvation.