A Thinking Reed

Category: Judaism

  • Stendahl’s rules

    Krister Stendahl was a Swedish Lutheran theologian, New Testament scholar, and ultimately a bishop of the Church of Sweden. He’s probably best known for arguing that St. Paul’s letters were responding to a specific context–namely the relationship between Jews and Gentiles and his mission to the latter. According to Stendahl, much Western theology (Lutheran in particular) has misunderstood Paul by projecting onto him later conflicts, such as Luther’s with the Catholic Church, resulting in an overly “psychological” understanding of Paul’s teaching on faith and justification (the “introspective conscience of the West” as he puts it). Stendahl’s argument was an important impetus for the so-called new perspective on Paul. His book Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, which coincidentally I just started reading, collects some of his best known essays on this general topic.

    But I didn’t know–until Christopher noted it in a comment–that Stendahl is also known for three “rules” for interreligious dialogue:

    (1) When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.

    (2) Don’t compare your best to their worst.

    (3) Leave room for “holy envy.” (By this, Stendahl seems to have meant that we should be open to finidng attractive or truthful elements in other religions that aren’t necessarily present in our own.)

    According to Wikipedia, Stendahl articulated these rules during a press conference in which he was responding to opponents of building a Mormon temple in Stockholm. Stendahl’s rules call for just the kind of approach to other religions that I was commending here.

  • Jews, Christians, and a “two-poled” eschatology

    I’ve read more than one work of theology that attempted to explain the rejection of Jesus’ messiah-hood by the majority of Jews like this: Jews expectated the messiah to be a nationalist–even military–leader who would liberate them from Roman oppression, but Jesus was a different kind of messiah, a “spiritual” one who came to liberate us from our guilt and sin.* One problem with this account is that it reinforces stereotypes about “carnal” Jews and “spiritual” Christians. In the chapter on eschatology in his Way of Blessing, Way of Life, Clark Williamson proposes that it’s more illumaniting to see Jewish rejection of Jesus in a different light: it was because Jesus’ ministry clearly didn’t usher in the “days of the messiah,” the age where oppression, injustice, war, and hunger (for everyone, not just Jews) would be things of the past. By this reckoning, Jews were well-justified in not accepting the claims made on Jesus’ behalf!

    Williamson says that the early Christians maintained the same kind of messianic expectation, at least for a while, with the teaching that Jesus would return soon to usher in the messianic age. But as that hope of an imminent return faded, the church pushed its eschatological hope off into the afterlife and/or identified the “kingdom of God” that Jesus proclaimed with the spread of the church. Thus it became possible for Christians to see Jews as stubbornly refusing to accept what should’ve been obvious to them–that the Messiah had come. Along the way, Christians lost their sense of the eschatological tension between what had already been accomplished in Jesus and what was yet to be accomplished.

    As Christian eschatology has become increasingly otherworldly and privatized, we need, Williamson argues, to recover a more “Jewish” emphasis on this-worldly liberation as one pole of our eschatological hope. God wants the world to display relations of justice and peace. On the other hand, even the most just society would contain suffering, disease, sin, oppression, and death. These are constituent elements of our present condition that can’t be done away with by any program of this-worldly liberation. Moreover, if we restrict our hope to establishing a just society in this world, what about all the people who have died, many of them under conditions of terrible oppression and injustice? That’s why the other pole of our eschatology must remain our ultimate hope in God’s promise to save us, even beyond the horizon of death.
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    *I recognize that it’s far from certain that Jesus, in fact, claimed to be the Jewish messiah in any straightforward way.

  • A story of blessing

    Clark Williamson’s systematic theology Way of Blessing, Way of Life is less focused on Jewish-Christian relations than his earlier work A Guest in the House of Israel (which I blogged about previously), but the project of re-connecting Christianity to its Jewish roots is still a major concern. One point Williamson makes is that the way Christians frequently tell their story tends to leave out the history of Israel. The arc of “creation-fall-redemption” that forms the backbone of much Christian theology, preaching, liturgy, and spirituality all too readily allows us to jump from the first three chapters of Genesis to the New Testament.

    By contrast, Williamson argues, we need to attend more to the “Old” Testament (he recommends we just refer to “the Scriptures”) to discern the identity of God and God’s purpose for humanity and the rest of creation:

    No story is more pivotal to Judaism than that of Exodus and Sinai. Nor should any book be more crucial to how Christians understand themselves. Exodus, says David Tracy, “provides a proper context for understanding the great Christian paradigm of the life-ministry-death-and-resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Christianity misunderstands itself whenever it wallows in a privatized, depoliticized, and de-historicized faith. Exodus requires “a resolutely this-worldly spirituality as it demands a historical and political, not a private or individualist, understanding of Christian salvation-as-total-liberation.” (p. 74)

    Williamson thinks that the Exodus story can help correct the Christian tendency to think of salvation in a narrowly individualistic way that emphasizes an otherworldly heaven. Following Methodist theologian R. Kendall Soulen, Williamson suggests that, more basic and inclusive than the creation-fall-redemption story is one of “an economy of consummation based on the Lord’s blessing”:

    God promises well-being that includes all of life (peace, economic sufficiency, health, safety, fertility, God’s loving presence) and makes for the fullness of human life. The fullness of human life is a gift from the fullness of God’s life. (p. 84)

    Becuase God’s blessings are freely shared with us, we should freely share those blessings with the other, those who are different. This “blessing-in-difference” characterizes God’s blessing of creation, human beings’ mutual self-giving, and Israel’s mission to be a blessing to “the nations.” Clearly, God’s purpose of blessing all creation has not yet been realized in its fullness, but awaits God’s eschatological consummation. And part of that ultimate consummation is our learning to share more widely the blessings we have received with each other and the rest of God’s creation.

  • Holy faith and holy disbelief

    I stand in awe before the memory of the K’doshim [holy ones] who walked into the gas chambers with the Ani Ma’amin–I believe–on their lips. How dare I question, if they did not question? I believe because they believed. And I stand in awe before the K’doshim, before the memory of the untold suffering of innocent human beings who walked to the gas chambers without faith, because what was imposed upon them was more than faith can endure…

    The faith is holy; but so are the disbelief and the religious rebellion of the concentration camps holy. The disbelief was not intellectual, but faith crushed, shattered, pulverized. And faith murdered a millionfold is holy disbelief. Those who were not there, and yet readily accept the Holocaust as the will of God that must not be questioned, desecrate the holy disbelief of those whose faith was murdered. And those who were not there and yet join with self-assurance the rank of the disbelievers desecrate the holy faith of the believers.

    — Jewish theologian Eliezer Berkowits, quoted in Jonathan Magonet, The Explorer’s Guide to Judaism, pp. 289-90.

  • Guest in the House wrap-up

    Readers may have noticed that my posts on Williamson’s book haven’t been very critical. That’s in part because I think he’s right about a lot of things. But it has more to do with the fact that I was mainly trying to get clear in my own mind about what he’s saying.

    I think a large part of the value I got out of reading this book is analogous to what I got from reading Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is last year. (See post here, here, here, and here.) Just as I was familiar with the concerns raised by feminists about traditional theology, I was aware, in a general sort of way, that anti-Judaism was part of the baggage of the church. But I had never thought about its pervasive effect on theology and what it would take to fix it in any deep or systematic way. And just as I came away from Johnson’s book convinced that incorporating feminist insights and addressing feminist concerns was a critical task for theology (even as I didn’t necessarily agree with all of Johnson’s specific positions), Williamson has convinced me that the same is true for Christianity’s legacy of anti-Judaism.

  • Williamson on Christology

    A question that naturally arises for any Christian theology that attempts to recognize the ongoing reality of Jewish faith and life is What about Jesus? That is, do Christians need to sacrifice, or at least modify, their convictions about the uniqueness and salvific importance of Jesus in order to avoid supersessionism?

    In A Guest in the House of Israel, Clark Williamson makes a number of critical comments about both traditional and modern Christologies. Traditional Christology tended to emphasize Christ’s divinity to the exclusion of his humanity, despite official dogmatic statements to the contrary. It was never able to provide a metaphysically satisfactory account of the “two natures.” Inevitably, this neglect of Jesus’ humanity resulted in downplaying his Jewishness. Moreover, much traditional Christology, he contends, describes Jesus as acting in such a way as to make it possible for God to welcome us back into fellowship, whereas for the Reformation, “[t]ransformation of life is the result of God’s gracious gift, not its condition” (p. 172).

    Modern Christologies don’t always fare much better in his view. Instead of grounding the uniqueness of Christ in his metaphysical nature, they ground it in his “empirical-historical” character as supposedly revealed by modern scholarship. While they have, commendably, recovered an awareness of the genuine humanity of Jesus, they try to ground their christological convictions in the supposedly unique (but ultimately unverifiable) character of the “empirical-historical” Jesus. Williamson finds this pattern in Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Harnack–Jesus can save us from “authoritarian religion” (usually identified with Judaism) because of his perfect faith or “God-consciousness.” “In modern critical-historical Christologies, the only way to establish the uniqueness of Jesus is to contrast him with his context; he is unique precisely to the extent that he is differentiated from and opposed to Jews and Judaism” (p. 174).

    “A post-Holocaust Christology,” Williamson writes, “will make it clear that to encounter Jesus Christ is to encounter the God of Israel, maker and redeemer of heaven and earth” (p. 188). Christology is not based on an “appeal to the empirical-historical Jesus” (though historical scholarship can provide a corrective to defective Christologies). When it is, Christians inevitably end up projecting onto the “historical” Jesus their own concerns and values (thus we get the feminist Jesus, the Marxist Jesus, etc.). But Jesus, Williamson insists, is not a norm, but a savior:

    In bringing us to face the decision whether we will understand ourselves in any ultimate sense in terms of and only in terms of the love of God graciously offered to us and in terms of the command of God that we love God and the neighbor, Jesus Christ offers us salvation and is properly spoken of as our savior. (p. 191)

    What we need to be aware of, however, is that Jesus points beyond himself to God the Father. We need to consistently “monotheize” our Christology, which, Williamson says, is what the doctrine of the Trinity is all about. The Trinity safeguards the oneness of God by maintaining that it was the God of Israel who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Jesus is the medium through which we are encountered by the singular promise and command of God.

    To believe in Jesus Christ is to confess that it is through Jesus Christ as witnessed to in the church that we are brought to understand ourselves in terms of the love of God freely offered to us, as accepted and justified, and in terms of the command of God that we love God and our neighbors in turn, called to a new and radically transformed life. (p. 192)

    Drawing on the thought of Paul Tillich, H. R. Niebuhr, and Schubert Ogden, Williamson warns against “absolutizing” the person of Jesus, which is a form of idolatry. Jesus is the medium of revelation, but not the revelation itself (see pp. 188-190). When we encounter the crucified and risen Lord in the church’s life and proclamation, we are presented anew with God’s promise and command–the promise of unconditional love and the command to love God and the neighbor. Jesus Christ is the gift given from within the Israel of God that we (Gentiles) might know the God of Israel. The work of Christ, so to speak, is to “re-present” God’s promise and command to us and to bring us face to face with that promise and command (see p. 190).

    Some might worry that Williamson’s Christology is “gnostic”–that is, that the role of Christ is that of a revealer of a truth (God’s love and command) that could, theoretically, be known by other means. In fact, he holds that it has been known by other means, namely through Israel’s relationship with God. Williamson even goes to far as to say that “salvation…at least in part, is authentic self-understanding” (p. 231), and “[o]ur salvation does not ‘become possible’ in Christ–a statement that the New Testament nowhere affirms–but in him what was previously possible and actual in the history of Israel ‘becomes manifest’” (p. 162).

    What Williamson would say in reply, I think, is that a Christology in which Christ functions to “make possible” our salvation sets limits on God’s grace. If we say that Jesus Christ as a condition apart from which God is not (or cannot be) gracious, then we are promoting a form of works-righteousness. “If we fail to remember that all christological and soteriological have God as their subject–God is the author of our salvation–we will render Christ into a limit on the grace of God and claim that apart from Christ there is no saving knowledge of God” (p. 198). In his view, the grace revealed in Jesus is the same grace that was and is present in the life of Israel.