A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology

  • Recent reading

    More #content partly repurposed from my Goodreads page…

    The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia, Rowan Williams

    The former archbishop of Canterbury explores the theological underpinnings of Lewis’s beloved fantasy series with his customary erudition and pastoral heart. Williams also does a nice job responding to some recent critics of the series (e.g., Philip Pullman). The purpose of the Narnia books, Williams contends, is to be an intellectual and imaginative “mouthwash” that allows us to encounter the Christian message anew. Probably the best indicator of the book’s success is that it immediately made me want to re-read the Narnia books.

    On Niebuhr: A Theological Study, Langdon Gilkey

    A clear and engaging exposition of Niebuhr’s theology from a former student (and accomplished theologian in his own right). Gilkey argues that Niebuhr is a more coherent and compelling theologian than he’s often given credit for (as opposed to being a social critic who festooned a largely secular ethical system with pious language). The final chapter helpfully delves into some of Niebuhr’s presuppositions and shows that he remained very much a modernist, despite his strident criticisms of the liberal Protestantism of his day. I came away from this with a renewed appreciation of Niebuhr as a religious thinker.

    Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, Katha Pollitt

    A comprehensive argument for the right to choose an abortion as essential for women’s full equality. It seems increasingly common for people to call for a “third way” on abortion beyond the extremes of “pro-life” and “pro-choice”; Pollitt, however, compels us to look closely at the concrete effects of various efforts to limit abortion and whether they are driven more by a desire to stigmatize or shame women who have abortions for the “wrong” reasons. She also notes repeatedly that many of the people who oppose legal abortion also oppose policies (e.g., widespread access to birth control, comprehensive sex education, and government support for families) that would do the most to reduce its prevalence. I probably still fall somewhat into the “mushy middle” this book is aimed at, but it definitely nudged me in a more steadfastly pro-choice direction.

  • Party spirit

    The fact is that democracy requires not only the organization of political parties, but also a certain degree of mutual respect or at least tolerance. Whenever the followers of one political party persuade themselves that the future of the nation is not safe with the opposition in power, it becomes fairly certain that the nation’s future is not safe, no matter which party rules. For such political acrimony endangers the nation’s health more than any specific political policies.

    –Reinhold Niebuhr, “Democracy and the Party Spirit,” from Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr

    These words were originally published in 1954, but it’s hardly much of a stretch to apply them today. Niebuhr thought that “party spirit” in 1954 was more of a problem on the Right than on the Left–as President Eisenhower was trying to manage his party’s radical right flank, who were busy looking for Communists under every bed. And similarly today, there’s no shortage of rhetoric coming from the Right about America’s imminent descent into a socialist hellscape (see Sen. Ted Cruz’s recent speech announcing his presidential campaign, to take just one pertinent example). The main difference now seems to be that the radical right flank accounts for the vast majority of the G.O.P.

    But then, I’m a Democrat, so I would say that, wouldn’t I?

  • The survival of chaos after the victory of God

    Jon D. Levenson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence is one of the most stimulating theology books I’ve read in a long time. I was expecting something different–a theodicy of sorts; but what I got instead was more interesting. Levenson argues that key passages in the Tanakh/Jewish Bible present creation not as “creation out of nothing,” but as God’s “mastery” of the forces of chaos. These forces continually threaten to reemerge and will not be fully vanquished until God’s final victory at the end of time; hence the “persistence of evil.”

    While Levenson recognizes that creatio ex nihilo has become the more-or-less orthodox view in Judaism (as well as in Christianity and Islam), he demonstrates–rather convincingly–that the Bible contains an only partially submerged motif of “creation from chaos.” That is, YHWH creates by defeating those forces that threaten to undo the divinely constituted order, stability, and peace that characterize creation. This victory, however, is precarious or incomplete: violence, disorder, and suffering are all-too-familiar parts of our experience, suggesting “the survival of chaos after the victory of God.” Contrary to many other interpreters, Levenson sees affinities with as much as differences from other Near Eastern creation myths–such as the Babylonian–that posit a primordial battle out of which the world order emerged. Through analysis of key texts, including of course the beginning of Genesis but also several Psalms, Job, and others, Levenson reveals traces of the creation from chaos motif.

    A key implication of this view is that evil and suffering are not the result of an inscrutable divine will, but rather of the incomplete, tentative, and agonistic nature of YHWH’s mastery of the forces of chaos, which continually resist his benevolent ordering. Peace, justice, and stability continually threaten to lapse back into the chaos out of which they were brought. This is vividly brought home for long stretches of Israel’s history, and the biblical traditions of lament and apocalyptic can be seen as a cry for God to finally bring about the decisive victory over the elements that threaten God’s good creation.

    Importantly, the Bible also attests to the role human beings are to play in this victory. When Israel keeps the commandments of God–including its cultic and ritual obedience–it is expanding the area over which the divine will holds sway in the world. (In this regard, Levenson allows himself some shots at certain Christian theologies that minimize the importance of human action.) The completion of creation only comes when the forces of evil and chaos are vanquished both in external history and in the human heart.

    Creation from chaos can seem a bit mythological, and Levenson generally avoids trying to cash it out in more rationalistic or metaphysical terms. Process theology is the most obvious candidate for a compatible philosophical account, but Levenson seems to prefer to let the tension between divine omnipotence and the “groaning” of creation stand. The point is that God’s sovereignty, or omnipotence, is not a static fact, but a true dramatic achievement:

    The operative dichotomy, thus, is not that between limitation and omnipotence, but that which lies between omnipotence as a static attribute and omnipotence as a dramatic enactment: the absolute power of God realizing itself in achievement and relationship. What this biblical theology of dramatic omnipotence shares with the theology of the limited God is a frank recognition of God’s setbacks, in contrast to the classical theodicies with their exaggerated commitment to divine impassibility and their tendency to ascribe imperfection solely to human free will, the recalcitrance of matter, or the like. . . . But whereas the theology of the limited God provides exoneration of a sort for God’s failures (for, in Kantian terms, how can we say God ought to do what he cannot?), the theology of omnipotence as dramatic enactment allows people to fault God for the persistence of evil (including, on occasion, human evil) and to goad him into reactivating his primal omnipotence, which is never relinquished but often agonizingly, catastrophically dormant. One might call this latter position a theology of omnipotence in potentia, omnipotence recollected from the cosmogonic past and expected in the eschatological future but only affirmed in faith in the disordered present.

    In any event, metaphysical speculation seems less important here than fidelity to experience. Faith in the God who is the source of all good can’t help but stand in tension with our manifest experience of evil and suffering. In this light, Levenson’s conclusion to his discussion of Job could (and probably does) double as a conclusion to the book as a whole:

    Though the persistence of evil seems to undermine the magisterial claims of the creator-God, it is through submission to exactly those claims that the good order that is creation comes into being. Like all other faith, creation-faith carries with it enormous risk. Only as the enormity of the risk is acknowledged can the grandeur of the faith be appreciated.

    Theodicy–in the sense of explaining why evil exists–is an inherently unsatisfying undertaking. Would you really be satisfied to learn that some tragedy that befell you or someone you loved was the inevitable outworking of the divine plan or the fundamental metaphysical principles of the universe? What Levenson’s biblical account evokes instead is a kind of holy impatience with evil and suffering and a faith–albeit one often sorely tested–in the One who laid the foundations of the world and who will “swallow up death for ever and . . . wipe away tears from all faces.”

  • Some recent reading

    Shamelessly plagiarized from my Goodreads page:

    Go Tell It On the Mountain, James Baldwin

    A vivid, searing exploration of religious, racial, sexual, and individual identity. An American classic.

    Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin

    A very different book from Go Tell It On the Mountain, but still occupied with the nature of the self, its desires, and its self-deceptions.

    Looking through the Cross: The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book of 2014, Graham Tomlin

    Nothing particularly ground-breaking, but a sound and edifying set of meditations on how Christians should approach power, suffering, ambition, failure, reconciliation, and other areas of life, informed by a Luther-esque “theology of the cross.”

    Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement, Paul Fiddes

    I’m not sure I’m fully convinced by Fiddes’ preference for “subjective” accounts of the atonement, but this is a helpful study of how the major models of how the cross saves (sacrifice, victory, love, etc.) can still speak to us.

    I’ve just started reading, at the recommendation of Alastair Roberts, Moshe Halbertal’s On Sacrifice. I’m not very far into it, but it already promises to be quite good.

    Read anything good lately?

  • Should Jews view Christianity as a new revelation?

    Over the past several decades Christians have been rethinking their relationship to Jews and Judaism. This has been prompted, most obviously, by the horrors of the Holocaust and the recognition that centuries of Christian anti-Judaism and persecution of Jews helped lay the groundwork for it. Most notably, both the Catholic Church and most mainline Protestant churches have issued official statements repenting of Christendom’s long, sordid history of anti-Judaism. They have also, albeit not always quite as clearly, affirmed the ongoing validity of God’s covenant with the Jewish people and largely renounced efforts to target Jews for conversion.

    This sea change in Christian-Jewish relations has been accompanied by some provocative theological revisionism. Both in official documents and in the work of individual theologians, Christians have struggled to articulate a “non-supersessionist” version of their faith. This raises a host of thorny theological issues, particularly about what it means to affirm Jesus as savior while respecting the covenant Jews already have with God.

    Jews have had far less reason to engage in this kind of theological soul-searching, most obviously because they were the ones on the receiving end of Christian hate and persecution. They don’t face the same obvious need to change their inherited theology or practice in light of improved Christian-Jewish relations. This is also in part because Judaism has, historically, been less inclined to make universalistic (some would say totalitarian) claims than Christianity since it has never taught that everyone has to convert to Judaism to be “saved.” Generally, the Jewish position seems to have been that the primary obligation of non-Jews is to follow the universal moral law.

    Jewish theologian Michael Kogan thinks, however, that Jews should revisit their inherited views of Christianity and embrace a more positive evaluation. In his book Opening the Covenant he argues that Jews should view Christianity as, in effect, a new revelation from the God of Israel, one by which God has acted to establish a covenant with gentiles.

    Kogan argues that Jews should acknowledge that, through Jesus and his interpreters (preeminently St. Paul), billions of non-Jews have been brought into a saving relationship with the God of Israel. This can be seen as a partial fulfillment of the promise that through the family of Abraham “all nations of the earth will be blessed.” Kogan thus wants to push beyond the traditional position that gentiles are saved by following the moral law (or the Noahide Laws) and affirm Christianity as a new revelation of Israel’s God.

    In line with this, he contends that Jews can regard Jesus as not only a great Jewish teacher or prophet, but as the means by which God has acted to incorporate gentiles into God’s covenant. This doesn’t mean that Jews should be come Christians–on the contrary, Jews are already in a saving relationship with God and have no need to do anything more than live by the light they have already received. Christianity, he says, is a revelation specifically for gentiles.

    Implied by Kogan’s argument is that Jesus is not the Jewish Messiah as Christians have long claimed. He spends a chapter summarizing various ideas about what the Messiah would be like that were circulating in the late BCE/early CE period. Contrary to what Christians sometimes argue, there was no single Jewish understanding of the Messiah that Jesus could be shown to have fulfilled (or overturned, as is sometimes maintained). The Messiah was variously portrayed as a Davidic king, a supernatural agent of God, or an Aaronic priest. In some cases, it was held that the messianic age would be brought about through God’s direct intervention, without the need for a “Messiah” per se. Early Christianity can be seen as one form of messianic Judaism, jostling for recognition and legitimacy alongside others, but there are no agreed-upon criteria for “messiahhood,” so to speak, which Jesus can be shown to have met.

    Jesus has not brought redemption to Israel, Kogan says. The messianic age has not arrived. What Jesus has done, however, is “brought the salvific word of Israel’s God to the gentiles . . . helping Israel to fulfill its calling to be a blessing to all peoples” (p. 68). Kogan thinks that Jews can affirm this without abandoning their identity as Jews.

    Underlying much of Kogan’s argument is a pluralistic theology of religions, but one that differs from some popular forms of pluralism. Often pluralists say that the various religions are humanly constructed attempts to reach the divine. But Kogan insists that revelation is a non-negotiable element of Jewish (and Christian) faith. It’s true that revelation is conditioned by human response; it is filtered and refracted through human language and concepts. But it is still God reaching out to humanity to reveal the divine self and will.

    What makes Kogan’s view pluralistic is that he takes both Judaism and Christianity to constitute true–although partial–revelations from God. Both Jews and Christians can enter into a saving relationship with the God of Israel through their respective faiths. (He suggests that this applies to other traditions too–at least the “higher” religions–though developing a full-blown pluralistic theory of religion is outside the scope of this book.)

    Kogan even goes so far as to suggest, drawing on Paul’s metaphor of the olive tree, that Christians and Jews are both branches of one Israel. They can, and should, be co-witnesses to God and work together toward realizing God’s reign of peace and justice. They have no need to try to convert each other, but Jews and Christians can have their faith mutually enriched and their understanding of God and what God requires deepened through dialogue. (Here Kogan echoes Christian theologians like Paul van Buren, Roy Eckhardt, and Clark Williamson.)

    It’s not my place to say what Judaism’s theological self-understanding should be, but as a Christian I welcome Kogan’s positive assessment of Christianity as something other than a heretical mash-up of Judaism and paganism. I still think Christians have work to do in understanding their faith in a way that can truly affirm the ongoing validity of Judaism. Many Christians are uneasy with a full-blown religious pluralism and often take refuge in an “inclusivist” view that, while well intentioned, can be condescending toward other faiths (e.g., Karl Rahner’s “anonymous Christians”). For what it’s worth, my hunch is that a suitably modified inclusivism will probably end up looking a lot like one of the more plausible versions of pluralism (such as Kogan’s).

    Christians may also balk at Kogan’s claim that Jesus was not the Jewish messiah, but can we really continue to maintain this while affirming God’ ongoing covenant with Jews? Perhaps one viable approach to this is the one suggested by Tyron Inbody. He says that both Christians and Jews, if they’re being honest, must recognize that God’s kingdom has not arrived in its fullness. Both are awaiting the same Kingdom–God’s universal reign of shalom. But 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.

    All these questions notwithstanding, I greatly enjoyed Kogan’s book, which provides (for Christians at least) a much-needed perspective on the Christian-Jewish dialogue.

  • What’s the appeal of Christianity without God?

    I was only previously aware of Daniel C. Maguire as a theologian on the liberal end of Roman Catholicism. But it seems he now rejects belief in God altogether and has written a book called Christianity without God.

    I’m not interested in criticizing anyone for what they can or can’t believe. Atheism can be a rational response to the world as we experience it. But what I’m less clear on (even after reading the interview linked above) is why, in the absence of some form of theistic belief, you would still want to place the Bible at the center of your moral and spiritual life.

    Sure, you can mine the Bible for ethical wisdom that doesn’t make an explicit reference to God, and you may be able to use its stories as powerful parables of social justice, as Maguire seems to be suggesting. But this seems like it would require an awful lot of effort if nothing else. Why go to all the trouble of jerry-rigging a godless Christianity when there are plenty of perfectly respectable non-theistic traditions available?

    It’s strange when people reject belief in God, but still want to give the Bible and/or Jesus pride of place in their moral and spiritual lives. To my mind, the Bible (or the teachings of Jesus) without God would be more than a little bit like Hamlet without the prince.

    It could be, as the recently departed Marcus Borg used to put it, that the God Maguire doesn’t believe in is one I don’t believe in either. But I’m skeptical that a Christianity that totally dispensed with the transcendent would be worth holding on to, or even particularly interesting.

  • Why early Christians confessed Jesus as divine

    In his review of Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God, Luke Timothy Johnson readily concedes that neither the empty-tomb stories nor the accounts of Jesus’ appearing to the disciples after his crucifixion prove–or could prove–the Christian confession that Jesus is divine. Rather, Johnson says, this confession was rooted in the early Christians’ experience of being made “new creations” through the power of the Holy Spirit:

    To close that gap [between the appearances and the confession of Jesus’ divinity] we must turn to a register of language in the New Testament’s earliest writings (the letters of Paul) that Ehrman’s historicist blinders do not allow him to consider. Paul speaks of the “new creation” as a reality that is experienced, not by a few visionaries, but by all the members of his churches. This new creation is at work through the presence of a personal, transcendent, and transforming power called the Holy Spirit.

    The Resurrection experience, in Paul’s letters, is not something that happened to Jesus alone. It is happening now to those who have been given this power through the one Paul speaks of in 1 Corinthians 15:45 as having become “life-giving spirit”—a statement oddly absent from Ehrman’s discussion of that chapter in First Corinthians. Similarly, Ehrman fails to consider 1 Corinthians 12:3, where Paul states emphatically that “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.” The presence of the transforming power of the Spirit among believers is the basis for Paul’s remarkable language about the Holy Spirit “dwelling” in them (Rom 8:9) and their being “in the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 12:2–3). In the same way, Paul speaks about Christ “dwelling” in his followers, and their being “in Christ ” (Rom 8:9–10).

    In short, it was not the reports concerning an empty tomb or claims about post-mortem visions among a few of Jesus’ followers that caused the early Christians to recognize Jesus’ divinity. It was the shared experience of divine power—manifested in a variety of wonders and gifts and new capacities of existence—among those who had all “drunk the same spirit” and had become members of “Christ’s body” (1 Cor 12:12–27).

    As Schleiermacher would say, the heart of Christian piety is the experience of redemption in Christ. This, not “proofs” derived from historical reconstructions, is the basis for Christian faith. As Johnson notes, both Christian apologists and their critics like Ehrman tend to argue on the positivist ground of historical criticism. “But the good news is not and never has been based in verifiable fact; from the beginning and still today, it is based in the experience of God’s power.”

  • Heschel’s trilemma

    Reading 20th-century Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel’s important work God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism recently, I was struck by this passage:

    There are only three ways of judging the prophets: they told the truth, deliberately invented a tale, or were victims of an illusion. In other words, revelation is either a fact, or the product of insanity, self-delusion, or a pedagogical invention, the product of a mental confusion, of wishful thinking, or a subconscious activity. (p. 223)

    This reminded me immediately of C. S. Lewis’s famous “trilemma” from Mere Christianity. Speaking of the claims the Jesus of the gospels makes for his own authority, Lewis writes that a man who did such things

    would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. (p. 56)

    What Lewis was criticizing was the view that Jesus of Nazareth was simply a “great moral teacher,” rather than God Incarnate. The claims Jesus makes for himself, Lewis argues, simply don’t allow us to place him in that category. His claims (e.g., the right to forgive sins) are much more radical than that.

    Somewhat similarly, Heschel argues that we aren’t really in a position to evaluate the prophets’ putative revelation by our own canons of rationality. He writes that “[i]n calling upon the prophets to stand before the bar of our critical judgment, we are like dwarfs undertaking to measure the height of giants” (p. 222). Prophets like Moses, Amos, or Isaiah weren’t offering moral wisdom for our dispassionate consideration; they were propounding a radical demand for holiness and justice that, they claimed, came from God himself.

    In both cases, we’re faced with a potentially life-changing challenge. Lewis and Heschel both want to bring us face-to-face with the unvarnished claim of God’s revelation. Categorizing Jesus or the prophets are purveyors of a vague and genial moral wisdom that we might choose to incorporate into our existing mental framework allows us to keep them at arm’s length. By denying this alternative and posing the remaining ones so starkly, both Lewis and Heschel are prodding us to decide whether we will accept their claims on us.

    (Oh, and yes, it looks like I’m blogging again, at least for the moment.)

  • John Macquarrie and process theology

    I’m currently re-reading Scottish Anglican theologian John Macquarrie‘s marvelously lucid Principles of Christian Theology (first published in 1966; I’m reading the substantially revised version that was published about 10 years later). I first read it as an undergrad when my interest in existentialism was at its height. In the first part of the book, Macquarrie draws on the work of philosophers like Sartre and, especially, Heidegger to develop an “existential-ontological” natural theology. It’s existential in that it uses an analysis of human existence as its jumping-off point; it’s ontological in developing the idea of God as “Holy Being.” By this Macquarrie means that God is not a being among beings in the world, but rather the very possibility of anything existing at all. God is the power of “letting-be.”

    One thing that struck me upon this reading, though, was how close some of Macquarrie’s ideas are to the process thought of A.N. Whitehead and his followers. In particular, Macquarrie’s description of human selfhood, while obviously owing a lot to the existentialists, emphasizes how the self incorporates what is bequeathed to it by the past with its apprehension of future possibilities and creates something genuinely new. This is very similar to the model of selfhood that lies at the center of Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism.” Further, Macquarrie develops what I think could be fairly called a “di-polar” version of theism which sees God as having both an eternal, unchanging nature and an aspect that is involved in and affected by what happens in history. One key difference is that Macquarrie preserves God’s ultimacy, while for Whitehead and most (but not all) forms of process theism, God is not properly speaking the ultimate creator or origin of everything. From a Christian point of view, Macquarrie’s view seems much more satisfactory.

    I just ordered Macquarrie’s In Search of Deity, which was the published form of his Gifford Lectures deliverd in 1983 and 1984. Looking at the subtitle (“An Essay in Dialectical Theism”) and browsing the table of contents suggest that Macquarrie may have moved even closer to a semi-Whiteheadian view later in his career.

  • Unredeemed history and Christian anti-Judaism

    In her book Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Origins of Anti-Semitism, Rosemary Radford Ruether argues that a key difference between Christianity and Judaism is that Christianity has been unwilling for much of its history to live with the tension of the unrealized messianic age. As a result, Christians have accused Jews of being blind to the “obvious” truth of Jesus’ messianic status and of misinterpreting their own scriptures, which (supposedly) clearly foretell Jesus.

    What Christians have often failed to understand, Ruether says, is that Jews have their own theologically rooted reasons for their “great refusal”:

    The assertion that the Jews are reprobate because they did not accept Christ as having already come is really a projection upon Judaism of that unredeemed side of itself that Christianity must constantly deny in order to assert that Christ has already come and founded “the Church.” The Jews represent that which Christianity must repress in itself, namely the recognition of history and Christian existence as unredeemed. In this sense, the Jews do indeed “kill Christ” for the Christian, since they preserve the memory of the original biblical meaning of the word Messiah which must judge present history and society as still unredeemed. For Judaism, Jesus cannot have been the Messiah, because the times remain unredeemed and neither he nor anything that came from him has yet altered that fact. In short, Judaism, in rejecting Jesus’ messianic status, is simply reaffirming the integrity of its own tradition about what the word Messiah means. Once the true nature of Judaism’s objection to Christian faith becomes clear, it becomes necessary to reappraise the meaning of Judaism’s Great Refusal. If Christian anti-Judaism is the suppression of the unredeemed side of itself and its projection of this upon Judaism, then Judaism’s negation of Christian faith must be recognized as a prophetic critique refused. (p. 245)

    In other words, Christian triumphalism has anti-Judaism as its inevitable corollary. Because it saw Christ’s advent and the founding of the church as the end of “unredeemed” history, Christianity concluded that the continuing existence of Jews and Judaism was a stubborn element of that history. Hence the characterization of Jews as “carnal,” “unspiritual,” etc. and the view that they were permanently objects of the divine wrath.

    But as Ruether points out, the empirical reality is that Christian history is not noticeably more “redeemed” or “spiritual” than what came before it or what continues to exist outside of it. Jews continue to witness to the fact that the advent of the Kingdom and the messianic age remains in the future.

    Earlier, Ruether writes:

    Those trained in traditional Christian theology will be pained by this discussion and declare that “Christ’s coming” has made an ultimate difference. What this means is that we know that we are “ultimately accepted.” We do not have to depend for our salvation upon our own efforts. But we have only to recall all the contradictions which have been produced by the efforts to make sense of this proposition. Either this means that everyone is finally accepted no matter what they do, obliterating any difference between good and evil. Or else it means that some are accepted and others are rejected no matter what they do, which makes God an amoral tyrant. In an effort to bring righteousness and election into tandem, one declares that the elect are known by their righteousness. Election is the basis of righteousness and not vice versa. We then embark on an all-consuming Puritan “legalism,” which seeks perfect righteousness, not to earn but to prove one’s election. Ordinary Christianity constantly abdicates from this whole discussion in practice and assumes the view that we are already loved by God, and yet must also do something to become what we are supposed to be. For such an ethic does one need a Messiah? It would seem that Creation, covenant, and commandments would be sufficient.

    The Church’s historical existence constantly evidences its premessianic actuality, while the proclamation that it is founded on the “new being” of Christ serves as much to hinder as to give it any perceptibly superior way of existing. Christian actuality has not transcended the human historical, i.e., unredeemed conditions known to Judaism. Yet, its messianic faith has made it a kind of mirror-opposite of Judaism. Judaism believes it has the commandments, can obey the commandments well enough to be in friendship with God, and yet the final resolution of the tension of letter and spirit is not yet. Christianity holds up the final redeemed moment of the “end” as its already established foundation. Yet it proves no more capable than Judaism of producing that final eschatological transfiguration of existence in practice, while losing the commandments that assured Judaism that it had the “way” to the “end.” For Christianity, there can be no “way” to the “end,” because the “end” (Christ) is the “way.” For Judaism, which had Torah without the Messiah, Christianity substitutes the Messiah without Torah. But the effort to deal with the finite as though one were already based on the Final produces myriad self-delusions; either one constantly rejects the finite qua finite, or else attempts to absolutize a particular givenness as final. (pp. 243-4)

    One thing Christianity needs to do, according to Ruether, is to recover the proleptic nature of its witness. Christ is a foretaste of the Kingdom, not the Kingdom come in its fullness. A Christianity that emphasizes the ever-future aspect of the Kingdom and the fact that history continues unredeemed–with all the ambiguity that entails–will be better able to extend charity and tolerance to other “ways,” including Judaism.