policies regarding the Jews, but, in far too many cases, firm support of and participation in those policies. It has also been shown that the history of Christian persecution of the Jews was an essential element in creating an environment in which the Holocaust itself could occur within the belly of a so-called Christian, but perhaps more accurately, post-Christian Europe. Furthermore, it has been convincingly argued that this history of moral failure of the Church in relation to the Jews is intimately linked to the history of Christian theology, its discourse about who God is and how God relates to creation—most specifically, its Gospel about Jesus Christ as Good News for the world. All this is assumed here as facts entered into evidence. The complicity of Christian theology in the history of Jewish suffering, therefore, is not in question. What is in question within these pages is the precise nature of this complicity, what the consequences of this complicity are for the integrity of Christian proclamation and faith, and what response is required by unflinching and honest self-examination.
The question is immediately complicated. What is the difference between theological anti-Judaism (and supersessionism) on the one hand and antisemitism on the other? The distinction is critical, but tricky. Anti-Judaism refers to the rejection and/or denigration of Jewish faith and religion—Judaism. Antisemitism refers to the denigration of the Jew qua Jew. A related complication: what is the relation between theological anti-Judaism and the material, historical suffering of Jews; more generally, what is the relation between imperialistic discourse and material imperialism, and even more comprehensively, between theology and the ethical? These are critical questions for our task at hand, and it will take the length of the book (which is, in view of the seriousness of these questions, nowhere near long enough) before we are in a position to really venture a responsible response to these questions.
2. Metz, Emergent Church, 24. Other Christian theologians engaging the problem of Christian faith in light of Jewish suffering, and specifically the Holocaust, that are not explicitly mentioned in my text include: John Pawlikowsky, Paul Van Buren, Gregory Baum, Monika Hellwig, Robert Everett, James Moore, Harry James Cargas, Michael McGarry, David Rausch, John Roth, Clark M. Williamson, and Henry F. Knight. This list, of course, is not exhaustive.
3. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, 246.
4. I use the rendering, antisemitism, rather than the more common, anti-Semitism, in view of the argument that the latter is based on and re-enforces the errant assumption of previous thinking that Jewish identity is fundamentally a racial category, that of the Semite. The inadequacy of this thinking is demonstrated by the trouble the Nazis had in identifying Jewish identity with any precision in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.
5. I take my cue here from Roy Eckardt. In Christian-Jewish Dialogue he states his suspicion that even “a positive Christian theologizing of Jews cannot escape imperialism.” Christian-Jewish Dialogue, 162
6. Haynes, Reluctant Witnesses, 184, 125.
7. Metz, Emergent Church, 19. My emphasis.
8. Haynes, Reluctant Witnesses, 184. Haynes cites Eckardt in this context. See, Eckardt, Jews and Christians, 143, 146.
9. Littell, Crucifixion of the Jews, 1.
10. Ibid., 3–4.
11. Sonderegger, “Response,” 86.
12. To the issue of the ubiquitous nature of the fundamental themes articulated by Said, this is a key point of contact with feminist theory and theology; patriarchy erases women as speaking subjects. In resistance to that violation, feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray and feminist theologians like Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza ask: “what if she should speak?”
13. Said, Orientalism, 27.
14. Ibid. Said’s thesis was that “oriental,” as seen through the lens of western categories, was always in fact a particular neighbor not subsumable within those general categories, whence the violence of the West’s interpretive relation to that neighbor in their concrete particularity. Nevertheless, Said is clear that quite a number of particular neighbors and neighbor-relations fall under the umbrella of Orientalism, whereas antisemitism, as likewise an imperialistic cultural discourse complexly complicit in material damages, pertains to one particular neighbor, the Jew.
15. Said, again: “That antisemitism and, as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch, Orientalism, resemble each other very closely is a historical, cultural, and political truth that needs only to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood.” (Orientalism, 27–28.) What Said fails to suggest is that an Israeli Jew might feel they have reason to grasp the irony here as well.
16. Arguments for the uniqueness of the Holocaust are, of course, implied here. Interestingly, there are some Jewish thinkers and theologians, such as Rubenstein and Irving Greenberg, as well as Christian theologians like Roy Eckardt, who make a double move here. They assert the uniqueness of Jewish suffering throughout the history of the Church and the West more generally. But on the basis of this uniqueness they argue for both the moral justification of the state of Israel and the revocation, or at least radical transformation, of the theological tenant of the divine election of the Jews. They see the latter as precisely that which endangers the continued survival of the Jewish people, because of the way it kindles a special antagonization for the Jewish neighbor in the heart of Christendom and the modern West.
17. Ruether, Fratricide, 239.
18. Ibid., 238.
19. Ibid., 237.
20. Rubenstein, “Some Perspectives,” 262.
21. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 68.
22. This point of the argument reveals how closely my project as a whole is anticipated by and resonates with that of Scott Bader-Saye in his fine work, Church and Israel after Christendom.
23. My reason for using feminine pronouns for God throughout the text is simply that I find feminist critiques of the idolatrous captivity of the Church’s theological imagination to male gendered images of God—despite the Church’s explicit theological doctrine of God, as Spirit, being neither male nor female—to be true (e.g., in the work of Ruether and Elizabeth Johnson, both of whom I engage critically in this book on other issues). It is true first and foremost of my own theological imagination; I also believe it to be true of much of the wider Church, to the extent that my experience and observation
