of the crucifixion? But Jesus triumphed. The God who was Law became Love, with an attitude of boundless mercy for all—except, perhaps, for the Jews who had killed His Son. The Savior saved those of us who followed him from the very ones who had killed him—Jews. Because he did, they could not kill us. Although we never forgot that, if they ever could, they would. Jews were the enemy, period.
So even the religious imagination of a normal Christian child was shot through with the buried fury of anti-Judaism. In my case, as noted, it was through openings crafted by Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel that these overheated currents first broke the surface of awareness. Ultimately, revelations tied to the Holocaust burst forth as the steaming geysers of a late-twentieth-century moral accounting. Because of accidents of circumstance, I myself had no choice but to take the temperature of this fever—hatred as an illness in the religion of love.
I came of age as a Catholic priest. To my surprise, I was initially required by my Church to continue the reckoning I’d begun with Anne Frank. During my seminary training, Christian theology reversed itself in the matter of the “Christ killer” slander, a change sparked just then by the Second Vatican Council, already referred to. The council was itself an overdue attempt to respond to what had been laid bare by the Holocaust.16 Christian thinkers began to contemplate the possibility that Jews had not been wrong to reject the Gospel, given the ways in which it was presented to them. The Christian doctrine that the covenant God made with Israel had been “superseded” was repudiated. Christian preachers of my generation were instructed in new ways of reading Gospel texts that had previously demonized “the Jews.” And a new wave of “historical Jesus” scholarship was launched, in part as an effort to purge Christian attitudes of an anti-Judaism that inevitably insulted Jesus himself, who—surprise!—was Jewish.
When I was a college chaplain in the late 1960s and early 1970s, my priesthood took root in the call to bring Jesus alive for young people, which brought him alive for me. As civil rights, peace, and social justice issues defined my ministry, I found myself emphasizing a memory of Jesus as a resister of unjust social structures and the empire that protected them. During the years of the Vietnam War, haunted by the record of a Church prostrate before the Nazi onslaught, priests like me joined the antiwar movement, however timidly. Silence in the face of a criminal war was not an option. My piety was redefined around the image of Jesus as a man of nonviolence. Indeed, far more was at stake for me than mere piety. Because I was raised to obey, not to rebel, and because my father was himself a man of war—an Air Force general with a key role in the U.S. bombing campaign that would kill more than a million Vietnamese—only the counterweight of a divine sanction could justify my open rejection of Dad’s worldview.
The climax of that rejection came in a midnight jail cell in Washington, D.C., where, with other religiously motivated antiwar protesters, I joined in the singing of verses from Handel’s Messiah. I felt fully and unexpectedly released when we came to Isaiah’s resounding litany, “called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.”17 That Jesus was essential to this rite of passage, enabling me to claim my adult identity as a man, separating from my father, sealed my bond with him forever.
As the Catholic hierarchy began to roll back the liberalizing innovations of Vatican II, reimposing restrictions on women and reinvigorating old Catholic rejections of modern thought, I came more than ever to see in Jesus’ conflict with Jewish high priests, scribes, and Pharisees a model of anti-establishment dissent—that Che Guevara figure. I did not realize that I was resuscitating an anti-Jewish motif. As a left-wing priest, I would be “marginal” to the reactionary Church and to war-making America the way Jesus was marginal to the Judaism of his day.18 To see dissent as righteous, in our oppositional culture—also known as “counterculture”—one simply had to reject orthodoxy. The liberation theology that my kind embraced began, in its Gospel template, as liberation from an implicitly Jewish power structure. The Jews.
After five tumultuous years, I left the priesthood to claim a more spacious Christian faith, which freed me to begin a profound recasting of the meaning of Jesus Christ. Only as a former priest was I free to question the assumptions—going far deeper than ancient “Christ killer” slanders—that perpetuate, even in this ecumenical age, anti-Jewish stereotypes. Again and again, I had to confront the ways in which my own attitudes toward Jesus were stubbornly anti-Jewish. As a person in the pew, also, I regularly heard the negative-positive pairing of Old Testament against the New Testament, and the tone-deaf sermons that assumed the war between Jesus and “the Jews.” I still hear such preaching at least once a month.
I staked my future on a writerly conscience, but I never abandoned my first religious insight—about God and suffering. It meant everything to me that the entire religious tradition of which I was still a part began with God’s coming to Moses not because God had seen the sin of the people, but because He’d seen their suffering: “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt,” He told Moses, “and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them.”19 Yet it took me decades of work on the sly mechanisms of the anti-Semitic imagination—including two books detailing the history of Christian contempt for Jews20—to reverse my primal identification of the gaunt-eyed Jews at barbed wire with the flayed and battered body of my Lord. Having put Auschwitz at the center of my work, I found it necessary, instead, to look at Jesus with the death camp as a lens—the opposite of my innate urge to see Auschwitz through the redeeming frame of Jesus’ self-sacrifice. At last, I shared the recognition that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had come to in a Gestapo prison; I could see the point that Elie Wiesel had made before the Auschwitz gallows: If Jesus had been hanged there, it would not have been as the atoning Son of God, but as another Jewish victim. Period. If there is to be Christian reckoning, it must begin there.
I have outgrown my childish faith. About time, for a man my age. I’ve left behind naive assumptions about reality irreparably divided between the material world and a separate spiritual world, the bifurcated realms of nature and grace, this life and afterlife. I don’t think that the Enlightenment’s closed system of mechanistic cause and consequence more faithfully renders reality than the spirit-filled world of miracles, but neither do I expect divine interference in history. I hold the faith not because religion can prove its claims for God, but because those claims can make a cosmos that includes self-knowing creatures more intelligible, not less. Proof is not the key; it is irrelevant.
That we know ourselves, and know that we do—there’s the opening to mature belief. One can move through it even in an era when the creation is understood as the infinitely expanding cosmos, rushing madly away from an unknown center, with humanity ever more marginal, insignificant, and puny. Yet we are the puny creatures who know, who think, and who love. We will return to this idea. The point here is that, as humans go endlessly in search of meaning, we also dare to ask what is the meaning of meaning?
“In the beginning was Meaning, and Meaning was with God, and Meaning was God. . . . Meaning became one of us.” That eccentric translation of the opening verse of the Gospel of John—traditionally rendered as “In the beginning was the Word . . .”—points, in an age when the quest for “meaning” has replaced the hope for “salvation,” to a new sense of the relevance of the idea of God, drawing on a particular tradition of Western culture that makes God present.21 A tradition named for Jesus Christ, who, whatever else can be said of him, was a man whose meaning captured what is essential to the meaning of every human fate. And he did this as a Jew—only a Jew, a Jew to the end.
Therefore, the most important way in which I have left behind the childish things of my religion has to do with the Jewish people, whose history remains the key to a plausible and morally responsible faith. I repudiate the hatred of Jews that courses through Christian understandings of Jesus like veins of mineral impurities through marble. “Impurity” in stone hardly defines
