extreme, justifies, if it does not incite to, the murder of Jews”?1 Does not the evidence of history suggest that a seed of violence toward Jews is planted so deeply within the soil of Christian theology and faith that they inherently entail a breach of ethical responsibility to Jews?
Hard sayings. And they have not gone unheeded. A growing number of Christian theologians have taken Rubenstein’s words to heart and, in varying ways, have made his question their own. In his effort to come to terms with the significance of Auschwitz for the Church and its theology, Johann Baptist Metz asks if Jewish suffering at the hands of the Church is an “unavoidable consequence” of traditional Christian theology.2 In a similar effort to fathom the sources of Christian “fratricide” of the Jewish “elder brother,” Rosemary Radford Ruether puts forward her own form of the question: “Is it possible to say ‘Jesus is Messiah’ without, implicitly or explicitly, saying at the same time ‘and the Jews be damned?’”3
Not surprisingly, theologians like Metz and Ruether have led the way in taking the history of Jewish suffering within Christendom seriously as a problem for Christian faith and theology. They have served and continue to serve the Church by calling it to self-examination, confession, and reformation. This book, and the labor of thought it represents, is a response to their prophetic voice and to these tasks to which they call the Church with such urgency. While convicted by these theologians’ call to self-examination and confession, I have been less compelled by some of their proposals for reformation; that is, by their attempts to make Christian faith safe for the Jewish neighbor, and indeed, for the world at large. The task of this book, then, is to follow the lead of these Christian theologians in taking up their—and Rubenstein’s—question as my own. Again, is the Christian Gospel of Jesus Christ as Good News for the world necessarily bad news for the Jewish neighbor? In working toward my own answer, I demonstrate how certain responses to this question, due to certain assumptions upon which they implicitly rely, often re-inscribe the very problem they are trying to overcome. As an alternative, I suggest that the problematic resources of what I will be calling an evangelical Christian faith might themselves provide unexpected ethical possibilities for the Church’s relation to the Jewish neighbor, as well as to the neighbor of the Jewish neighbor.
The Problem and Its Context
In struggling toward an answer to the central question of the book, it soon became clear that the possible toxic dangers of Christian faith for the Jewish neighbor could not be fully analyzed without considering the wider context of contemporary analysis and critique of Christian faith in relation to the neighbor more generally, and how this wider context and the relation to it was situated vis-à-vis the even wider—or deeper—context of the modern West. To fail to consider these complex connections was inevitably to encounter a certain contradictory logic that seemed to undermine the very ethical intentions for analyzing and remedying the dangers of Christian faith for the Jewish neighbor in the first place. This is, in fact, what I believe to be the case with many Christian theologians leading the way on this difficult issue. In what follows I will briefly demonstrate what I mean and, in so doing, introduce the major categories employed in the argument of the book.
In my reading of theological work on this issue, I discern three dimensions entailed in the danger of Christian faith for the Jewish neighbor that strike me as organically related to the wider (contemporary) and deeper (modern) context of analysis and critique of Christian faith. They are: the nature of imperialistic discourse, the relation of faith to the ethical, and the relation of the particular to the universal.
Imperialistic Discourse and the Interpretive Imperialism of Christian Faith
The ethically dangerous features of the Christian theological tradition in its specific relation to the Jewish neighbor are most often identified as anti-Judaism and supersessionism. Anti-Judaism generally refers to the singling out of Judaism for polemical judgment throughout the history of Christian theology, as what is seen to be a unique form of humanity’s sinful rejection of God’s gracious work of salvation, a rejection uniquely perverse given the status of the Jews as God’s chosen people and first receivers of the promise of that gracious work. When this unique rejection of God’s grace in Jesus Christ, expressed religiously in Judaism (again, according to traditional Christian categories), is seen to be rooted in the unique and essential character of the Jewish people qua Jewish (rather than as determined, for example, from “outside,” as a result of their unique election by the free and unaccountable decision of the God of Abraham), then Christian theological anti-Judaism slides into Christian cultural antisemitism.4 Supersessionism, in the strictest sense—what I will refer to as a “hard” supersessionism—refers to the theological proposition that the children of Israel are replaced by the Church as God’s chosen people, due both to what is understood to be their unbelieving rejection of their own promised Messiah, Jesus Christ, and to God’s sovereign plan of salvation for the nations of which this rejection is an integral and providential part. Supersession is often more broadly understood to be entailed in the exegetical and theological structure of promise and fulfillment, expectation and advent, provisionality and finality, pre-figurement and real completion, Law and Gospel, etc., by which the unique journey of God with Israel is related to and relativized by its fulfillment in the advent of Jesus Christ and the gathering of the Church in faith. Even if Israel is not here understood as replaced by the Church, and God’s covenant promises to Israel are affirmed as unabrogated and eternal, the truth and reality of historical Jewish existence and of Judaism is still understood to find its full meaning in a reality outside of itself, and to which it points—Jesus Christ and the Church’s confession of faith. I refer to this as a “soft” supersessionism, a supersessionism of displacement rather than replacement.
While anti-Judaism and supersessionism are, without doubt, fundamental elements of the ethically problematic relation of Christian faith to Jews and Judaism, if one reads contemporary theological analyses closely, they can both be seen to emerge from a deeper, single source—what I will call interpretive imperialism.5 This refers to the logic wherein Christian theological interpretation and representation of Jews and Judaism is based strictly on Christian categories and resources, to the exclusion of Jewish self-understanding. As Steven Haynes has put it, in his own engagement with Rubenstein’s question, the real source of the trouble occurs when Christians are incapable of regarding the Jewish people otherwise than “through the lens of Christian faith.”6 The true meaning and value—indeed, the very identity and reality—of Jews and of Judaism are assumed to be grounded in the categories of Christian faith and theology. This occurs when the meaning, value, identity, and reality of Jews and Judaism are imposed upon Jews from a region outside of and foreign to Jewish self-understanding. Jews are thereby reduced to a silenced object within the discourse of Christian faith. And the native resources of Jewish identity and reality are pressed into the service of a foreign interest; they help to inform and clarify a Christian understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as Good News to and for the world.
This analysis of the Christian theological tradition in relation to the Jewish neighbor is a featured refrain in the work of several leading theologians who have engaged the issues of Jewish suffering and the Holocaust. Note Metz’ suggestion of a remedy in response to his own question regarding the link between Christian faith and the Holocaust: “Yet how are we Christians to come to terms with Auschwitz? We will in any case forego the temptation to interpret the suffering of the Jewish people from our standpoint, in terms of saving history.”7 Similarly, Haynes observes that Roy Eckardt “effectively bans Christian speculation on the mystery of Israel.” Eckardt understands this ban as a measure essential in “protecting the Jewish people from Christian imperialism.”8
