Michael S Kogan. Journal of Ecumenical Studies. Volume 41, Issue 1, Winter 2004.

Prior to Vatican II, supersessionist and triumphalist attitudes informed Christian evaluations of Judaism, but in the past forty years many churches have reconsidered Jews and Judaism in positive ways. They now view Jews as partners in healing the world rather than as potential converts. The key to this new attitude is Christianity’s recognition of the eternal validity of the divine covenant with Israel, still operative after Calvary as it was before. A proper Jewish response to these changes in Christian thinking will include a Jewish recognition of Christianity as a revealed faith. At least one Jewish statement on Christianity seems to affirm this position. The essay examines this statement of Jewish theologians as well as a statement in response to it by a group of Christian theologians, then concludes with an evaluation of twin statements issued by Catholic bishops and Conservative and Reform rabbis, bringing the evolving dialogue up to date.

Since the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, a revolution has taken place in the views of most Christian denominations toward Jews and Judaism. Until that time Christians had seen the Jewish people and faith largely through the twin lenses of triumphalism and supersessionism. According to this view, Judaism was a used-up, virtually dead religion of the past, the Jews having given up their place as God’s people to a new people of God (the Church) who replaced them in the divine plan of salvation. All this happened when the Jews rejected Jesus and were, in turn, rejected by God, an event manifest to all with the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. This was the generally held Christian belief.

To Jews, of course, it was obviously a false belief. “The Jews” could not have “accepted” or “rejected” Jesus during his lifetime, since only twenty percent of Jews lived in the Jewish homeland, and only a small percentage of them would have had the opportunity to meet or even hear of Jesus. What had ended in 70 C.E. was not Judaism, but merely one of its components, the Temple sacrificial system of the Sadducees. In fact, this passing of the Temple worship led to the triumph of the Rabbinic Judaism that had been developing out of Pharisaic thought in the shadow of the Temple system. Only with the Temple’s destruction could the synagogue, the rabbi, and the religion of Torah, prayer, and good deeds come into its own.

It was not until long after Jesus’ death that large numbers of Jews heard for the first time of Jesus Christ, the God-man of Christian theology. Jewish religious leaders were busily reinterpreting Israelite faith to fit post-Temple conditions, but they could not find any way or see any reason to incorporate into their faith the concept of Christ that had been developed by the Christian movement. This was true for several reasons. First of all, Jesus had not accomplished what Rabbinic Judaism expected the Messiah to do; Christianity was, in fact, preaching a notion (or notions) of the Messiah unknown to traditional Judaism. Second, the church that was presenting Jesus to the world was now a gentile institution; and third, the very notion of a God-man struck Jews as pagan, as did many of the ideas that became fundamental church teachings. Yet, these Christians, almost all of whom were gentiles, were claiming to be “the new and true Israel.” Here was a situation in which Jews and Christians would inevitably be led into violent conflict. We are just now emerging from that period of conflict nearly 2,000 years later.

That began to happen with Vatican II. Many are familiar with the scores of statements reevaluating Jews and Judaism issued since 1965 by virtually every mainstream Protestant denomination, as well as the three official documents on the Jews produced by the Roman Catholic Church, expanded by a number of statements by Pope John Paul II and various episcopal commissions. I have evaluated these statements in earlier essays. It seems to me that the key acknowledgment in all these statements on the Christian side of the dialogue is that the church did not replace the Jews with the coming of Jesus. These statements all agree that, in the following 2,000 years, Jews continued to be faithful to their God and developed new and vibrant expressions of belief and practice. Jews remain a people eternally covenanted with God. Today the Roman Catholic Church and all mainstream Protestant churches recognize this.

For the Jewish side, the key to successful dialogue must be the recognition that, through Jesus, Christians joined Jews in the worship of the God of Israel. Another way of putting this is that, through Jesus and his interpreters, the covenant established between God and Israel was opened to include gentiles, thus widening the meaning of “Israel” to embrace all who followed the one true God. Now, nearly two millennia after the initial mutual misunderstandings, Jews and Christians are at last in a position to realize what they could not have seen earlier: that Jews and Christians are members of two branches of the same ongoing covenant and that each is the fruit of divine revelation in which the one God has broken into history to reveal God’s truths to two distinct but closely related communities.

For the first 2,000 years of its history, Israel was one and alone in its devotion to God and God’s revealed truth. For the second 2,000 years, Israel has had two branches. Today, Jewish Israelites and Christian Israelites worship the same God, using somewhat different, but intimately related, symbol systems. For Jews, the people Israel is the collective individual called by God to lead the world to redemption, to reconciliation with its Creator. Born of a miracle birth (Isaac, born to the aged Sarah and Abraham), the people Israel labors and suffers for the Realm of God that it is called to build. Given up for dead again and again, Israel rises to new life to take up once more the work of healing a broken world.

For Christians, Jesus, born of a miracle birth, labors and suffers for the kingdom of God. He also heals the sick of the world and witnesses to the presence of God. As the single individual, the exemplary Israelite, he recapitulates the history of Israel in his own life. As Israel bears the word of God (Torah) in its midst, so Jesus bears it within himself, and he suffers, dies, and returns to life. Once one realizes that what the collective individual (Israel) accomplishes in Judaism, the single individual (Jesus) does in Christianity, one is freed, as it were, to see the full power of the parallels existing between the two faiths—and one is also led to conclude that both are of God. It is with this conclusion in mind that I tend to evaluate developments in the Jewish-Christian dialogue, an ongoing encounter that I hope is moving toward the realizations outlined above.

Progress toward this end is in some ways easier for Christians. True, they will have to recognize that Judaism did not end with the coming of Jesus. For this they will be required to move beyond their own tradition to concern themselves with a religious heritage that for two millennia has paralleled their own. But, since what Christians call the “Old Testament” has been incorporated into the authoritative text of the church (the Holy Bible), in an important way, key concepts, events, and hopes of the Hebrew scriptures are already interior to Christian tradition. The Christian scriptures speak in the language of and represent the concepts of, the earlier Hebrew text. In short, the New Testament makes, and could make, no sense without the Old. It would have no validity without the prior validity of Hebrew scripture. Christians hear and read about ancient Israel every Sunday in church. They certainly recognize the connection between the Jewish family living down the street from them and the ancients they read about in their Bibles. They are in a good position to come to new realizations about that family’s continuing fidelity to the Hebrew scriptures and to the God revealed therein.

However, for the Jews, a new understanding of Christians and Christianity will take them entirely beyond the parameters of their rabbinic faith and the biblical sources out of which it grew. Jews will never encounter the term “Christianity” in their biblical or rabbinic studies. The temporal priority of ancient Israel’s faith and the relative isolation of Rabbinic Judaism from Christianity make the Jewish encounter with this other faith something new the minute it gets beneath the anecdotal surface level. The general Jewish view has been that Judaism has no need of Christianity for its own self-understanding. But, that view ignores the ongoing influence of the surrounding Christian culture in the midst of which Judaism lived and developed its practice and thought, sometimes in imitation of the dominant faith, sometimes in contrast to it. It is also true that, if Christianity parallels Judaism’s work of witnessing to the world and building the kingdom of God, Jews are no longer alone in their labors. Christians now work beside us to build the kingdom. A change in exterior context inevitably brings about a change in interior self-understanding. Today, in order to understand ourselves and our calling as Jews, we must look around us and see how Christian activity in the world has affected our task. That process of Jewish reevaluation of Christianity has begun.

Prior to 1965 some Jewish theologians had written of Jesus and, less frequently, of Christianity with sympathy and understanding. Notably, Martin Buber spoke of Jesus as “my great brother,” and Franz Rosenzweig developed a comprehensive theory of the related roles of Judaism (the divine flame) and Christianity (the flame’s rays of light) in God’s plan to enlighten the world. Since 1965 a number of Jewish thinkers have attempted to respond to the new Christian overtures with their own evaluations of the churches’ recently more open spirit. But, it was not until 2000 that a group of Jewish religious thinkers, sponsored by the Institute of Jewish and Christian Studies of Baltimore, Maryland, produced a comprehensive statement expressing a Jewish view of the Christian faith. A twenty-year-old group of concerned Jewish and Christian scholars, clergy, and laypeople committed to advancing understanding between the two faiths, the institute supports a wide variety of educational programs, including radio broadcasts, student essay contests, seminars, and conferences.

“Dabru Emet”

Presented as a “thoughtful Jewish response” to the dramatic shift in Christian attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, the statement, “Dabru Emet” (Speak the Truth) listed a series of eight points, some obvious, some quite new: (1) “Jews and Christians worship the same God.” (2) “Jews and Christians seek authority from the same book—the Bible …” (3) “Christians can respect the claim of the Jewish people upon the land of Israel.” (4) “Jews and Christians respect the moral principles of Torah.” (5) “Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon.” (6) “The … difference between Jews and Christians will not be settled until God redeems the entire world … [Meanwhile] Jews can respect Christians’ faithfulness to their revelation just as we expect Christians to respect our faithfulness to our revelation. “Neither Jew nor Christian should be pressed into affirming the teaching of the other community.”(7) “A new relationship between Jews and Christians will not weaken Jewish practice. [N]or [will it] create a false blending of Judaism and Christianity. We respect Christianity as a faith that originated within Judaism … We do not see it as an extension Of Judaism.” (8) “Jews and Christians must work together for justice and peace.”

For me the most important points are (1), (6), and (7). Certainly, Jews and Christians worship the same God, although they have not always recognized this. While the church long ago rejected Marcion and adopted the text of the Old Testament, Christians continued to see the God of Hebrew scripture as a “wrathful” figure as opposed to their “God of love.” Jews, reacting to the Christomonism of some Christians, concluded that the church no longer worshipped God the Father. However, greater familiarity with each other’s texts and liturgy have led both sides to look more deeply into the complexities of the other faith. The same God is certainly the subject of both. The symbol systems are somewhat different, as are the styles of thought and worship, but Christians recognize that the God of Jesus and the church is also the God of Israel.

What is the Jewish position on these questions? In the first point of “Dabru Emet,” we find that “through Christianity hundreds of millions of people have entered into relationship with the God of Israel.” So the God of Christianity is Israel’s God. Jews “rejoice” that the covenant has been opened to include non-Jews. It is suggested that this may, in fact, be the work that Jesus or his interpreters were sent to do. If not the Messiah according to rabbinic expectations, Jesus was an indirect agent of world salvation, since the knowledge of God has come to the nations through his church. We can see this as a partial fulfillment of Abraham’s divine commission to bring blessings to all the peoples of the world: God called Abraham, out of whom came the people Israel, out of whom came Jesus, through whose interpreters came the church, from whom came the knowledge of God for the peoples of the world. Judaism and Christianity are therefore two ways of relating to the one God.

Does this mean we should see them as two human paths to God or as two divine paths to humanity? What is at stake here is the all-important issue of revelation. The question is whether we Jews can see Christianity as a revealed religion. No Jewish authority since Rabban Gamaliel, the great first-century Pharisee, has taken that view, and even he raised it as a question, not a conclusion. Of course, Gamaliel’s alleged view that Christianity may be “of God” (Acts 5:33-39) is reported in the New Testament and may be somewhat tendentious. Many would dismiss it as Christian propaganda. If he said it, he was certainly the most open-minded character in the New Testament, the only one prepared to consider the possibility of more than one religious truth. But, while the authenticity of the Gamaliel quote remains unproved, in “Dabru Emet”‘s sixth point we hear an echo of its willingness to entertain the truth claims of the religious “other.” In this statement we seem to find a contemporary Jewish affirmation of the view that both Judaism and Christianity are products of genuine revelation.

Here we read, “Jews can respect Christians’ faithfulness to their revelation just as we expect Christians to respect our faithfulness to our revelation.” This is, I believe, the first time this crucial issue has been met head-on by Jewish theologians and formulated in a positive manner. The text is clear; Christians as well as Jews have received a divine revelation, an in-breaking into history by God—the one God, the God of Israel—who is revealed through the life, words, and deeds of Jesus. It is this that constitutes the revelation to which Christians are faithful. It is called here a revelation, not an earthly symbol-system or a humanly created religion.

Christians have always held that ancient Israelite faith was of God and that it originated in historical communications (revelations) from God containing information about the world, instruction in the divine plan, and ethical and moral laws by which to live. Of course, Christians believe that God has broken into history yet again to reveal truth in and through Jesus. Are the authors of “Dabru Emet” agreeing with this latter claim? It would appear so. It is significant that in this statement the word “revelation” is used of Christianity by Jewish religious thinkers for the first time. This is an important breakthrough that in no way diminishes Judaism. Rather, it affirms what thoughtful Jews must have long suspected. The God of all humanity could not have restricted God’s religious concerns to one tiny group of people. If the Creator loves all humanity, providing sun and rain, the earth and its beauties, food and water for all, how could we imagine that God is indifferent to the spiritual well-being of everyone but the Jews? Surely God would speak to more than these. If some 1,500,000,000 people worship the God of Israel as revealed through Jewish scriptures and in Jesus, can we view it as some kind of accident, or is it part of the same divine plan initiated through Abraham (“in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” [Gen. 12:3b])? “Dabru Emet” is suggesting the latter explanation in stating clearly that Christianity is a revealed religion. This makes “Dabru Emet” unique and a major advance on the Jewish side of the dialogue.

I find myself in some disagreement with the formulations in the seventh point of the statement: “We respect Christianity as a faith that originated within Judaism.… We do not see it as an extension of Judaism.” There is something unsatisfactory about the way this has been put. Might it not be preferable to see both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism as extensions of ancient Israelite faith? There were once others—Essenes, Sadducees, Zealots, and other groups—who produced the richly varied intertestamental books. They were all expressions of Israelite faith, all “Judaisms” of the period between the testaments. Two of those Judaisms—the followers of Jesus, sometimes called the Nazarene movement, and the Pharisees—survived the Roman wars. The first fed into early Christianity; the second developed into Rabbinic Judaism. Both were grounded in their particular interpretations of the Hebrew scriptures; both eventually added new sacred writings through which they read the commonly inherited text. It would be futile to attempt to determine which of these movements reflects the faith of ancient Israel more closely or exactly. Both differ greatly from ancient Israelite practice. Would Moses be any more at home in a modern synagogue than in a church? Both Jews and Christians have produced—or been guided by God to produce— new things. Which is newer? Which is older? Which is more biblical? Such attempts at legitimizing ourselves at the expense of the other are unworthy of either people of God. Each of us feels that we are extensions of the faith of the Hebrew scriptures—and so we are, although we have each “extended” that tradition in unique, though related, ways.

“Dabru Emet” is a significant accomplishment, a worthy response to the many Christian statements on Judaism that cried out for Jewish acknowledgement and reaction. Once the church had affirmed the ongoing validity of the Jewish covenant in the 2,000 years since the Christ event, conditions were right for Jews to affirm the validity of God’s later covenant with the nations through Christianity. Neither of these moves was easy for either party. Monotheistic religions tend to make universal claims. We both still make such claims, but not in the exclusivist way we once did. We have learned that it is possible to affirm the truth of one’s own faith tradition without having to devalue or deny the truth-claims of the other faith. This is especially true of Judaism and Christianity, sibling faiths, both offspring of an ancient Israelite parent, joined in common memory and shared hope.

“A Sacred Obligation”

On September 1, 2002, in response to “Dabru Emet,” the Christian Scholars Group on Christian-Jewish Relations issued their ten-point statement: “A Sacred Obligation: Rethinking Christian Faith in Relation to Judaism and the Jewish People.” The Scholars Group has existed since its establishment in 1969 by the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Currently partnered with the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning of Boston College, it includes leading Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox scholars and holds regular meetings devoted to various aspects of Jewish-Christian relations. The ten headings of the statement are as follows:

1. God’s covenant with the Jewish people endures forever.
2. Jesus of Nazareth lived and died as a faithful Jew.
3. Ancient rivalries must not define Christian-Jewish relations today.
4. Judaism is a living faith, enriched by many centuries of development.
5. The Bible both connects and separates Jews and Christians.
6. Affirming God’s enduring covenant with the Jewish people has consequences for Christian understandings of salvation.
7. Christians should not target Jews for conversion.
8. Christian worship that teaches contempt for Judaism dishonors God.
9. We affirm the importance of the land of Israel for the life of the Jewish people.
10. Christians should work with Jews for the healing of the world.

This statement is important because it states explicitly and in one place a number of ideas only hinted at earlier in prior church statements. The Scholars’ Group, made up of leading Catholic and Protestant theologians, deliberately chose direct and unequivocal language so that their views would not be seen as ambiguous by later interpreters.

In the first point, they reject supersessionism absolutely. “God does not revoke divine promises.… God is in covenant with both Jews and Christians.” They affirm “the abiding validity of Judaism.” This is the key move for Christians in the dialogue. Without it, all theological conversation must cease. Jews will not long continue to talk with people who refuse to see their faith as valid or, indeed, as a living reality. Of course, Christians who see Judaism as a fossil will, for their part, have little interest in the dialogue.

The point that “God does not revoke divine promises,” has been developed elsewhere by Clark Williamson, one of the signers of “A Sacred Obligation.” His argument is that, if God would break what the Torah had described as an eternal covenant with Israel—due, presumably, to Israelites’ sins—what would keep God from breaking the eternal covenant with the church whose members are also guilty of sin? Seen in this light, the traditional Christian supersessionist theory that Israel once possessed but later lost its covenant relationship with God would call into question the reliability of all of God’s promises and undermine the Christian’s certainty of “standing on” those very promises. Here is another reason, one centered on Christian self-conception, for moving beyond all supersessionist theories.

The third point, regarding past Jewish-Christian rivalries, focuses on the anti-Jewish passages in the New Testament. It asks the churches to recognize what scholars have known for a century and a half: that these confrontational passages reflect the mutual hostility between Rabbinic and Nazarene Judaism (proto-Christianity) of the late first century. Vying with each other for the title of “true Israel,” the parties engaged in fierce mutual name-calling. Some passages in the Gospels reflect this conflict within the Jewish community. These anti-Jewish passages should not guide Christians today any more than Jews should cling to ancient rabbinic denunciations of early Christianity. Once again, if only we would let the implications of Gamaliel’s words in Acts guide us, we could break down our exclusivist prejudices and affirm the truth of both traditions.

The fourth point expands on the first. Freed from its ties to the ancient Temple worship, Rabbinic Judaism came into its own. Both Jeremiah and Jesus had recognized the inadequacy of the Temple cult to express the higher spiritual aspirations of Israel’s faith. Prophetic faith had grown up as one alternative, then the prayer life of the synagogue, then the religion of Jesus and that of the rabbis. It took the Roman legions to finally sweep the Temple away and to open the way for Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. Both stressed prayer, repentance, and righteousness with God’s grace ever present to make up for our failures in achieving the last of these. Through Torah and this new Judaism, Jews have lived out their faith for two millennia. Through Christ and church, Christians have lived theirs. In each case, this history reveals the divine hand. Neither faith can understand itself without understanding the role of the other in God’s plan.

The sixth point returns to this issue, demonstrating how the realization of the ongoing life of Jewry and Judaism is crucial to Christianity’s self-understanding. This may be the most radical point of this statement and the one that will prove to be the most controversial. It must be quoted in full:

Affirming God’s enduring covenant with the Jewish people has consequences for Christian understanding of salvation.

Christians meet God’s saving power in the person of Jesus Christ and believe that this power is available to all people in him. Christians have therefore taught for centuries that salvation is available only through Jesus Christ. With their recent realization that God’s covenant with the Jewish people is eternal, Christians can now recognize in the Jewish tradition the redemptive power of God at work. If Jews, who do not share our faith in Christ, are in a saving covenant with God, then Christians need new ways of understanding the universal significance of Christ.

This is a very complex issue and a fascinating one. On the one hand, Christians have long believed that salvation is available to all the peoples of the world through Jesus Christ—and only through him. On the other, many Christians have now come to realize that God’s covenant with the Jews is eternal and still salvific after Jesus, as it was before. What then of the universal claim of salvation only through Christ? Can these two views be reconciled? This statement holds only that “Christians need new ways of understanding the universal significance of Christ.” It does not suggest what those ways may be. However, significantly, it does not say that Christians should give up the claim of “the universal significance of Christ,” only that they need to rethink it. What might that rethinking look like?

Evangelical Protestants (according to polls, forty-six percent of our American population) will resist such a rethinking. For them, every individual must consciously accept the salvation offered by Christ and recognize Jesus as personal savior. But, there are other possibilities.

It has been said in Catholic statements (one by John Paul II himself) that, while Jesus is the necessary vehicle of salvation for all, one need not recognize this to benefit from his saving act on the cross. Christ died for all. He opens heaven to all who live according to conscience and do their utmost to adhere to the moral law. They may never have heard of Jesus or may even be hostile to him because of their upbringing, but, if they try to be good people according to their best lights, they can be saved through Christ. Jews will, of course, find this view strange, but, according to its universalist logic, if they are good Jews, they too will be saved by Christ.

Interestingly, this rather benevolent (if somewhat condescending) approach is sometimes coupled with a denial of the view stated in “A Sacred Obligation” that the Jewish covenant is or was ever salvific. It is Christ and Christ alone who saves both in Old Testament times and today. The Catholic “inclusivist” theory can be held together with the ancient story that the Patriarchs and heroes of the Hebrew scriptures were not, in fact, saved until the coming of Jesus and his descent into Limbo on Holy Saturday. This account illustrates the belief that Jesus’ salvific act was retroactive and that even the earlier generations were saved by the eternal work of Christ. Again, Jews would find all this alien to their self-understanding. However, this is a theory for Christians, not Jews. It offers them a way to maintain the universal applicability of Christ’s self-sacrifice without condemning to Hell people who never heard of Jesus or, having heard, fail to accept him due to non-Christian upbringing. Certainly, in terms of our concept of God as loving and righteous, this theory (inclusivism) is a great improvement over the exclusivist version of salvation only for those who accept Christ as personal savior.

Liberal Protestants, like Catholics, have sought to overcome exclusivism. Christ’s death and resurrection were for all, not just Christian believers. Most broadly conceived, this would be expressed in a formula something like that used by my friend Barrie Shepherd, former pastor of the First Presbyterian Church on lower Fifth Avenue in New York. At lunch one day, I asked him to be absolutely honest with his Jewish dining companion. Did he or did he not believe that salvation was available only through Christ? He put down his fork and thought deeply for a few minutes before answering. “Yes” he replied, “salvation is of and through Christ. By Christ I mean the Word of God. That Word is spoken to me through Jesus of Nazareth, the Word made flesh. It is spoken to you through Torah and your membership in the Israel of God.” I replied that, in my view, he and all Christians are Israelites (God-wrestlers), members of the Christian branch of Israel. His view seemed to complement mine from the Christian perspective. Jewish Israelites are a people who are collectively the enfleshment of Torah, the word of God, as is Christ in the New Testament. This is surely “inclusivism” in its most comprehensive expression. Since this theory identifies Christ as the Word of God operative in Judaism as well as in Jesus, this is an inclusivism that is, in practical effect, pluralism

If one were to go beyond this view, one would arrive at a full-blown self-conscious pluralism. Some liberal Christian thinkers have gone there already. John Hick and Paul Knitter come to mind, but they differ in crucial ways. For Hick, religions are humanly created symbol-systems, a number of which can get one to God, or the “Real,” as he prefers to call it. Any one of them—or all of them—is true if they produce virtuous people. This is truth seen not in terms of a religion’s being an accurate reflection of the divine reality but as producing a desired end. Religions are like diets. A diet aims at producing a slim and healthy person. Any number of diets will work—if you follow them. Religions seek to produce virtuous and God-fearing people. Many of them work and are thus “true” in this functional sense. For Hick, the Real reveals only its reality, God’s existence itself. All the rest of religion is human. The problem with this version of pluralism is that it seems alien to the lived experience of the believer in the pew who is convinced that the content of his or her faith is divinely revealed. If theologians let themselves get too far from the religious experience of their co-believers, they may be doing philosophy of religion, but not theology, which must be based on the living tradition of a particular faith.

Knitter has, in my view, a sounder theory of pluralism. He holds that religions are not human paths to God but divine revelations to human beings. In other words, revelation has a complex content. More than just God’s existence is revealed. A varied message is given by God to God’s people, including doctrines, ethics, mythohistorical accounts, and theological truths. And, he reverses the direction of all this content. It is not a human production enlarged and flung out at the heavens but a divine revelation that comes to us from God. His theory is pluralistic because he holds that God sends different revelations to different people at different points in history. Thus, Judaism is the revelation of God’s message and purpose to the Jews, and Christianity is a revelation of God to the gentiles. Both are true; both are of God.

From what I have already written, it should be obvious that I think he is right on target. Without revelation, there can be no religion. Without revelation, we are left with a one-way road from the human to God. This is what I would call spirituality, an expression of the human capacity for self self-transcendence. However, for what I mean by “religion,” one must hear the voice of the God who says, “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.” That voice will be heard by different people, at different times, in different ways, and one hearing need not cancel out the others. In Jewish terms, God did chose Israel as God’s elect people, but who says God can make only one choice?

It appears that the authors of “A Sacred Obligation” probably have some formulation in mind short of full-blown pluralism, perhaps a variation on Shepherd’s inclusivist formula, which is indeed a new way “of understanding the universal significance of Christ.”

The seventh point is important. Sensitive Christians of many denominations have come to understand how insulting it is to Jews to urge them to give up the faith that defines and expresses their relationship to God. The Catholic Church long ago dismantled its Office for the Conversion of the Jews. Their aim is now partnership with Jews in healing the world (the tenth point in this statement), rather than conversion. John Paul II has declared that the very existence of Jews today as a flourishing religious community demonstrates this people’s fidelity to God and God’s fidelity to them. A half-century ago a pope would have said it proved how stubborn and stiff-necked the sons and daughters of Jacob were in their refusal to accept Jesus—quite a change!

Christians had long considered Judaism an “incomplete Christianity,” but, if we properly understand ourselves, both Jews and Christians are incomplete. We both await the complete knowledge that will come with the unfolding of the kingdom of God. We are “partners in waiting.” There will come a day when “all will worship God with one voice.” Until then, we Jews and Christians who await the Messiah differ as to his identity and as to whether he has been here before. But, this difference is hardly a fatal one. It gives us so much of importance to discuss while we are waiting and laboring for the kingdom of God.

In Julius Caesar (V.i), Brutus says his farewell to Cassius:

O that a man might know
The end of this day’s business, ere it come:
But it sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known.

Let it suffice us that this human day will end and at last we shall look upon the face of King Messiah. Then we shall know him even as he knows us. For now, we wait and we work, faithful to the truths that have been revealed to us in this dispensation.

The eighth point indicates what should surely be the next step for churches in dialogue with Jews: lectionary reform. (The lectionary is the collection of biblical passages read publicly during Christian worship services.) As noted above, passages in the New Testament express the Christian side of the late-first- and early-second-century hostility between proto-Rabbinic Jews and early Christians. John’s indiscriminate use of the terms “Jew” or “the Jews” could better be rendered in the lectionary to say what he really meant. Terms such as “Jesus’ opponents” or “the authorities” or “the crowd” would convey the meaning of the text more faithfully. There are some passages in John and Matthew that probably should not be read publicly at all, at least not without explanation by the clergy who are at hand. Since this cannot usually be counted on, some selections, certainly some read during Holy Week, should be changed for less inflammatory and more accurate readings. It must be possible “to tell the old, old story,” focusing on “Jesus and his love,” rather than hate for or anger toward anyone, especially a whole people, the one from whom Jesus came.

Overall, “A Sacred Obligation” is a splendid and comprehensive statement, a landmark of reconciliation in the history of the new relationship between Jews and Christians. It is a worthy response to “Dabru Emet.”

“Reflections on Covenant and Mission”

In August, 2002, “Reflections on Covenant and Mission” was issued by the delegates of the Bishops’ Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs (Roman Catholic) and the National Council of Synagogues (Conservative and Reform Jews). These two groups of clergypersons were established some twenty years ago by their respective churches and synagogues and have been meeting twice a year since then to discuss issues in the ongoing dialogue between the faiths. “Reflections” was a joint statement but not a shared one. Each faith produced a separate reflection on “Covenant and Mission.” It must be said that what the two sides produced is strangely unbalanced, even unrelated. The Catholic statement deals extensively with Jews and questions of mission to Jews, while the Jewish statements hardly mentions Christians and says nothing at all about Christian theology or religious claims and beliefs. There is one passing reference to the fact that Jews await the Messiah, while Christians await the Second Coming. This is pointed to as a significant difference. That is it for reflections on Christian religious thought. Following this, the Jewish statement elaborates on common social action Jews and Christians can undertake to make a better world. Earlier there is offered an excellent survey of Jewish faith developed historically via the scriptural story of Israel. As a Jewish document it is fine as far as it goes, but as part of a joint statement issued together with Christians, it is woefully lacking. It says nothing of interest about Christianity. It offers no new insights on the Catholic faith of those producing the twin statement. Indeed, it all but ignores the other participant as a religious community. This is especially disappointing since Rabbi Michael Signer, one of the composers of “Dabru Emet,” was one of those who produced this document.

Perhaps the problem was the subject matter: covenant and mission. Catholics cannot address the topic of mission without speaking of Jews, whom they have been trying to convert for nearly two millennia. For Jews, mission has not entailed converting others for nearly as long a time. It has to do with building the kingdom of God in the human community in a moral and ethical sense. Jews have realized for many centuries that you do not have to be Jewish to be moral. Indeed, the statement quotes Jewish tradition that “the righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come.” Why then try to make them Jews? Jews are to live morally and witness to the universal moral law to all peoples. It is morality, not Judaism, that all people must accept. Since Jews have not seen their mission as conversionary for some seventeen centuries, there was no need in this statement to do more than renounce such activity once in passing.

Still one feels that a great opportunity was lost here to raise the question of whether Christianity is a covenantal faith, and, if so, is it an extension of Israel’s covenant or a distinct, new covenant? The Jewish participants took the easy path. They fell back on the usual practice of speaking of God’s love for all peoples and the equality of all human souls (Jewish and non-Jewish) before God. This is the easy path because it is taken to avoid discussing Christianity and Christians as such. So, the question of whether Christianity is of divine origin or is merely a human product is avoided, as are the work, mission, and teachings of Christianity beyond social action in the world. True, the call to engage in joint social and political activities with Christians would probably not have been part of a Jewish statement fifty years ago. However, too many Jewish statements are stuck at that point. Dabru Emet was the groundbreaking exception. One would have thought that, after its appearance, there could be no going back. But, here we are, two years later, back at the old social-action stand.

Another explanation for this theological reticence may be that this statement is made by synagogue groups, the Conservative and Reform Movements. Dabru Emet was issued by a group of theologians who did not have to answer to boards of rabbis or lay organizations. The fact is that no official branch of Judaism has ever issued a statement on Christianity. The United Synagogue of America (now the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism) has addressed the question of God’s dealing with non-Jews in the general terms of the old seven Noahide laws, which outline the moral rules all peoples must follow. This discussion is found in Emet ve-Emunah, issued by the United Synagogue of America, in conjunction with several other groups, in 1988. In fact, the present statement falls back on the Noahide laws, but these laws are for gentiles in general. Never are Christianity or Christians as such dealt with in terms of their religious claims and beliefs. This is utterly inadequate as part of a joint Christian-Jewish statement.

For their pan, the Catholic participants speak directly and in an admirably progressive spirit to issues of vital concern to Jews. Their statement recapitulates earlier Catholic statements and restates essential points in a refreshingly direct fashion. They go further, taking a step into a revolutionary Catholic pluralism. They speak of Jews as “the present-day people of the covenant concluded with Moses” and as “partners in a covenant of eternal love which was never revoked.” In the introduction, they note that Catholic belief in the permanence of the Jewish people’s covenant with God has led them “to a new positive regard for the post-biblical or rabbinic Jewish tradition.” They call upon Catholics to note the continuing fecundity of Judaism and to observe it to help their own self-understanding as Catholics. Past persecution of Jews is denounced; Jewish survival is seen as pan of “God’s design”; and Rabbinic Judaism is seen as being “of God.” This has never been said so strongly before.

These Catholic authors redefine “The Mission of the Church: Evangelization” in new ways. The church must evangelize. This means that it must work for world liberation from evil. This evil includes religious bigotry. Thus, interfaith dialogue is part of evangelization and must be “devoid of any intention whatsoever to invite the dialogue partner to baptism.” In the Section, “Evangelization and the Jewish People,” they speak of Christianity’s unique relationship with Judaism: Both share the Hebrew scriptures, the hope for the coming kingdom of God, and the obligation to prepare the world for its advent. Thus the Church “shares a central and defining task with the Jewish people.” The statement notes the sad history of forced conversion of Jews and points to the passing away decades ago of the Church Office for the Conversion of the Jews. Indeed, missionary activities “are not appropriately directed at Jews.” This is because “mission … refers to conversion from false gods.., to the true and one God … [while] Jews … [already] believe in the true and one God.”

Developing this thought, the statement quotes Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews. His words, first articulated in May, 2001, are repeated here as expressing the views of this Bishops’ Committee” “God’s Grace, which is the grace of Jesus Christ according to our faith, is available to all. Therefore, the Church believes that Judaism, [as] the faithful response of the Jewish people to God’s irrevocable covenant, is salvific for them, because God is faithful to his promises.”

While this statement is not official Catholic Church policy, which continues to be the inclusivism discussed above, the fact that Kasper stated this pluralist view in 2001 in Rome, repeated it in Jerusalem, and now we find it in this American bishops’ statement indicates that it represents an expanding sentiment in the Catholic Church. It truly is a groundbreaking idea for Catholics that it is “God’s grace” that saves. For Christians it takes the form of “the grace of Jesus Christ,” but for Jews it is found in “God’s irrevocable covenant” and in Judaism, which is equally salvific for Jews. It is not Christ who saves “even Jews,” but divine grace that saves all through both Christ and Judaism. This is true religious pluralism. Never before has a Catholic statement recognized that the Sinai covenant is salvific for Jews today. Earlier statements had held that, while the covenant between God and the Jews had never been revoked, it was Christ alone who saved everyone. Jews might well ask what the purpose was of affirming the ongoing existence of a covenant that could not save. However, the Church remained caught in the dilemma of wanting to affirm both the validity of Israel’s covenant and the universality of salvation through Christ. This seemingly self-contradictory position is still where the Catholic Church finds itself, midway between the exclusivism of evangelical Protestants and the pluralism toward which its more liberal theologians are urging it. Kasper’s position, echoed by the bishops’ statement, represents a new Catholic pluralism free of qualifications or behind-the-scenes salvific activity by a hidden Christ.

As I have said, this is not the official view of the Catholic Church; it may never be. However, it is a subtle but enormous advance, or beginning of an advance, in Catholic thinking that may yet bear fruit. Furthermore, it is a very controversial step that will be opposed by many. Indeed, a cover story of America magazine in the Fall of 2002 dealt with the problems created for Christianity by the bishops’ statement, with its theory of two agencies of salvation—a theory that Catholicism had explicitly rejected only a few years ago. In this article, Cardinal Avery Dulles denounced the bishops’ statement and invoked old supersessionist ideas. Appealing to the New Testament’s Letter to the Hebrews, with its relentless supersessionist message, Dulles, as if awakening from a theological slumber of nearly four decades, seems unaware of his Church’s current position on Jews and Judaism. For him there is no question of the salvific power of the divine covenant with the Jews, since that covenant was superseded and replaced by Christ and Christianity 2,000 years ago. Responses to Dulles’s view were written by three leading Catholic participants in the dialogue, pointing out that biblical literalism is foreign to a Church that believes in the ongoing interpretation of scripture by its Magisterium. Though the dispute will continue, the Church has taken its first tentative steps into religion pluralism.

“Reflections” quotes then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later to become Pope Benedict XVI): “God’s providence … has obviously given Israel a particular mission in this ‘time of the Gentiles.'” This is an extraordinary comment, coming, as it does, from a leading Catholic conservative. Thus, the statement concludes, the Church’s mission “no longer includes the wish to absorb the Jewish faith into Christianity and so end the distinctive witness of Jews to God in human history.” As the statement nears its close, it proclaims once more that “Jews already dwell in a saving covenant with God” and so must not be subjected to conversionary efforts. To those who would cite the “great commission” of the resurrected Christ to convert the world (Mt. 28:19), the authors note that Jesus on this occasion commanded his disciples to go to “all nations” (Kal goyim), meaning to gentile nations, not to Jews. They are on firm ground here. When Jews spoke (or speak) of “goyim,” they mean peoples other than Jews. It is true that Jesus called Jews, but he called them to be better Jews; he could hardly have been calling them to become Christians.

One could read many seemingly exclusivist New Testament passages in an inclusivist or even pluralist manner. When Jesus says, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn. 14:6b), we might interpret this to refer to living the kind of self-sacrificial life he led, not to a need to confess him as savior. Alternately, one might read it as Rosenzweig did, to refer to gentiles who are far from the Father and must come via Jesus. It could not refer to Jews who are already with the Father. They must work on the relationship they already have, but they are already where the gentile convert to Christianity wants to be.

This statement—at least its Catholic half—is an extraordinary expression of the new sprit of openness toward Jews and Judaism that is animating the Catholic Church and the mainstream churches of the Protestant world. There are still many holdouts who interpret their faith in exclusivist ways. They do so because they want to do so, but even they must acknowledge that there are other ways to be faithful Christians, ways that do not entail denying the validity of the Jewish faith whose patterns of thought and practice are so similar to theirs.

Likewise, there are Jews who still resist looking around them and seeing that they are no longer alone in building the kingdom of God. The God of Israel is the God of all humankind. God would not leave the whole world—except for some 15,000,000 chosen—without spiritual direction. If God has chosen—as God apparently has done—to open the covenant to include the gentiles and if God has done this through Jesus and his interpreters, why should we Jews not rejoice as we see the nations come to know the God we cherish above all else? The words of the psalmist are being fulfilled: “From the rising of the sun to its setting / the name of the LORD is to be praised” (Ps. 113:3).