In last month’s Kol Emunah, I gave an account of the radical change of Christian attitudes regarding Jews and Judaism. Over the past fifty years most churches have completely re-thought their ancient teachings about us and our faith. For two thousand years Christians held that the Jews, by not accepting Jesus as messiah, had forfeited their claim to be “the people of God,” and had been replaced in that role by the church, the “new Israel”, the “new people of God.” In order to regain divine favor Jews would have to accept Jesus as messiah and convert to Christianity. But all that has changed. While some evangelical churches still hold to the old attitudes, the Roman Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant churches have completely repudiated their traditional teachings on this subject.
The catalyst for that change was the Holocaust which shocked the churches into realizing the horrific consequences of their venomous teaching that the Jews were collectively guilty of the death of Jesus. This charge is, of course, historical nonsense and theological poison. But Christian hatred of Jews for this imagined crime paved the way for genocide. Finally recognizing this, Christians purged their religion of its toxic anti-Jewish, antisemitic teachings. In the new post-Shoah Christian view, the Jews as a people are not and never have been guilty of the death of Jesus. Christians have repudiated and apologized for the deicide theory.
Today most Christian churches hold that they did not replace the Jews, but joined them in service to God, and that the covenant between God and Israel is eternal and unbreakable. God may have made a New Covenant with Christians, but the original Mosaic Covenant between God and Israel is still valid. What churches today are calling for is not the conversion of Jews to Christianity, but a conversion of Christian attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. Christians are taught by their churches to see Jews, not as candidates for conversion, but as partners in dialogue and in the shared work for world redemption.
At the end of last month’s article, I called on Jews to become more familiar with this epic-making, 180 degrees turn in Christian attitudes—and “to respond accordingly.” But how do we do so? What should be our response to all these Christian gestures of friendship and penance for past sins against us? In this essay, I would like to suggest some possible Jewish responses. What follows is a distillation of the contents of my book: Opening the Covenant: A Jewish Theology of Christianity, published by Oxford University Press.
Religions are interpretations of events. They express those interpretations through stories which read like historical narratives but are actually theological accounts of the religious community’s experience of their ongoing interaction with God. The community’s story reveals God’s redemptive plan for them and, in a larger sense, for the whole human race.
Judaism and Christianity both tell stories. They are closely related to each other since they both are grounded in the accounts of ancient Israel found in the Hebrew Scriptures. To those ancient tales Judaism adds Midrash, Talmud and related rabbinic literature through which the original biblical narratives are interpreted. For its part, Christianity adds the New Testament (additional scripture) and later church theology through which it reads and interprets the original Israelite text.
First, a quick review of the “Jewish story.” The tale begins with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They are forbidden to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Now they already understand good and evil. Good is to obey God; evil is to disobey God. What the forbidden tree represents is the human desire to redefine good and evil; to replace God’s will with human whim. That is the sin they commit when they disobey God and eat of the tree. They have mis-used the free will that God gave them so that they could freely choose to love and serve the Holy One. They used that God-given free will to rebel and to try to make themselves God with the power to define good and evil on their own.
Adam and Eve, father and mother of us all, established a negative pattern of human behavior. As a result, we adopted the bad habit of disobeying God. But in this Jewish story, that disobedience is not necessary. We still have free will. Each of us can choose to follow our first parents’ bad example or to obey God’s commands.
Adam and Eve gave birth to Cain and Abel. In a jealous rage, Cain kills his brother Abel. Murder has been introduced into the world. The story tells us that all homicide is fratricide and the result of the continuing mis-use of free will. Cain chose to indulge his emotions rather than discipline them by listening to God’s teaching. Cain is driven out from God’s presence even as his parents had been expelled from Eden.
The human story spirals downward morally until, in Noah’s generation, the whole world drowns in sin, again defined as the mis-use of human free will. Only Noah, who was “righteous in his generation,” and his family are saved. So righteousness is still possible; free will is still real. But God’s attempt to solve the problem of sin does not work. Following the watery un-creation and re-creation of the world, Noah’s son commits a forbidden act (some unspeakable sexual act euphemistically referred to as “looking upon his father’s nakedness”) and sin is present once more.
God must find a new way to solve the problem. Some three chapters later in Genesis, God decides on a new plan to redeem humanity from its habit of sin. God chooses one man, and from him creates a family, and from that family a tribe, and from that tribe a people. God will train that people to use their free will to follow the divine Word rather than their own whims. They will be God’s earthly agents of redemption who will learn God’s laws and then teach them to the world, thus directing the human story to its culmination: the establishment of the kingdom of God, a world of universal justice and righteousness.
That chosen people is Israel; that man is Abraham. Adam failed, Cain failed, Noah failed—Abraham must not fail!
Abraham and Sarah give birth, in their old age, to a son, Isaac. Philo of Alexander, the great ancient Jewish Platonist philosopher, noting Abraham and Sarah’s ages (100 and 90, respectively) wrote that Isaac, a miracle child, was really God’s son, rather than Abraham’s. Abraham is the father of many nations, but Isaac is the progenitor only of the people Israel. Through that people, God has told Abraham that “all the families of the earth will be blessed.”
Ultimately, Israel does not exist for its own sake. This people was called into being by the Holy One to be a blessing to all nations. As Philo also wrote, “The Jew is to the nations as the priest is to his congregation.” We are to enlighten the world as witnesses to the Oneness of God and God’s universal Moral Law. That is our calling as a witness people, God’s earthly agent of redemption.
The story goes on with the wondrous tales of the patriarchs. Each story reveals more of God’s message to the people Israel to pursue justice, righteousness and compassion, and to proclaim the infinite value of every human life. As a test of faith and a means of sensitizing God’s people to their calling to alleviate human suffering, God has Israel suffer the horrors of slavery for several hundred years in Egypt, so that they will emerge with the determination never to wrong the stranger, having been “strangers in the land of Egypt.” Having been enslaved, the Israelite must labor to liberate humanity.
When Moses presented himself to Pharaoh to demand the liberation of God’s people, he declared, “Thus says the LORD: `Israel is my firstborn son; let my son go that he may serve Me.’” Once again, we see this people as the “son of God,” the nation created to be the earthly agent of world redemption.
So the suffering in Egypt is seen as “redemptive suffering” in that it is imposed upon Israel as a means of sensitizing this people to the plight of a suffering human race. In the Exodus, God comes to Israel as a Liberator, freeing them to undertake a national life of service to the world. At Sinai the Holy One establishes an eternal Covenant with Moses and his people. God will guide and protect them and they will be God’s witnesses, the up-builders of God’s kingdom in the human community.
If God is revealed as Israel’s Liberator at the Red Sea, God is revealed at Sinai to be Israel’s Law Giver. Torah instructs God’s people how to use the freedom God has given them. “Liberty through Law” is the theme of the Torah, the guide for living as God’s people called to righteousness and to the task of leading humanity to redemption. For this task we are freed from Egypt and given Torah, which we are to carry into the world. No people has ever been entrusted with a higher calling or a greater responsibility.
From Sinai the story progresses through Israel’s entry into the promised land and its national life on its native soil. Then, having absorbed the lessons God has taught, Israel goes forth into the world to witness and to teach by example how people live when God is their King. The tale will culminate only when God’s redemptive work through Israel is brought to fruition in a messianic future when “the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”
That is the Jewish story. Now a sketch of the Christian story.
This tale also begins in the Garden of Eden. But in this story, when our first parents eat the forbidden fruit, the consequences are much more radical. In the Jewish account, sin is what Adam and Eve do; in the Christian reading of the story, sin is what Adam and Eve become. By their disobedience their essential natures are changed and corrupted, as is all creation. The whole creation collapses into sin and becomes a fallen world in constant rebellion against God.
For Judaism, sin is what we too often do; for Christianity, sin is what we always are. You can stop doing what you do; you cannot stop being what you are. In the Christian account, our hearts, our inner motivation is sinful. Even if we do the right thing, we do it for the wrong reason: self-gratification. All humanity inherits the sinful nature of Adam, his “original sin.” This is the doctrine of the “fall of man.” And since sin is our very nature, we can do nothing about it. We are born in sin and conceived in corruption with our free will fatally compromised. Yet there is hope.
If humans cannot liberate themselves from sin, God—the only One not corrupted by “the fall”—is still free to act. In the Jewish story, God gives us the gift of Torah to train us in righteousness. That can work because humans are still free agents able to amend their ways and choose to use their still operative free will to follow the path of Torah. But Christians view the Torah as inadequate to deal with the problem of sin since they say it can only influence our external conduct; it cannot alter our inner motivation which is where sin lies. So, with our will in bondage to sin, a more radical solution is called for to solve Christianity’s more radical version of the problem. Christ is called for.
God acts to bridge the chasm of sin which separates the fallen creation from its righteous Creator. God becomes one of us. He is born as a man, lives a sinless life, and dies a sinless and self-sacrificing death. He pours out his redeeming blood for our salvation from sin.
While Christianity rejects the Jewish belief that after the fall humans can choose to be righteous, it puts all its hope in the righteousness of a God who suffers and dies as a man to pay the penalty for human sin. Humans are “saved” by accepting what God has done for them on the cross. This is the doctrine of “justification by faith in God’s righteousness.” So here, too, righteousness is the solution to sin, but it is not man’s righteousness, but God’s righteousness which liberates humanity. God now acts toward sinful humans as if they had died on the cross. He forgives their sins for the sake of Jesus, who paid the price for humanity’s sins. We are now asked to accept this gift of salvation. If we open ourselves to the in-breaking presence of Christ, he will enter us, remake our lives to conform to his perfect life, and we will be able to say with Paul, the first to articulate this theory, “not I live, but Christ liveth in me.” We are now free from sin, given an uncorrupted heart, and able to walk before God “in the newness of life.”
Judaism believes that good deeds lead to salvation. Pauline Christianity holds that faith leads to salvation which leads to good deeds. One might say that Paul reverses the Jewish theory, making righteousness not the path to acceptance by God, but the consequence of it.
So here we have two definitions of sin and two theories of how to deal with the problem of sin, one Jewish, one Christian. Which one is correct? I think this is the wrong question.
In a performative sense, any theory is “correct” if it works. Both Judaism and Christianity “work.” They both lead their followers to live righteous lives if they follow them faithfully. A good Jew and a good Christian live identical moral lives. If that is the test of the truth of religions, then both faiths are equally “true.” Their symbol systems, their respective stories, and the paths they lay out toward salvation are somewhat different. But their end is the same, a human race free to follow the way of righteousness.
Since I believe both to be equally true, I would like to engage in a thought experiment, expressed as a third story which incorporates both the Jewish and Christian accounts. I offer this as a Jewish response to the new Christian affirmation of the eternal validity of our Jewish faith. It is a way for us to remain faithful to our religion while acknowledging the validity of Christianity.
Returning to the Jewish story, we see that for some 1,200 years—from Abraham in 1800 BCE to the Babylonian Exile in 586 BCE—God trained the people Israel in the ways of righteousness in their own land. Then, in a process lasting some six centuries, Israelites began to spread out across the Middle East and North Africa. Finally, with the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, many of our people still living in Palestine moved into Europe and eventually reached the New World in 1654. Theologically interpreted, we may see this dispersion as a divine effort to scatter Jews across the world to act as a spiritual and ethical catalyst in many societies. God had called Abraham’s seed to bring “blessings to all the families of the earth.” In the diaspora, Israel could fulfill this commission. And so we have done, working for social justice, moral uplift, expanding freedoms, scientific discovery, and cultural excellence in every land in which God has caused us to dwell.
But at the same time that Israelites were spreading into Europe, God undertook another related plan to bring the divine Word to the larger world. He sent Jesus and his interpreters (Paul and others) to carry a message to the gentile world that they too could enter the Covenant which had previously defined the exclusive relationship between the Holy One and Israel. Through Jesus, I believe that God opened the Covenant to include all peoples. Jesus thought of himself as a Jewish reformer, calling his people to return to the ethical, spiritual essence of the faith. Many Jews thought of him as a prophet in the tradition of Amos and Jeremiah. But Paul, the “apostle to the gentiles” saw him as a universal savior and preached his message to non-Jews. Jesus had summed up his teachings as “love the LORD your God with all your heart . . . and your neighbor as yourself.”
These teachings from Deuteronomy and Leviticus were already known to Jews. Paul understood that it was the gentiles who needed to hear them. He added to this the theory of Jesus as a second Adam who reversed the direction of a sinful world by paying for people’s sins and freeing them to serve God. The Jews bore Torah, the Word of God into the world; Jesus was the incarnation of Torah, the “Word made flesh.” Paul offered the gentiles the spiritual and ethical essence of Judaism without the ritual law (circumcision, kashrut, Shabbat, etc) incumbent on the Jews. This was an attractive package and the new faith spread rapidly.
Can we Jews not see in the growth and spread of Christianity a divinely ordained effort of God to expand the Covenant to include all the peoples of the Western world? This, as well as the dispersing of the Jews, was God’s way of fulfilling Abraham’s call to bring blessings to all people.
Is Jesus the messiah of the Jews? No. He did not fulfill our messianic expectations. But Jesus has functioned as a messiah from the Jews, for the gentiles. He has been the means of bringing untold billions to know the God of Israel. The vast majority of people who read the Hebrew Scriptures today are non-Jews. Is that an accident? Or is it evidence of a double redemptive plan of God to fulfill the Abrahamic promises via two parallel paths, Judaism and Christianity.
The stories they tell are similar in many ways. In both, sin is the problem. To solve the problem, God causes a “son” to be born. In the Jewish story, we learn of the miracle birth of Isaac to two parents well beyond child-bearing age. Israel is Isaac’s offspring, the collective individual who will be God’s earthly agent of redemption. God reveals his Word, Torah, to Israel who carries it to the world. But the world resists these efforts and persecutes the Jews who suffer and die as a result of their faithfulness to their redemptive calling.
The Christian story also speaks of God’s begetting a “son”, also by a miracle birth (this time to a virgin), a single individual who will be God’s redemptive agent and who will embody the divine Word. Here, too, the world resists his efforts and persecutes him unto death—as has happened so often in the Jewish story. The two stories are clearly parallel. Both can be seen as embodying the same truth: human sin, God’s love, and a divine effort to redeem sinners and establish God’s kingdom. But one is for us and the other is for gentiles. Both are of divine origin and offer equally valid paths to redemption.
Such a Jewish theology of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity is an appropriate means for us to respond to the new Christian outreach to Jews. It recognizes the divine hand at work in the Christian faith without compromising our fidelity to Judaism, God’s truth for us.