Jews & Christians: the next step for theology
FISHER, EUGENE J.
WHAT WAS UNIQUE ABOUT JESUS? Jews & Christians: the next step for theology EUGENE J. FISHER CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT scholars drawn into the dialogue with Jews have found themselves both enriched...
...And "proper" such statements no longer are...
...and pejorative themes (abrogation, supersession, fulfillment, etc...
...It is a "derivative of the Incarnation," which is itself only the "beginning of a process" within that history which "remains fundamentally incomplete...
...Rather, it was the teaching about Jesus (and this too is illustrated in Acts) which split apart what Jesus and the Apostles would,have not seen split...
...1980) and Clemens Thoma's A Christian Theology of Judaism (Paulist, $7.95, 212 pp...
...That, at least, is my own view...
...He is the author of Faith Without Prejudice: Rebuilding Christian Attitudes Toward Judaism (Paulist...
...The saying itself ("the Sabbath is made for man . . .") occurs in a midrash, possibly Pharisaic in origin, on Exodus 13:14 (Mekilta Ki Tissa, Shab...
...Peck, ed., Jews and Christians After the Holocaust, Fortress, $8.95, 128 pp...
...1981...
...In fact, the rabbinic "evil inclination" included sex but also other factors, some of them quite necessary for the progress of civilization, such as the urge to build...
...The first, taken from Clemens Thoma, points to the way in which Jesus "preached the actual presence of the Kingdom of God in his activities and in his person...
...EUGENE J. FISHER, executive secretary of the Secretariat for Catholic-Jewish Relations of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, was recently appointed Consultor to the Vatican Commission on Religious Relations with the Jews...
...R. Simeon b. Abba said: The verse means that if one returns evil for evil, evils shall not depart from his house.'' In practice, one might ask, how much difference is there between Hillel's negative phasing of the golden rule ("Do not do unto others what you would not want them to do unto you"), and Jesus's positive re-formulation of it...
...1978) and by D. Zeller and A. Finkel in A. Finkel and L. Firzzell, eds., Standing Before God (KTAV, $35, 416 pp...
...It reveals to humanity that, while a gulf necessarily remains between God and the human community, God, from the act of creation itself, needs humanity...
...Regarding the former, Pawlikowski himself adds the caveat (as does Thoma) that one must reject "any notion of the Kingdom being fully present in Jesus," since the parousia remains an end-time event...
...new, etc...
...Hence, he asserts, "we may say that the Christ event is far from its full activation...
...Parkes, in The Foundations of Judaism and Christianity (University of Chicago, 1960), for example, felt that Jesus's willingness to ignore the "fences about the Sabbath" erected by the Pharisees as a safeguard against the Hellenization of Judaism, was based on Jesus's desire to push the concept of the dignity of the individual to its utmost limits, and that this push, threatening the Jewish sense of peoplehood, put Jesus into conflict with the Pharisees...
...Leviticus 19:17-18 explains its ruling against hating one's enemy with the admonition to "love your neighbor as yourself," so Jesus's understanding of the text would not seem to be outside the spirit of the law...
...Pawlikoski is at his cogent best in the section of his book summarizing and criticizing the Christologies of a wide range of major thinkers, from the European scene (Pannenberg, Moltmann, Kung, Schillebeeckx) to the Latin American "liberation theologians" (Gutierrez, Bonino, Sobrino, Boff) He emerges from this survey with the somber report that "Christ-ology continues to suffer from a deep anti-Judaic malady...
...Obviously, a positive, more objective description of Judaism on its own terms and based on its own sources is needed...
...Pawlikowski's chapter on "The Uniqueness of Christianity" develops his notion of "incarnational Christology...
...Still, as briefly as possible and with due caution in view of the source problems that he himself carefully notes, let me comment point for point on Pawlikowski's list of differences: Pawlikowski's first "unique dimension" of Jesus's teaching is the "Abba experience" made so popular (on rather slim grounds) by J. Jeremias...
...Biblical precedent is also found in Proverbs 24:21 ("If your enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink") and Proverbs 17:13, on which the Talmud comments: "R...
...Much of this work comes to fruition in his chapter on " Jesus's Teaching: Its Links with and Separation from Pharisaic Judaism...
...Much too much has been posited by Jeremias, in the view of these scholars, on the slim evidence thus far adduced...
...There is a growing consensus of Christian scholars working in the field, in the words of John Pawlikowski who surveys them in his recent Christ in the Light of the Christian-Jewish Dialogue (Paulist, $7.95, 168 pp...
...These studiessuggest that Jesus's prayer, while distinctive, is, in the words of Samuel Sandmel, "quite congruent'' with that attested to in Pharisaic-rabbinic literature...
...This enables him to affirm the "once and for all" uniqueness of the Christ event while avoiding the triumphalism that has marred Christian apologetics in the past...
...Here, I would comment only that Pawlikowski also needs to take into account that deeper sense of linkages stressed repeatedly in official documents since the Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate as a "spiritual bond" tying the church to the Jewish people, in John Paul IPs words, "at the very heart of the church's own mystery...
...I found it curious that Pawlikoski does not come to the category of "mystery" (which would be my own starting point) until the final page of his text...
...Exactly how "partial fulfillment" is to be envisioned the Guidelines do not say, but "fulfillment" is clearly something which Christians no less than Jews still await...
...The systematic theologians he studied concur with those more directly involved in the dialogue that "the Kingdom of God must be seen as a future rather than a present reality'' and that "Jesus can no longer be explained simply as the one who fulfilled the Messianic prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures.'' These notions, he affirms, break down centuries-old distortions of the Jewish-Christian relationship and open up the way for Christians to recapture the Jewish sense of history which was lost when Christology turned to triumphalism to establish the "superiority" of its claims over against Judaism...
...PAWLIKOWSKI'S LAST TWO distinctions, I believe, are the most salient...
...For Ruether, as for others, the needed theological overhaul would be incomplete without going to the heart of the matter, the figure of Jesus who both forges the link between Jews and Christians in his person, and yet is the source of division between us...
...1982), would agree with Hellwig that the church's essential claim about Jesus "in no way implies the displacement of Judaism by Christianity.'' To articulate this truth successfully, however, Tracy suggests that Christology might need to be "reformulated as proleptic," in order to affirm more clearly that in the Christ event the future reign of God is both "always/already" made manifest "and, just as really, not yet here," an approach which seems to me to offer a positive way of framing the distinction within the concept of fulfillment cited above from the Vatican Guidelines...
...Pawlikowski's case on the implications of the doctrine of incarnation as achieving this is, again, stronger than his case based on Jesus's own teachings...
...The second is the way in which Jesus as depicted in the Gospels claims for himself the power to forgive sins, a power that, so boldly stated, Jews could ascribe to God alone...
...with what doctrines do we fill up all the resulting theological "holes...
...But I wonder if it is not more a matter of degree than anything else, at least in practice...
...IN THIS CONTEXT, Pawlikowski's Christ in the Light of the Christian-Jewish Dialogue, along with Paul M. Van Buren's Discerning the Way (Seabury, $ 12.95, 207 pp...
...Martin McNamara (Targum and Testament, Eerdmans, 1972) has shown that while the Mishnah (the earliest written section of the Talmud) does not rule on the question, the later Babylonian Talmud (Shabbath 128 ab) shows a division, with the more lenient side (Rabbi Akiba, whose opponents are not named) permitting one to "pluck with the hand and eat" - "but not to pluck with an implement...
...He does not give definitive answers here to the questions he himself raises and he stresses that, throughout, his book must be taken as "tentative" and in need of refinement...
...Pawlikowski concludes with an excellent summary of the question of "Christian Mission and the Jewish people.'' Here, he notes the crucial "study paper" of Tomaso Federici on the question and calls for an abandonment of "all aspects of the 'total fulfillment' interpretation of Christology which has been responsible for Christian theology's destructive superiority complex vis a vis Judaism and other non-Christian religions...
...The fourth distinction is likewise overdrawn...
...Such considerations bring with them the inevitable corollary that more is afoot in this movement than merely stripping away the negatives of the past...
...1980...
...It is the idea, rather frequently put forth, that Jesus was "the great champion" of the poor am haaretz ("people of the land...
...The liberation theologians, who take the Jewish Exodus experience very seriously at the heart of their theologies, don't seem to realize that, in words cited from Rabbi Leon Klenicki, the Exodus was not a moment, but a movement of a particular, real people that "culminated with the spiritual liberation of Israel at Sinai and the possession of Eretz Israel...
...In the suffering of the Son of God [is] revealed the vulnerability of God...
...love, justice vs...
...Granted, they are beginning to ask, that we succeed in rooting out from our teaching, the old simplistic dichotomies (law vs...
...Yet Pawlikowski himself admits that the enunciated principle ("the Sabbath is made for man and not man for the Sabbath") "is in fact in line with fundamental Pharisaic teaching...
...Pawlikowski notes that with such a Christological perspective comes the acknowledgment that we are far from the realization of the human as well as the divine/human communion revealed to us as the human potential by the Incarnation...
...So the distinction could not be used, even if valid, as Pawlikowski wants to use it, i.e., as another piece of evidence for his theory that Jesus's teaching carries a stronger "affirmation of human personhood" than does that of the rabbis...
...Martyrdom, such as Jesus faced in the crucifixion, is something one goes into with some willingness and in the hope that some ultimate meaning may emerge...
...It is the Christian interpretation of the meaning of the person of Jesus, hot the sayings of Jesus as wandering Jewish teacher, which makes Christianity irrevocably distinct from Judaism as a religion and which forces the separation of the people of God into the "peoples'' of God (if one may use questionable terminology to make a point...
...In my own view, it was not so much the teachings of Jesus which precipitated the break between the early Christians and their fellow Jews...
...The second "difference" is one which will have much to do with Pawlikowski's subsequent development of his Christology, and is taken essentially from the work of the eminent English scholar James Parkes...
...Somehow the people of Exodus, the Jews, seem to disappear from liberation theology with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple...
...And in both (Mk 2:28...
...I would hope that major systemati-cians would attempt to meet it head on...
...As a generalization, this appears to my mind as having some validity...
...While Hellwig, Tracy, and others such as Gregory Baum, Alice and Roy Eckardt, Krister Stendahl, and Hans Kung (to pick only a few) have attempted to take up the Christological challenge with varying success, Pawlikowski's is the first attempt to treat it at book length...
...Pawlikowski, I suspect, would challenge this formulation as overly simplified...
...This is a distinction many Jewish scholars, such as the Israeli David Flusser, would also make, "In Judaism," Flussernotes, "hatred is practically forbidden...
...The continental theologians, who tend to evince "general sensitivity" on the Jewish question, somehow fail to bring this with them when they turn to Christological construction...
...Ruether, by the way, should be read together with the dozen responses to her collected by Alan T. Davies in Antisemitism and the Foundations of Christianity [Paulist, $7.95, 258 pp...
...He raises helpful warnings against too easy attempts by Christians to equate the Jewish experience of Auschwitz with a "theology of the Cross" Christology...
...God will make him at peace with you...
...Pawlikowski's third distinction is one he lists only as "possible" and takes back almost as soon as he mentions it...
...1979), can be seen to mark a distinct turning point in contemporary Christian reflection on the enduring mystery of the church's relationship with the Jewish people...
...The problem with this thesis, as recent research has shown, is that, in the words of Michael Cook, "the presumed antipathy between the Pharisees and the am haaretz...
...12:8), the "point" of the grain-plucking story is quite clearly an affirmation about the person of Jesus: "the Son of Man is indeed Lord of the Sabbath...
...The resurrection, he believes, is an event which cannot be taken in isolation, either in Jesus's life or in articulating the meaning of the Christ event for human history...
...The 1974 Vatican Guidelines, though in a cautious way, made a crucial distinction between "fulfillment" and "perfect fulfillment" of the biblical promises in Christ...
...David Tracy, who views the Holocaust as "theologically the tremendum of our age" (in A.J...
...Taken as offered, the work of all these scholars must be judged as one of the most important challenges to systematic theology to come along in the past decade...
...It is of interest to note that the New Testament context where this principle is announced is one in which Jesus's teaching is, in truth, not opposed to but quite consistent with what ultimately became the majority rabbinic ruling on the case at hand...
...a statement about future promise rather than about present reality...
...Jews & Christians: the next step for theology EUGENE J. FISHER CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT scholars drawn into the dialogue with Jews have found themselves both enriched and deeply challenged, sometimes to their surprise but invariably to their delight...
...It is Christ (God) who forgives...
...This idea, it might be noted, has begun to come under increasing criticism, for example, from scholars like J. Oesterreicher, A. Vogtle, and A. Deissler in J. Petuchkowski & M. Brocke, eds., The Lord's Prayer and Jewish Liturgy, (Seabury Crossroad, $14.95, 224 pp...
...Pope John Paul II, for example, has spoken quite clearly of the Jewish people as "today's people of the covenant concluded with Moses" and as "the people of God of the old covenant never revoked by God" (Address to Jewish community in Mainz, Nov...
...In it he wisely, I believe, avoids both the notion that Christianity is simply "Judaism for the Gentiles'' and that the Christ event is merely one among several, equally valid Messianic experiences...
...1982), "that the Christ event did not invalidate the Jewish faith perspective [and] that Christianity is not superior to Judaism, nor is it the fulfillment of Judaism, as previously maintained...
...The fifth "unique quality" of Jesus's teaching is his teaching on love of one's enemy...
...Pawlikowski notes, too, on this distinction that the obsession to secure wealth frequently causes one to "disregard the basic dignity of men and women.'' This is true, but so, equally if not more so, does obsessive sexuality...
...With the first task, that of beginning to purge the ancient "teaching of contempt" with which Christians most typically approached Judaism in the past, at least well underway, Christian thinkers are now increasingly turning to a second, perhaps even more difficult challenge...
...1982...
...Interestingly, his presentation of the Jesus-Pharisee link, which relies heavily on Ellis Rivkin's work for its sense of "the Pharisaic Revolution," is more complete and more persuasive than his treatment of the "unique dimensions of his [Jesus's] teachings...
...Both of these, of course, are, as assimilated into Christian tradition, liturgical-sacramental in character...
...March 26...
...None of those surveyed, he finds, reflects more than a rudimentary second- or third-hand awareness of the realities of second-temple Judaism...
...Monika Hell wig's "From the Jesus of History to the Christ of Dogma" in the Davies book, concludes that one can (must) uphold the essential Christology of Chalcedon while freeing it from the "ethnocentric assumptions . . . which lead us (anachronisti-cally) to read back into the story of Jesus and into the doctrine that he is Christ and Lord a divinely ordained ending of the covenant of Israel...
...Pawlikowski fails, then, to show why this should be considered more than simply a difference of degree in teaching...
...It is a much subtler and more nuanced concept than Pawlikowski allows in his dichotomy...
...is not easily demonstrable...
...This affirms the dignity of the individual human person in a way that builds on but goes beyond Pharisaic doctrine, Pawlikowski asserts...
...1, ascribed to a late second-century rabbi...
...This Incarnational Christology is then applied to questions such as the continuing validity of God's covenant with the Jewish people, the particularity-universality question, the theology of Land in our two traditions, and theological reactions to the Holocaust...
...More recently, in his address to the Vatican Commission, he has spoken of the sense of "mutual esteem" between our two communities which must replace the disparagements of the past and of the need for the two to witness together to the world the Name - of the One God (Origins...
...1974) a renewed understanding of the Christian-Jewish relationship is intimately tied up with a renewal of Christianity's own self-definition, if only because the "teachings of contempt" has been so intricately interwoven with basic Christian claims since the earliest times...
...It depends on a view that Jesus saw the "evil inclination" (the second "master") as exclusively wealth (or mammon), while the Pharisees saw it as having a sexual base...
...Incarnation, Pawlikowski feels, takes the Pharisaic insight into the Divine-human relationship to its farthest limit...
...In Mark 2:23-28, the context is that of Jesus's disciples plucking "standing grain" on the Sabbath...
...In both cases the stories are followed up with that of the healing of the man with the withered hand...
...The attempt to find differences of teaching can thus lead to overconcluding at times from the available evidence, while failing to bring out the difference in beliefs about Jesus...
...The Book of Acts illustrates quite vividly that the schism was only a very gradual one...
...but how, precisely do we characterize the relationship between the church and the Jewish people if it is no longer proper to argue simply that the church has replaced the Jews as the divinely chosen people in God's salvific plan...
...And the latter power, though in one sense passed on by Jesus to his disciples, is not passed on directly but sacramentally...
...While there is little difference here between what Jesus taught his disciples to do and what Pharisaic/rabbinic teaching would have them do, Mark 2 and its parallel Matthew 12:1-8 do point to a difference between Jewish and Christian belief...
...As Rosemary Radford Ruether maintained, if perhaps too categorically, in Faith and Fratricide, (Seabury, $8.95, 304 pp...
...One might well question, especially in -the light of the slimness of the results, the very necessity of the latter exercise...
...As I understand it, Pawlikowski's theology here is intended to take the eschatological caution about present claims to the Kingdom with fundamental seriousness...
...He affirms, on the contrary, that the two religions are distinct,' 'each with a unique faith perspective despite their historic links...
...OVER THE YEARS Pawlikowski has done a great deal of work in reclaiming an objective and positive appreciation of Pharisaism based on Jewish as well as Christian sources...
...1979...
...mercy, old vs...
...Hama b. Hanina said: Even though your enemy has risen up early to kill you, and he comes hungry and thirsty to your house, give him food and drink...
...Touched by the challenge are not only ecclesiol-ogy and eschatology, but Christology itself...
...To try to derive such meaning out of the deaths of six million, including a million and a half children, Pawlikowski warns, is to risk blasphemy...
...These are warnings with which I would sympathize, since such attempts, no matter how well meant, risk continuing the ancient Christian practice of defining Jews primarily as sufferers, as victims, even if this victimhood is defined positively in the sense of martyrdom...
...On the other hand, Pawlikowski also finds basis for hope...
...The "not yet" of New Testament eschatology, for him as for Tracy, must be given equal weight with its "already here" aspect...
...But love of enemy is not prescribed...
...This scholarly consensus is strongly supported by the official positions of most "mainline" Christian churches...
Vol. 109 • November 1982 • No. 19
