A Christian Theology of Judaism

...Elizabeth's Hospital of Boston and associate professor of medicine at Tufts, is a former research internist at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

...but this people first made the discovery that we are able to experience the eternal mystery that surrounds God and the external Law arising out of the mystery...

...Behind the law, imperative and commanding, is the mystery, surrounding God the Eternal . . . We cannot experience God himself...

...The Jew, engendered a Jew, attests his belief by continuing to procreate the Jewish people...

...The organization of the text is basically historical from ancient Judaism through the beginning of the Common Era, medieval times down to the contemporary problems of Holocaust theology...

...And so it is...

...He goes on to cite Franz Rosenzweig's view of Christian belief as belief [in] the content of a testimony...

...Judaism has retained its particularism...

...In so misreading Jewish material, these theologies also misread the Christian coda to those Biblical fabliaux...

...He is on the board of directors of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War...

...These few meager verses of Genesis can be said to establish both the subject and the substance of the Jewish story...

...Clemens Thoma's immensely rich and valuable study of Christianity and Judaism is thus not directed at some corner of a scholarly inquiry, it exists at the point of the central question of Christian belief in the contemporary world...

...It is the belief in something...

...I was struck in reading the Commonweal review of theologians and their work a year ago what a problem they seemed to have being theologians at all...

...David Flusser in a brilliant preface to Clemens Thoma's study states this issue with great clarity: Christian theologians of Judaism must accept that, according to Jewish understanding, it was not a religion that was chosen but a group of human beings, not the Jewish religion but Israel...

...is the great, opening cry of the Shema which initiates the prayer life of Jews...

...But it is doubtful that orthopraxis properly captures the tradition...

...Judaism is a religion of Law or right action, orthopraxis rather than orthodoxy...

...But modern science, critical history, and concentration camps have conspired to persuade contemporary Christian theologians that no religious message will be heard which is addressed to the rational, universal Roman cosmopolitan...

...DANA GREENE is associate professor of history at St...

...Mary's College of Maryland...

...already raise suspicions and require justification...

...Yet I had the notion that some of the "theologians" would have been more comfortable with the position of those popular Jewish thinkers who state that the advantage of Judaism is that it avoids embarrassing theological dogmatics...

...The substance is the long night struggle with a dark stranger - is he friend or enemy...

...And the stranger departs refusing to give his name in return: "Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name...

...Quoting Rabbi Leo Baeck, Only out of the experience of eternal mystery, of infinity, of the beyond can the experience of law emerge...

...One can understand Robert McAfee Brown's problems of affirming in Auschwitz...

...this people, this land are the special chosen vehicle of the holy...

...The stranger vanishes leaving Jacob only with the memory of a losing battle in the night, the name of Israel, and the conviction that he has seen God face to face...

...In this regard, then, the book is a challenge to both Christian and Jewish theologians as well as a corrective to a myriad of subtle distortions that creep into the two traditions...

...Thoma does not pretend to resolve the complex issues raised by Christian-Jewish dialogue, but he deserves great praise for positioning that dialogue at the depth appropriate to an age-long grappling with God in dust and darkness...

...Yet Jacob struggles on and will not release the dark stranger unless he bless him...

...At the breaking of day, the unknown one has not prevailed...

...The stranger asks, "What is thy name...

...FATHER RAYMOND SCHROTH, S.J...

...Jacob...

...The implication of emphasizing who is addressed, an Israel, is radical...

...For a variety of reasons ranging from existential philosophy to a conflict between certain dogmas and scientific belief, much of modern Christian theology emphasizes the centrality of belief in someone, Jesus Christ, rather than in a set of "truths...

...That is exactly the opposite of the belief of the Jew...

...There is no doubt that a certain kind of Christian theology with its emphasis on dogmatics and demonstrations is likely to radically misread Jewish sources as so many religious truths scattered among a variety of picaresque tales from ancient Palestine...

...Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture) Rational Rome insinuated itself into its Roman Catholic descendant so that Christian universalism yielded to the temptation to vilify Judaism in similar terms for a narrow attachment to people and place...

...REVIEWERS JOHN O. pastore, a cardiologist at St...

...they are the by-products of the moment of address, they do not themselves create or constitute the "religion...

...One has to come to some dogma for the struggle: "I have seen God face to face...

...It also prevents him from accepting any of the easy polemical positions which Jews and Christians favor when confronting one another...

...And Jacob called the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved...

...is Dean of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts...

...Thoma is a theologian for Christianity and Judaism who offers the proper corrective to religion as orthopraxis...

...To whom is that summoning addressed...

...DENNIS O'BRIEN is president of Bucknell University...

...cf...

...Crippled, Jacob will not release the unknown except he is blessed...

...Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God...

...That generations of Jews who summon themselves as "Israel" should regard their long dark struggle in history as a wrestling with an unknown who blesses is, in truth, no more mysterious, puzzling, and daring than Jacob's conclusion that he, Israel, has seen God face to face and been preserved...

...one can appreciate Rosemary Ruether's feminism...

...Any proper theology of Judaism - and Christianity - must begin from the question, who is addressed by this body of writings and rituals...

...Judaism" and "Christianity" are secondary superstructures which grow over the initial summoning of a Jacob/Israel who lives the night struggle and experiences it as a moment of blessing from an unknown, unnamed God...

...Theology can be reduced (almost without remainder) to an ideology for the practical life...

...A Christian Theology of Judaism is brief, lucid, and learned...

...Christianity cannot be indifferent to the central summoning of Israel which is the heart of what we call Judaism...

...lots of people were properly concerned with the poor and wretched of the earth...

...BETTE WEIDMAN, assistant professor of American literature at Queens College, is the editor of White on Red: Images of the American Indian (Kenniket Press...

...Without learning his name, without seeing his face in the clear dawn, Jacob accepts a blessing...

...Given a reorientation away from "scientific" theology to "personalistic" theology, it is no surprise that the relation between Judaism and Christianity should reemerge as a central contemporary theological concern...

...Jewish thought was a wretched parochialism to the rational Roman, Julian the Apostate, who (properly) traces the whole defect in Christianity to the Jewish conception of God whom he regards as "short-sighted, jealous, resentful, capricious, sectional, particularist, essentially the deity of a primitive and uncivilized folk...

...Professor Thoma, who is professor of Biblical and Jewish Studies at the Catholic Faculty of Theology at Lucerne and a consultor to the Vatican Secretariat of Christian Unity, illustrates an impressive familiarity with Jewish material from modern theologies to the extensive rabbinical literature of the inter-testamental period...

...The problems it discusses are central for this religious tradition...

...It means that Jewish Law and Christian dogma, rabbinical wisdom and sacramental ritual only live for the person of one who is addressed...

...The subject, the one addressed, is a Jacob/Israel...

...Hear O Israel - you, Jacob, that one there who struggles on the ground with the dark stranger who may yet leave you with a blessing.'' Only when Jacob/Israel is summoned will the religious message be heard by Jew or Christian...

...To entitle any book these days "A -----------Theology of-----------" may...

...In Genesis we hear the story of Jacob who wrestles through a long night with an unknown stranger...

...he touches the hollow of Jacob's thigh and he is lamed...

...Rosenzweig's characterization of Christian belief becomes correct: a belief in something, not someone...

...His belief is not the content of a testimony, but rather the product of reproduction...

...There is this dark struggle with a friend or foe who will or will not name and bless...

...Only if the summoning is valid can Christian particularism expect any hearing...

...His ability to deal with this long history gives to the study the specificity of detail which a study of a particularist tradition demands...

...His belief is not in something: he is himself the belief...

...It is this judicious balance which gives point to orthodoxy and law, to monotheistic demands and Trinitarian formulae, to rabbinic exegesis and eucharistic sacrament that makes Tho-ma's work so valuable...

...Prof...