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Importance of Christian Teaching about the Jews
B. D. Dupuy
The director of the ecumenical Centre d'๊tudes Istina of Paris brings out the importance of Christian teaching about the Jews in seminaries and theological faculties.
Until recently teaching about the Jewish people in Catholic institutions was extremely succinct, only giving those facts necessary to an understanding of Scripture. But about actual Jews, this was passed over as if they should be ignored, as if Judaism no longer existed since Christianity began, or at least had no more interest for Christians. Most often, Christian teaching was reduced in scripture courses to historical judgements on the people of the Bible and on a Judaism considered by many as no longer living.
Today, thanks to the efforts of several pioneers, and mainly because of the world events that threatened the very existence of the Jewish people, Christians and Jews have begun to discover one another. But not in the same way or with the same rhythm. Herein lie the difficulties. The climate of sympathy is burdened with a spiritual mortgage, indeed a theological one, of which the teaching institutions, both Jewish and Christian, must become conscious.
In the relations between Jews and Christians the optic of one side is in effect radically different from the other. In the beginning, for the Jew, the Christian is a man among others. Christianity is a fact that history presents as one of exceptional importance and having a particular neuralgic relationship with Judaism, but nothing allows or obliges the Jew to consider it decisive for his faith. He feels no need to meet the Christian. Judaism could exist for centuries in Babylonia and the Persian empire in complete ignorance of Christianity. It is marginal to Judaism. Notwithstanding Christianity's worldwide scope, for the Jew it is only an episode in his history, neither more nor less troubling fora great many Jews than Sabbatianism. Contrary to what many Christians believe, it is not on the religious or dogmatic level that Judaism encounters the Christian fact, but in the social domain, on the level of ethics. The Jew encounters Christianity as a political and cultural fact. Aside from a few very remarkable exceptions (such as Franz Werfel, Sholem Asch, Martin Buber), the Jewish thinker collides with Christianity as a conception of the world different from his. He recognizes, of course, what it has received from Judaism, but he 'considers it a complex contradictory phenomenon, a mixture of faith and paganism.
On the other hand, Christianity carries Judaism within itself as its fundamental historical and religious event, without which it would have no existence. It cannot forget that salvation history began with the election of this people, that the Son of God chose this people in order to become Son of Man, and that this people played a decisive role, crucial in the New Testament. The Christian needs the Jew to define himself in the world. His spiritual life would be empty of meaning if the Jew, with his Traditon and Law, were to disappear. Thus the Jew has a double meaning for him. One, the concrete the life of the people, their precepts, literature, social thought , interests the Christian little. The concrete, alien to his faith, seems alien to the faith. All his attention is on the other meaning, of a theological and mystical order. His interest is in this family of Jesus who gave birth to Him and yet has not recognized Him. For the Christian, the Jew is always a paradox, almost a mystery. He is ambiguous Abel or Cain, Simon-Peter or Judas whose kinship with Jesus and whose ignorance of the Christ are an enigma, a thorn in the flesh, a goad.
Since Judaism and Christianity can only approach one another by different routes, it will be necessary that Christians not limit themselves in their theological teaching simply to the habitual questions that they raise about Judaism. Jews should then reciprocate by being equally open and we know a certain number who already are so disposed. But for such an hypothesis to become a reality, Christian teaching must learn to consider the questions that Judaism itself puts to the Christian faith. It must make this effort, for it can only understand itself, if we believe Paul, through its living relationship with Judaism.
This is precisely the task of Christian teaching about Judaism. It is no longer sufficient to treat the Jewish people in those sections of theology (inspiration, messianism, the Law, observances, prophecy) where they are met with bias, usually a negative one. In fact, in seminaries and universities there should be courses for a genuine understanding of Judaism, where the actual Judaism of today will be studied for itself, in order to understand its difference, to accept this difference as fundamental to an understanding of the Christian faith. The students will learn at first that this difference as such is not a national or racial particularism, nor a voluntary isolation from other peoples. S. R. Hirsch, a 19th century German rabbi, wrote, "The isolation of Judaism is only in appearance, for all the force of its faith consists in making conscious the conviction that all men, all, march with Israel towards the Kingdom of God on earth". The students then will learn that this difference, as difference from their own faith, is fruitful for Christianity itself.
The Christian who discovers Jewish life and thought cannot fail to be dazzled by its depth and truth. In effect, he suddenly plunges into a treasure buried in Revelation. But because Christianity draws its strength from Judaism which gave it birth, the risk of this contemporaryrediscovery could be to minimize the divergences or to believe that they can miraculously disappear in a sort of spiritual recognition. On the contrary, the experience of Jewish-Christian dialogue, as that among Christians, shows that the divergences are revealed rather than effaced in an authentic dialogue. It is in accepting the difference that its spiritual value, its raison d'๊tre, will be found. The Christian will not be asked to judaize his faith, nor the Jew to christianize his. But what will be asked of both is to recognize the price of their fidelity and reciprocal ambiguity. Each one affirms himself faithful; each one accuses the other of "infidelity" to the Living God. But can they not also face each other with respect for each one's proper existence and their reciprocal ambiguity before the Living God?
Each faith seems to have received the mission to question the certitudes of the other, to help the other to be modest, to recall it to the demands of everyday life. Each faith is a test of validity for the other. If it is true, as Paul wrote, that "the assumption" of the Jews is the final event of history and that God's action itself will bring it about, the Jewish-Christian encounter that prepares for this "assumption" is included in ordinary daily work and must be inserted within the texture of the most fundamental human tasks.
The value of a better knowledge of Judaism for Christians would be to realize that not everything is refusal in the Jewish attitude towards the Christian faith. Today's Judaism simply continues its secular existence. From this viewpoint, Christianity still has much to learn from it. Throughout its history Judaism has not stopped giving an astonishing witness of fidelity to God, a faithfulness maintained at the price of its blood in the ordeals for which Christians, paradoxically, have very often been responsible. For centuries there was a true contradiction in the Christian attitude towards Jews. On the one hand, the Church professed to receive from them its Holy Scripture, and it rejected the anti Judaism of Marcion. But Scripture for the Church is always read within a tradition the Old Testament is the Holy Scripture of a people, this people. Yet, on the other hand, Christians most often have preferred to read Scripture without this people who continually draws its life-blood from Revelation. Thus, the relation to the Jewish people is forever handing, unresolved and ambiguous for the Church. Christian theologians have read the Old Testament most especially as prophecy of the New, as the promise of fulfillment. However, it is not primarily the old Testament, but the first one. Too often it has been forgotten that the Bible should be read for itself and that the Old Testament, as the last popes and Vatican II have pointed out, gives the Church inexhaustible riches. It must continue to ask Judaism for this wealth.
Nevertheless, Israel's refusals (we prefer to use the term in the plural rather than the singular) cannot be denied. Christians must recognize that these refusals generally come from an intention to be faithful. It is in the name of its fidelity to the faith of its fathers and to the Covenant with God that Israel rejects the Gospel when encountering it. This is the heart of the drama, which simultaneously separates us from Israel and unites us with it. The Jewish people, for the most part, reject our faith. This is not lessened by the fact that in their own eyes the motives for refusing come from Revelation and the precepts of the Law, that the refusals are the response of their own deep fidelity to the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob. This faithfulness is not, as many believe, an obstinate attachment to the past. For Israel in its very flesh has throughout the centuries given faithful witness to the God of the Covenant. It is not we Christians who will decide which the refusals or the fidelity will count most in Israel's heart nor, a fortiori, in God's eyes. Perhaps even, as in the case of ecumenism, it is a deeper mystery that we can only understand by meditating on the whole of human history in the light of Revelation. Today we have recognized that the Christian communities separated from Rome play a role in salvation history, and this recognition has now found a place in Catholic teaching. The importance of a deeper and more radical reality has yet to be stressed that the division of Jews and Christians is at the heart of the present eon in salvation history, an eon which will draw to a close with their encounter. The Bible has not given us another human division than on the one side the Jews, on the other the gentiles. In God's design the fundamental reconciliation is not among Catholics, Orthodox or Protestants, but between Jews and Christians. A vision of salvation history, and in consequence a theology, which limits itself to questions among Christians is too narrow and is condemned to sterility. To examine Judaism's questions put to the Christian faith is vital for the life of the Church.
Israel's difference, within a fundamentally common faith, must lead Christian theology to an examination of conscience. From this viewpoint, the Jewish conscience must preserve the Christian conscience from its traditional inclinations over-assurance and triumphalism. We cannot help understanding that, if the refusals of the Christian faith by the Jewish people, are founded on its fidelity and have meaning, this can be because of the refusals themselves. But at the same time, and this most importantly, this can also come from the failures of Christianity vis-a-vis the Jewish people. After preaching Jesus Christ successfully for centuries, the Church, now in a minority position, must also in our time question itself and its history, at the very moment when the Jewish people, persecuted but dive, find themselves forced by events to the same action. We enter a new age. The Christian era, the age of the ghetto are dead. The time of dialogue has begun. But the Jewish difference remains a difference which will cling to its fidelity, tomorrow more than yesterday.
In this new context Israel's refusals will challenge Christianity, while appearing more estranged and detached from the Christian faith.
But the refusals themselves ought to remind us of Israel's fidelity, as our own fidelity to the God of the Bible ought to make us recognize our own refusals. We are forced to exchange, under the eye of the Living God, the image of our respective ambiguities, original and contemporary. It is this enormous task to which Christian theology is called. Someone said that we should never live and think alone but only in tilt. presence of others. Christian life and thought is radically bound to exist in the presence of Jewish life and thought. This must be so in order that the converse can become equally true. In Paul's words (Rom. 9), such is the design of God.
