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The Pharisaic Revolution_ Its Significance for Christian Renewal
John T. Pawlikowski

 

The following text is the second part of an address given at the First National Workshop on Catholic-Jewish Relations, Dayton, Ohio, in November 1973. The first section was printed in SIDIC Vol. VII No. 2 under the title « Issues in Catholic-Jewish Dialogue ».

So much for the cleansing part of the Catholic agenda in the dialogue. Let me now move on briefly to part two — how the study of Judaism can contribute substantially to .Catholic self-renewal. Here I must return to my friends the Pharisees. For it is only by grasping the significance of some of their basic innovations within Judaism which had far-reaching influence on the teachings of Jesus and the structure of the early church that we can bring about authentic renewal within Christianity.

At the heart of the Pharisaic revolution lay a new perception of the God-man relationship —one far more personal and direct than any previous form of Judaism had envisioned it. This perceptual change was so fundamental that the Pharisees felt obliged to discover new names for God and to restrict the old terms to quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures. One of the principal names they applied to God was « Father ». Now to us today this may not sound very revolutionary. But as developed by the Pharisees the Father-Son image bespeaks a consciousness of a new intimacy between God and the individual person — an intimacy which ultimately undercut the intermediary/hereditary elite system that formed the core of the Sadducean/Temple priesthood approach to religion. Every person, no matter who he or she might be, had such standing before God that they could approach him directly; intermediaries were no longer an absolute requirement. Thus there was no longer any basis for maintaining a select class of people who, because they were born into priestly families, automatically held a distinct status in the eyes of God and were the only ones who could communicate with Adonai. Inevitably this « spiritual » transformation led to a complete re-shaping of the liturgical, ministerial and institutional life of Second Temple Judaism.

Seeing themselves as the heirs of the prophets, the Pharisees introduced basic changes into the ongoing pattern of Jewish existence in the hope of translating prophetic ideals into daily realities. The following are some of the major new features emerging from the Pharisaic revolution with an added word or two about their implications for the Christian renewal process. With respect to the latter, those interested in pursuing the question of how an understanding of Pharisaic Judaism can open up new perspectives on the meaning of Christian faith and mission can consult my articles in such journals as Commonweal ( Jan. 21, 1972), The Christian Century (Dec. 6, 1972), Cross Currents (Fall 1970) and The Bible Today (Oct. 1970), as well as several chapters in my recently published book Catechetics and Prejudice and several in my upcoming volume Sinai and Calvary: The Meeting of Two Peoples.

One of the most fundamental changes brought about by the Pharisees was the shift in emphasis from the Temple to the synagogue as the central religious institution in Jewish life. The significance of this shift can best be put in the words of a contemporary Jewish writer Stuart Rosenberg who contrasts the Temple and the synagogue as the house of God over against the house of the people of God. Do you catch the nuance? The Temple was essentially a place for cult and sacrifice. The synagogue strove to meet the total needs of the Jewish people — the place where prayer and study occurred, where the poor were given alms, where the homeless and travelers were housed, where justice and mercy and prayer were interwoven because of the realization that authentic covenantal religion demanded all of these. And we Christians have often forgotten that our word church basically stems from the word synagogue. So as we go about the process of rethinking the shape of the central religious institution of our faith we can learn much from investigating the Pharisaic conception of the synagogue and how it differed from the Temple model. After all, did not Vatican II stress the idea of the church as the people of God. Maybe this makes the synagogue our home as well.

The second innovative feature of the Pharisaic revolution is the person of the rabbi who gradually replaced the priest as the central religious figure in Judaism. The rabbi was essentially a layman, a minister who had no specific liturgical functions but who was accepted as a leader by the people after demonstrating a living knowledge of Torah, both in synagogal debates and even more importantly through acts of healing and mercy in the marketplace. Jesus basically followed the rabbinic pattern in his own ministry, a fact clearly acknowledged in the New Testament. Hence if we wish to come to a better understanding of what Christian ministry ought to be in our time, an examination of the Pharisaic changeover from Temple priest to rabbi will prove of immense value.

My statement that the rabbi had no specifically liturgical function leads me to another change introduced by the Pharisees which has paramount importance. Under their revolution the basic liturgical life of the Jewish people was transferred away from the Temple setting to a meal setting in the home where the father of the family or the head of a Pharisaic brotherhood presided. The significance of this Pharisaic change lies in its abandonment of the sacrificial concept of liturgy and in its attempt to place worship within the context of natural community celebration. Since it is likely that Jesus presided at the Last Supper, where the Christian Eucharist had its origin, in the capacity of head of a Pharisaic brotherhood (i.e. his apostles), exposure to the Pharisaic approach to liturgy would add substantially to our awareness of what the Eucharist was and ought to be in the life of the Christian community.

Another major feature of Pharisaism was its development of the notion of oral Torah. This arose from the Pharisaic conviction that the written Torah, mainly the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, had been written in a cultural and social milieu that was different from theirs. In addition, the written Torah often contained fine general principles. But unless these principles could be brought to life in the concrete social situations of the Palestine of the Second Temple period they were of little value. So oral Torah was conceived as a way of opening the written Torah to continuous development and application. Oral Torah, let me propose, is really the root of the Catholic notion of tradition as a source of revelation. Unfortunately, unlike the Pharisees, we have too often looked upon tradition as a restricting process rather than retaining the Pharisaic sense of oral Torah as a vehicle for defrosting the biblical tradition so that it might be useable in each and every age. Investigation of the oral Torah concept can help, I believe, revive among Christians an authentic feeling for tradition as a source of revelation. It will also aid us in appreciating that Torah in Judaism is not the same as the overriding Western notion of law as a restricting force, but rather signifies the basic responses that people must make to the experience of God's presence.

A fifth important contribution of the Pharisaic revolution as viewed from a Christian perspective is the notion of resurrection of the individual person. You will no doubt recall that the New Testament mentions resurrection as a major point of contention between the Pharisees who believed in it and the Sadducees who did not. It was really the Pharisees who introduced into religious language and perception a belief that would take on central importance in Christianity. An understanding of how resurrection was a natural outflow of the Pharisaic grasp of the heightened dignity of the individual person would add a new perspective to our theology of death and dying that is attracting considerable attention in our day.

Lastly, with respect to the Pharisees it must be said that their sense of ethics shows great similarities to that espoused by Jesus, with the Sermon on the Mount being an excellent example of their correlation. Likewise the Pharisees attempted to confront the political power of the Temple priesthood, an effort supported by Jesus in his own ministry — most dramatically through his invasion of the Temple precincts, an action which under no stretch of the imagination can be interpreted as merely a protest against empty ritual. There is much in the Pharisaic ethical stance adopted -by Jesus that would find a resonance in the theologies of liberation and revolution currently emerging from Latin American Christianity.

To round off my presentation this evening, let me just mention without lengthy comment a few other aspects of Judaism that would prove beneficial for the deepening of contemporary Christian faith. I would list the following:

1. the Genesis sense of the goodness of thisearth and the role of man as its co-creator and as its responsible agent during historical time;

2. the Jewish sense of peoplehood and community;

3. the positive valuation given to sexuality in Judaism, even to the point of seeing it as a medium for experiencing God's presence;

4. the close interweaving of prayer and social action, especially in the Jewish mystical tradition, which would help Christians bridge a serious gap in the contemporary church;

5. the Hebraic sense of creation as a visible expression and locale of God's presence. This awareness among Christians would help us find God more naturally again after centuries of Greek influence which mistakenly led us to conceive of creation as only a shadow of reality, as something from which we had to strip the outer layers in order to find God. The conviction of the Psalmist that God's face is to be found in the mountains and the seas, in the winds and in the waters, must be reclaimed by Christians in our day if God is to come more truly alive in our world;

6. and last of all, the emphasis on dynamism in religious expression — that freedom to express God's presence in ever new ways and symbols, to speak of him with new words and a new tone of voice. Recovery of this priority from Judaism will keep Christianity from being continually stifled by outdated institutional structures or theological structures we call dogmas. The general conclusion from all of the above, let me add by way of postscript, is the clear recognition that there is no such creature as a single Judeo-Christian tradition. Each faith-community, in spite of their common origins, has developed a religious ethos of its own. Recognition of this fact is a sine qua non for the type of growth in interfaith sharing I have just called for.

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Fr. Pawlikowski O.S.M. is Assistant Professor at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, and the author of Catechetics and Prejudice (New York: Paulist Press, 1973).