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Perspectives - Images of the other: further reflections
The Editors
Introduction
In the preceding section we have presented two of the main articles of the Heppenheim ICCJ colloquium on Images of the Other — that of the complete text of Rabbi David Hartman's lecture, followed by two important sections from that of Dr. Eugene Fisher. We should like now to oiler you further insights in summary form. The third position paper of the colloquium: Christians and Christianity in Jewish Textbooks, presented by Mrs. Judith Hersheopl Banki, throws light on a little known topic which is very important to ongoing dialogue between the two faiths. Archbishop Jean-Marie Lustiger, who was one of the guests of honor at the closing dinner, delivered an address during the course of which he made some pertinent observations and issued some resounding challenges for the future, not only of Jewish-Christian dialogue as such, but of the whole world. Finally, Prof. Paul van Buren, in fulfilling his task of summing up the colloquium, has in his turn spelled out the challenges which face us as we wrestle with new theological concepts in our endeavors, Christians and Jews, to truly recognize in the image of the other the significant other.
CHRISTIANS AND CHRISTIANITY IN JEWISH TEXTBOOKS
Judith Hershcopf Banki, who is the Assistant National Director for Interreligious Affairs in the American Jewish Committee, pointed out some interesting similarities and differences between Christian and Jewish education.
Similarities
It is inevitable that textbooks will stress the distinctiveness of the particular faith, especially in a pluralistic society. While it is necessary to bring out one's own unique history, values and beliefs, this may encourage a defensive or polemical attitude.
While all groups have to cope with the problem that stories of one's own martyrs always presuppose the naming of the oppressor, this is especially true for Jews
"who have lived as a minority in Christendom for the past 2,000 years, much of the time under duress from Christian ecclesiastical legislation or the policies of Christian rulers."
Differences
Mrs. Banki feels that the greatest difference between the two faiths in this area of education is that, while Christianity cannot avoid coming to grips with Judaism on theological grounds, Judaism can he expounded without reference to Christianity. She agrees, however, with Dr. Eugene Fisher that, while this latter course is possible, it is not necessarily the prudent course to follow.
'For better or for worse, Judaism is stuck with Christianity as one of its own chief gifts to the world... While it may be true that biblical Judaism can be understood without reference to Christianity, rabbinic Judaism from the first century of the Common Era developed side by side with — often in the midst of — Christendom. All subsequent self-articulations of Judaism have been profoundly touched by that relationship and cannot be adequately understood without reference to it.
I would suggest then, that Jews may have a much greater stake in the theological dialogue with Christians than might appear on the surface. The exchange of views on central topics such as
covenant, mission, peoplehood, the Kingdom, etc., should be of more than passing interest to Jews wishing better to understand their own traditions, for Christianity embodies particular aspects of all of these core Jewish beliefs. 1
In Christian textbooks, Jews are usually referred to as Jews, whereas Christians are more often designated by national or ethnic terms — Poles, Ukrainians, French, Spanish, etc. The result of this is that Jewish persecution by non-Jews is not depicted essentially as a Jewish-Christian confrontation.
"One would like to write that the period of Catholic rule led to a civilization built on the gentle teachings of Jesus. But this is not true. The truth is that no individual group or nation has ever persecuted the Jewish people so of ten and so brutally over so many centuries as has the Roman Catholic Church; and this persecution was given its official and classic form during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the very time when the Church had its greatest power to control, for good or evil, the minds and hearts of Europe.
Nor can all this be ignored as 'ancient history'. The anti-Jewish attitudes taught by the Church helped create a European society in which the Holocaust was possible. Indeed, some of the antisemitic laws of the Nazis came directly from laws of the medieval Church. These are heavy charges, made with sadness, but the history which we must now tell will bear them out."
(Abbe Eban, My People, Vol. 1)
Such reflections are not limited, though, to the Catholic Church, because history points to other offenders such as Muhammad and Martin Luther.
This negative image of the Church does not preclude the acknowledgement of those in the Church who had protected Jews, as is evidenced especially in the way in which the holocaust is presented, giving credit to those Christians who tried to save Jews from Hitler's genocide.
Among her conclusions, Mrs. Banki noted the following:
"The textbook is only as good as the teacher who uses it. There is a great need for teacher training, and for feeding both information about and awareness of the issues we have discussed into seminary education...
Above all, ours is a consciousness-raising task: to persuade our respective educational establishments that developing positive attitudes and genuine understandings between Christians and Jews is not optional, not peripheral, but central and crucial to the building of God's kingdom on earth."
TOWARDS THE FUTURE TOGETHER
The historical significance of the work of Jewish-Christian relations was touched upon by one of the guest speakers, Mgr. Jean-Marie Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris. He then proceeded to issue some pertinent challenges for the future.
If we look upon the Jewish and Christian worlds as forming a historical unity in western civilization, we can only consider as schizophrenic the division that has endured for so long.
"It is evident that only by being faithful to this heritage which is ours can we be cured of this fatal disease. Christians must stop denying Jews their right to live if they do not want to deny the same rights to themselves. Jews must discover, through mutual forgiveness and mutual recognition, that Christians share in the same blessing which has been bestowed upon themselves.
It can only be possible for each one to live what he or she truly is if both Jew and Christian recognize the other's fidelity, thereby drawing closer, in the darkness of history, to the messianic relationship which exists between Israel and the Nations."
Challenges which Jews and Christians must face together
Archbishop Lustiger considers that the first challenge facing the western world is that of reacting against secularization. If there is one value which underlies Jewish tradition and without which Christianity would not be Christianity, it is a sense of the sacred. We are challenged, secondly, by the tendency of our civilization to totalitarianism and to scepticism. The consciousness that we both have of the eschatological nature of the Kingdom of God will enable us to meet these threats in a spirit of faith. Thirdly, this world of ours, which places so much stress on the dignity of the human person, challenges us to recognize that this dignity comes, not from declarations of human rights, but from the fact that we are created in the image of God.
After having thus turned the thoughts of both Jews and Christians towards future tasks, the speaker then looked at the present which, he said, brings us both back to the most fundamental question of faith:
"At this end of the second Christian millenium we find ourselves now among peoples whose history we discovered no more than a few centuries ago. The peoples of Africa, Asia and America have brought us to a moment of truth. Are the Jewish and Christian traditions merely the signs of the sacred in the west, or do they have a universal vocation? Does an African, who has to learn a western language in order to enter into an assembly of the nations, have to read Hebrew, Greek or Latin in order to share in the blessing? Can he. truly say: If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem... Should he learn to say it?
Finally, in view of the word which God has spoken to us through the concrete reality of our history, what is our true vocation? Is it a special, ethnic and perishable history or rather, is it a universal one? If it is a special history, then we are nothing more than imperialists. If however, it is a universal one, then we have to prove it, and that is the gift of the Holy Spirit...
If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem!"
THE COLLOQUIUM SUMMARIZED
The summing up lecture of the colloquium was presented by Professor Paul van Buren who is from Temple University, College of Liberal Arts Department of Religion, Philadelphia.
In his opening remarks, Prof. van Buren regretted that our primary images of one another have been limited until recent times to images that Jews have held of their fellow Jews and that Christians have had of other Christians. He then went on to state that
-Some of the greatest things that lie in both traditions have been what Jews have said about their behaviour to fellow-Jews and Christians have had to say about their fellow Christians. Our primary sense of the other has been the other within our own communities. And then our secondary sense in our traditions historically through the centuries has not been the Christians' sense of Jews or Jews' sense of Christians, but the sense of any other. Now I say, I think it's too bad we didn't share what we have had to say about the immediate other, that has been important in both traditions. I spend a good deal of my time with my graduate students, Christians and Jews, trying to keep Jews Jewish and Christians Christian. They tend to get slightly seduced by the greener grass on the other side of the fence. I teach them to love their traditions... We are obliged to love those traditions, because, I believe, flawed as they are, they are loved by God."
The fundamental decision to be made in entering into this new phase of our history is, according to the speaker, whether we want to look on the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity as something that happened according to the will of God, or else consider it as an act of apostasy on one side or on both. He considers that in itself it was willed by God, though the animosity that developed subsequently was not. He sees God's will for his elect people as one way, and, alongside it, the path for his gentile people; God, as it were, carries on two love affairs at the same time.
Images of the Other seems to Prof. van Buren an impossible topic in the sense that neither of the two traditions in the past has known or attempted to know the other as the significant other.
"Judaism has not thought about Christians as the other that they have come to terms with. There has been a good deal of talk about our Jewish roots and in a certain sense I think the Christian tradition has always been aware of its Jewish roots, but when it has looked the Jew in the face (in so far as it has looked the Jew in the face) it is not seeing there its significant other."
In point of fact, the only true dialogues are the conversations sustained by the same Christians and the same Jews building up mutual confidence and trust over a long period of time. Christians talking about their Jewish roots will not bring about the desired change, since this can only come about by face to face dialogue with Jews.
The speaker then outlined some theological points which he would have liked to have seen deepened during the group discussions:
Jewish Denial of Christian Claims
-The hard point theologically from the Christian side is that the Jewish people stand as a continuing, perpetual negation of the central Christian theological claims... The idea that Jesus is an end in himself seems to me in every sense a contradiction of the highest Christ°logy that Christianity has ever held. But that Jesus was one to bring Christians to Torah, it seems to me, is an equal misunderstanding. For, if there is anything clear — from the Gospel accounts —and let me put this in an oversimplified formula — it seems to me this: Jesus is to Christianity what Torah is to Judaism. ... But I think Christians have to be further asked what is it that they really claim. What is it that Judaism has said `No' to, which Christians find that they have to affirm as Christians and which they have to say out of their own gut, have to say out of what it means to them to be a Christian. I think the answer to that is that Christians have to say that they have been called out of darkness into light, the light, indeed, of the God of Israel, that light and no other. And that this light has been shown to them in the face of Jesus Christ."
A Missionary Church
The speaker has his own individual way of expressing the church's mission — a word which is so susceptible of misunderstanding.
-The church is missionary and cannot be otherwise. It has a mission to all peoples. Therefore it has a mission to the Jews. But, second, the church stands in a peculiar relationship to the Jewish people which is different from its relationship to any other people. And that means that the church's mission to the Jews is different. It does not simply fall into the general line of what the churoh's mission might be. The word emission' is overloaded with all kinds of historical connotations. I wish we could find another word, I can only find an alternative expression, instead of "mission', "What we owe". "What we owe to the pagan world.' is the message of Jesus Christ, for I believe that Christ was given by God as a way in which pagans, such as us, could come to know him, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But I think, when it comes to our relationship to the Jewish people, our mission, 'what we owe", is a very different thing. We owe them the support and cooperation in their task, which was given to them long before us, of being a light to the world for the sake of God's creation."
Finally, he feels, we are only at the beginning of a long road — only beginning to explore the problems which dialogue raises. We have, however, begun to take one another seriously and to work together for the sake of our threatened world.
1. A Roman Catholic Perspective: The Interfaith Agenda, Eugene J. Fisher, Ecumenical Bulletin — The Episcopal Church Center — Ecumenical Office; No. 44. Special Jewish-Christian Edition, Guest Editor: Lawrence McCoombe, November/December 1980.
