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Christian witness to One God
David Burreill
"... when Christians enter into dialogue they take up a new attitude, made up mainly of the will and capacity of listening of the Jews who want to speak of themselves and of their vision of reality, and letting themselves be taught, wanting to learn with a grateful heart" (Tommaso Federici in SIDIC XI:3 (1978), p. 34).
What is it to offer witness to the one God? To insist that God is one — in season and out — as though that were a doctrinal achievement to be announced and celebrated? That hardly sounds plausible, somehow, for the achievement has long since been won, if achievement it be: whoever believes in God, we surmize, believes God to be one. The witness, then, is not to a belief but to the God who reveals the name unique to the living God. So the witness will have to lie in a way of life reflecting that uniqueness.
Fidelity the Watchword
If we want to learn what that looks like, we turn spontaneously to biblical Israel, dominated by images of a people called to be faithful to a God who called them from out of a common humanity as well as slavery in Egypt to become God's own people. Fidelity became the watchword of a relationship between this people and the one God who addressed them in particular: their God to be sure, yet also creator of heaven and earth. It is indeed that equation which we proclaim in
The prophets turned spontaneously to spousal imagery to celebrate this fact: one people espoused to one Lord. Perhaps because that Lord had initiated a covenant with Israel, and the most natural, and naturally fruitful covenanting known to man is marriage. Fruitful, more¬over, of life itself: new life as an image of God's creative activity. So a familiar reality became the central symbol for a relationship otherwise quite unimaginable — be¬tween the Lord of heaven and earth and a particular people. And that reality, of course, was gradually made over in the process, especially in the respect accorded to the partner whose status had always been deemed inferior. If Israel was called to be the faithful bride, wives could claim a commensurate respect.
So the oneness of God carried with it a way of life — only gradually and fitfully adopted, to be sure, yet thoroughly consonant with the original revelation. And so it was in the days of Jesus, when the people had to submit to pagan overlords, yet their sense of integrity was secured by the unshakable knowledge that their God was Lord of heaven and earth. Or nearly unshakable, for those were not lacking who would prefer to see that fact demonstrated by a divine victory over the Romans. Jesus' response, however, was quite other: to introduce his followers to their God as Father. Such an introduction, he judged, would prove even more liberating than political action. And so it proved to be, as the one God of Israel was to be preached throughout the Greco-Roman world — indeed, to the ends of the earth.
Jews do not normally see it that way, to be sure, as the strains between believers in Jesus and the rest of the community escalated to a breaking point in the wake of the Roman victory over Bar-Kochba. The Judaism which resulted from that defeat could not but set itself over against the new sect, known increasingly as Christians, unsure just how the God who was said to have raised Jesus from the dead could also be the God of Israel. Yet Jesus' followers have never flinched on that point: the one to whom they had been introduced as Father is emphatically the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, "not God of the dead but of the living" (Lk 20:38). While the scriptures came to be known as the Old Testament, by contrast to the New or apostolic writings, they were never considered to be superseded as revelation even if the new covenant was often said to replace the old. Christian missionaries, for example, have customarily mined the scriptures for those stories of God with the people which would help them com¬municate de novo the character of this God and Father of Jesus. Their recourse to the scriptures has been spontaneous, whatever theology they may have held regarding Christianity and Israel.
The God of Israel and the Gospel
So it can truly be said that preaching the gospel has been bearing witness to the one God of Israel — as the Father of Jesus. Yet that fact has no doubt been obscured by a theology which found it necessary to denigrate God's covenant with Israel in the interests of confessing God to be the Father of Jesus. It was this "replacement theory" which made it incumbent upon Christians to seek the conversion of Jews: who after all could settle for the old in the presence of the new? It was the Second Vatican Council which undermined that long-standing attitude with its bold one-liner: "the Jews still remain most dear to God because of their fathers, for He does not repent of the gifts He makes nor of the calls He issues [cf. Rom. 11:28-29]" (Nostra Aetate, n. 4).
And if that be the case, what form should our faithful witness take to the one God who "does not repent of the . . . calls He issues"? We will certainly be hyper¬conscious of the ways in which a convenient theology exalted the "new" at the expense of the "old" by adopting the simple scheme of replacement. Yet the scheme was so attractive and the theology so widespread as to be virtually indistinguishable from church doctrine. So much so that the forthright assertion of Vatican II sounds like a much bolder assertion than it actually is. For all it does is reiterate the faithfulness of God with respect to the covenants God makes, yet its proclamation rings loudly and clearly across the bloody history of Christian intolerance of Jews and Judaism to sound a common note: the Father of Jesus is none other than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — a God faithful to the end, who dwells in the "world without end." Amen.
And the lesson is wider still. The simple scheme which allowed Jesus' gentile followers to regard them¬selves as replacing the Jews found its match in similarattitudes towards other distinguished religious traditions. Muslims were infidels — a charge which mirrored Islam's own attitude towards outsiders, but which Muslims characteristically mitigated regarding Jews and Christians: "peoples of the book". Hindus and others were pagans, and generally considered lost without the overt preaching of the gospel. What is worse, these attitudes easily received theological warrant, but they could be traced more easily to that superiority endemic to any civilization or creed. Nothing seems more ingrained, in fact, than our propensity to elevate our own status by denigrating the other person's. Again Vatican II confronts us, this time in the very Constitution on the Church: "Those also can attain to everlasting salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and, moved by grace, strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them (Lumen Gentium, n. 16).
What we are faced with in these conciliar statements is a startling call: to reform our ingrained human attitudes and to renounce the theologies which they may have infected — and to do so in the name of the one true God. Would it be too convenient to see this as a flowering of the God whom Jesus revealed to us as Father? Probably so, since the bush has taken so long to bud. Yet however diverse the causes, the fruit of this blossom cannot but initiate a new epoch for the followers of Jesus. And it is noteworthy that an outreach to other religions as authentic ways to God coincides with a fresh attitude towards our own roots in Israel. The next council cannot be Vatican III — nor even "Chicago I" — but must be Jerusalem II. The epoch-making ingress of the nations into the "qahal Adonai" — the "ingathering to the Lord" (Acts 15) — will be completed only when that largely European witness to the one God is extended over the face of the earth.
There is certainly no city on earth which reflects this fact as does Jerusalem. Ironically, no doubt, as so many of its archaic arrangements reflect a religious standoff, officially sanctioned as the "status quo." And partially as well, since the venerable traditions of the subcontinent and of southeast Asia find no place there. Yet for all that, a city holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims makes us pause. First because it is a city, an endeavor of human culture, yet suffused with the touch of the transcendent. Then because it stands constantly to remind us of our incapacity either to respond to or to suppress that otherworldly presence.
Our incapacity takes the form of intransigence and even violence, as two justices contend in a struggle in which each wrongs the other in attempting to deny its right. The return of the people to the land, conceived through nineteen centuries of prayerful longing, and born in the idealism endemic to modern socialism, finds itself freighted with fear and animated by an aggressive paranoia. The native inhabitants, for their side, be they Christians or Muslims, cannot even bring themselves to give overt recognition to a presence they have found so disruptive of their traditional ways of life. Could this stubborn fact represent the dark side of witnessing to one God? For many divinities allow one more easily to countenance many paths up the mountain — even if we cannot be assured that they do mount to the same summit. Intolerance has dogged each of the religious traditions which claim Jerusalem as a holy place, however, so it may well not be accidental to their affirming God to be one. Yet must we settle for a hostile standoff as the human side of a witness to the one God?
The Real Challenge of Dialogue
Not if we have come to appreciate how much that God eludes our characterizations, and how present is God's power in our midst. And here it is not dialogue so much as the fruits of dialogue — the impulse to see and hear the world through the sensibilities of the other — which can yield that insight. The Christian who has lived in Israel and prayed with Jewish friends at home or in synagogue can feel this dimension more forcefully than most. For the prayer takes place within the context of a common endeavor — return to the land, while the terms and circumstances of that return shape the prayer. The recurring repose of shabbat punctuates an aggressive policy of incentives encouraging new settlers to participate in the takeover of land right¬fully belonging to others, so an entire society is impli¬cated as it groans in anguish. Unless that same God isinvoked in support of an ancient guarantee, and so harnessed to an expansionist will, the periodic time of reflection and prayer which shabbat assures should also raise questions about directions being taken by the state. And in the measure that it does, Israel offers witness to the one true God.
It is that witness, and the forms it takes, which convince Christians of their inner links with Jews trying to be faithful to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And those links can come to overshadow obvious doctrinal cleavages between us regarding "the Christ." For we can come to appreciate just how much we dare accept the name "Christians," for are we not also on pilgrimage, animated by a faith in Jesus to want to become his disciples, yet unable to claim that status outright. So we must admit that the very best we can do is to say that we're trying to become Christians, disciples of the Lord; and that we can only wonder — in fear and trembling — if we would recognize him were he to come into our midst. Moreover, our prayer has ever been largely and primarily the psalms, so the quality of our response to God finds its best expression in the accents of David.
That is what we realize as Christians in Israel, as we sojourn in the land where Jesus dwelled, and live amidst his people. Our witness becomes more distinc tively our own as a result of such an exchange, as it focusses more and more on reconciliation. The God who is so eminently one must make us so, through the mutual fructification that attends our efforts to adapt one another's vision of reality. For our record, as God's erstwhile witnesses, is so -poor that we have no further recourse, at this point, than prayer. May we search for ways to make it common.
Rev. Dr. David Burrell, C.S.C. is Professor of Philosophy and Theology at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. During 1980/81 he was Rector of the Ecumenical Institute for Theological Research (Tantur) Jerusalem. The following year he was a research fellow at Isaiah House in Jerusalem and Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University.announcing that our God is one: there is no other source or ultimate goal of human endeavor.
