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In Memoriam - James Parkes 1896-1981
A. Roy Eckardt

 

Two prevailing memories I have of James Parkes involve spirits, though in rather different forms. I still see him, as of the third weekend in August 1963, captivating our children Paula and Steve with tales of a mischievous 'impersonating Elemental" that dwelt in his boyhood homestead on Guernsey, still among the more Norman of the Channel Islands. (Read for yourself James's account of "The Bungalow Ghost" in his autobiography, Voyage of Discoveries, Victor Gollancz, 1969.) Heir to a venerable if whimsical line of persuasion, Parkes adhered to strictly empirical data — compounded, one is tempted to interject, by the marvelous fogs of Britain — to become an orateur, though always a chary one, for that elusive coterie known as ghosts. My other memory is of the expression that would light up James's handsome face when he poured the wine at dinner. His beaming in so artless a way was made possible by a standing order he had worked out with a London merchant, who agreed to keep his clientele supplied with very good French wines at no higher than "seven and six" per bottle. (In those years that cost was anything but the boutade it would be today.)

James's mother died while he was still a boy, following a long illness that left his father very poor. His brother and sister were both killed in the First Great War. He was himself gassed severely while serving as an infantry officer on the Ypres Salient. Physicians who afterwards attended him doubted that he would live out his twenties. He was eventually reduced, due to a `Dupuytren's Contracture", to typing entire manuscripts with a pencil end held in a hand he could not unclench. Yet Parkes was well on his way to eighty five when he died on August 6, 1981 in Bournemouth. I once dared remark to him that I had recently been laid low by a coronary. James sniffed, and responded, "0, I've had a number of those!"

An individual of genius and of far-ranging interests, Parkes painted with marked creativity, and he knew the history of architecture and how to fabricate tapestries as well as he knew religious history and theology. It was as a boy of twelve or perhaps thirteen that he began to develop a tremendous interest in theology, politics, and history, all in their interrelatedness. His sense of humor was "something else." Back in 1933 he produced a handbook titled International Conferences that contained the decree,
'For the purposes of a conference, all museums are the same museum, all Gothic churches are the same Gothic church, all castles are the same castle, all palaces are the same palace."

For a Columbia University-Union Seminary doctorate Robert A. Everett is at present preparing a dissertation on Parkes's life and thought. (It promises to be a beauty; I have read the initial sections.) When the student's mentors-to-be wondered aloud whether Parkes had actually "written enough" to qualify as a thesis subject, the young Everett could call attention, with more than a little scorn, to the master's list of publications totaling 329 entries by the year 1977 (David A. Pennie, ed., A Bibliography of the Printed Works of James Parkes, University of Southampton, 1977).

Unremitting Campaigner Against Antisemitism
A great man has left us. Contra the chronic ignorance, near and far, of his legagy, James Parkes remains the preeminent historian-prophet of the Christian-and-Jewish worlds. (The hyphens are of the essence, at both places.) Roland de Corneille, the Canadian churchman and politician, claims Parkes as one
”who has done the most in this or any other century to destroy evil myths and legends."

Beginning in the year 1925, through his professional work in several student organizations, Parkes was appalled by the regnant antisemitism of Christian students and others throughout Europe. The consequence was a determination to give himself to study and resolution of what was then known as (with built-in shamefulness) the Jewish problem. His first book, The Jew and His Neighbour, appeared in 1930 (SCM Press). Lest his developing and controversial reputation within than area needlessly compromise his endeavors beyond it, he fashioned the nom de plume John Hadham, under whose identity he wrote many volumes of a different genre, popular works in Christianity. (The surname was inspired by James's love for the Hadham villages of Hertfordshire. Even had the villages been ugly, who would not be beguiled by such an appellation as Much Hadham?) The first of the Hadham books was Good God (1940), the universalist and perfectionist soteriology of which so antagonized the Student Christian Movement Press that they rejected the manuscript, but the work went on to sell over a hundred thousand copies under the Penguin imprint. The one man was to become two best-selling authors. (His fiance demanded, and received, two engagement rings, one from James, the other from John.)

Parkes read in five languages; his books have been translated into seven. His other major works in his primary subject include The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism (Meridian Books, Jewish Publication Society, 1961 [1934]); End of An Exile: Israel, the Jews and the Gentile World (Vallentine, Mitchell, 1954); The Foundations of Judaism and Christianity (Quadrangle, 1960); A History of the Jewish People (Quadrangle, 1963)) Antisemitism (Quadrangle, 1964); and Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine (Taplinger, 1971). Much of his writing involved him in the case for, and the meaning of, a Jewish state. He become deeply involved in the question of Zionism and the Zionist cause.

The contribution of James Parkes to your life and mine has come out of his pioneering, singular, and unrelenting warfare against the antisemitisms of the Christian (and, subsequently, non-Christian) world and in behalf of the God-given, abiding integrity of Judaism and the Jewish people. Parkes saw well that antisemitism has little, if anything, to do with Jews. It is a gentile problem from beginning to end. (Appropriately, he was honored with an assassination attempt by the official Nazi Antisemitische Weltdienst when he resided in Geneva.) Parkes was a whole generation ahead of almost everybody else on these vital issues. He was no reductionist or cushy latitudinarian when it came to church doctrine. An Anglican clergyman (as well as an Oxford Ph.D.), he always thought of himself as an orthodox Christian. But he kept nourishing and redeeming his orthodoxy through the resources of biblical-prophetic judgment and praxis. (Here is one explanation among several of why he always found Karl Barth's views so perverse and "abominably heretical.") During the Nazi horror, Parkes, at his rambling home/library in Barley, Royston, Herts., gave shelter to so many Jewish and other refugees, including numbers of children, that at one point there was scarcely room for him to sleep. In later years he was to resolve that a right Christianwitness dictated his absence from church during Holy Week — upon the eminently moral/logical ground that that is the time when, a outrance, unholy things, (viz., untruths) are uttered and acted out respecting the Jewish people and Judaism.

Parkes's watchword from the start to finish of his career was: You cannot build good theology upon had history (i.e., false history). For centuries Christian scholarship and church teaching had been disseminating a massively false but world-determining "history', horn from the twin allegations that 'the Jews" were guilty of deicide and that the Judaism of Jesus' time was already spilt Judentum, a dying, even malignant thing corrupted by inhuman legalism and rife with hopelessness. James Parkes stood in the vanguard of those who identified this entire ideology for the terrible calumny it was — and is.

On Parkes's selfsame watchword, good Christian teaching has to be relentlessly truthful concerning the actual history/life of the churches. In an address to the London Society of Jews and Christians, Parkes observed that the hatred and denigration of Jews and Judaism
"have a quite clear and precise historical origin. They arise from Christian preaching and teaching from the time of the bitter controversies of the first century in which the two religions separated from each other. From that time up to today there has been an unbroken line which culminates in the massacre . . . of six million Jews. The fact that the action of Hitler and his henchmen was not really motivated by Christian sentiments, the fact that mingled with the ashes of murdered Jews are the ashes of German soldiers who refused to obey orders when they found out what those orders were, the fact that churches protested and that Christians risked their lives to save Jews — all these facts come into the picture, but unhappily they do not invalidate the basic statement that antisemitism from the first century to the twentieth is a Christian creation and a Christian responsibility, whatever secondary causes may come into the picture."

How many future. Christian clergy and teachers of my generation ever heard a word about any of this from their own ministers and teachers? I never did, through all the years of 'liberal" divinity school and "liberal' graduate school courses — until at last Reinhold Niebuhr rescued me and enabled me to uncover the facts for myself. Of course, Parkes has not been the only scholar (Christian or Jewish) or decent/devout churchman to point to the sin-ridden realities of church history. But the historic and all-decisive truth remains that he was among the very first to do so, and, uniquely, upon the sure foundation of his own original, all-revealing researches into the ancient-to-recent Christian past. Indeed, well before the Nazis gained power in Germany he was already exposing the dread tale of Christian denigration and persecution of Jews and Judaism. Parkes acted to create a whole new anti-ideological historiography, to be subsequently elaborated and applied by such Christian scholars as Alan Davies, Edward Flannery, Franklin Linen, John Pawlikowski, Rosemary Ruether, Peter Schneider, and W.W. Simpson.

A Pioneer in Jewish-Christian Dialogue
Parkes's views of Judaism and Christianity were distinctive and, perforce, disputatious. In total opposition to preachments declaring that the Christian church has superseded Israel in the divine economy, he bore soholarly and personal testimony to the living, dynamic, and incomparable quality of Judaism. He was especially struck by the great creativity and joy that suffused the period from Ezra to the completion of the Talmud — a period extending to a time much after "the new Israel:* initiated the pretense that it had replaced "the old Israel." For Parkes, in Judaism and Christianity we are met with two quite different kinds of religion. He emphasized that at the center of Judaism is the "natural community." Although it would be absurd to assert that Judaism has no concern for the individual person, that faith's concerted stress falls upon humankind as social being, related to other human beings "through righteousness and justice." And while Christianity is not unaware of the social aspect of humanity, it has consistently subordinated that dimension 'to the personal aspect of life" (The Bible, the World, and the Trinity, Parkes Library Pamphlet, reprinted in Prelude to Dialogue, Vallentine, Mitchell, 1969). Thus it may be adjudged that Judaism concentrates upon "the elect nation," while Christianity directs itself to "the elect from every nation". The reasoning here points as well to the legitimacy of a Jewish state. Such a state finds its religious and thence political basis within the natural community. (In the specific instance of the State of Israel, the justifications of historical continuity, legality, and moral necessity are to he added to the above foundation.)

Judaism is a way of life, the religion of the attainable. Its task and contribution focus upon the norms and patterns of daily living. Christianity is a way to personal salvation, and is in a certain sense therefore the religion of the unattainable. In an earlier article Parkes wrote:
`God speaking to men in community through Sinai speaks with a different voice from God speaking to the hearts of men as separate persons from Calvary; and just as the church found a satisfactory doctrine of God only in the frank acceptance of the paradox of the Trinity in Unity, so we shall only find a satisfactory doctrine of man when we found it squarely on the paradox of man's dual existence as person in himself, and as member of the community in which alone his personality can exist" ("The Problem for the Churches Today,' St. Martin's Review, November 1949).

This one of four essays appeared under the significant general title, "The Permanence of Sinai as God's Revelation of Man in Society." The point is that Parkes was proposing an anthropological rationale and formulation for the shared legitimacy of Judaism and Christianity. In completion of ehe picture, man is in addition
"a seeker called to explore and use all the riches this world provides" ("Three Channels for God's Giving," The Times [London], June 27, 1970).

Correspondingly, to the understanding of God as the source and sustainer of societal Israel, and as personal redeemer, must be added a third channel (not persona): the action of the spirit of God in political, secular, and scientific life, or, put differently, humankind's calling and power to understand and have responsible dominion over the world. In sum, Judaism, Christianity, and scientific Humanism are to be co-related with the threefold action of God and the threefold understanding of man.

It should be apparent that in Parkes's trinitarian authentication of Judaism, Christianity, and Humanism, he has not abandoned a Christian frame of reference. Since, as he himself taught, the two faiths of Judaism and Christianity differ essentially, it follows that the Jew will speak in a quite alternative way. I am not Jewish and I cannot represent Judaism, but I believe I am correct that the spokesperson for Judaism will testify that all three of the roles or channels Parkes depicts are underwritten within Judaism proper, without any need to introduce or call upon Christianity or Humanism. The Jew will agree that, yes, his faith is fundamentally communal. But that faith also provides a fully personal dimension (cf., for example, the sublime Psalms of David). And, thirdly, Judaism has itself opened the way for man as seeker and lord of the world, through its original teaching that God grants humankind dominion over his creation.

It is not at all to the end of faulting Parkes's advocacy that I allude to a possible Jewish rejoinder to his position. That would be inappropriate in a tribute to him, but it is, in any case, not the point. I make the reference as a means, first, of underscoring Parkes's own insistence that the Jewish and the Christian outlooks are fundamentally different; and, second, of illustrating the kind of dialogue between Jews and Christians that meant so much to him and to which he devoted a large part of his life.

It remains evident, I trust, why Parkes was utterly repelled by any attempt to "convert" Jews to Christianity. The Jewish and Christian faiths are not only profoundly different; they are also of permanently equal validity.

Basic Root of Antisemitism
James was distressed when I saw fit to introduce -the devil' into the question of antisemitism and the struggle against it. (Ghosts, si; the devil, no.) As 1 was more and more going the route of real politik vis-à-vis an antisemitism metastasized far beyond the churches and religion, Parkes remained the Christian educationist, the rectifier of churchly sin. Contending as late as 1979 (and correctly so, as far as it goes) that
"the basic root of modern antisemitism lies squarely in the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament,”
he drew from this the restricted and sanguine conclusion that with the aid of a radical reform of the church's liturgy and its biblical hermeneutic, J ews can be shown as
"a normal, contemporary people with a normal, contemporary religion" (Preface to Alan T. Davies, ed., Antisemitism and the Foundations of Christianity, Paulist, 1979).

A few years earlier James had written to me that
"if for two thousand years you read the New Testament in church as the Word of God,' I think this is enough explanation of that subconscious and instinctive hostility which is the 'abnormal' part of antisemitism."

On the other hand, Parkes did not seem to object to my usage of the concept "demonic" (letter to author, May 26, 1976). However we may feel on the wisdom of directing energies to the reform of Christian liturgy, Parkes was surely right that the life of local Christian congregations can be a powerful force for either evil or good.
We have to keep in mind that Parkes was a wondrously reasonable man, and it was natural for him to expect everyone to be reasonable. He looked to the rationality of theological endeavor as judge of and guide to practical decision making. Yet he forever insisted that religious understanding and claims must be assessed and chastened, not only by historical truth, but also by moral demands and ethical criteria. His threefold, dialectical devotion to reason, faith, and ethics prompted me once to denominate him an Anglican of the Anglicans. He rather enjoyed the characterization.

Parkes would often protest that while Christians have comprehended the person of Jesus, they have grievously denied the significance of the religion of Jesus, the religion of Judaism. Here erupts, in fact, the nightmarish, betraying irony of the whole history of Christianity. (One may venture to wonder, in the name of the very truthfulness that Parkes pursued so unflinchingly and at such great personal hardship, what the "person" of Jesus can ever mean in abstraction from the religious faith that possessed him and for which he gave his life.)

You May Break Me ...
I have told of a few incidents in the life of James Parkes. I must make place for some lines from his Autobiography, which may better than anything else take the full measure of the man (also perhaps of the woman he married):
Among our post-war visitors was one unusual guest, known to us as The Old Man of the Road. Some tragedy early in life had turned him into a 'tramp," and he had been on the road ever since the First Great War. He took much pride in keeping himself clean; he knew that he could have a bed in our garden house when he wanted, that he could come to us when he felt ill, and that there would always be a meal for him. Once or twice we sent him to hospital, where he never stayed long. He loved the country, would tell us of its beauty and bring [my wife] Dorothy some offering of flowers or fruit culled on his way. His visits continued till we knew he was too old for the road, and we then found a place for him where he died peacefully and well loved in an old people's home.

In 1949 Parkes was elected president of the Jewish Historical Society of England, only the second gentile to be so chosen by that date. He received fitting academic honors from, among other institutions, the Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and University College, London. In the mid- 1960s he bequeathed his unique library of some 10,000 books, periodicals, pamphlets, and papers to the University of Southampton. He is survived by Dorothy, a redoubtable colleague in her own right. James has gone off now, kiveyakhol, to look up good Pope John, Reinhold Niebuhr, Cornelis Rijk, Kurt Gerstein, Heinz David Lamer, and the other departed saints of Christian redress and Christian-Jewish reconciliation (1). He had few peers within the category historian-cum-theologian. Nor do I know a more superb teller of tales. It may not be all that long until, over a good transfigured sherry, James will be regaling the others with his stories — perhaps pausing to find Barth and remind him (but only the one quick time, I think) of his opinion of him. From Parkes's early years to his death (and beyond?), he has been living out the motto of his family crest, Vous pouvez me rompre mail je ne plie pas ("You may break me but I do not bend"). His prodigious intellect was matched by his valor, his prophetic indignation, his steadfastness, his hopefulness. But greatest of all was his empathy. He was not a Jew, yet he was a Jew.

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* A. Roy Eckardt, emeritus professor in Lehigh University's Department of Religion Studies, has known James Parkes and his work for 36 years.
1. Parkes contended that either no human being survives physical death or everyone does. If all do, "then it is into a world of growth and further understanding, not into a static world of heaven or hell" (-Parkes on Pawlikowski on Parkes," Journal of Ecumenical Studies, VII, 4 [Fall 1970], 791).