Jews, Christians and Messianic Consciousness
Martin Stohl | 28.03.2005 16:24 | Analysis | World
God will be all in all! This article encourages the Jewish-Christian dialogue by criticizing the church's anti-Jewish disinheriting. Dogmatism and intolerance threaten to turn living water into a frozen waterfall. Without the origin, the present and future dry up.
JEWS, CHRISTIANS AND MESSIANIC CONSCIOUSNESS
By Martin Stohr
[This article is translated from the German on the World Wide Web,
http://www.jcrelations.net/de/?id=2436.]
The search for the knowledge of good and evil is not an anti-divine hubris. But to know in a final judgment who are the good and who are evil expels one from the course of history and makes the others the omnipotent lords of history. In God’s place, they anticipate God’s last word. Nevertheless the messianic future is not in our control.
According to the biblical understanding, re-opening the horizon of the future is a prophetic task. The church often tried to close this horizon for Israel intellectually and practically. Only in this way will the true present tasks become clear on the long way to the goal of history. If history is open up to the perfection of the world by God – for conversion and renewal of people and their world -, then Israel through its existence and its Holy Scripture holds open the future and the way there. “The Jew keeps open the question of Christ,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in 1941 and established this with Jesus’ Jewish nature. (1) However this is more than a genealogical fact that only refers to the origin of the church and its messianic faith. This aims at a new relationship of the church and Israel (that Bonhoeffer did not accomplish but left as a task). “Western history according to God’s will is indissolubly connected with the people of Israel not only genetically but in authentic endless encounter.”
Thus whoever separates from the root finds his present and future dried up. This is parallel to the olive tree parable of Paul (Rom 11,17-24). As a result, Bonhoeffer concludes the “repudiation of Christ” occurs with the “repudiation of the Jews.” (2)
With several ideal-type figures, the Christian interpretation sovereignty over history includes a definition authority with final judgments over Israel and its way. Definition authority over others replaces the perception of the other as different, refusing to see his self-image and discipleship of God and refusing to speak with him at eye level. This is the beginning of all violence. Appealing to the Torah of Moses (Deut 32,43), Paul recommends another way: “with one voice, glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” “Rejoice O Gentiles (=goyim) with his people!” (Rom 15,6-13).
The way of the church was often different. Rejoicing was not with Israel but over and against Israel. Israel was overtaken, rejected and punished with suffering. Christian identity was built on the negation of Jewish identity. The countless pictures of a triumphant Ecclesia and a defeated synagogue preached to Christian people Israel’s alleged irrevocable defeat. Israel should relinquish or give itself up to become part of the church. How could the church, Israel’s daughter and sister, pass off its human discretion as God’s judgment?
I
The word of the Jewish witness and martyr Jesus of Nazareth on the Roman gallows “It is finished” was misunderstood as a definitive statement for a concluded redemption of the world through Jesus’ death on the cross. Redemption is then only a virtual event to be propagated. The history of God’s whole world is not changed in the sense of a new creation. The self-image of the person in his world is changed, not his world. The messianic time only commands a change of consciousness. The hope for a new heaven and a new earth – with all the poetic pictures – thins to hope for the immortality of the soul.
The New Testament sets the accent differently. The cross is the deepest earthly point of Jesus’ self-abasement and at the same time the model of the witness faithful to God (Phil 2). God shows in Jesus how human is his word. He comes to the world. Although Israel can think incarnationally (God is present on earth in his word, in his people, in their exile and in his temple), the Christian faith speaks of God’s incarnation or the word made flesh in another way. This incarnation is bound to the Jew Jesus of Nazareth and to Israel and its history with God. A renewal of Christian-Jewish relations depends on not understanding this new revelation as though it overtakes, annuls or denies the revelation in Israel. Seeing God’s love and affection for his world is vital for the self-image of Christian life and faith. God’s love and affection for his world is manifest in both Israel’s abiding call and the new call of a church out of all nations.
Therefore the cross is not the last word of the God creating new life. Jesus died for all. All die with Jesus Christ to life according to the world’s old rules of the game (which isn’t Israel’s Torah) and rise to a new life with him according to the rules of the new creation that began with the Easter event. “The old has passed away, behold the new has come. All this is from God” (2 Cor 5,14ff). The creation is not yet totally renewed. However the new assumes form in the life and work of Jesus Christ. The God of Israel and the nations acts here.
II
The Jewish question begins here. Can there be islands of redemption in an unredeemed world? Can there be true life in the false? Where were swords forged into plowshares? Is Israel liberated from violence and threats? Where do children no longer die an early death? Is God all in all? These are biblically legitimate questions in the Jewish and Christian Bible.
Against the medieval disputations that emptied the Old Testament to a book of mere predictions and matched New Testament answers like covers on pots, that Christian tradition should be emphasized that speaks of the way of the church to the certain goal that is in no way achieved. If that dogmatic understanding of scripture – there prophesy and here fulfillment – cast Israel as absolute injustice and the church as absolute justice, God’s truth is “the evidence of two witnesses” (Deut 17,6; Joh 8,17). Their ways have many common starting points. They pursue the same goal. They touch each other. Hopefully in the future the church will not add the attribute of the Messiah from Israel and say of itself instead of God’s anointed that it is the way, the truth and the life while ascribing wrong ways, lies and death to others. Such a messianic declaration (Joh 14,5) is both comfort and church criticism for a “distressed community.” (3) In the future, parts of the separated ways will hopefully be taken together (chapter VIII). (4) since the Hebrew Bible is a completely valid part of the Christian Bible.
The history of Christian contempt of Jews is an (historical) argument against Jewish mission. This mission was always nourished by the presumption of having the only correct interpretation of the messianic hopes. However the different ideas of God’s coming reign give an equal dignity and quality to both continuing histories of the Hebrew Bible in Judaism and Christianity.
No other God than the God of Israel and the nations is at work here and there. Jesus’ Jewish nature is another theological reason against all forms of Jewish mission. A special conversation is necessary between people with common sources. Both conversation partners are “deficient” in different ways regarding God’s revelation. In their hearing and obedience, both fall short of what God intends with them. The coming of God’s reign is not free of surprises (Mt 7,21; 25,31-46). This fact makes faith more self-critical and capable of conversion, not more uncertain and resistant to failure.
III
A special malformation in the church arose out of its claim to be the “true Israel” since it rejected God’s attempt to unite with Israel. God’s supposed rejection was attested with the reproach of “God’s murder.” Israel rejected and executed its Messiah. In his conflicts with the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus referred to their wrong ways of legalism and faith in letters. Jerusalem’s destruction and Israel’s history of suffering and exile allegedly proved that God turned away from them and turned toward the church. The church invented the legend of the eternally wandering punished Jews. The church transformed biblical self-criticism over lukewarm faithfulness toward Jesus Christ into anti-Jewish criticism.
This widespread argument ignores that Jesus like Paul was closer to the pharisaic movement than to the zealots, Qumran community and Sadducees. The conflict “around the exceeding or higher righteousness” (Mt 5,20) was not a dispute between two religions but a polemical argument over the right way of understanding and doing God’s directive here and now.
Jesus’ criticism of the scribes and Pharisees in which he was not alone in Israel started from the common base: “They sit on Moses’ seat. So practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do” (Mt 23,2). Their deeds are everything but exemplary. Engagement and credibility in doing God’s word are sought. If the common discussion in Israel is severed from its context and the internal Jewish frontal positions are changed into an argument of the “Christian” Jesus with the “Jews” (which began with the oldest letter 1 Thess 2,13-16 and Joh 8,44, occurred with the Galatians letter and was countered by Rom 9-11 and Joh 4,22), Jesus’ words become (popular Christian) lies. A rabbinic discussion did not first begin after the conclusion of the two testaments. A conciliar debate occurred on the Christian side. There is no “self-interpretation history” of authors, hearers and readers free of contradiction in the Holy Scripture whose books come from different centuries and contexts. The vitality of the Bible is unmistakable.
A church in solidarity with Israel and faithful to Jesus may understand or “appropriate” texts of the Hebrew Bible as referring to itself if Israel’s disposition doesn’t occur. The church may call itself God’s people or temple (1 Petr 2,1-10; 1 Cor 3,16f; Eph 2,21) alongside the term “Christ’s body” if it recognizes that this is first and everlastingly Israel. Nowhere in the New Testament is the church described as the new or true Israel. Solidarity with Israel has a consequence. Internal Jewish Israel criticism of the prophets and the criticism from Jesus’ mouth strike Christians as church criticism when they read the whole Bible as also addressed to them.
IV
The way of the church is a way that prepares the coming of the messianic reign (praeparatio messianica) and doesn’t dream or escape into its perfection (perfektio messianica). Beginning in Corinth, different Gnostics and esoterics have offered this bland diet of faith again and again. In the prayer that Jesus taught his community, the central petition for the coming of God’s reign is framed with the request that his name be hallowed (this meant witness service up to martyrdom as with Jesus) and that his will be done (corresponding to heavenly or divine ideas) on earth. (5) These authors like many church opinions turn away from this basic model as though the Christian faith were “free of the law” in contrast to “legal” Judaism. In his interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount in “Cost of Discipleship”, Dietrich Bonhoeffer underscored doing the ommandments and pointed out that the “gospel” (6) like the “law” can become “cheap grace” in the hands of people or invert into their opposites.
A Christian question is raised here. Can the argument be opposed that Jews don’t need to be occupied in the same way with Christianity since it is not one of their prerequisites while the church must be occupied with Israel since it cannot otherwise understand itself? The latter is certainly right. Generations of constant learning- and renewal processes are still needed after the anti-Jewish heritage in the church. This has three main points. How do we confess to Jesus the Christ without demeaning the people from whom we have learned to act and hope in a messianic way? How do we speak of the church without forcing Israel into a deficient position? How do we read the Old Testament without, like Marcion, making it the message of a foreign and different God?
These difficult questions are answered differently in many churches: Can Israel – like the Samaritans and Canaanites as children of the Torah – understand the different continuing history of the Tenach similar to the New Testament? Didn’t a primal messianic trust arise here in certain interpretations and understandings, the “new in Judaism, not against Judaism”? A new relationship begins to grow after a church- and theology history that always joined the Christian “new” with a qualification of the Jewish as “old.” This relation did not arise on the Christian side according to its principle “sola scriptura.” It was the Schoa and the genesis of the state of Israel, not Holy Scripture, that prompted little groups in the church to question the traditional Israel theology. Doing justice to the will of the shared God is central. While this happens differently, to let it happen without communication and indifferent to one another doesn’t take seriously this will and the necessity of realizing it in the common creation of the one and only God. On the separated ways, people will ask one another more intensely in the future how the way between the origin and the goal can be understood and traveled on this earth without the orientation of Holy Scripture and its interpretation- and realization traditions.
V
How can solidarity with Israel and faithfulness to Jesus be understood together? The Ephesians letter describes Jesus’ act that those “who were without hope and without God in the world” and “outside the Israel covenant of the promise” are no longer “strangers and guests (xenoi kai paroikoi) after Jesus’ appearance but fellow-citizens with the saints and God’s household” (sympolitai ton ahgion kai oikeloi tou theou)” (Eph 2,11-20). The saints mean Israel. Dwelling with Israel in God’s house is the new. Dwelling in God’s house means serving God. We know that the church in history declared itself exclusively God’s house and wanted to administer the housing right alone. The church terminated the covenant of promise for the “saints” and expelled them from God’s house to present itself alone as God’s people and temple.
Can one say that Jesus is for Christians what the Torah is for Jews despite this history of disinheriting and the murderous attacks on the deceased: the mediator and way of knowing and serving God? Isn’t all this imagined too symmetrically since it ignores that the Torah in its explicit form and in the whole action-oriented history of Israel was taken along by the Jew Jesus and the Jewish apostles in the world of the nations as God’s binding word? Wasn’t the world of the nations already included in this blessing through Israel’s blessed election in Abraham – when it blesses and doesn’t curse Israel?
Isn’t the New Testament intent on confirming and not refuting the “scriptures,” that is “Moses and the prophets”? This happens with some daring exegesis of “scripture.” However this is not different in the Talmud and Midrasch. Doesn’t the internal Jewish conflict continue in the controversy between Paul and Peter about what is given to Israel (exodus, circumcision and dietary rules) and what is God’s gift and task through Israel to the world? Isn’t the question whether the Torah is inapplicable or whether it should be fully observed by everyone part of a discourse on the messianic time? Aren’t the Decalogue, the twofold command of love, the ethos of the prophets as remembrances of the covenant and the organization of life of the coming reign of God inseparably connected with the praxis and proclamation of the Jew Jesus? What did he proclaim other than this? Does the rabbinic answer of making available the Noahic commands as instructions of the God of Israel suffice for the nations? Isn’t the universal Torah that the churches like to claim as their essence against Israel’s allegedly national or particular message separate from Jesus’ message? Isn’t Israel’s specific nature in association with the Torah declared irrelevant? Questions are only asked about the riches and the diverse possible fruits of the Torah as God’s word. Hasn’t the Torah been taught again and again in the churches – up to ruler ethics oriented in David, Solomon and the royal psalms and up to the hallowing of Sunday? Hasn’t this exchange occurring thanklessly from the side of the churches toward Israel been illegitimate or is it part of the announcement of God’s name and word “to the ends of the earth”?
On top of that, hasn’t Israel learned from the Babylonian creation stories and Egypt’s wisdom? Isn’t what is said by the first addressants of the God of Israel also true for these gods: that his word is valid to whomever it may concern? Doesn’t God have co-workers beyond the borders of the church and Israel? How open is Israel and how open is the church? When is it necessary to mark borders – as Ezra set after his return from exile and Bonhoeffer attempted with the Confessing Church – “between the Scylla of orthodoxy and the Charybdis of confessionlessness? (9)
The messianic hopes of the Hebrew Bible and those of the inter-testamental non-canonical books cannot be condensed into a messianology. They are different from one another and have been interpreted differently. Analogously there isn’t one Christology in the New Testament but different christologies. These have also been interpreted differently.
VI
A vague relation of their faith and life and of their borders remains for the churches. Answers have been sought, rejected and found in the controversial conciliar disputes continuing the rabbinic tradition. These processes were always accompanied by the secret longing that a philosophical or legal system, a state, teaching office or fundamentalism would remove obscurities and make God’s truth and clarity unmistakable.
John the Baptist was also stuck in this longing dilemma. He had spoken clearly and in an obligatory way. As Nathan spoke to king David, John had said the truth publically to Herod. He landed in prison from which he did not leave alive. He doubted in his own messianology and Christology. “Are you he who is to come or should be look for another?” (Matt 11,1-6). Who or what is stronger? The effective nearness of God’s reign announced identically by Jesus and John with its rules of the game not of this world but for this world or the old rules?
John did not receive as an answer any “Christology” or doctrine about Jesus as the Messiah. He was referred to the messianic signs that could be discovered in Jesus’ public human life and history. The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear. The dead are raised and the gospel of the nearness and effective power of God’s reign is proclaimed to the poor.
These are the messianic signs that the Bible of Jesus, his followers, the New Testament authors and the apostles always name (in rich variations). The Good News for Jesus and his own can be found in the Tenach that did not know any New Testament and thus did not need to be described as “old”. With its content of faith (=trust), love and hope, the Good News concerns the life of people damaged concretely by guilt, estrangement and hopelessness. It aims at fulfillment and realization – as important as these may be in their beginnings. True life exists in the false and islands of rescue in an unredeemed world, not first for themselves but for “the others”.
The Isaiah-books and others make the signs of the messianic time credible and concrete – for those who can see in Jesus the herald and first fruits of the messianic reign hoped for by Jews and Christians. They were and are a minority. The church of Jesus Christ is not more than salt in the soup, light and the city on the hill. However more is promised to this church and the world. Every little fulfillment is a beginning of the new creation. Easter begins this new creation and plants new hopes again and again. The surplus in promises will not end until God brings about his reign, “until God is all in all” and Jesus gives back his messianic calling to the Father and is “subject” to him (1 Cor 15,28).
The pouring out of the Holy Spirit was not without consequence on the long way from Nazareth or Jerusalem to the “ends of the earth.” As with Jesus’ first appearance in his hometown Nazareth, there are works of the first Christendom in the Acts of the Apostles that liberate from death, sickness, guilt, injustice, imprisonment, hunger or exclusion. They are in no way “passion narratives with detailed introductions” (Martin Kahler) but stories of a new life of the body of Christ as the church is called, Christ’s earthly form of existence, giving instruction on acting like Christ.
Jesus like the New Testament is more strongly reserved than the later church fathers in the question whether he is the Messiah. In the terms of the world languages at that time, they represented their cause in Greek and later Latin, in the pantheon of attractive deities and in conflict with an emperor cult. If the emperor as Kyrios and Theos, Dominus and Deus commanded worship of himself as the Lord and God of the world, Christians like the Jews – faithful to the Hebrew Bible – use these terms exclusively for God or – faithful to the developing Christian tradition – also for Jesus. They do not defend either a two-god theory or a polytheism in the doctrine of the Trinity. Proclaiming the riches in God’s works and spirit in an inadequate language is always uppermost. The ancient synods and church fathers coined paradoxical formulas “true man and true God” when they spoke of Jesus the Christ against the denigration of God’s humanliness and against a human self-idolization. They knew how much this was patchwork (1 Cor 13) and how they had their “treasure in earthen vessels” (2 Cor 4,7).
VII
Too often the awareness was lost that language, church and discipleship are provisional. Fortresses were built, an understanding of dogma that no longer dared or allowed questioning doctrinal opinions, an infallible teaching office, an unerring church or an understanding of Holy Scripture that froze scripture in a fundamentalist dogma of verbal inspiration. Living water turned into frozen waterfalls. As beautiful as they may be, frozen waterfalls do not move anything or offer refreshing drink. A special petrification of the church arose in the state church of the Roman Empire. This began with the Tolerance edict (313) for a persecuted church that quickly accustomed itself to the good cause of state power. The state church paid so its teachings were enforced and protected like state laws with the help of politically influenced synods. Christian dissidents (heretics) and the Jewish people were victims of churches that had borrowed state power long after the end of the state church. These minorities were also champions of human rights against state and religious tutelage and incapacitation.
A fortification of power of another kind corresponded with the church’s nearness to power. This was the idea of an absoluteness claim of Christianity. A kind of religious theory of progress and evolution sees Christianity at the peak of absoluteness that fit the other religions into a hierarchy. This began with the so-called primitive religions up to Judaism and Islam and surpassed them or made them mere forerunners. Hegel reflected these ideas most consistently (and hardly uncritically toward concrete Christianity) in his philosophy of religion. Christianity is the “absolute religion” in which the unity of the infinite and finite and the divine and human occurs in the “incarnation of the divine nature.” Universality and the absoluteness claim of Christianity are anchored in the absoluteness of the spirit and its self-realization in history. In the present, the churches are beginning to understand that they are not in a different situation in the concert of world religions and worldviews than early Christendom in the multi-religious world of the Roman Empire.
After Albert Schweitzer concluded his critical analysis of the life of Jesus research, he ended his book with these words: “As an unknown and nameless one, he comes to us as he approached those men on the shore of that sea who didn’t know who he was. He says the same word: Follow me and face the challenges that our age must solve. He commands. To whoever obeys him, the wise and the foolish, he will reveal himself in what they experience in his community in peace, acting, struggling and suffering. They will learn who he is as the inexpressible.” (10)
By Martin Stohr
[This article is translated from the German on the World Wide Web,
http://www.jcrelations.net/de/?id=2436.] The search for the knowledge of good and evil is not an anti-divine hubris. But to know in a final judgment who are the good and who are evil expels one from the course of history and makes the others the omnipotent lords of history. In God’s place, they anticipate God’s last word. Nevertheless the messianic future is not in our control.
According to the biblical understanding, re-opening the horizon of the future is a prophetic task. The church often tried to close this horizon for Israel intellectually and practically. Only in this way will the true present tasks become clear on the long way to the goal of history. If history is open up to the perfection of the world by God – for conversion and renewal of people and their world -, then Israel through its existence and its Holy Scripture holds open the future and the way there. “The Jew keeps open the question of Christ,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in 1941 and established this with Jesus’ Jewish nature. (1) However this is more than a genealogical fact that only refers to the origin of the church and its messianic faith. This aims at a new relationship of the church and Israel (that Bonhoeffer did not accomplish but left as a task). “Western history according to God’s will is indissolubly connected with the people of Israel not only genetically but in authentic endless encounter.”
Thus whoever separates from the root finds his present and future dried up. This is parallel to the olive tree parable of Paul (Rom 11,17-24). As a result, Bonhoeffer concludes the “repudiation of Christ” occurs with the “repudiation of the Jews.” (2)
With several ideal-type figures, the Christian interpretation sovereignty over history includes a definition authority with final judgments over Israel and its way. Definition authority over others replaces the perception of the other as different, refusing to see his self-image and discipleship of God and refusing to speak with him at eye level. This is the beginning of all violence. Appealing to the Torah of Moses (Deut 32,43), Paul recommends another way: “with one voice, glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” “Rejoice O Gentiles (=goyim) with his people!” (Rom 15,6-13).
The way of the church was often different. Rejoicing was not with Israel but over and against Israel. Israel was overtaken, rejected and punished with suffering. Christian identity was built on the negation of Jewish identity. The countless pictures of a triumphant Ecclesia and a defeated synagogue preached to Christian people Israel’s alleged irrevocable defeat. Israel should relinquish or give itself up to become part of the church. How could the church, Israel’s daughter and sister, pass off its human discretion as God’s judgment?
I
The word of the Jewish witness and martyr Jesus of Nazareth on the Roman gallows “It is finished” was misunderstood as a definitive statement for a concluded redemption of the world through Jesus’ death on the cross. Redemption is then only a virtual event to be propagated. The history of God’s whole world is not changed in the sense of a new creation. The self-image of the person in his world is changed, not his world. The messianic time only commands a change of consciousness. The hope for a new heaven and a new earth – with all the poetic pictures – thins to hope for the immortality of the soul.
The New Testament sets the accent differently. The cross is the deepest earthly point of Jesus’ self-abasement and at the same time the model of the witness faithful to God (Phil 2). God shows in Jesus how human is his word. He comes to the world. Although Israel can think incarnationally (God is present on earth in his word, in his people, in their exile and in his temple), the Christian faith speaks of God’s incarnation or the word made flesh in another way. This incarnation is bound to the Jew Jesus of Nazareth and to Israel and its history with God. A renewal of Christian-Jewish relations depends on not understanding this new revelation as though it overtakes, annuls or denies the revelation in Israel. Seeing God’s love and affection for his world is vital for the self-image of Christian life and faith. God’s love and affection for his world is manifest in both Israel’s abiding call and the new call of a church out of all nations.
Therefore the cross is not the last word of the God creating new life. Jesus died for all. All die with Jesus Christ to life according to the world’s old rules of the game (which isn’t Israel’s Torah) and rise to a new life with him according to the rules of the new creation that began with the Easter event. “The old has passed away, behold the new has come. All this is from God” (2 Cor 5,14ff). The creation is not yet totally renewed. However the new assumes form in the life and work of Jesus Christ. The God of Israel and the nations acts here.
II
The Jewish question begins here. Can there be islands of redemption in an unredeemed world? Can there be true life in the false? Where were swords forged into plowshares? Is Israel liberated from violence and threats? Where do children no longer die an early death? Is God all in all? These are biblically legitimate questions in the Jewish and Christian Bible.
Against the medieval disputations that emptied the Old Testament to a book of mere predictions and matched New Testament answers like covers on pots, that Christian tradition should be emphasized that speaks of the way of the church to the certain goal that is in no way achieved. If that dogmatic understanding of scripture – there prophesy and here fulfillment – cast Israel as absolute injustice and the church as absolute justice, God’s truth is “the evidence of two witnesses” (Deut 17,6; Joh 8,17). Their ways have many common starting points. They pursue the same goal. They touch each other. Hopefully in the future the church will not add the attribute of the Messiah from Israel and say of itself instead of God’s anointed that it is the way, the truth and the life while ascribing wrong ways, lies and death to others. Such a messianic declaration (Joh 14,5) is both comfort and church criticism for a “distressed community.” (3) In the future, parts of the separated ways will hopefully be taken together (chapter VIII). (4) since the Hebrew Bible is a completely valid part of the Christian Bible.
The history of Christian contempt of Jews is an (historical) argument against Jewish mission. This mission was always nourished by the presumption of having the only correct interpretation of the messianic hopes. However the different ideas of God’s coming reign give an equal dignity and quality to both continuing histories of the Hebrew Bible in Judaism and Christianity.
No other God than the God of Israel and the nations is at work here and there. Jesus’ Jewish nature is another theological reason against all forms of Jewish mission. A special conversation is necessary between people with common sources. Both conversation partners are “deficient” in different ways regarding God’s revelation. In their hearing and obedience, both fall short of what God intends with them. The coming of God’s reign is not free of surprises (Mt 7,21; 25,31-46). This fact makes faith more self-critical and capable of conversion, not more uncertain and resistant to failure.
III
A special malformation in the church arose out of its claim to be the “true Israel” since it rejected God’s attempt to unite with Israel. God’s supposed rejection was attested with the reproach of “God’s murder.” Israel rejected and executed its Messiah. In his conflicts with the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus referred to their wrong ways of legalism and faith in letters. Jerusalem’s destruction and Israel’s history of suffering and exile allegedly proved that God turned away from them and turned toward the church. The church invented the legend of the eternally wandering punished Jews. The church transformed biblical self-criticism over lukewarm faithfulness toward Jesus Christ into anti-Jewish criticism.
This widespread argument ignores that Jesus like Paul was closer to the pharisaic movement than to the zealots, Qumran community and Sadducees. The conflict “around the exceeding or higher righteousness” (Mt 5,20) was not a dispute between two religions but a polemical argument over the right way of understanding and doing God’s directive here and now.
Jesus’ criticism of the scribes and Pharisees in which he was not alone in Israel started from the common base: “They sit on Moses’ seat. So practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do” (Mt 23,2). Their deeds are everything but exemplary. Engagement and credibility in doing God’s word are sought. If the common discussion in Israel is severed from its context and the internal Jewish frontal positions are changed into an argument of the “Christian” Jesus with the “Jews” (which began with the oldest letter 1 Thess 2,13-16 and Joh 8,44, occurred with the Galatians letter and was countered by Rom 9-11 and Joh 4,22), Jesus’ words become (popular Christian) lies. A rabbinic discussion did not first begin after the conclusion of the two testaments. A conciliar debate occurred on the Christian side. There is no “self-interpretation history” of authors, hearers and readers free of contradiction in the Holy Scripture whose books come from different centuries and contexts. The vitality of the Bible is unmistakable.
A church in solidarity with Israel and faithful to Jesus may understand or “appropriate” texts of the Hebrew Bible as referring to itself if Israel’s disposition doesn’t occur. The church may call itself God’s people or temple (1 Petr 2,1-10; 1 Cor 3,16f; Eph 2,21) alongside the term “Christ’s body” if it recognizes that this is first and everlastingly Israel. Nowhere in the New Testament is the church described as the new or true Israel. Solidarity with Israel has a consequence. Internal Jewish Israel criticism of the prophets and the criticism from Jesus’ mouth strike Christians as church criticism when they read the whole Bible as also addressed to them.
IV
The way of the church is a way that prepares the coming of the messianic reign (praeparatio messianica) and doesn’t dream or escape into its perfection (perfektio messianica). Beginning in Corinth, different Gnostics and esoterics have offered this bland diet of faith again and again. In the prayer that Jesus taught his community, the central petition for the coming of God’s reign is framed with the request that his name be hallowed (this meant witness service up to martyrdom as with Jesus) and that his will be done (corresponding to heavenly or divine ideas) on earth. (5) These authors like many church opinions turn away from this basic model as though the Christian faith were “free of the law” in contrast to “legal” Judaism. In his interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount in “Cost of Discipleship”, Dietrich Bonhoeffer underscored doing the ommandments and pointed out that the “gospel” (6) like the “law” can become “cheap grace” in the hands of people or invert into their opposites.
A Christian question is raised here. Can the argument be opposed that Jews don’t need to be occupied in the same way with Christianity since it is not one of their prerequisites while the church must be occupied with Israel since it cannot otherwise understand itself? The latter is certainly right. Generations of constant learning- and renewal processes are still needed after the anti-Jewish heritage in the church. This has three main points. How do we confess to Jesus the Christ without demeaning the people from whom we have learned to act and hope in a messianic way? How do we speak of the church without forcing Israel into a deficient position? How do we read the Old Testament without, like Marcion, making it the message of a foreign and different God?
These difficult questions are answered differently in many churches: Can Israel – like the Samaritans and Canaanites as children of the Torah – understand the different continuing history of the Tenach similar to the New Testament? Didn’t a primal messianic trust arise here in certain interpretations and understandings, the “new in Judaism, not against Judaism”? A new relationship begins to grow after a church- and theology history that always joined the Christian “new” with a qualification of the Jewish as “old.” This relation did not arise on the Christian side according to its principle “sola scriptura.” It was the Schoa and the genesis of the state of Israel, not Holy Scripture, that prompted little groups in the church to question the traditional Israel theology. Doing justice to the will of the shared God is central. While this happens differently, to let it happen without communication and indifferent to one another doesn’t take seriously this will and the necessity of realizing it in the common creation of the one and only God. On the separated ways, people will ask one another more intensely in the future how the way between the origin and the goal can be understood and traveled on this earth without the orientation of Holy Scripture and its interpretation- and realization traditions.
V
How can solidarity with Israel and faithfulness to Jesus be understood together? The Ephesians letter describes Jesus’ act that those “who were without hope and without God in the world” and “outside the Israel covenant of the promise” are no longer “strangers and guests (xenoi kai paroikoi) after Jesus’ appearance but fellow-citizens with the saints and God’s household” (sympolitai ton ahgion kai oikeloi tou theou)” (Eph 2,11-20). The saints mean Israel. Dwelling with Israel in God’s house is the new. Dwelling in God’s house means serving God. We know that the church in history declared itself exclusively God’s house and wanted to administer the housing right alone. The church terminated the covenant of promise for the “saints” and expelled them from God’s house to present itself alone as God’s people and temple.
Can one say that Jesus is for Christians what the Torah is for Jews despite this history of disinheriting and the murderous attacks on the deceased: the mediator and way of knowing and serving God? Isn’t all this imagined too symmetrically since it ignores that the Torah in its explicit form and in the whole action-oriented history of Israel was taken along by the Jew Jesus and the Jewish apostles in the world of the nations as God’s binding word? Wasn’t the world of the nations already included in this blessing through Israel’s blessed election in Abraham – when it blesses and doesn’t curse Israel?
Isn’t the New Testament intent on confirming and not refuting the “scriptures,” that is “Moses and the prophets”? This happens with some daring exegesis of “scripture.” However this is not different in the Talmud and Midrasch. Doesn’t the internal Jewish conflict continue in the controversy between Paul and Peter about what is given to Israel (exodus, circumcision and dietary rules) and what is God’s gift and task through Israel to the world? Isn’t the question whether the Torah is inapplicable or whether it should be fully observed by everyone part of a discourse on the messianic time? Aren’t the Decalogue, the twofold command of love, the ethos of the prophets as remembrances of the covenant and the organization of life of the coming reign of God inseparably connected with the praxis and proclamation of the Jew Jesus? What did he proclaim other than this? Does the rabbinic answer of making available the Noahic commands as instructions of the God of Israel suffice for the nations? Isn’t the universal Torah that the churches like to claim as their essence against Israel’s allegedly national or particular message separate from Jesus’ message? Isn’t Israel’s specific nature in association with the Torah declared irrelevant? Questions are only asked about the riches and the diverse possible fruits of the Torah as God’s word. Hasn’t the Torah been taught again and again in the churches – up to ruler ethics oriented in David, Solomon and the royal psalms and up to the hallowing of Sunday? Hasn’t this exchange occurring thanklessly from the side of the churches toward Israel been illegitimate or is it part of the announcement of God’s name and word “to the ends of the earth”?
On top of that, hasn’t Israel learned from the Babylonian creation stories and Egypt’s wisdom? Isn’t what is said by the first addressants of the God of Israel also true for these gods: that his word is valid to whomever it may concern? Doesn’t God have co-workers beyond the borders of the church and Israel? How open is Israel and how open is the church? When is it necessary to mark borders – as Ezra set after his return from exile and Bonhoeffer attempted with the Confessing Church – “between the Scylla of orthodoxy and the Charybdis of confessionlessness? (9)
The messianic hopes of the Hebrew Bible and those of the inter-testamental non-canonical books cannot be condensed into a messianology. They are different from one another and have been interpreted differently. Analogously there isn’t one Christology in the New Testament but different christologies. These have also been interpreted differently.
VI
A vague relation of their faith and life and of their borders remains for the churches. Answers have been sought, rejected and found in the controversial conciliar disputes continuing the rabbinic tradition. These processes were always accompanied by the secret longing that a philosophical or legal system, a state, teaching office or fundamentalism would remove obscurities and make God’s truth and clarity unmistakable.
John the Baptist was also stuck in this longing dilemma. He had spoken clearly and in an obligatory way. As Nathan spoke to king David, John had said the truth publically to Herod. He landed in prison from which he did not leave alive. He doubted in his own messianology and Christology. “Are you he who is to come or should be look for another?” (Matt 11,1-6). Who or what is stronger? The effective nearness of God’s reign announced identically by Jesus and John with its rules of the game not of this world but for this world or the old rules?
John did not receive as an answer any “Christology” or doctrine about Jesus as the Messiah. He was referred to the messianic signs that could be discovered in Jesus’ public human life and history. The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear. The dead are raised and the gospel of the nearness and effective power of God’s reign is proclaimed to the poor.
These are the messianic signs that the Bible of Jesus, his followers, the New Testament authors and the apostles always name (in rich variations). The Good News for Jesus and his own can be found in the Tenach that did not know any New Testament and thus did not need to be described as “old”. With its content of faith (=trust), love and hope, the Good News concerns the life of people damaged concretely by guilt, estrangement and hopelessness. It aims at fulfillment and realization – as important as these may be in their beginnings. True life exists in the false and islands of rescue in an unredeemed world, not first for themselves but for “the others”.
The Isaiah-books and others make the signs of the messianic time credible and concrete – for those who can see in Jesus the herald and first fruits of the messianic reign hoped for by Jews and Christians. They were and are a minority. The church of Jesus Christ is not more than salt in the soup, light and the city on the hill. However more is promised to this church and the world. Every little fulfillment is a beginning of the new creation. Easter begins this new creation and plants new hopes again and again. The surplus in promises will not end until God brings about his reign, “until God is all in all” and Jesus gives back his messianic calling to the Father and is “subject” to him (1 Cor 15,28).
The pouring out of the Holy Spirit was not without consequence on the long way from Nazareth or Jerusalem to the “ends of the earth.” As with Jesus’ first appearance in his hometown Nazareth, there are works of the first Christendom in the Acts of the Apostles that liberate from death, sickness, guilt, injustice, imprisonment, hunger or exclusion. They are in no way “passion narratives with detailed introductions” (Martin Kahler) but stories of a new life of the body of Christ as the church is called, Christ’s earthly form of existence, giving instruction on acting like Christ.
Jesus like the New Testament is more strongly reserved than the later church fathers in the question whether he is the Messiah. In the terms of the world languages at that time, they represented their cause in Greek and later Latin, in the pantheon of attractive deities and in conflict with an emperor cult. If the emperor as Kyrios and Theos, Dominus and Deus commanded worship of himself as the Lord and God of the world, Christians like the Jews – faithful to the Hebrew Bible – use these terms exclusively for God or – faithful to the developing Christian tradition – also for Jesus. They do not defend either a two-god theory or a polytheism in the doctrine of the Trinity. Proclaiming the riches in God’s works and spirit in an inadequate language is always uppermost. The ancient synods and church fathers coined paradoxical formulas “true man and true God” when they spoke of Jesus the Christ against the denigration of God’s humanliness and against a human self-idolization. They knew how much this was patchwork (1 Cor 13) and how they had their “treasure in earthen vessels” (2 Cor 4,7).
VII
Too often the awareness was lost that language, church and discipleship are provisional. Fortresses were built, an understanding of dogma that no longer dared or allowed questioning doctrinal opinions, an infallible teaching office, an unerring church or an understanding of Holy Scripture that froze scripture in a fundamentalist dogma of verbal inspiration. Living water turned into frozen waterfalls. As beautiful as they may be, frozen waterfalls do not move anything or offer refreshing drink. A special petrification of the church arose in the state church of the Roman Empire. This began with the Tolerance edict (313) for a persecuted church that quickly accustomed itself to the good cause of state power. The state church paid so its teachings were enforced and protected like state laws with the help of politically influenced synods. Christian dissidents (heretics) and the Jewish people were victims of churches that had borrowed state power long after the end of the state church. These minorities were also champions of human rights against state and religious tutelage and incapacitation.
A fortification of power of another kind corresponded with the church’s nearness to power. This was the idea of an absoluteness claim of Christianity. A kind of religious theory of progress and evolution sees Christianity at the peak of absoluteness that fit the other religions into a hierarchy. This began with the so-called primitive religions up to Judaism and Islam and surpassed them or made them mere forerunners. Hegel reflected these ideas most consistently (and hardly uncritically toward concrete Christianity) in his philosophy of religion. Christianity is the “absolute religion” in which the unity of the infinite and finite and the divine and human occurs in the “incarnation of the divine nature.” Universality and the absoluteness claim of Christianity are anchored in the absoluteness of the spirit and its self-realization in history. In the present, the churches are beginning to understand that they are not in a different situation in the concert of world religions and worldviews than early Christendom in the multi-religious world of the Roman Empire.
After Albert Schweitzer concluded his critical analysis of the life of Jesus research, he ended his book with these words: “As an unknown and nameless one, he comes to us as he approached those men on the shore of that sea who didn’t know who he was. He says the same word: Follow me and face the challenges that our age must solve. He commands. To whoever obeys him, the wise and the foolish, he will reveal himself in what they experience in his community in peace, acting, struggling and suffering. They will learn who he is as the inexpressible.” (10)
Martin Stohl
e-mail:
mbatko@lycos.com
Homepage:
http://www.mbtranslations.com
