Levenson on Theological Dialogue
Jon Levenson is the Alfred List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School. He has contributed to Commonweal, and is, in my view, one of the most insightful commentators both on the Hebrew Bible and on Jewish-Christian dialogue.
In the recent issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, he makes a number of challenging (and, I think, helpful) observations.
He suggests:
It should be no surprise that the new focus on the literary character
of the Hebrew Bible that has emerged over the past three decades has
gone hand in hand with a new appreciation of midrash, including the
midrashim that appear in the Bible itself—not only the Hebrew Bible but
also the New Testament. One of the most welcome developments of recent
years has been the increased awareness of how deeply rooted in the
scriptural interpretation of Second Temple Judaism both early
Christianity and rabbinic Judaism are. If we look at Judaism and
Christianity from that historical perspective, we see them not as mother
and daughter but as two siblings, descended from the common parent that
was the Judaism that preceded them both and, more distantly, from the
Hebrew Bible, which their common parent had long been reworking,
rewriting, and reinterpreting. That insight, which derives from
historical criticism but has important implications for the present, is
one that I have found to be highly productive. As yet, neither Jews nor
Christians have, for the most part, reckoned sufficiently with it.
He then ponders impediments to an in-depth dialogue:
On the Jewish side, the danger lies in a major difference between the
purposes for which Christians and Jews go into the dialogue in the first
place. If I may generalize (with due allowances for the exceptions),
Christians go into it because of religious motives, whereas Jews go into
the dialogue because of motives of communal self-defense and in pursuit
of better intergroup relations—to prevent defamation, persecution,
pogroms, and Holocausts. In my judgment, this altogether worthwhile
motivation often leads the Jewish participants to minimize too readily
the importance of theology, including the theological core of their own
tradition, as if the difference between truth claims were no more
significant than the difference between “eye-ther” and “ee-ther” or
between “tomayto” and “tomahto.” The logical end point is a religious
relativism that undermines the whole idea of Jewish-Christian dialogue
and ultimately can undermine as well the moral claims on which good
intergroup relations depend. Whether the subject is biblical
interpretation or interreligious conversation, in my judgment it is
imperative to remember how important what we say and do really is.
Thanks for bringing this very thoughtful piece to everyone’s attention. It is so well done that it is difficult to find anythng in it to disagree with, or even, at a first reading, to expatiate upon.
Robert: Thanks for this post. My wife is an HDS graduate and so gets this in the mail. Somehow I missed it, but must now find it. One thought and one question.
Thought: The more I read rabbinical biblical interpretation, the more I find that Christian biblical studies are remarkably shallow. I reach this conclusion for a variety of reasons, but the most basic is that Christian biblical interpretation almost never seems to include consideration of rabbinical interpretation. Thus, I offer the modest proposal that a pre-requisite for both ordination and graduate study is a year of studying the Rabbis.
Question: Where does Catholic biblical thought stand on the use of OT texts as messianic proof texts? Is the official or acceptable line still that the texts are proof texts for Jesus, or is there more of a willingness to see such texts as theological and rhetorical tools, rather than actual predictions? If the latter, does the average Catholic appreciate this?
Joseph (either or both):
Levenson says, in the first passage I cite above: “If we look at Judaism and Christianity from that historical perspective, we see them not as mother and daughter but as two siblings, descended from the common parent that was the Judaism that preceded them both and, more distantly, from the Hebrew Bible, which their common parent had long been reworking, rewriting, and reinterpreting.”
I find the sentence to be close in tenor to what Pope Benedict writes in the “Foreword” to his “Jesus of Nazareth.” “Modern exegesis has brought to light the process of constant rereading that forged the words transmitted in the Bible into Scripture: older texts are reappropriated, reinterpreted, and read with new eyes in new contexts. They become Scripture by being read anew, evolving in continuity with their original sense, tacitly corrected, and given added depth and breadth of meaning.”
From this point of view the “midrashim” that appear in the New Testament (in Levenson’s phrase), and the midrashim of the New Testament that are the Patristic writings, for example, are claims regarding the true unity and sense of Scripture. They are governed, as Pope Benedict writes, by a “Christological hermeneutic.” I would call them not “proof texts” or “tools,” but theological interpretations. Interpretations which, of course, the rabbinic tradition would dispute.
Though it is not currently available online, the journal, Communio, in its Summer 2007 issue, has a short piece by Jacob Neusner (the rabbi with whom the Pope dialogues in “Jesus of Nazareth”). The title itself gives the gist: “Renewing Religious Disputation in Quest of Theological Truth: In Dialogue with Benedict XVI’s ‘Jesus of Nazareth’.” Neusner writes: “In his “Jesus of Nazareth” the Judaeo-Christian disputation enters a new age. We are able to meet one another in a forthright exercise of reason and criticism. The challenges of Sinai bring us together for the renewal of a two-thousand-year-old tradition of religious debate int he service of God’s truth.”
The rabbis are beginning to read and speak to one another… and peacefully dispute about religious truth.
Regarding Christians proof-texting the OT: istm that the view taken by many Christians is consciously a-chronological. By that I mean, they don’t see salvation history in the same time-linear fashion in which history is usually presented. Instead, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is the centerpiece of history; all that happened before, as recounted in the OT from all its time periods, in all its literary genres and forms, prepares, prefigures and points to that center; and all that has happened after, flows from and interprets in new light that center.
The arrangement of our Lectionary for Sundays illustrates this, itsm. By and large, the Old Testament readings are selected specifically because they represent some sort of thematic unity with the Gospel passage for the week. Hence, this past Sunday, the Wisdom reading about God’s abundant mercy is paired with Luke’s account of Zacchaeus.
In that sense, istm that the OT passages are utilized almost like a “prefiguring midrash” on the Gospel selection of the week – a commentary on the Gospel, written before the actual Gospel was written.
Joe P., I don’t know if that would precisely be “proof-texting”. But certainly we’re encouraged to interpret OT texts through the prism of Jesus.
(Whether that’s encouraged in undergraduate-level OT courses, even at Christian universities, is perhaps another question!)
Robert:
With respect, I am not sure I see much room for “debate” as you and Benedict are setting up the ground rules. I guess the question is “What is the relationship between scriptural claims and theological claims?” Does one assume the truth of theological and creedal claims and then interpret scripture in light of these claims? If so, would that mean that one could not then use scripture to validate that which has already been assumed to be true?
It seems quite clear to me that the earliest Christian thought did not work this way. Rather, it used biblical claims to support theological conclusions. This method included, but was not limited to, the appropriation of Hebrew Bible texts, not simply to interpret Jesus, but to prove claims about who he was. Thus, a legitimate way to challenge theological conclusions, whether one is a Jew or renegade adoptionist, would be to challenge the scriptural claims. Yet, I am not clear how one can do this from within a so-called Christological hermeneutic.
Finally, regarding the unity of scripture, how would one go about demonstrating this? Is not one simply forced to assume it? If one assumes the unity of scripture as a precondition for scriptural study, does that mean that any reading of texts that suggests some lack of unity is by definition mistaken? If scripture is clearly not unified in some ways, in what way is it a unity?
Again, I fail to see where Benedict’s position on biblical criticism would allow for anything that looks like real a real challenge to magisterial interpretations.
Jim,
I guess if we are going to borrow Jewish terms such as Midrash, we should at least respect their origins and their orignators enough to admit when we have utterly changed their meaning. As I understand the term, Midrash comes after and “fills in”, so to speak, scripture. There is a clear logical and temporal relation between the two. The way you are using this term to describe OT texts is exactly backwards from its standard usage. You suggest that OT texts are midrash on scriptural and theological claims that have not yet been made. In what way is this legitimately midrash?
Perhaps the better comparison would be with Mahayana Buddhist texts that even Mahayana Buddhists admit must have been written hundreds of years after Gautama had died. For the Mahayana, these texts are legitimately teachings of the Buddha because the Buddha can teach trans dimensionally, such that the texts are taught while he is on earth, but only “received” later on. Thus, OT texts become trans-dimensional revelations of the earthly Jesus centuries before he walked the earth.
Of course, the only problem is that Christians would either simply have to assert that this is the case, or provide some explanation for why someone should believe it to be true. Another route would be to provide some reason to affirm the a-historical notion of scripture that you present.
Jim
Unfortunately the NAB translation of the story of Zacchaeus is defective as is the NRSV, as a learned homilist at one of the churches we frequent pointed out on Sunday. Joseph Fitzmyer’s commentary in the Anchor Bible series makes all clear. In brief, Zacchaeus is not saying that he “will give” but that he “makes a practice of giving” and so on. Zacchaeus is responding to the calumny of the crowd and Jesus agrees with him.
It is one thng to find meanings in the words of an author that he did not, or could not have, anticipated. It is quite another simply to mistranslate the text. Philology has its uses.
Jim
I should have added that Luke Timothy Johnson in his Luke in the Sacra Pagina series takes the same view of the sense although his rendering, “I am giving”, seems to me at odds with English usage.
With Fr.s Imbelli and Komonchak around, I probably ought to keep my peace. But then fools rush in etc.
As I understand things, the books of the Bible can be studied as literature ( see Harold Bloom’s piece on Robert Alter’s translation of the Psalms in the latest NY Review of Books) or as historical documents.
But for Christians they have regularly been taken to constitute an indispensable part of revelation. At Vatican II, a big issue was: Are Scripture and Tradition to be understood as two distinct sourses of revelation or as two parts of one revelation?The conclusion reached was that these two together constitute one and only one revelation.
This means, if I am not mistaken, that it is by one seamless act of FAITH that we acknowledge that both Scripture and Tradition are mutually revelatory. It is not a matter of proving the one by the other, unless one means by the term ‘proof’ that they are consistent with, or perhaps better, not inconsistent with, each other when both are embraced by faith.
Pedagogically, many of us “cradle” Catholics first learned the doctrines of the Creed through some catechism and, in the course of doing so, and thereafter learned how the Tradition understood the Bible to be consonant with credal doctrine.
Of course, it may not be rare for people to start with the Bible and then come to grasp and adhere to credal doctrine. At least so it appears to me. But in any event, to embrace any part of revelation as revelation requires the gift of faith.
Another, better, way to put all this is to say that the Bible itself , along with its interpretation in the Church is itself an essential part of Tradition. To say that we believe in this Tradition is not to say that we have somehow found proof of it from some extrinsic source. It is, rather, (I think Luke Timothy Johnson makes this point) to declare our allegiance to the Tradition.
If one believes that Tradition is really divinely revealed, how could it make sense to look for “external” proof that it is or is not revealed?
If I’m hopelessly off base here, please, somebody, let me know.
I take Jon Levenson to be making a point similar to the one Bernard Dauenhauer is making regarding the intimate ties that bind Scripture and Tradition, both in the formation of Scripture and its ongoing interpretation.
Joseph P. , if I understand him correctly, wonders what there is to “debate,” given Benedict’s acknowledged Christological hermeneutic.
I suppose I would suggest that it was Rabbi Neusner who spoke of the renewal of “debate,” in positive terms. This was after having read Benedict’s book with its explicit avowal of a Christological hermeneutic. Neusner does not seem to find such an avowal an impediment to debate or disputation in search of truth.
To that debate Neusner would presumably bring a “Torah hermeneutic” (my term not his), which Benedict found challenging and clarifying in writing his book. So the “debate” seems already to be bearing fruit.
Bernard Dauenhauer appositely refers to Harold Bloom’s review of Alter’s translation of the Psalms in the current New York Review (available online only to subscribers).
Here is part of what Bloom says: “Alter, a critic of great sophistication, does not allow himself to express any uneasiness with the Christian appropriation of the Bible. I prefer to be rougher about this two thousand year old theft. The Old Testament is a captive work dragged along in the triumphal wake of Christianity.”
Elsewhere, if memory serves, Bloom spoke of the New Testament as a “strong misreading” of the Hebrew Bible.
Interesting charges that would lend themselves to a stimulating debate.
It would be fascinating to have Pope Benedict and Luke Johnson and Frank Matera (the author of the recent “New Testament Theology: Exploring Diversity and Unity”) and Jacob Neusner and Jon Levenson and Harold Bloom dispute or debate together. That would be a “disputatio” worth attending. It might even make for a terrific issue of Commonweal.
Fr. Imbelli
I would suggest adding N.T. Wright to the mix.
I must say that I think Bloom is noy a good selection. Why not Robert Alter? His Art of Biblical Narrative is a marvelous study.
Bernard
There is no contradiction between reading the Bible as containing revelation and reading the Bible as literature, unless you take literature to exclude all concern for truth. But why would anyone do that?
It is late, I am not sure the following will be clear, but I want to try to get it out just to keep this very fine conversation going.
Bernard: I see a third option in how one understands scripture, beyond literature or history; that is, one can understand it as theology.
However, in all three cases, one may understand it as only partial in its successes. Your claim that it is revelation leaves me wondering in what sense we may call scripture mistaken, or, for that matter, in what way tradition may be said to be mistaken. If revelation simply means the non-mistaken parts of the whole of scripture and tradition, that leaves us to wonder how to identify which is which. You claim that scripture and tradition are mutually revelatory does not help me here, as I could easily see how this is true, but at the same time not wish to affirm that ALL of scripture and tradition are revelatory.
Robert: (and Bernard, and anyone else!) I would pay good money for the debate you propose (and so I should note to Grant that I would pay good money for extra copies of a Commonweal with such a debate). However, I remain skeptical that the Christians would really debate the Jews. If I recall properly Neusner said he would like to debate the Jesus of the gospel of Matthew, specifically on the question of whether or not the claims of Torah can be nullified. I, not surprisingly, wonder if the historical Jesus actually said these things.
However, when I think of the Gospel of Matthew, I think of the many ways that Matthew makes use of Hebrew scriptures to make claims about Jesus. I want to be able to ask whether or not Matthew should be read as claiming that these scriptures really were about Jesus all along, or, if he should be read as saying that Christians are now going to use these scriptures to gain a better understanding of Jesus. I would like to believe he used them in the latter sense. However, I think that even if he did so intend his use to be read this way that there is a good chance that most of those who read Matthew in the early churches, and even those who read him today, read his use of Hebrew scriptures in the former sense. It is this appropriation of Hebrew scripture that I think genuinely amounts to theft, to borrow Bloom’s terms.
As I understand the development of the creeds and of Christian theology in the first few centuries, one criterion for right theology was that it not contradict scripture (thus, the will of the Son and the Father could not be identical because there is scripture suggesting that this is not the case). Now, suppose, just for the sake of argument, that there really is not fundamental unity between the four gospels, and between the gospels and Paul (remember, this is just a supposition for the sake of argument). If there was no such unity, yet, it was insisted that theology must be formulated in a way that insisted on such unity, then it seems to me highly likely that the theological products would have a content that was in many ways contrary to the theological intentions of each of the five major NT writers. Should Christians today not care that this could be the case? Does faith in the revelation of scripture and tradition render such a question nonsensical from the outset?
Is it impossible FROM WITHIN faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ that the early churches, and even some of the NT writers, were, at times, simply mistaken in the theological conclusions they reached about Jesus?
Just to clarify: I meant to ask whether or not it is possible from within faith TO CONCLUDE that the early churches, and even some of the NT writers, were, at times, simply mistaken in the theological conclusions they reached about Jesus.
And to add another question: If it is possible, how would one go about doing this if not by critically evaluating individual biblical and even patristic (and beyond) texts?
It is said by many that the historical-critical branch of biblical criticism imposes presuppositions on believers that they are in no way bound to accept. If anyone reading this thread agrees with this criticism of the historical-critical study of scripture and Christian theology, I would be genuinely grateful to know exactly how this is the case.
Does the presupposition of a Christological hermeneutic rule out the possibility of christological error? Such a conclusion seems impossible given the countless and contrary christologies that have been put forth in Christian history. Presumably, then, it becomes necessary to evaluate competing christologies. How does one do this from within a Christological hermeneutic?
There is at least one sense in which both Jews and Christians can agree in reading Scripture. They can all use the what is usualy called critical-historical method. They can identify literary genres and try to determine their hermeneutic significance. They can consider how much of the content of a narrative text is historical and how much comes from the fictive imagination of the narrator. And I could elaborate further, but I doubt it is necessary. I think it is fair to say the F. W. Albright was a moving force in the U.S. spreading this idea. The Anchor Bible is a monument to his work, and what a monument it is!
Christians and Jews can also agree to some extent in a theological reading of Scripture, at least as to method, generically, but such agreement is likely to have its limitations. They do not agree on a common canon of Scripture. But perhaps that is the wrong way of looking at it. The do not agree on a whole set of issues centering on the man Jesus. Who was he? How did he think of himself? How did he present himself? Can his self-presentation be grounded in the tradition of the Tanakh and the understanding of the Tanakh in his day? Is it possible to look at those issues and others again after so many years? One would hope so. Of course it would require the necessary study on the part of the participants. One more thing. I do not think the format of debate here is useful. Debaters tend to want to win. Perhaps dialogue is a preferable notion, understood as thoughtful interchange in which all the paricipants expect to learn something.
Joseph: I understand your concern about the format of a debate, but I am even more concerned about a “thoughtful exchange.” I think the “thoughtful” part would characterize the people speaking, but not necessarily what is said. Christianity has made, and continues to make, very strong claims that are contrary to central Jewish convictions (e.g. original sin, the nature of redemption, and obviously the interpretation of Jewish scripture). If Jews and Christians were having a theological discussion in the same room, I would like to hear Christians defend some of these strong claims and allow Jews to respond. A “debate” calls for the defense of ideas, not just an explication of them. I think one would could ask for such defenses without reducing the discussion to a win at all costs kind of affair.
Joe: If you put it that way, I agree. One of Jerome’s intentions was to provide Christians with an accurate translation of the Tanakh so that in defending their positions, they would not cite texts that Jews did not recognize as authoritative. This is not to deny that he cut a few corners.
It seems pretty clear that both Josephs (Gannon and Petit) know much more than I do about Scripture studies. I, for one, could not take part in the conversations or debates that they are talking about. But let me take a stab at making another point about how we as Catholics receive Scripture.
We profess to believe in, i.e., to trust, to rely on, the Church’s fidelity to God’s revelation of His own being and His salvific action for us. This faith is the starting point for our reception of the Tradition which includes the proclamation of the message expressed in Scripture.
This Tradition includes a number of elements that are, in the proper sense, mysteries, e.g., the Trinitarian nature of God, the Christ who is both God and man. All Catholic theology, or so it seems to me, has these commitments as its point of departure.
All the questions that Joe Petit raises have their validity for scholars who investigate them. But the Catholic scholar does not suspend his or her fundamental beliefs in the Church’s Tradition in order to make some sort of “neutral” investigation. Far from regarding these commitments as limitations, he or she accepts them as supports for his or her scholarly work.
Of course, I recognize that history shows conflicts between the work of some Catholic scholars and the official positions of Church leaders that prevailed at the time. Our Faith, though, holds that by God’s help the salvific truths of Revelation have never been flatly denied by official Church teaching. I grant that this claim is itself less than immediately transparent. What its truth amounts to remains a topic of study, but not of simple rejection.
I would suggest one application of all this to Joe Petit’s postings. He asks whether adoptionism is not a defensible Christological position. I would reply that, had God so chosen, it seems perfectly possible that Jesus, or some other human being, COULD have been made our savior. But, or so we believe, that in fact God did not so choose. Rather, we have received Jesus, who is both God and man.
I’m not sure that I’m doing justice to Joe Petit’s questions.But this is all I have to contribute.
Bernard: Your post is, as usual, very thoughtful, and I think represents a very Catholic position, although not one that I think who call themselves Catholic would affirm.
I do have a question, just to help me understand your point. What do you mean when you claim that “Our Faith, though, holds that by God’s help the salvific truths of Revelation have never been flatly denied by official Church teaching.”?
As I see it, this can have a minimal meaning and a maximal meaning. For a minimal reading, it seems to me possible for the Church always to affirm the salvific truths of Revelation, while at the same time also affirming a lot more than this. In such a situation, much of what the Church affirms may have little to do with the salvific truths of revelation, and so might be legitimately challenged without challenging the salvific truths of revelation. On a maximal understanding, everything the Church teaches becomes part of the salvific truths of Revelation. Under this reading, it would be very important for those holding the position you present to believe that the Church has never affirmed contrary claims over time.
I think that it is likely impossible to hold something other than these two options, but that is for a longer discussion. I must run to class.
Hi, Joe. With some trepidation, I’d opt for minimalism, with a large caveat. Clearly the church has changed its teaching on charging interest for loans (usury) and any number of other moral issues. Sometimes, apparently, conditions changed (the practices concerning borrowing and lending) and other times discussion about things like slavery showed the practice to be gravely wrong. Conceivably, the issue of birth control will be found to run counter to the sensus fidelium (however that is to be determined)>
On dogmatic matters, I take the credal propositions and the infallible proclamations to be irreformable in principle, but open to real reformulation. For example, Mary’s bodily Assumption, or Jesus’ bodily Ascension into heaven. Clearly, what properties a a resurrected body would have would not be the same as our bodies have. How to say all this requires heavy theological reflection. Nonetheless, we are committed, or so it seems to me, to acknowledge that something good happened to their bodies upon their deaths that doesn’t usually happen, even for the greatest of saints.
That’s the best I can do, Joe.
Bernard: I genuinely appreciate your effort to offer and explain your position. As you know, you and I are in very different places regarding some of the teachings of the Catholic Church. My own problems start with an unwillingness to separate ethical from doctrinal claims. If the mere authority of the Church, and I include in this the concept of authority extended over time in the form of Tradition, does not suffice to establish the truth of a claim in ethical cases, I do not see why it does in doctrinal cases. In so far as it does not in either case, there must be good reasons beyond authority to affirm something as true.
As I see it, religious claims can begin with a cerrtain analytic quality. I belong to such and such a religious tradition, such and such a religious tradition affirms thus and so, and therefore, I affirm thus and so. The moment of possible rupture comes, so it seems to me, when begins to ask is thus and so is true.
Neusner’s response to Ratzinger’s dialogue with him in his Jesus book (see Communio, Summer 2007) leaves me uneasy. He calls for a new age of disputation. But we remember the horrors of imposed Jewish-Christian disputation in the middle ages. I think religions should discuss their differences, but I think people in the field of “theology of religion” are often hermeneutically precipitous and presume too readily that the contradictions between Christianity and Judaism (or Islam or Buddhism) are easy to articulate and to put in propositional form. I note that in his response to Ratzinger, Neusner more or less concedes that his account of Jesus was not meant as a contribution to the “historical Jesus” debate (for which it was misappropriated by Ratzinger) but merely as an encounter with Matthew’s Jesus or with Jesus as commonly understood by Christians.
Someone above thinks that Jews and Christians can begin by agreeing on historical-critical methods of scripture reading. But these are a product of the Christian West. Are they embraced by Jewish scholars generally?
Neusner’s call for disputation reminds me of the second Islamic letter to the Pope, also stressing a point of disputation between Christianity and Islam, namely, the unity of God. I am for a theological debate, but not for these repristinations of old controversies that can only lead to wearying dogmatic tit-for-tat. The world of religious truth today is larger than can be encompassed in these doctrinal oppositions within monotheism.
Joe Petit,
I take it that the Church’s authority, both in moral and doctrinal matters, is part of the revelation embodied in the Tradition. Within this Tradition there is inquiry, i,e, theology, concerning the contents of Tradition and the proper way to articulate the contents.
I don’t see how one can investigate the truth of some fully established doctrine within the Tradition by testing it from some “neutral” standpoint, e.g. by applying some historical method. Accepting the Tradition, in the way that the Church presents it, is, when all is said and done, a matter of faith. Faith concerns that which is beyond external confirmation or falsification. This does not place it outside the realm of the true, provided that that realm is not, positivistically, reduced merely to the scope of the empirically verifiable.
Joe, I realize that you have been through all this before, but I offer it as the best I can do.
Bernard
Bernard: However many times I have revisited these issues, I never tire of doing so, but I certainly understand when others do.
Just to be clear, I do not believe that history is a “neutral” arbiter of theology. Rather, I think that historical study opens up possibilities for theological discussion. Like you, I think we begin with faith, and then seek to understand it. I believe that God finds us, we do not find God. Yet, I find neither of these truths to include much in the way of theological detail. Theology is the task of communicating faith and the reality of God seeking out humanity. Because my understanding of faith is relatively under defined, there are many questions that I can ask that others with a more detailed understanding of faith cannot. For example, I can ask if it is a theological mistake to do theology from an assumption of the unity of scripture. Here, I think history, combined with biblical study, becomes interesting. Biblical study gives some rather compelling suggestions that scripture is not a unity, and what are learning about the early centuries of the churches is entirely consistent with the creation of texts that were not unified. Thus, it is not that history “proves” anything one way or the other. Instead, it provides some, at times very compelling, support for the conclusion that scripture is not a unity. If, then, one concludes in the course of theological reflection, that scripture is not unified, it then becomes necessary to ask about the relationship of scripture to theology.
Joseph O’Leary: Do you really think it likely new Jewish-Christian debates would have any resemblance to the debates of the Middle Ages? It seems to me that such debates would serve a very important function; namely, to encourage Christians to revisit some parts of their theological tradition that are not always so coherently presented, such as original sin and the nature of redemption. On issues like this, I think that Jews would be invaluable conversation partners and would provide impressive challenges.
In many ways, Christianity missed out on an opportunity when it for centuries decided to do theology without confronting the challenges provided by their closest theological relatives, the Jews.
This thread is now sufficiently low on the Blog page that I imagine few will read this post, but, still, I offer it for what it is worth, call it an act of prayer.
In the civility thread above, there is a discussion about what it means to be prophetic, and the difficulty of cultivating civil discourse from within a prophetic paradigm. Thinking about that discussion in connection with this one, I realized that I had an opportunity to explain where I think Christianity can properly run with a Jewish idea, rather than highjacking them (Sometimes people ask me “Why don’t you just become Jewish? I have my reasons, and this is one of them)
The idea comes from what Abraham Joshua Heschel calls the Divine Pathos. I think Christians have a special ability to make this notion central to their religious life through meditation on the Cross. For Heschel, the Divine Pathos emerges from God’s fundamental relationship to creation, and humanity in particular, as a relationship of concern. For Heschel, God seeks humanity, God is even said to “need” humanity.
The prophets, according to Heschel, respond not first out of sympathy for humanity, but rather out of sympathy for God. This adds levels of both ultimacy and urgency to the sense of violation that the prophets experience whenever they see the world as contrary to what God wills for it, contrary to God’s concern for it. This is especially true when human dignity is violated.
In the end, all of us, according to Heschel, are called to be prophets. Not in the sense of making sweeping public condemnations, but in the sense of living our lives in sympathy for God. Christians, I think, through meditation on the Cross, can view the Cross as an icon of God’s suffering, and from daily reflection on this reality come to a conclusion very similar to that proposed by Heschel. The life of a Christian should be one of constant sympathy for God, and so of constant sympathy for God’s creation.
I will add that, contrary to “fun” form of being prophet, telling everyone off, the true prophetic voice should also have words of encouragement. Thus, a prophetic voice that is only strident is not truly a prophetic voice. This encouragement is required not just generally, but specifically for those against whom one speaks. Maybe this is the root of civility.
Joe P:
Do you mean to suggest that “a bruised reed he shall not break, and a smoldering wick he shall not quench?”
What a novel idea.
He’d never make it on a blog.
(P.S. Heschel is invoked upon quite a bit by von Balthasar.)
Yes, the Christian use of suffering servant imagery is one appeal to Jewish scripture that seems, potentially, quite proper. However, rarely is this text set within the context of what it means to be a prophet, and thus what is means truly to be human before God.
Within Christian tradition, however, the use of the text breaks on the rocks when the suffering becomes an exclusive means, and even more improperly, a requirement, for atonement and redemption.
Of course, the great horror of Christian history is that the tradition that gives Christianity this window into our uderstanding of God then must experience so much suffering at the hands of Christians.
The Cross should be an invitation to sympathy for God, not a source of triumphalism (not saying that any on this thread understand it in the latter sense, just that many in the history of Christianity have).