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Introduction
 Surely one of the most evocative challenges to Christianity in the post-Constantinian, post-Modern period is the one that is stated so succinctly at the end of Irving Greenberg's seminal 1984 essay entitled, "The Relationship of Judaism and Christianity: Toward a New Organic Model."1 In this presentation, I shall use Rabbi Greenberg's concluding paragraphs in that essay as the basis of my attempt to address the topic announced for this fourth and final Plenary: "Power, Authority, and Responsibility in the Post-Holocaust Era: Reflections on God and Humanity." I did not devise that topic, and I may end by confusing the intentions of those who did; but as it happens, perhaps providentially, the three primary concepts named in the title of these deliberations (power, authority, and responsibility) are conspicuously present in the section of Dr. Greenberg's statement which I shall cite; and therefore I hope that in responding to his challenge, I shall also do some minimal justice to the intentions of the organizers.
Greenberg's essay, which is in fact a challenge to both of the religious communities under discussion, draws to a conclusion with proposals that I feel cannot be ignored by serious Christians today, and, more than that must strike such Christians as indicative of possibilities for a faithfulness seldom attained by historic Christianity. I shall quote the passage in its entirety:
One might suggest that the Holocaust has its primary impact on Judaism. Nevertheless, as a Jewish theologian, I suggest that Christianity also cannot be untouched by the event. At the least, I believe that Christianity will have to enter its second stage. If we follow the rabbis' model [Greenberg has developed this in the earlier part of the essay], this stage will be marked by a greater "worldliness" in holiness. The role of the laity would shift from being relatively passive observers in a sacramental religion to full (or fuller) participation. In this stage, Christianity would make the move from being out of history to taking power, i.e. taking part in the struggle to exercise power to advance redemption. The religious message would be not accepting inequality but demanding its correction. The movement is toward learning and understanding as against hierarchy and mystery. Christians--as Jews--will recover the true role of Israel/Jacob who struggles with God and with People, for the sake of God and humanity.
Unless this shift takes place, those Christians who seek to correct Christianity vis-a-vis Judaism will be blocked by the fact that within the New Testament itself are hateful images of Jews. Therefore humans must take full responsibility--not out of arrogance, not out of idolatry. It must be done without making God into the convenient one who says what one wants to hear. Out of the fullest responsibility towards its covenant partner, Christianity can undergo the renewal which I believe it must undertake.
The unfinished agenda of the Jewish-Christian dialogue is the recognition of the profound interrelationship between both. Each faith community experiencing the love of God and the chosenness of God was tempted into saying: I am the only one chosen. There was a human failure to see that here is enough love in God to choose again and again and again. Both faiths in renewal may yet apply this insight not just to each other but to religions not yet worked into this dialogue. Humans are called in this generation to renew the covenanta renewal which will demand openness to each other, learning from each other, and respect for the distinctiveness of the ongoing validity of each other. Such openness puts no religious claim beyond possibility but places the completion of total redemption at the center of the agenda.
Judaism as a religion of redemption believes that in ages of great destruction, one must summon up an even greater response of life and recreation. Nothing less than a messianic moment could possibly begin to correct the balance of the world after Auschwitz. This is a generation called to overwhelming renewal of life, a renewal built on such love and such power that it would truly restore the image of God to every human being in the world.
This marvelous statement, which succeeds as imperative because it is so obviously grounded in the indicative, that is, in the very being of the two faith communities, contains more food for thought than can properly be digested in a short presentation. My response to it, for reasons that I hope will become obvious in the process, will concentrate upon four aspects of what it proposes. First I shall speak briefly to the general framework of the quotation, which is the necessary impact of the Holocaust upon Christianity. Then I shall use specific directives of Greenberg's challenge to address (but in a different order) the three categories named in the topic of the Plenary: responsibility, power, and authority.
I
Christianity and the Holocaust
With great modesty, Rabbi Greenberg at the outset of the segment I have quoted suggests that while the Holocaust "has its primary impact on Judaism" Christianity can hardly be "untouched by the event." Unfortunately, Christian honesty compels us to admit that much Christianity perhaps even most, has been singularly unaffected by Auschwitz. To be sure, few Christians expressly ignore the event. Confronted explicitly by the horrors of the Holocaust for instance through a film like Schindler's List--most Christians will express sorrow and a few something verging on repentance. Yet for the majority forms of our faith, I fear, the Holocaust has not produced the kind of self-knowledge that issues in new consciousness of the effects of our doctrine, not only our practices, upon "the other"--notable and first or all, the Jewish other.
To illustrate: Within the past month I attended the convocation of a well-known Christian theological college in my country. In Canada, theological colleges are usually affiliates of large universities; and it happens that the chancellor of the university of which this particular seminary is part is a Jewish woman. As chancellor, she was visibly and indeed officially the most prominent person in the ceremony. Despite this, and despite the fact that the convocation took place, not in a Christian church or chapel but in the convocation hall of the secular university, the entire proceedings--with hymns, prayers, addresses, charges to the graduands and all else--assumed a Christendom context of the most blatant and unreflective type. Christian triumphalism, with its inevitable corollary of supercessionsism vis-a-vis Judaism, was rampant throughout. There is no way of measuring such feelings, of course, but I doubt very much that more than a handful of persons in that sizable assemble of Christians asked themselves, "How is all of this being heard by our Jewish chancellor?"2
We dare not exaggerate, therefore, the post-Holocaust sensitivity of Christians. Nevertheless, humbly and gratefully we must recognize that a minority amongst Christians--a significant minority, I believe--has begun to develop the imagination and the courage that are needed to bring to bear upon Christian faith and life the "impact" that Greenberg believes the Holocaust must have as this consultation, amongst other things, attests. And if we are to speak here about "the implications [of Jewish-Christian encounter] for preaching and teaching ministries of the church" (as the announcement of this event says that we are), then the most conspicuous task of this minority is to create within the larger Christian community an atmosphere of critical reflection, in which the Holocaust is seen, not only as an horrendous event of modern history, but precisely as a challenge to Christians to rethink their own faith--their theology, not only their practice. For, as Gregory Baum asserted in his introduction to Rosemary Ruether's Faith and Fratricide, while Christians as Christians did not engineer the mass murder of Jews under Hitler, such an occurrence could never have taken place apart from the centuries of "contempt" for Judaism and Jews inspired by ecclesiastical teaching and practice.3
In my Thinking the Faith, I proposed that the impact of the Holocaust upon Christianity can be characterized by the dubious adjectives "negative" and "positive," because negations are often highly positive in effect.4 The most salutary "negative" teaching of the Holocaust, it seems to me, is that it demonstrates in an horribly graphic manner the real, if usually hidden, consequences of Christian triumphalism. Christians who become conscious of the Holocaust and its implications for Christianity can no longer assume that is possible to present the gospel of Jesus as the Christ with such finality as empirical Christianity has done, and remain innocent of the crimes and horrors that occur, and always have occurred, within the sphere of influence of such an account of reality. Ideologies of triumph create victims whether they are secular doctrinaire Marxism or sacred; and history seems to indicate that sacred ideologies are on the whole more effective and enduring in the process of victimization than are the secular ones, whose flaws are less camouflaged by appeal to the supernatural.
Whether this "negative" lesson from Auschwitz has yet passed over into the realm of the "positive" that it silently assumes remains for me a question. It is one thing for Christians to recognize that their doctrine and practice has begotten arrogance with respect to the parental faith, an arrogance whose implicit virulence always required some kind of enactment; but it is something else for Christians to come to understand that this is a familial affair--that the first faith excluded by the triumphal Christian offspring is indeed the parental faith, a faith whose foundations are our foundations, foundations that cannot be rejected without dire consequences, foundations therefore that must somehow be recovered for the sake of our own authenticity.5
It was none other than Paul who, with some justification, Martin Buber and others identify as the first divider of Christianity from its Judaic roots, who provided the rudimentary rationale why such a division is always illegitimate: "...if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the rich root of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches. If you do boast remember that it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you." (Rom. 11:27-28).
By the logic of this rationale, however ambiguous may be some of its language, the final impact of the renunciation of Judaism symbolized for Christians by the Holocaust must be not only the ("negative") recognition that we have pretended to victorious finality that we cannot sustain without victimization and exclusion, not to mention delusion, but the ("positive") acknowledgement and recovery of our membership within" the tradition of Jerusalem."6 As Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in one of his final works, while Christianity is "commonly believed to be a joint product of Hebraic and Hellenic cultures" and "has embodied in its own life the permanent tension between the Greek and the Hebraic ways of apprehending reality," "This does not change the fact that when it is true to itself [Christianity] is Hebraic rather than Hellenic."7
We Christians have still, I think, a very long way to go before we shall have reclaimed that Hebraic heritage that is the sine qua non of our "being true to ourselves," i.e. of Christian authenticity. The "impact" of the Holocaust upon Christianity is a best--even amongst the minority that has become sensitive to it--in process. If that process is to approximate the goal that is its potential, it must consider dialogue with Jewish thinkers and people not only something from which it may benefit, but something absolutely necessary. If Christians turn to Jews today, and are wise, they will do so, not out of charity or mere "interest," and certainly not out of the politeness of those Brotherhood Weeks of the immediate past, but out of sheer necessity. Our future--Christian future!--depends upon the right recall of our past, namely our deepest past; and that past, which has been obscured by so much of our own doctrinal as well as political past, i.e. by Christendom, is better remembered and, on the whole, better lived by Jews than by most of us.
That is why it is not surprising that one can find in the statement of a Jewish theologian, Irving Greenberg, such an accurate expression of what the process of assimilating the meaning of the Holocaust entails for Christians. Three of his directives now become the substance of what follows.
II
Worldly Holiness
The "second stage" into which Dr. Greenberg feels Christianity after Auschwitz "will have to enter" is, first of all, one that "will be marked by a greater 'worldliness' in holiness." He places the term "worldliness" in semi-quotes, for the obvious reason that he does not intend by this the kind of mindless celebrationism that is practiced in some bourgeois religious circle today and, in the sixties, acquired a species of ecclesiastical legitimacy under the nomenclature of "secular theology." In an insightful discussion of the similarity between Greenberg and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Larry Rasmussen has made this point very effectively. Like Bonhoeffer, Rasmussen argues, Greenberg intuits a decisive "break" with the past, namely the "religious" past of both Christianity and Judaism: they are called by the God who refuse to govern the world without the human covenant partner, to take responsibility in and for the "fate of the earth" (Schell). They must not use God's sovereignty and dominium to excuse themselves from this responsibility. But, says Rasmussen, this break with the religious past does not warrant for either thinker the adoption of a complacent or simplistically celebrative attitude towards the secular world, as if it were already fully redeemed. Later uses of Bonhoeffer's thought, Rasmussen writes, "such as Harvey Cox's Secular City and William Hamilton's Life in Stride, have badly understood this. Bonhoeffer and his colleagues were interpreted as bold partisans of Enlightment confident and ardent champions of modernity. This was true in the most carefully qualified sense.8
The historical background against which Christians ought to hear what Greenberg, along with Bonhoeffer and many other recent Christian commentators, have said concerning the necessity of Christian world-orientation, is not modernity, with its renunciation of transcendence and its elevation of human rationality, but rather the abiding ambiguity of empirical Christianity in regard to this world. While (as I shall maintain in the subsequent section) Christian religious triumphalism has led nearly every form of Christendom to seek to possess and control the world, the other side of this strange coin has been a recurrent distaste for creation, all the way from outright renunciation of matter, including the body, to the mild but corrosive fear of the pious that a too consistent attachment to this world would be tantamount to distancing oneself from God. If the worldly imperialism of Christendom is its inheritance from imperial Rome, its temptation to world-abandonment is its heritage from the hellenic and hellenistic side. We cannot seem to make up our minds, as Christians, whether the world is to be taken over and made to conform to Christ or whether it is (in the words of the great American evangelist, Dwight L. Moody) "a wrecked vessel" from which Christian are to flee with as many saved souls as they can muster.9
On the whole, when it comes to the question of holiness, Christian spirituality has been decisively otherworldly. While Christians could never simply ignore this world, the piety they have most admired is the type that passes through all the trials and tribulations of earthly existence with its faith firmly orientated towards the distant shore. Indeed, redemption as such--to which Greenberg's challenge calls us--has regularly implied for the most belief-ful Christian believers what amounts to redemption from the world. The dispensationalism that has been a conspicuous element of our North American religious history and has been given what is probably its most blatant expression in Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth, is not, I think, the sheer aberration that liberal Christians frequently assume, but an exaggerated variation on the theme that permeates nearly every conventional hymn and prayer of Christendom: namely, the lesson that the end--the telos--of "it all" is that postmundane life in which all the inevitable pain and sorrow of this life will be erased.
[It is strictly consistent with this understanding of holiness when it happens, as (with variations) it has happened in all ecclesiastical histories, that the laity is assigned a status farther away from the source of the holy. For unlike the clergy, the lay person has his or her vocation in the world. Indeed, until Luther redeemed somewhat the term "vocation" for use in a worldly sense, it was applied exclusively to priestly and more particularly monastic calling. When, therefore, Irving Greenberg follows his observations about the "worldly holiness" of Christianity in its "second stage" with an immediate reference to the new role of the laity he shows, almost, an insider's intuition. For the worldly holiness that he counsels is one that would necessarily entail the cessation of this dual classification of Christians and the achievement, amongst the laos, of "full participation"--active rather than "passive" participation--in the worldly mission of the people of God. While thoughtful Christians have been advocating such a change for decades, it has not, I think, occurred with any kind of consistency or intentionality in most Christian denominations; and part of the reason for this, I believe, is that the admonition to full lay participation has not been accompanied by anything like a serious theological renovation. Such a renewal of theological reflection would not only throw in question the tendency to perpetuate ontological distinctions between lay and clerical Christians, but (more importantly) it would necessitate a depth of comprehension on the part of the laity beyond anything so far attained in Christendom.
I shall return to this in Part IV.]
At base, the kind of "worldly" holiness of which Greenberg speaks is a holiness that comes with commitment to and gratitude for life--creaturely life. Precisely this life affirmation, which is not to be equated with naive acceptance of the status quo, has been wanting in most expressions of Christian faith and dogma. There are many reasons for our being "half in love with easeful death"--amongst the resignations that is, in part, our inheritance for Stoicism; the "Nordic melancholy" (Barth) that is perhaps indigenous to peoples whose placement in the world is cold and dark and rocky (hence to much Protestantism!); or the sheer psychic and physical reality of "finitude in anxious selfawareness" (Tillich's definition of sin). But at the level of doctrine perhaps nothing has fostered our preoccupation with suffering, death and the afterlife to which death is allegedly the portal as has our handling of the cross that is at the center of our story and, even more directly, the resurrectionism that issues from this.
As one who tries to recover the import of what Luther called theologia crucis, I feel a particular need to redirect this misplaced piety of the cross. The central point of the centrality of Jesus' passion and death is not its demonstration of the inevitability of death, the assurance of God's presence with us even as we walk that road, and the reward that awaits us on "the other side;" it is rather its revelation of the depths of the divine commitment to life. Through sin, death has become the preoccupation of the human creature, preventing us from entering wholeheartedly into the life that is the Creator's gift. The whole strategy of the God of the Gospel, a strategy of which the doctrine of the Trinity is in its way an attempt to depict and explain, is directed towards the turning (metanoia) of the human spirit from death to life, from inevitability to possibility, from passivity to active participation, from sloth to responsibility. Paradoxically and as the core of biblical paradox, the death of the Christ testifies to the divine commitment to life: God will enter so unqualifiedly into the heart of our darkness because God is not willing to abandon the creation to darkness. It is this life-commitment of the biblical God that informs the whole story told in the continuity of the Testaments: life which to be sure, extends beyond the historical and physical sphere, but which incorporates creaturehood and hallows it.10
The object of this incarnational stratagem of the God of the Gospel is not only, however, to bring men and women to the glad acceptance of their own creaturehood; it is to beget in them the sense of their unique creaturely vocation--what Bonhoeffer called their "responsibility towards history."11 I have had the same thing in mind in my various attempts to articulate the meaning of the biblical metaphor of stewardship.12 We are "steward of the mysteries of God" (I Cor. 4:1), the ultimate and normative mystery of which is the disposition of a love that will suffer for the world's redemption (John 3:16). I think we shall not have understood the cross until we have been grasped by the same manner of world-commitment that impels the Creator to become acquainted with death for the sake of the life of the groaning creation. This life-orientation, which has been so central in the faith of the Jews, must surely become at last the matrix for our Christian understanding of redemption through the One who was obedient unto death. Responsibility for the world will only be undertaken by those who believe that the "fate of the earth" matters ultimately.
III
Power To Redeem
The second emphasis of Greenberg's challenge relates to the first noun of our topic as announced: power. In its "second stage," he writes, "Christianity would make the move from being out of history to taking power, i.e. taking part in the struggle to exercise power to advance redemption."
This is undoubtedly the most complex--potentially the most dangerous--counsel for Christians. Because from Constantine13 onwards, Christians have had power! So far as Western history is concerned (and perhaps one may generalize beyond the West), no religion has ever been so powerful as the Christian religion. It was precisely the power of Christendom, including the successive empires that were inspired and blessed by the Christian religion, that enabled it to render other religions and ways of life powerless, or relatively so. The Holocaust itself, as we have already noted, was in some undeniable way a consequence of Christian power. And here is a Jewish Theologian insisting that Christians, in their "second stage," should "take power." Is this not dangerous counsel?
It is dangerous, I think, if it is heard by Christians who have not yet pondered the contradiction between their gospel of divine "suffering love" (agape), the love of One who "so loved the world" (John 3:16), and their ambiguous history, a history limping awkwardly between world renunciation and world-dominance. Recently, I was involved with Rabbi Greenberg in an event sponsored by a Roman Catholic college in the American midwest. Each of us was requested to address the question, "Why Believe in God Today?" and to do so in a personal and even an autobiographical manner. As I listened to Irving Greenberg tell of the way in which his belief in God was both defied and, ultimately, strengthened by reflection upon the Holocaust, an event that claimed the lives of many of his close relatives, a critical theological-historical question formed itself in my mind: How can one explain the fact that while a people, the Jews, who had to face death so perpetually, end by affirming life so enthusiastically, another people, the Christians, who were so remarkably in charge of the dance of life through three-quarters of their history, end by being as preoccupied with death and the hereafter as we have been? When I put this question to Dr.Greenberg, he graciously admitted (as he does also in the essay from which I have been quoting here that Jews too have often courted otherworldliness. This may be so; but it does not explain Christian duplicity in relation to this world.
The answer to my question so far as the Christian religion is concerned has, I believe, a good deal to do with the fact and the nature of the power that Christendom has wielded. While it may be a matter of ambiguity that Christendom has tried to possess and rule the very world that it wishes, religiously, to transcend, the ambiguity is not a full fledged contradiction. There is, it seems to me, a fatal logic of power that almost ensures that such an ambiguity will arise from its deployment. Surely the pious Christian pursuit of "otherworld" has something to do with Christendom's all too successful attempt to dominate this world. For in possessing, in ruling, in having, do we not regularly kill, or render less desirable, the very thing we seek to possess and master? Judaism did not "have" the world. It was never empire. Israel always lived on the edge of empire--usually as empire's victim. That it was tempted to imperialism is clear enough from the testimony of the prophets during times of Israel's prosperity; but it was never permitted to achieve the power that it sometimes coveted.
And was it not partly for that very reason that Judaism was able, in a way that great "possessing" religions of the world have not been able, to appreciate the world's goodness, mystery, and livingness? Israel did not have to suffer the burden and illusion of ownership. It was denied that kind of power--therefore the power that it pursued, and with remarkable consistency and imagination, was the power of the powerless, namely, the power of truth, of wisdom, of the thirst for justice, of passion for the good. Surely it is not accidental that Judaism, a religion whose adherents for most of their Western history could not possess property, could not hold high office, could not attend universities like Oxford and Cambridge and (until 1950) Harvard14, produced a disproportionately large number of scholars, artists, musicians, philosophers and political thinkers. The power that reflective Judaism has explored, and in a way that, if not unique, is historically rare, is the power of those whose exclusion from power taught them to seek a qualitatively different kind of power.
It is clearly that different kind of power that Irving Greenberg is grasping for in his counsel to the Christian movement in its "second phase." His very language mirrors the point: "Christianity would make the move from being out of history (otherworldly) to taking power, that is, taking part in the struggle to exercise power to advance redemption." It is a rather awkward sentence, this. Fortunately! Because it is impossible to speak of this subject, power, and especially to speak of it as a Jew speaking to Christians, without betraying the essence of what one means. Even though--or perhaps because!--Greenberg believes firmly in the necessity of the modern state of Israel, he is extremely conscious of the perils of power. Rabbi Dow Marmus of Toronto writes: "Power is the essential tool of sovereignty, but it is also the tool of imperialism--that is why it has to be exercised (in Irving Greenberg's felicitous phrase) with the memory of powerlessness. Unless we remember that, for much of our history, we have been the underdog, that history will have been rendered meaningless and the Jewish state will be indistinguishable from every other state..."15
Communicating such a nuanced understanding of power to Christians is very difficult, even for Christian theologians and ethicists, as the whole lifework of Reinhold Niebuhr testifies. In my own work I have been loath to use the term power in a positive sense for this very reason. For in a real way it is precisely the habit of power that Christians must unlearn. We must learn again the Pauline lesson, the ecclesiological dimension of the theology of the cross, that "when we are weak, then we are strong" (II Cor. 12:10). For one thing, the voluntary adoption of Christian "weakness" is the only way in which, especially in dominant cultures like our own, Christians may experience anything approaching solidarity with those who are oppressed by power.
On the other hand, the Christian piety which glorifies weakness and therefore refuses to involve itself in the struggle of life against death is a capitulation to the condition Greenberg means by "being out of history." What he counsels is neither an historical passivity nor the kind of activism that pursues power as an end in itself, but (as he puts it) "power to advance redemption."
What would it mean for the Christian church to struggle to exercise power "to advance redemption," or rather, "to take part in" that struggle? Negatively speaking, it would mean that the church would be required to engage in a prolonged and subtle critique of its own tendencies, centuries in the making, to seek power for itself. Christianity can no longer legitimately assume that "redemption" is an exclusively Christian mission and that, therefore, acquiring more people and more influence for the church is ipso facto redemptive activity. If redemption is a worldly category; if it means the hallowing and the fulfillment of life, as not only Irving Greenberg but the Jesus of John's Gospel (e.g. 10:10) insists, that its "advancement" has to be directed towards this world, and all the "means of grace" are means to that end. The church itself is only means. The end that it serves is one that infinitely transcends it own successes and failures.
That is why it seemed to me such a sign of hope when the world Council of Churches at its Sixth General Assembly (Vancouver, 1983) adopted as its whole task the theme, "Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation." With this theme the World Council, for the first time in its history, set aside any explicitly confessional reference to its vocation and in doing so, not only made it possible for others, non-Christians, to associate themselves with it, but came directly to the point of its worldly discipleship. This did not mean that the Christian confession was ignored or reduced to ethics, as some proposed; on the contrary, the complex and even overwhelming worldly task that was named by the motto, "Justice, Peace and The Integrity of Creation," required of the Council more original theological reflection than did most of the explicitly doctrinal mottos of the past Assemblies of the Council. For it was soon realized that the Christian contribution to the solution of the three "great instabilities" (Charles Birch) assumed by this motto would have to be more profound than a merely moral recognition of their seriousness or a sloganized and self-promotional public announcement of Christian "concern." If there were to be anything distinctive in this contribution to worldly redemption, it would require a depth of meditation upon the foundations of the faith seldom if ever demanded by themes that are blatantly religious and Christian from the outset.
I shall not comment here on the outcome of this exercise16, for my present reference to it is meant only to illustrate something of the character of the power that can be called upon by a faith-movement whose political power can no longer be relied upon. Earlier I called that power the power of wisdom, of an accumulated tradition of reflection constituting a perspective for decision and change. David Novak, Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia, has made this point insight fully in an essay entitled, "A Jewish Understanding of Christianity in Our Time." Both Jews and Christians, he affirms, have a certain advantage where most of the great ethical problems of our time are concerned; for both have "a tradition" (and it is largely a shared one) from which to consider questions of justice, race, ecology, sexuality and other issues of contemporary moment; and this is not an incidental boon, for the moral lostness of our society is at best precisely the loss of any such perspective. For instance, "...Jews and Christians, both informed by what they have learned about the integrity of creation from the Hebrew Bible, need not try to invent ecological ethics de novo. Indeed, that project itself is trapped in a paradox: How does one invent a criterion for containing invention?...Rather, Jews and Christians have a resource for developing approaches that both respect the integrity of creation and the integrity of the unique human creature therein, one who is in some ways part of it, and in some ways is not."17
I conclude this section, then, by observing that, whatever the taking-part-in-power-to-advance-redemption may mean for contemporary Jews, and notably for the state of Israel, for Christians, who have heretofore "enjoyed" great political power and ought to recognize its false promises, such participation must mean taking hold of the quite different power that lies in the deeper traditions of the faith--traditions that had to be set aside or compromised, usually, for the sake of the kind of power that Christendom coveted. What Christians have going for them, if they will at last recognize the fact, is not fifteen centuries of geopolitical prominence and influence in high places, but an account of reality, the faithful memory of which is the very stuff out of which hope is made.
But this leads me to the final consideration, perhaps the most important of Greenberg's proposals--though it is thrown into his essay almost at random, and though I shall have to abbreviate my own response to it.
IV
Learning and Understanding
Here, having at least nodded in the direction of the first two subjects of our topic (power and responsibility), we come to the third: authority. For the greater part of its history, the Christian religion has relied upon the kind of authority that accompanies political power and does not have to justify itself by evidence of its human and worldly responsibility. Ironically, most Christianity has mirrored rather consistently the authority of those "scribes" whose official authority Matthew's gospel contrasts with the genuine authority of Jesus, whose teaching authenticated itself (Matt. 7:29). Still today, reduced as is our social status, Christian bodies tend to make pronouncements that quietly assume they will bear weight because it is the church that speaks. And still today, within our own ranks (ranks!), authority can be meted out hierarchically and the hierarchy can still assume--or they do!--that their directives will be honored because of their status.18
But now, says Greenberg, another conception of authority is being called for. "The movement," as he puts it, "is toward learning and understanding as against hierarchy and mystery." In view of the one dimensionality of most ecclesiastical life in our context today, I wish that Greenberg had used the word "mystification" here rather than "mystery." I think that is what he intended. For the church has survived (and sometimes seemed to thrive) on the supposition that its doctrine transcended the limits of ordinary intelligence and, if not wholly ungraspable by the laity, required such prodigious feats of sanctity that only those prepared to devote their lives to it could ever approximate understanding.
Classical Protestantism, in both its Lutheran and Reformed expressions, profoundly challenge this mystification of Christian thought, at one level; but at another, in its struggle against sacerdotalism it tended so to elevate scholarship that in the end, particularly during the heyday of Protestant Scholasticism, it had the effect of replacing the priestly hierarchy of Rome with a hierarchy of learning. The laity might be taught catechisms and creeds and required to listen to long sermons; but in spite of some undoubted gains at certain high points in its history Classical Protestantism has ended, today, with a truly abysmal gulf fixed between a scholarly minority that often feels little commitment to the churches and a lay majority that fluctuates between religious simplism, anti-intellectual activism, and sheer confusion.
The only authority that Christianity can legitimately claim; the only authority that was ever authentic for this faith; the only authority, certainly, that it can seek as it is edged out of the center and caused by historical providence to share the religious periphery with many others is the authority of "the word"--that is, the authority of those who "stand under authority" (Luke 7:8), who are grasped by a truth that they cannot contain, who sense a meaning that they cannot reduce to propositions and system, who wrestle with a Spirit who will not let them go and whom they will not let go until they are blessed.
It was just this kind of authority that Judaism in its "second stage" had to experience if it was to survive. As Rabbi Greenberg writes, "In this stage, God is more hidden, Judaism is more worldly. In this stage, the human matures and the covenantal model leads to greater responsibility for human beings." Just at this point, the synagogue, "a secondary institution before the destruction" (of the temple), becomes vital to the life of Israel, and the rabbis teach that "to see God everywhere, one must understand," and that "The key to religious understanding is learning."
The Jewish people, in biblical times an ignorant peasantry, awed by sacramental, revelatory experience in the temple, were [now] trained by the rabbis to learn and study. Now that God no longer speaks directly, how would one know what God wants? The answer is to go to the synagogue...19
Here at last we glimpse what Greenberg has in mind when he employs the term, "second stage," and applies it to both Judaism and Christianity, though at different times in their respective histories. The "second" stage is second in relation to a "first" stage in which the faith of those concerned has been, not automatic, certainly, but generated and perpetuated by social and religious factors that did not require of the faith community an original wrestling with the substance of their belief, and did not plunge them into direct responsibility for their life and the life of their world. With the destruction of the temple and the dispersion of the Jewish people, those societal and religious factors were profoundly altered. "Learning and understanding" were now no longer pursuits of the few wise ones whose relative leisure and aptitude made such activity possible but the survival strategem of a people, all of whose members must at some level of seriousness devote themselves to disciplined recall of the tradition as it impinged upon the problematique of the present.
And is this not precisely the "stage" at which Christianity finds itself today? It would be absurd to attempt to draw an exact parallel between Judaism at the time of its dispersion and Christianity as it undergoes the process of de-Constantinianization. For one thing (and it is determinative), Christianity experiences its dispersion as a religion that has known centuries of imperial establishment; and therefore, as we saw especially in the discussion of power, there can be no question of an easy translation of the Jewish experience into Christian experience. But particularly where our present subject, "learning and understanding," is concerned, the parallel is very close. Just as first century Judaism could no longer depend upon the ritual and mystique of the temple to perpetuate faith but had to call the whole people to the synagogue and the life of learning, so the Christian movement, denied its accustomed place in the life of Western cultures, can no longer assume that generation after generation will be swept into its sanctuaries by the sheer force of convention and must therefore engage in an original and ongoing struggle with its tradition and attempt to extend this struggle to all of its members. For without such "learning and understanding" nothing can withstand the winnowing process that is by now well under way and will undoubtedly increase in the decades ahead. The authority of Christianity is dependent from now on on its own internal capacity to persuade, convict, and change. We are entering the age of theology!
Conclusion
Accordingly, I shall end these reflections with a quotation from another Jewish thinker, one who I have mentioned in passing, Professor David Novak. Under the heading, "The Post-Modern Opportunity for Jews and Christians," Dr. Novak writes:
In our age, when the pretensions of the enlightenment are becoming more and more apparent, Jews and Christians who still believe that their respective religious traditions can speak to them, and to the world beyond them as well, now have an important opportunity to speak to each other in a new way. If thoughtful members of both communities are adequately aware of the moment they now occupy in history, and are prepared to research their respective traditions for the resources there to be developed for this moment, the Jewish-Christian relationship has a good chance of becoming something more enriching than it has ever been heretofore. Here is where the theological challenge lies, understanding "theology" in its wider rather than its stricter sense.20
The key phrase in this statement is the phrase, "If thoughtful members of both communities are adequately aware of the moment they now occupy in history..." It is a moment of vast change, creaturely upheaval, and (to quote Greenberg) "great destruction." For the Christian as well as the Jewish faith it is a moment of profound internal questioning--something that is new especially for Christians, whose long establishment bred complacency and thoughtlessness. But as Elie Wiesel has said at the end of his great novel, The Town Beyond the Wall, if two questions confront and recognize each other, the consequence may be far more productive of genuine renewal and hope than any number of answers could be.
Endnotes
1. In "Perspectives," Quarterly Review, Vol. 4, No. 4, Winter 1984: pp. 1-11.
2. An instructive account of the subtlety of anti-Jewish behaviour in the "New World" context is given by John Rousmaniere in A Bridge to Dialogue; New York: New York: Paulist Press, 1991; pp. 88-103.
3. N.Y. Seabury, 1974; p. 7
4. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1989; pp. 210 ff.
5. I am sympathetic to Hayim Goren Perelmuter's presentation of Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity at Their Beginnings as Siblings (the title of the book). At the same time, I feel it is more accurate and also more important strategically to speak of the relation of Christianity to Judaism as that of child and parent. The sibling concept, while accurate enough where rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are concerned, too easily allows Christians to neglect or relativize their Hebraic origins and ethos. (New York: Paulist Press, l989)
6. I borrow the term "tradition of Jerusalem" from the Canadian philosopher-theologian, George Grant, who used it to distinguish the Hebraic from the Hellenic foundations of our civilization, For me it both incorporates that distinction and stands as a reminder of the fact that Christian and Jews share a common heritage.
7. The Self and the Dramas of History; reissued by the University Press of America (Lanham, N.Y.) in l983; pp. 89-90. (First published in 1955).
8. With Renate Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and His Significance for North Americans; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990; p. 120.
9. Quoted by Howard Clark Kee et al., eds., Christianity: A Social and Cultural History; N.Y.: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1991; p. 696.
10. I have argued in Thinking the Faith (op.cit., pp. 22 ff.) that Luther's theologia crucis should be seen as being based, not only on Paul, but on his reading of the Psalms and prophets. What Abraham Heschel in his definitive work, The Prophets, claims concerning "divine compassion" as the "ground tone" of prophetic consciousness is very close to Luther's conception of the God revealed at Golgotha.
In that place, I have also quoted Bonhoeffer at length--his late insistence that the cross of the Christ reveals God's determination that "This world must not be prematurely written off." This is reminiscent of Greenberg's assessment of Christian otherworldliness: "In its faithfulness to its vision of Christ come--pitted against the shocking reality of a world of suffering and evil and poverty--Christianity is continually tempted to answer: 'This vale of tears is not the real world. The world of suffering and oppression does not matter. It is trivial or secondary. The world that really counts is the spiritual world. That is where you can be born again--and free right now.' But this finding betrays the fundamental claim of Judaism that life itself and not only life afterwards will be perfected." ("The Relationship of Judaism to Christianity," op.cit., p.4)
11. Letters and Papers from History, ed. by Eberhard Bethge, trans. by R. Fuller, John Bowden, et al.; New York: Macmillan, 1972; p. 7.
12. See The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Come of Age; The Stewardship of Life in the Kingdom of Death; and Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship, all published by Eerdmans of Grand Rapids.
13. In his essay, "Toward a Process of Healing": Understanding the Other as a Person of God," Rabbi Leon Klenicki notes, amongst the various prejudices that Jews must overcome it they are to "understand" the Christian "Other" is "the memory of Constantine." I would say that while it is gracious of the Jewish thinker to write this, a better approach where Christians are concerned would be for Jews to help Christians remember what the constantinianization of the Christian religion meant for non-Christians! This might help the Christians to reconsider what it meant for them as well.
14. Re. Harvard (and Yale), according to John Rousmaniere "Until the 1950s, and in some cases later,...those institutions either banned Jews altogether or enforced rigid quotas." The same thing has been claimed of my university, McGill. (Op.Cit., p. 89)
15. From an unpublished lecture entitled, "Judaism After the Holocaust," given in Toronto on November 11, l991, at the Toronto Jewish Book Fair; p. 19.
In his Beyond Innocence and Redemption: Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power, Mark H. Ellis is critical of Greenberg and other "Holocaust theologians" for their justification of power in relation to the state of Israel. Quoting Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht's 1983 book The Fate of the Jews, Ellis writes: "The heritage of the Jews is not power but ethics..." While I find much to approve in Ellis's work, I have the impression that Greenberg is well aware of the perils of power (as Marmur says); besides, can one apply to a small nation like Israel the same critical questions concerning power that one applies to imperial peoples?
16. For my assessment of the"JPIC" Process, see Premen Niles, ed., Between the Flood and the Rainbow (publication details later)
17. In Klenicki, ed., op.cit., pp.96-97.
18. See for example H. Jung's discussion of the role of the papacy in his Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, trans. by John Bowden; N.Y. Crossroads: 1991; pp.624 ff.
19. Greenberg, "The Relationship of Judaism and Christianity," op.cit., p. 7
20 "A Jewish Theological Understanding of Christianity," in Klenicki, ed., op.cit., pp.94-95. |
