Within a year of the liberation of France from the Nazis, a book appeared in Paris by a prominent Catholic theologian expressing his abhorrence of anti-Semitism. Charles Journet, having witnessed the virtually limitless power of Jew-hatred, was determined that it no longer be perpetuated by Christians or in the name of Christianity. Yet Journet's attempt to reject anti-Semitism while at the same time maintaining a traditional Christian theology, with its traditional anti-Jewish elements, led him into an unresolved and un-resolvable dialectic. One passage in his Destinées d'Israël makes this clear. Journet took issue with the Jewish historian Joseph Klausner, who had wondered which was worse: death by persecution or death by a kiss (conversion) . In the face of the Holocaust, Journet confidently argued, there could be little doubt concerning the answer. This was especially true because “death” by conversion was in fact rebirth into a new life, in which Israel—disencumbered of its old Law—could fulfill its true destiny. On the other hand, he conceded, the Jewish people might, if it insisted, establish itself in its ancient homeland. Indeed, as a philo-Semite, Journet was bound to support such a venture. But what the Church Fathers had reiterated remained true: this people, after Christ, was no longer a people at all, but an aggregate of individuals who merely gave the appearance of being a people.

In 1945, then, the ancient nominalist-realist debate was still to be heard in Paris. In the same vein, Jacques Maritain was to be a most outspoken advocate of Zionism and later of the State of Israel, yet he too—with Saint Paul—was awaiting the eschatological moment when Israel would at last be true to its mission. During the two decades following the war, the Jewish question continued to be raised sporadically in Christian thinking. Then in the middle and late 60's there was a greater resurgence of interest, of which such declarations as those of Vatican II and the Reformed Church of the Netherlands (Israel: People, Land, and State) are products. The former stemmed from the desire of Pope John XXIII to introduce a radical transformation in the Christian portrayal of Jews and Judaism. Yet political pressure and conservative reaction corroded the formulations originally proposed. Indeed, in the opinion of many, the entire Vatican II statement on the Jews was nullified by being relegated to a section in a general schema on non-Christian religions. The Dutch declaration, as clearly as any other Christian theological pronouncement, evinces the same ambivalence—Israel elected and Israel rejected—as that found in Journet or Maritain or, on the Protestant side, Karl Barth.

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For all their ambivalence, however, Journet, Maritain, and Vatican II had opened a Pandora's box. Inevitably, someone could conclude that Christian anti-Judaism and Christian dogma were so interwoven that a change in one would perforce lead to a modification or reformulation of the other. Now a generation of Christian theologians, reacting in its own way to the Holocaust and to its implications for Christianity, has chosen to face these consequences. In three recent volumes, one Catholic and two Protestant thinkers have given us their latest analyses of the problem of the Jewish-Christian relationship.¹

Rosemary Radford Ruether's Faith and Fratricide, A. Roy Eck-ardt's Your People, My People, and Franklin H. Littell's The Crucifixion of the Jews all revolve around common themes and often point to identical or similar solutions. This is not surprising, since the writers know, read, and affect one another (the cynic might wonder whom else they affect). Like Journet and Maritain, all three take the Holocaust as their point of departure. Yet for them the destruction of European Jewry is far more crucial than it was for the two Frenchmen; they consider it a problem as pivotal for Christianity as it is for Judaism. In the view of Franklin Littell, the Holocaust is the most important theological event for Christianity of the 20th century, for the Church must now grapple with the dilemma of establishing Christian integrity while coming to terms with the Christian background of Nazi anti-Semitism. No longer are the anti-Semitic pronouncements of Christian tradition to be considered “respectable” merely because they have time and authority behind them; after the Third Reich, they are heresy. There is no choice for the Church but to create “theological space” for Judaism, whose rejection by Christianity has had the most momentous consequences in word and deed.

The three authors do not shrink from a radical response to this radical challenge: Judaism, they hold, has not been superseded. The old Israel has not been replaced by the new. Indeed, to ask the Jew to become a Christian is to imply he is less than he can be. And to say this is to invalidate the soil from which Christianity grew and hence to call its legitimacy into question. Thus we are given an appeal for an end to Christian missionizing and proselytizing, and an insistence that Jews be taken at their own self-understanding (Eckardt), that Jews “have a right . . . to self-identity and self-definition” (Littell). This in turn requires the formulation of a new covenantal theology or even with Eckardt, a demand that “all Christian theologizing about the Jewish people be somehow transcended.”

With these common principles, each book has its particular emphases. Faith and Fratricide is written by a Catholic, both a serious scholar in patristics and an original theologian. Others—Jews and Christians—have written histories of the anti-Semitic traditions in the gospels and the Fathers, expressed disapproval or confessed complicity, and stopped there. Ruether attempts to find a corrective to the situation through a rethinking of Christianity and an attempt to reconnect it with its Jewish roots. Drawing on an impressive variety of sources, she ably and pointedly illustrates the development of what she calls the “left hand of Christology”: an affirmation of Jesus as the Christ which entails, ipso facto, the vilification of Judaism. In her words, “the Jews assume the status of a people on probation who fail all the tests and finally are flunked out.” The theological displacement of the “old Israel” by the “new Israel” leads to a variety of dichotomies—law-grace, letter-spirit, Jews-Gentiles, Old Testament-New Testament—in which the second term of each pair is spiritualized and the first declared valid only so long as it serves as a substratum for the second.²

Ruether's task is to find a way of affirming her Christian faith while maintaining the integrity of Israel. The question she asks is: “Is it possible to say ‘Jesus is Messiah’ without, implicitly or explicitly, saying at the same time, 'and the Jews be damned?” Ruether answers “yes” but her “yes” carries a price tag for traditional Christian belief. For her, to say “Jesus is Messiah” is not to say that the world has been concretely redeemed. Rather, the resurrection experience is to be seen as proleptic—as pointing to future redemption. One may speak, then, of an “unfulfilled messianism” which, as in early Christianity, places renewed emphasis on the parousia (second coming). All religions may wait for the moment of redemption together, yet each religion is allowed to follow its own paradigm and not necessarily that of the Easter resurrection.

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The attempt to work out a covenantal theology is absent from Your People, My People, although Eckardt has made such an attempt in his earlier work. In fact, the somewhat unsystematic (although quite coherent) sequence of the book ably exemplifies the author's refusal to construct theological systems defining or confining the people Israel in any way. Your People, My People is a severe book; few of those who play a role in the contemporary drama of Jewish-Christian relations escape Eckardt's criticisms. He has no truck with Christian “liberals” whose love of “humanity” leads them into a hatred of any form of Jewish particularism, or with those, such as Quakers, whose one-sided view of the Middle East situation stems from an inherited legacy of Christian anti-Semitism. As for conservatives, Eckardt censures the framers of the declaration of the Reformed Church of the Netherlands for failing to admit an ongoing covenant between God and Israel and for insisting that God waits patiently (or impatiently) for Israel to recognize its true calling and become other than what it is. Even the fundamentalists, those very strange bedfellows of the Zionists, come under scrutiny, for Eckardt recognizes that they too will shift allegiances when the Jews fail to convert according to timetable. Nor does he confine his criticism to Christians; Jews too are called to account—the late Abraham Joshua Heschel for daring to suggest that the State of Israel may be a consolation prize for the Holocaust, and the Israeli writer Amos Elon who finds no justification for the state other than that it is a political f ail accompli.

Yet, perhaps understandably, Eckardt reserves his harshest words not for misguided Jews or Christian anti-Zionists but for Christians who have actually made gestures at lowering the barriers between the two faith-communities but whose gestures have remained only that. He adduces the case of Cardinal Bea, who expended much energy trying to promote a radical new declaration on the Jews from Vatican II. That he failed was surely not his fault, and it is not for this that Eckardt censures him, but rather for his attempt to whitewash the failure in his book, The Church and the Jewish People; there Bea justifies the final schema on non-Christian religions and the compromises it underwent with regard to the Jewish issue at the hands of conservative and pro-Arab prelates. Ironically, a Jewish reader might be less critical than Eckardt of Bea's book, and might sympathize with the Cardinal's struggle to demonstrate that the final formulations were not really so far from what was originally intended. Yet Eckardt is not a Jew but a Christian, and family arguments are always more acrimonious. No one, he notes, forced Bea to write this book in the first place; better not to speak at all than to endorse the ancient theology of Jewish election and rejection.

Your People, My People, was written on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, and Eckardt thus does not incorporate his reactions to the replay of Christian indifference or hostility to the fate of Israel that showed itself still very much alive at that time. Yet his remarkable reaction to the war—“The Devil and Yom Kippur” (Midstream, August-September 1974)—is an outgrowth of many of the themes discussed in this volume. Your People, My People is a severe book, but its severity is tempered with humor and faith, Eckardt believing with Kierkegaard and Niebuhr that “humor is second only to faith as a way of living with life's ironies and contingencies.”

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The Crucifixion of the Jews is in its own way no less harsh than Your People, My People. Like Ruether, Littell begins with the New Testament and the Fathers; like Eckardt, he places his main emphasis on modern anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. In his analysis, Littell points out how the process of abstraction and generalization now characteristic of Western education has prevented Christians from confronting the true character of Christian attitudes toward Judaism. Thus, Christians ignore the Holocaust because they can dismiss it as only one among a number of examples of genocide. In fact, he continues, the Jews themselves are an abstraction for the Christian, who invokes an artificial construct called “Judaism” (compare the Nazi use of Judentum) in order to avoid facing the reality of Jewish peoplehood. In this way, the old patristic allegories are revamped in contemporary socio-religious terms.

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II

If it is evident that these volumes convey a common message, it is not unreasonable to assume that they will also share a common fate. One can think of three possibilities. They may fall on receptive ears; they may fall on deaf ears; they may fall on hostile ears. It is probably too soon to say whether Eck-ardt, Littell, and Ruether will raise disciples. Rather, one may wonder whether more harm than good will come from their writings.

Many centuries of Jewish polemic were distilled into Martin Buber's declaration that the Jew feels “the world's lack of redemption . . . against his skin, he tastes it on his tongue, the burden of the unredeemed world lies on him.” Is Christianity now, after all this time, to give in? After two thousand years of Christian possession of the “truth,” is that truth now to be relativized? After proclaiming its mission to the world, is the Church to admit, in Ruether's words, that “in denying the Israel that makes God live, we have practiced a form of deicide”? Can Christianity, with Eckardt, prefer to “concede that the apostle [Paul] was in error . . . [on the question of the suspension of the election of Israel] rather than to try to make him say the opposite of what he in truth says”? Can it proclaim that “because we took the wonderful goodness of Christianity and changed it into God's misdeed, because we have transubstantiated that faith into a cancer of humanity, we can now only commit ourselves to the demise of whatever remains of Christianity lest worse crimes be done”? Are Christians, with Littell, to deem irrelevant the crisis put by Christianity to the Jewish people because “the central issue today is the crisis put to Christianity by a crucified and resurrected Jewry”?

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Such a radical turnabout in Christian self-understanding hardly seems likely, and it is perhaps for this reason that none of the writers discussed here trusts to the strength of theological systems alone for the success of his or her vision. Instead, all three advocate educational programs which are to alter, experientially, the ways in which Christianity relates to Judaism. Ruether suggests reforms or innovations in seminary curricula which will present Jewish tradition as a counterpoise to the Christian denial of it, which will come to grips with the anti-Jewish element in Christian thought, and which will insist on encounters with “living” Judaism. Littell proposes seminary study in Israel, in order “to dispel the idle vapors of a sentimental ‘spirituality,’ and renew the consciousness of a providential history involving real persons, concrete events, and specific commitments.” On a broader base, he suggests incorporating the observance of certain Jewish holidays into the Christian liturgical calendar. The original rending of Easter from Passover should be sewn up, while practices similar to Yahrzeit and Bar Mitzvah would introduce a consciousness of communal continuity and of deliberate personal commitment. Littell feels Christians can come to terms with the Holocaust by observing a day of remembrance in accordance with a liturgy which he publishes as an appendix to his volume.

Clearly, this effort to combat “the failure of Christians to understand the Jewish experience” (the subtitle of Littell's book) and to instill in Christians an awareness of the reality of the Jewish people and the concreteness of the background of their own faith is a departure more radical than any form of “dialogue” set forth thus far in Jewish-Christian relations. It remains to ask: in the face of such pronouncements as those of Eckardt and Littell, how should Jews respond? Certainly, A. J. Heschel's caveat on this point is well taken: dialogue is no activity for the uninitiated—one must come to it with rigorous preparation. The era of a volume like Dialogue, by J. S. Spong and J. D. Spiro,³ is over. For the book's adroit skirting of central issues and the concentration on fallacious similarities between the two faiths (both have festivals at the winter equinox, or Jesus was really a Reform rabbi) hardly stand up to the intense probing one finds in the volumes discussed above. On the other hand, Walter Jacob's Christianity Through Jewish Eyes⁴ stresses greater substance (views of Christianity by Jewish thinkers from Mendelssohn to the present) but lacks direction. In itself, it is no example of what it proclaims to illustrate: “the quest for common ground.”

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The content of interfaith dialogue—a better word might be communication—is becoming far too important to be left to the professional “dialoguers” and local clergy. As far as Jews are concerned, it is perhaps time for those segments of Jewry best qualified to discuss these matters—on the one hand, spokesmen for the traditional Jewish community, on the other hand, scholars and historians—to cease abdicating their responsibility to those least qualified. A. Roy Eckardt asks: “Who in fact builds for the future? He who desires to bury the past, refusing to allow any real link between his present behavior and that past? Or the human being who dedicates himself to redeeming the present consequences of the past?” The redemption Eckardt speaks of is a universal task.

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¹ Faith and Fratricide, by Rosemary Radford Ruether. Seabury, 294 pp., $9.50. Your People, My People, by A. Roy Eckardt. Quadrangle. 272 pp. . $7.95. The Crucifixion of the Jews, by Franklin H. Littell. Harper & Row, 153 pp., $7.95.

² So insidious is this process that the author herself is not completely liberated from it. The oral Torah is seen by her as “emancipating” Judaism from the priesthood and temple cult. In point of fact, the priest-prophet or priest-sage dichotomy is foreign to rabbinic Judaism, which views the priest and the cult as instruments of love and grace whose loss is to be mourned and not celebrated.

³ Dialogue: In Search of Jewish/Christian Understanding, by John Shelby Spong and Jack Daniel Spiro. Seabury, 109 pp., $3.50.

⁴ Christianity Through Jewish Eyes, by Walter Jacob. HUC-Ktav, 284 pp., $12.50.

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