Chosen peoples.

For the Sake of Heaven and Earth

The New Encounter beween Judaism and Christianity

Irving Greenberg 

The Jewish Publication Society, $20, 274 pp.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg has been one of the leading figures in American Jewish communal life for three decades. A rather unorthodox Orthodox rabbi, he has worked tirelessly and courageously among both Jews and Gentiles to raise awareness of the significance of the Holocaust, to assess the practical and theological import of the emergence of a Jewish state in his lifetime, and to improve relations among the various movements in Judaism. He has performed these services in a wide array of contexts--as a professor of Jewish Studies, as a congregational rabbi, and as the president of more than one influential communal organization.

The present volume reflects Greenberg's passionate and longstanding involvement in Jewish-Christian dialogue. His own contribution is followed by brief reflections from five respondents, both Christian and Jewish. These are mostly in the manner of uncritical encomia, but (as we shall see) they occasionally raise a valuable objection. The book closes with a study guide.

The "new encounter between Judaism and Christianity" to which the subtitle refers, is the product of the post-Holocaust shift in Christian practice from the "teaching of contempt" to a more appreciative understanding of Judaism in all its periods and of the continuing role of the Jewish people in the economy of salvation. The shift has already been well-documented, but Greenberg's personal reminiscences are illuminating and reveal a generous and compassionate sensibility along with a refreshing openness to correction and reformulation. Particularly moving are the accounts of how he came to rethink the negative stereotypes of Christianity that he imbibed in his intense Jewish education.

A few years ago, Greenberg's rethinking got him into deep trouble with an Orthodox rabbinical body to which he has long belonged. In particular, his application of the term "failed messiah" to Jesus implied to some that he accepted Christian messianic claims. In Greenberg's telling, Orthodoxy has also proved unable to distinguish between pluralism (in which he believes) and relativism (which he opposes). One cannot but sense the deep pain he felt when he was summoned into something approaching a heresy trial, which ended only with his accepting a kind of consent decree.

Consisting of nine essays written over nearly forty years, Greenberg's volume displays considerable inconsistencies, some of which are undoubtedly owing to the "shifts" that the author openly acknowledges in his preface. The book is, though, also exceedingly repetitive, and one does not sense that the problematic aspects of the early essays have been resolved, or even effectively addressed, in the later ones. A major source of the difficulty is that Greenberg's discourse tends to be more homiletic than analytic; he too easily disposes of objections (where they are dealt with at all), with references to the novelty of our times, the putative "revelational event" of the Holocaust, and other ideas that are themselves inadequately defended.

The parade example is that all-important notion of pluralism. Rooted in a claim that "acts of love and repentance deserve to be reciprocated," Greenberg's concept of the new encounter of Judaism and Christianity requires that both communities revamp their historic traditions drastically in light of the other. On the Christian side, this means not only that the Jewish Torah must be seen as currently valid, but that Jesus himself is better reconceived as "more a messenger for the Divine than a Divine Messenger." Similarly, "from a Jewish perspective, one hopes," he writes, "that the growing Christian emphasis on Jesus as the path to God rather than on Jesus as God Incarnate may yet win out as a more proper understanding." The Crucifixion fares no better: it is to be "addressed through Holocaust categories as total degradation and as a model of what should not be tolerated or allowed to happen rather than as redemptive suffering" (his italics). Indeed, Greenberg thinks the Holocaust shows that "both faiths ... must downplay elements of formal sacrality and intermediary figures and teach believers to serve God with greater purity--for God's sake and not for reward or victory."

The changes on the Jewish side are also wide-ranging and fundamental. Jesus should be seen as a failed rather than a false messiah: "a failed messiah is one who has the right values and upholds the covenant, but does not attain the final goal." In this, as Greenberg would have it, Jesus resembles Bar Kokhba, "the great Jewish freedom fighter" of the second century C.E. whom one prominent Talmudic rabbi hailed as the messiah before the Romans crushed his armed rebellion (and killed the rabbi). Jews need to recognize that Christianity not only spreads Jewish values but also brings millions of people into a knowledge of the God of Israel that they would never otherwise have had. Thus, Jews must see Christians, too, as a chosen people, as "the people of Israel" no less, for "there is enough love in God to choose again and again." There is one condition, though. God's choice is real only when Christians have "purged themselves of hatred of Jews and of supersessionist claims." For that reason, in Greenberg's judgment, Muslims, who also spread the knowledge of the God of Abraham, cannot yet be considered the people of Israel. This is because of the virulent Jew-hatred surging through the Muslim world in recent years and the correlative opposition to the very existence of the State of Israel, within whatever borders.

The goal of these twin reconstructions of tradition is to "create a Judaism and a Christianity free of in-group distortions and rewards." Only when the reconstructions have succeeded shall we attain the "mutual affirmation" that Greenberg considers imperative in the pluralistic, post-Holocaust age in which we live. And in my experience, much, perhaps most Jewish-Christian dialogue takes place between parties who have trimmed their traditional sails much as Greenberg's version of pluralism recommends. I am thinking of Christians who wince at the thought that Jesus was God Incarnate, voluntarily died a gruesome sacrificial death necessary to atone for the world's sins, and then rose from the dead to found a new order that surpasses yet fulfills the old. And I am thinking of Jews for whom the whole notion of a chosen people is an embarrassment and for whom the "formal sacrality" of traditional observance is anything but essential to their understanding of Jewish practice. Where mutual affirmation is the goal of the encounter, these sorts of Christians and Jews have a distinct advantage.

What is odd, though, is that Greenberg also advocates "mutual criticism" and insists that "both sides should strive to affirm the fullness of the faith claims of the other." Most Christians will rightly wonder how much of the fullness of their faith claims can appear in a Christianity without the Incarnation, atonement, or the Resurrection (as their tradition has historically understood them), and in which Jesus is no longer a unique saving figure, the Messiah of Israel, but one of many failed figures who had "the right values." It is one thing to say that if Jews will only make such adjustments, they can come into a greater appreciation of Christianity. It is quite another thing to say, as Greenberg repeatedly does, that Christians should make those same adjustments. And where they have been made--where Judaism and Christianity have each accepted an extreme makeover in order to rid themselves of any trace of offensiveness to the other--on what basis can they possibly engage in that mutual criticism that Greenberg so desires?

Greenberg's lack of concern for traditional belief stems from an instrumentalist view of religion, according to which the truth of a belief is solely a function of its ethical consequences: "We should measure religions by the criterion of how people act after they hear the word in community." So long as Jews and Christians work in support of the right values, their differences in worldview need give no one pause. Thus, when he protests that his pluralism is to be sharply distinguished from relativism and indifferentism (as he repeatedly does), he is only partly right. Greenberg is far from an ethical relativist, but his ethical commitments so overwhelm his concern for theological truth that he is quite indifferent to questions of doctrine--and thus readily able to recommend the drastic reconstructions mentioned above. Even on the critical issue of the messiah, he imagines a scenario in which the long-awaited figure finally appears but refuses to answer the question of whether this is his first coming (thus validating Judaism) or his second (validating Christianity). If this is not theological indifferentism, what is it?

The identity of the "values" to which Greenberg attaches so much importance is, unfortunately, murky, too often designated by catch phrases like "work[ing] for the perfection of the world." But when he writes that "humans were called ... to revere, value, and uphold the dignity of every form of life," he raises the expectation that he is about to take a specific stand on one of the greatest ethical issues of our time, abortion. But the only reference to abortion in the book is, alas, an exquisitely noncommittal appreciation of both the "anti-abortion" and the "pro-abortion" positions (to use his terminology). For all his oft-reiterated invocations of "life" as the greatest good, Greenberg here positions himself firmly on the fence, depriving Jews and Christians of any guidance as to how they can collaborate in the face of what Pope John Paul II has termed "the culture of death."

Greenberg's conviction that Christian theology must change as a result of the Holocaust seems to derive from a prior but unstated conviction that orthodox Christian theology is necessarily (and not contingently) associated with the "teaching of contempt." To be sure, there is an abundance of prima facie evidence in support of this claim, from both the past and the present. On the other hand, one wishes that Greenberg had argued the case and not simply invoked the Holocaust as self-evident support for it. In particular, one wishes the present book had included an answer from Greenberg to Michael Novak's claim in his own response that he believes "the second covenant, while not destroying the Jewish law ... fulfills' the Jewish law (complementing it with the witness of Christ's life)." Is Novak, as a post-Holocaust American Catholic thinker with a long history of interfaith involvement, an exception, or can the theology he articulates be sustained indefinitely and on a mass level without degenerating into the hatred of Jews and Judaism to which Christendom has historically been vulnerable? If the latter is the case--and we may not know for centuries--then Greenberg has seriously misjudged the theological import of the Holocaust.

An analogous question must be raised about Greenberg's effort as a Jewish thinker to classify Christians (and, potentially, Muslims) alongside the Jews as chosen peoples, "the people of Israel." Here the operative insight is a valid one: "Our own religion must make room for the independent dignity of the other and the faith of the other." But given the Talmudic dictum that "the righteous of the nations have a portion in the World-to-Come [Christian translation: will be saved]," can we really say that the Jewish doctrine of election is necessarily (and not contingently) an assault on the dignity and faith of Gentiles? Must Jews, in other words, make Gentiles into Jews in order to respect them? Here another of Greenberg's appreciative Christian respondents, Krister Stendahl, draws an astute analogy with Christian supersessionism, which also saw the church as Israel. "Suddenly," Stendahl writes, "I feel it important to be an uncircumcised Gentile." I might add that the claim that God chooses repeatedly undercuts the whole idea of chosenness. When Christians and Muslims, who together constitute perhaps half the world's population, are potentially chosen (even earning the title "Israel"), the question arises whether it would not be better to retire the language of chosenness altogether and replace it with an unqualified affirmation of universal human dignity.

There is, though, some reason to doubt that Greenberg really means it when he reclassifies Christians as members of the people Israel. For one thing, as I have noted, he makes membership therein conditional on Christians having "purged themselves of hatred of Jews and of supersessionist claims." (Ironically, his notion that Gentiles earn their new status through their works is the diametric opposite of the Apostle Paul's view.) But the classical Jewish idea of election is not analogously conditional, affirming instead that God bears with his people despite their waywardness and sin, punishing but never disowning. Here, it seems to me, we detect a marked asymmetry and Judeocentrism that are at odds with Greenberg's vision of a pluralism grounded in equality and reciprocity. Similarly, his repeated opposition to Jewish-Christian syncretism and intermarriage requires the maintenance of divisions within the enlarged people of Israel of exactly the sort that Greenberg has valiantly struggled against within the Jewish people itself. To say that Jews, Christians, and perhaps eventually Muslims are all Israelites but may not engage in religious syncretism or intermarriage is to redefine the term "Israel" so drastically that one again wonders why it should be retained at all.

Rabbi Greenberg's book offers a passionate assault on the elements of misperception and bigotry that have historically marred the relationship of Christians and Jews. But is every judgment that the one tradition renders upon the other attributable to prejudice and partiality of vision? Do not some of them derive from an inevitable conflict of truth claims? If they do, then retaining the traditional theological vocabulary while bleeding it of its historic meaning is surely not in the interest of either community.

Jon D. Levenson is the Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School and the author of The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (Yale University Press).