Has God Only One Blessing? Judaism as a Source of Christian Self-Understanding.

Has God Only One Blessing?
Judaism as a Source of Christian Self-Understanding
Mary Boys
Paulist, $29.95, 393 pp.

Sister Mary Boys holds the chair in practical theology at New York's Union Theological Seminary where she moved after some years of teaching religious education at Boston College. She is a highly regarded writer and scholar who has devoted much of her energies to the relationship of Judaism to Catholicism. This book, the fruit of her own lengthy engagement with the topic, reflects a command of the pertinent literature in the area of Jewish-Christian relations as well as an agreeable style which makes the work not only readable but teachable.

Some of the more rewarding aspects of this volume are her demonstration that what we do as Catholics might sound less innocent were we to imagine having a Jew in a pew next to us. She made me wonder what, for example, a Jew would make of my favorite Advent hymn "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" with its plea "to ransom captive Israel," a phrase which, prior to reading Boys, I had always identified as "us." Boys also notes that the juxtaposition of texts from Old and New Testament could easily be mistaken to suggest that the Old has now been superseded by the New when, in fact, the church teaches that God's revelation is a continuum.

Boys (trained in Scripture) spends many pages thinking about how the Bible is to be read. She argues, for example, that the hostility the Gospel of John shows toward Jews is the result of specific polemics between the synagogues and the Johannine community at the time of the Gospel's composition, and must not be universalized. Further, one cannot reduce the complex forms of Judaism in the times of Jesus to an abstraction described simply as "the Jews." And one must hold onto the fundamental insight of historical-critical scholarship, namely, that Jesus must be understood as a Jew or not be understood at all. That insight, not always accepted by such groups as the Jesus Seminar who want Jesus to be some kind of vagrant cynic philosopher, needs much attention beyond the world of academe. Finally, the cross, a central image in Christianity, she argues, can and must be "read" without falling back on the poisonous observation of Jews as Christ-killers, or as an image that gives support to anti-Jewish sentiment.

In the last part of her book, Boys takes up various strategies for teaching the faith with a sensitivity to Judaism, and offers an overview of recent fruitful dialogue between Christians and Jews. She also raises the issue of aggressive evangelizing of Jews. Different Christian groups have different positions: Evangelicals feel compelled to evangelize vigorously while Catholic attitudes are in flux. If I understand Boys correctly, she would cede the right of Catholics to present fairly the claims of faith, accept converts if they are so led to the church, but not "target" Jews since they are part of that one blessing from God. Edith Stein (oddly, never mentioned in this work) would be a good test case. Although she was by birth and heritage a Jew, when she converted, she did so from atheism, not from Judaism.

Has God Only One Blessing? has an extensive bibliography, a good index, and pages of footnotes that contain material almost as interesting as what appears in the text. Boys's survey of Catholic and ecumenical movements promoting greater Jewish-Christian understanding provides additional resources for this important undertaking.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.