Jesus, an Emerging Jewish Mosaic: Jewish Perspectives, Post-Holocaust (Jewish and Christian Text)

Jesus, an Emerging Jewish Mosaic

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Retrieved from " https: Articles containing Hebrew-language text Articles containing Ancient Greek-language text Articles containing potentially dated statements from All articles containing potentially dated statements All articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases Articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases from June All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from December Commons category link from Wikidata. Views Read Edit View history.

In other projects Wikimedia Commons. This page was last edited on 2 December , at By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Author Moore, Daniel F. Series Jewish and Christian texts in contexts and related studies ; v. Subjects Jesus Christ -- Jewish interpretations. Jesus Christ -- Jewishness. New Testament -- Criticism, interpretation, etc. Christianity and other religions -- Judaism.

An insightful book for those interested in ecumenical and interreligious discourse and Jesus studies. Convergence "From a different angle" Of glass and stone: Includes bibliographical references p. Jesus, an emerging Jewish mosaic. View online Borrow Buy Freely available Show 0 more links Related resource Table of contents only at http: Set up My libraries How do I set up "My libraries"?

Emancipation revolutionized Jewish spirituality, for whenever Jews were permitted to modernize, they did so avidly, and uncomplainingly accepted its accompanying secularization. Freedom from segregated existence brought on a transition from a life oriented by revelation, tradition, and a sense of the holy to one in which religion became privatized if not irrelevant or obsolete. Jews began to ask, 'What does it mean to be a Jew today?

Why should one undertake its special responsibilities? By what criteria would modern Jews choose which aspects of their Jewishness to retain and which to discard? According to Borowitz, modern Jews chose criteria offered by Western, Enlightenment sources rather than traditional, rabbinic sources: For Borowitz, however, this "Jewish modernism" also contained the seeds of its own self-negation, since it represented a particular form of social assimilation that could not over time adequately serve the people Israel's covenantal norms of community and traditional religious law:.

People were profoundly disturbed by the deterioration of the quality of life The Enlightenment, the intellectual credo of modernity, had promised that replacing tradition with rational scepticism, hierarchy with democracy, and custom with freedom would bring messianic benefit - and certainly it hasn't.

All the certainties about mind and self and human nature that once powered the bold move into greater freedom now seem dubious. There is no simple alternative, however, since the dominant theologies that supported pious practice in the modern era emerged as reactions against Jewish rationalism rather than as transformational responses to it. I do not mean that pious practices are reactionary - they share, rather, in the timeless dimensions of Torah as a way of life; I am referring, instead, to the reactionary forms of orthodox argumentation that were developed to defend such practices against secular critics.

Jesus, an Emerging Jewish Mosaic

Examples include popular Hasidism, as well as the varieties of esoteric Kabbalism that lie behind it; neo-Orthodoxy, when it appears only as a means for traditionally religious Jews to make use of the socio-economic vehicles of life inside of modern civilization; and the expanding varieties of contemporary ultra-Orthodoxy, combined in Israel with political or ethnic nationalism.

These orthodoxies tended to replace Jewish religious tradition with the idea of it - that is, they tended to replace the humanly unpredictable evolution of traditional Jewish life and law with artificially constructed systems of communal and hermeneutical order. There is therefore reason for us conclude, sadly, that there is no way for Jews to move beyond the dialectic of modernity without allowing its inner logic to die.

From this perspective, a salvation history of Israel's death in the Shoah may indeed mark the terminus of the epoch of modern Judaism. To acknowledge the fact of the people Israel's physical death in the Shoah is to acknowledge the incapacity of modern Western civilization to prevent this death. If so, this is to recognize that, unredeemed, the modern West - which includes modern Western Judaism and Christianity - offers no home for us; it is a place of death.

The salvation history of our day therefore reiterates the narratives of Israel's previous destructions, marking the end of a moment of Jewish collective life. There is also a significantly new feature in this history, however. In all of Judaism's previous narratives of destruction, the people Israel suffered alone, facing by itself the end of one epoch of its civilization.

This time, however, the end of modern Judaism may very well parallel the end of modern Christianity as well. This is, at least, the lesson I learn from an expanding circle of powerful Christian theologians who work at the centres of their respective church communities, but who are also at the centre of a potentially transformative movement some call "postliberal theology. Karl Barth is the theologian cited most often by all them.

Along with a supporting cast of students and colleagues throughout the United States and Europe, these theologians have shown the people Israel that it is not alone, neither in facing an end to one of its epochs, nor in drawing on its Scriptural sources as resources for possible religious renewal.

I am not suggesting that Judaism and Christian are united in this transformative moment in Israel's salvation history. But I am appealing to the belief that previously, around , drew a number of us Jewish scholars to the projects of Dabru Emet and Christianity in Jewish Terms: From the perspective of my reading of Judaism after Shoah , I read the works of my postliberal Christian colleagues as witnesses to the renewal of Christianity after Shoah and after modernity.

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This leads me to derive from their writings a series of six lessons in "Christian Scriptural Reading" that parallel the eight lessons I have offered about Jewish Scriptural Reading. I do not, in fact, presume that my Christian colleagues would assent to my drawing these lessons from their work.

It is controversial enough to read Jewish salvation history, as I have done, as a story of the cycles of Judaism's death and resurrection; would it be more - or less - controversial to speak analogously of the cycles of Christianity's renewal? Christian Scriptural Reading after Modernity is, for one, a critique of the dualistic and dichotomous character of modern Christianity. Modern Christianity fails in its efforts to correct and redeem the imperfections of premodern Christianity, because its efforts perpetually divide into mutually exclusive alternatives: The latter alternative is sub-divided again, between the self-validating claims of Biblical literalists and of autonomous reasoners.

In The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative , Hans Frei, of blessed memory, introduced a highly influential genealogy that traced this dualism, in particular, to the work of eighteenth century Lockeans and neologians. Following their lead, most modern Christian thinkers became what he called "mediating theologians," who sought to mediate the two poles of received and revealed knowledge, but always in favour of the revealed.

Advocates of revealed or what some call foundational knowledge divided, in turn, into advocates of the literal sense of scripture and of autonomous reason. George Lindbeck extended this genealogy, and his The Nature of Doctrine is perhaps the most well-known manifesto of scriptural reading as a form of Christian theology.

Robert Jenson's two volume Systematic Theology also extends this genealogical critique into a project of what we might call "Trinitarian Scriptural Reading. According to both Lindbeck and Jenson, the mediating theologians' inner divisions generated modern Christianity's destructive battles between a religion of liberal academia and fundamentalist or literalist orthodoxies. Jenson argues, in the first volume of the Systematic Theology , that modern theologians have failed in their efforts to unify a divided Church and that this division threatens the life of the Church.

Divided among themselves, furthermore, the modern theologians tend to be dominated by advocates of autonomous reason over scriptural tradition, grace over law and ultimately, the epistemologies of the academy over those of the church denominations. In The Nature of Doctrine , Lindbeck argues that academic Christian theologians are themselves divided between "propositionalist" and "experiential-expressivist" tendencies. One group argues that the doctrines that govern Christian lives can be disclosed in clear and distinct statements that are either true or false.

The other group argues that what God wants of us is disclosed, ultimately, to the individual heart, and enters into public discourse only probatively, hypothetically and relative to the contexts of interpretation. Modern Christianity has failed to locate any successful method for mediating between these two models, or, all the more so for repairing the divisions of Christian church and Christian academy.

Christian Scriptural Reading does not simply reject the various poles of modern theology; it restores them into a redemptive relationship to the divine word as their mediating ground. This divine word is the word of Scripture: Academic scholarship, including historical-critical studies, has a proper place among this chain of interpretive literatures; it is simply not privileged over other modes of scholarship.

In Jenson's words , the error of the mediating theologians was to presume that their individual reasonings could unify the divisions of the Church. For postliberal Christian scholars, God alone is mediator, in the presence of Jesus Christ as disclosed through the texts and interpretations of the Gospel narrative.

As resources for their theological work, these Christian scriptural readers draw, at once, on historical-critical studies of the Bible and of Christian salvation history; on their participation in community-specific practices of Christian life; and on tradition-specific and academic disciplines of reasoning. No one of these resources dominates the other, because the Word that guides this reading belongs irreducibly to the triune life of God. Trusting in this Word, Lindbeck can therefore say that historical-critical scholarship protects the Church against denominational misreadings of the Gospel, without betraying what he considers his Christian orthodoxy.

And Soulen - as well as Jenson and Lindbeck - can, with comparable assurance, offer far-reaching ethical, hermeneutical and source-critical arguments against supersessionist exegeses. As both a means and a consequence of renewing Christianity's primordial traditions of scriptural theology, Christian Scriptural Reading renews Christianity's identity with the people Israel, and fosters a new relationship of the Church to contemporary Judaism.

Lesson C-5 which is also Lesson 9 for Judaism: Christian Scriptural Reading therefore suggests that, like Jewish salvation history, Christian salvation history can also include cycles of renewal. Since these mark certain ends of history, but not final ends, we might label them "meantime-endtimes" - that is, times that qualitatively end one epoch of Christian salvation history and initiate a subsequent one. Like Judaism, Christianity might experience this time after Modernity and after Shoah as a time of change and renewal.

This lesson about Christian Scriptural Reasoning may, therefore, contribute a new lesson to Jewish Scriptural Reading: In the present day, we may say that both Jews and Christians are entering one of these meantime-endtimes, characterized this time by parallel and interrelated forms of scriptural reading, which redeem the failings of their modern epochs by re-engaging modern scriptural reading with its premodern sources.

This may be the most challenging of my reflections. It suggests that popular distinctions between Jewish and Christian eschatologies should be modified. In popular Jewish understanding, Christianity looks to the resurrection of Jesus Christ as fulfilling Jewish eschatology: This meantime, the time of the church, would be an eschatologically homogeneous time, a time of bringing the world to realize what the Apostles have already beheld. In popular Christian understanding, Judaism looks to the long run of future history as the time of bringing humanity from this world of sin and suffering to the time of messianic fulfilment.

This time, the time of Israel's history, would also be eschatologically homogeneous, a time during which the world comes to know the God who created the world and spoke the Torah. The typical conclusion is that Christianity believes it lives in the endtime; Judaism does not. Lesson C-5 , which would apply to Jewish as well as Christian scriptural reading, revises these popular beliefs without necessarily contradicting them.

According to this lesson, both Judaism and Christianity participate in temporally extended meantimes that are not eschatologically homogeneous. These meantimes are, instead, marked by "meantime endtimes," or disruptive moments when the people Israel, within its salvation history, and the Church, within its, may suffer the end of a given epoch of history and also the beginning of another epoch.

As noted in Lesson 2 , such disruptions are marked by and recorded in the writings of witnesses to salvation history.

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These writings imitate Scripture itself as the narrative of salvation history, and, according to patterns disclosed within the texts of Scripture, they interpret Scripture within the contexts of their own histories. Thus, both scriptural documents and the written witnesses that interpret them mark what Arthur Cohen called the "caesura of history," the meantime-endtimes of salvation history.

For both Jews and Christians, the present day may therefore mark a moment of transition: Unique, perhaps, in the salvation histories of Judaism and Christianity, these revivals may be taking place together, which means at least in parallel ways and possibly in inter-related ways.

Each religion's revival may display parallel and possibly inter-related forms of scriptural reading, while applied to different scriptural traditions and with differences of detail and theme. Will Christian theologians accept these claims?

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This means, he says, that the time of the church is neither the final endtime nor independent of the end time:. Yet neither is the time of the church simply a continuation of this world's history. The time of the church is a time within the advent of the Christ to fulfil Israel's history Until the last judgment and our own resurrection, the Christ has not yet come in the way that consummates Israel's mission God institutes the church by not letting Jesus's resurrection be itself the End, by appointing the famous 'delay of the parousia'.

The church is, in this view, a detour that mirrors the detour that is rabbinic Judaism: Jenson does not say explicitly that, during this meantime, both Christianity and Judaism may enter non-final endtimes. I infer, however, that the practices of all the postliberal Christian scriptural readers warrant such a claim, at least for the present day.

Lindbeck, Jenson, Soulen, as well as Stanley Hauerwas, Bruce Marshall, Daniel Hardy and David Ford, promote a Christianity that would overcome the dualisms and divisions of modern Christianity as well as from modern and premodern anti-Judaism and supersessionism. Is this not to acknowledge epochs within Christian salvation and meantime ends and meantime beginnings?

If the God of history is to reenter Jewish theology and renew Jewish life after Shoah , then, I believe, Jews need first to understand this time after Shoah and after modernity as a non-final endtime, through which one cycle of Judaism has died and another must be born. I say "must be born," because Jews cannot be passive vessels of any rebirth but only active participants.

A rebirth of Judaism is found only in the renewal of Jewish scriptural reading. Effort, will, and works are not sufficient for this renewal, but they are necessary elements: And the Jews may not be alone in their waiting. The scriptural texts that initiated our study of scriptural reading in the second part of this series were texts of distress that served as prototypes for the people Israel's latest and most horrifying encounter with destruction.

By now, however, our study has led to the expectation that such an encounter could also be followed by an epoch of religious revival. Are there scriptural prototypes for such a revival, as well? Let me revisit the same sets of texts and observe how the Jewish scriptural tradition came to re-read texts of distress and death as at the same time signs of future revival and resurrection. Peter Ochs is Edgar M.

Postliberal Christianity and the Jews. To study Scripture prayerfully, after the destruction of the people of Israel, is to anticipate redemption but in a way that contradicts what explicit Jewish tradition would lead one to expect.

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