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This is the second installment in a five-part series.
Part 1 [November/December 2000], "Living by Law, Looking for Intimacy," explored what Christians can learn from the debates that divide American Jews, taking as a point of departure Samuel G. Freedman's book, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry.
Next, part 3 will consider medieval anti-Semitism and the Eucharist (via Miri Rubin's Gentile Tales).
Part 4 will discuss German Jews, Edith Stein in particular.
Part 5 will conclude the series with Messianic Judiaism.
Christianity in Jewish Terms edited by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Signer, Westview Press, 256 pp.; $30
For many, "Jewish-Christian dialogue" conjures up images of earnest, well-meaning folks in the 1970s, sitting around informally over cake and coffee: Jews and Christians who want to get people together and embrace. Reconcile. Make friends. See that the Jews don't have horns or drink blood. See that the Christians aren't going to shove tracts down your throat or kill you.
Jewish-Christian dialogue, as it has proceeded in the half-century after the Shoah, has been measured, judicious, exquisitely sensitive—but even those of us with a strong stake in the outcome have found the conversation rather stale. Christianity in Jewish Terms might be the book to reinvigorate the dialogue. The volume's editors have gathered together 34 scholars, 23 Jewish and 11 Christian, to comment on ten theological themes: God, Scripture, Suffering, Redemption, and so on. Each chapter comprises three essays—a main piece by a Jewish scholar, and then two shorter responses, one by a Jewish scholar and one by a Christian.
The essays are governed by the prefatory "Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity," which first ran as a full-page ad in the New York Times. Though that statement makes historical points ("Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon") and normative assertions ("Jews and Christians must work together for justice and peace"), the heart of the statement is theology—bold, simple theology: "Jews and Christians worship the same God." That opening salvo, and the theological structure of the book, promise to introduce theology into a conversation that has too long been dominated by Rodney King's question: Why can't we all just get along?
In the event, Christianity in Jewish Terms offers something more modest. Instead of doing theology together, most of the contributors use theological tools to accomplish a social project—implicitly conceding, perhaps, that a social project may be as far as Jews and Christians can go, that we need to play it safe: articulate each other's beliefs, and revel in the family resemblances. But even that is no mean accomplishment, and some of the contributors clearly want to go beyond the social project to genuine theological engagement.
The strategy of Christianity in Jewish Terms is perhaps best exemplified by Elliot Wolfson's essay on incarnation (or "embodiment"). The incarnation of God is, arguably, the Christian concept that seems most foreign to Jews. Many Jews assume that Judaism has no place at all for a doctrine of an embodied God, but Wolfson shows that
classical Jewish sources yield a philosophical conception of incarnation … that refers specifically to the imaginal body of God, a symbolic construct that allows human consciousness to access the transcendent reality as a concrete form manifest primarily (if not exclusively) in the sacred space of the two major forms of worship of the heart: prayer and study.
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