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To be sure, there's a sizable gulch between the "imaginal body" that Wolfson outlines and the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. But Wolfson's demonstration that the Jewish God can be "experienced in a tangible and concrete manner" goes a long way toward fording that gulch.
This presenting of Christian concepts in Jewish terms is useful, but it is only the first step in the theological engagement that ought to follow as a consequence of the acknowledgement that Jews and Christians worship the same God. For implicit in the claim that we worship the same God is that we can learn from one another about how to worship that God. Most of the Jewish contributors here nod at certain Christian concepts, but don't take the bold step of trying to learn from them—nor are the Christian authors too concerned with learning from Judaism. What is standing in the way? For Christians, the impasse is supersessionism; for Jews it is the person of Jesus.
Supersessionism, which comes from the Latin word to sit upon or to rule over, is the belief that, because the Jews were stiff-necked and hard-hearted and didn't accept Christ, God canceled the covenant He had made with them, and the church replaced Israel as God's one and only chosen people. Throughout the history of the church, many a Christian has embraced supersessionism, often quoting from the Gospel of Matthew, whose rendition of the parable of the vineyard (Matt. 21:43) says the vineyard will be taken away from the wicked tenants and given to other people. Augustine: "the church admits and avows the Jewish people to be cursed." Luther, in order to show that God had replaced the Jews with the Church: " 'Listen Jew, are you aware that Jerusalem and your sovereignty, together with your temple and priesthood, have been destroyed for 1,460 years?' For this year, which we Christians write as the year 1542 since the birth of Christ, is exactly 1,468 years, going on fifteen hundred years, since Vespasian and Titus destroyed Jerusalem, and expelled the Jews from the city." Cranmer, making the same point: "Whoso listeth to read the histories of the heathen people and greatest idolaters, he shall not find among them all any region, people, or nation that was so scourged by God, so oft brought into servitude, so oft carried into captivity, with so divers, strange and many calamities oppressed, as were the children of Israel." And Cranmer's fellow English Reformer, Hugh Latimer: the Jews "were cursed in the sight of God. … Though Jerusalem be builded again, yet the Jews shall have it no more." You get the idea.
Since the Shoah, many Christians have renounced supersessionism. In Nostra Aetate, issued by the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the Roman Catholic Church declared that "the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed" by God, a theme taken up and emphasized repeatedly by Pope John Paul II. Presbyterians, in 1987, declared that "the church, elected in Jesus Christ, has been engrafted onto the people of God established by the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Therefore, Christians have not replaced Jews."
The Christians in this volume are at pains to distance themselves from supersessionism. "God's covenant with the Jews is unconditional," says George Lindbeck. "The task of neutralizing supersessionist patterns," writes Christopher M. Leighton, "entails nothing less than the reenvisioning of the Christian narrative. The challenge for Christian theology is to accept, perhaps even celebrate, the gaps, the silences, the distances between us Christians and Jews." Indeed, contributors to Christianity in Jewish Terms show that Paul himself was not supersessionist: in Romans 11:29, he declares "The gifts and call of God are unrevokable."
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