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In the late 1950s and early 1960s, my grandfather was an active member of his local branch of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, best known for sponsoring National Brotherhood Week (the inspiration for Tom Lehrer's satirical song of the same name). The group aimed to foster interfaith understanding and, eventually, to combat racial prejudice. In a 1951 article on organizations that promoted civil rights, lawyer Joseph B. Robison noted, "Since [the NCCJ] adheres to the principle of refraining from action on any controversial question, the value of its work in an area in which all issues are highly controversial is open to question." But on the local level in Asheville, North Carolina, the group did foster understanding and feelings of fellowship among Jews, Protestants, and Catholics, and members of the group were able, by the early 1960s, to work together on issues of larger civic concern, such as the local implementation of civil rights measures.
The NCCJ was not far from my mind as I read Gustav Niebuhr's Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America, an engaging journalistic portrait of contemporary interfaith endeavors. Niebuhr showcases groups of Christians who helped guard Muslim buildings against vandalism in the weeks after 9/11; a Congregationalist church that, after realizing their own numbers were dwindling, gave their church building and land to the local Jewish community; Methodists in California who raised money for the rebuilding of three Sacramento synagogues that had been destroyed by arsonists; Jews and Episcopalians who helped fund the repair of a mosque damaged by American bombing in Afghanistan; Muslim and Hindu communities that intentionally "welcome the curious" to educational tours of their mosques and temples.
Much has changed, and much has not changed, since my grandfather's term as Jewish co-chair of his local NCCJ chapter. The demographics, of course, are different: the Immigration Act of 1965 guaranteed that American interfaith conversations would no longer be limited to Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. (The NCCJ acknowledged that shift by changing its name in 1999 to the National Conference for Community and Justice.)
What has not changed is that, at least on Niebuhr's account, interfaith encounters remain largely social—in two senses of the term. Niebuhr describes people of different faiths getting together and getting to know one another better, and he describes episodes in which people of different faiths work together in the pursuit of some shared civic goal. Niebuhr argues that these partnerships— neighbors of different faiths helping guard mosques against vandalism, for instance—go beyond "mere courtesy" and "being 'nice.'" Rather, they represent "vitality within a functioning civil society, the creation of networks that reach beyond obvious boundaries." In a country in which mosques are being vandalized, such social engagements are not to be gainsaid.
One of Niebuhr's profiles—that of Baltimore's Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies—points away from the purely social, toward more explicitly theological encounters between different religious communities. The ICJS brings Jews and Christians together to study shared sacred texts. The institute is especially keen to, in the phrase of executive director Christopher Leighton, "defang Christian anti-Semitism." (Leighton's comment points to the important reality: when it comes to Christian violence against Jews, the social and theological are inextricably linked.)
Niebuhr says that one of the questions central to Jewish-Christian theological engagement is "what does it mean to be different together?" That is an important question, but it is only one question that theologically engaged Jewish-Christian conversation asks. Over the last fifteen years or so, some of the most interesting work in academic theology has been that of Jewish and Christian theologians who are committed to substantively theological dialogue. These theologians have asked, inter alia, what a robustly anti-supersessionist Christian theology looks like, and what Christianity and Judaism have to learn from one another about how we speak to and about the living God of Israel. This turn in academic theology is perhaps represented best by three books published between 1996 and 2000, books that remain seminal in Jewish-Christian conversation: Christianity in Jewish Terms, co-edited by Tikvah Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel and Michael S. Singer; The Church and Israel After Christendom by Scott Bader-Saye; and The God of Israel and Christian Theology by Kendall Soulen.
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