2 of 5
Such explicitly theological conversations can feel risky, and they are sometimes difficult to pull off. For Jews, the risks are almost unavoidable. After all, for most of the last 2,000 years, most Jewish-Christian "conversations" have not been conversations at all. They have been, rather, Christians talking about Jews in ways that are both hermeneutically and literally violent. For Jews today, the risks include having their story told by someone else— specifically by a someone else (the church) whose own self-narration seems to require criticizing and re-telling Judaism's own account of itself. Christians know that we, too, are taking risks in these conversations. If Christians are really willing to believe that we may learn something about the God who is Christ by engaging with Jews about the God of Israel, our understanding of God, and of ourselves, may change.
Because these conversations can be perilous, we regularly need to revisit the terms on which we conduct them. In establishing the terms for contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue, no one has been more influential than David Novak; the fruits of his thirty-year engagement with Christians and Christianity have been recently collected in the volume Talking with Christians. Central to Novak's vision of Jewish-Christian conversation is his insistence that when Jews talk about Christians, and when Christians talk about Jews, we can't say things about the other religion that its practitioners and adherents wouldn't recognize. This means avoiding obviously false and obviously polemical descriptions: "Christians are idolaters"; "Jews don't recognize Jesus' lordship because they are stiffnecked." But it also means avoiding linguistic sleight of hand, subtly ascribing to practitioners a description of their religion that they wouldn't recognize, as when some well-meaning Christians talk about how much they love "the Jewish faith." "Faith" (emunah in Hebrew) is not a category alien to Judaism, but the phrase "the Jewish faith" is tacitly Christianizing. It is not a phrase that many Jews would use to describe themselves, or even recog-nize—at least, they wouldn't recognize the thing that Christians mean when Christians speak of "the Jewish faith." The Jewish people, sure. Jewish practice, great. But not "the Jewish faith."
Novak's point may seem obvious: don't describe your neighbor in terms she wouldn't recognize. But, in fact, this simple guideline has broad and deep implications for how Christians speak about Judaism—not just in the academy, but also in the local church, especially in the pulpit. It has implications for how we speak about "Pharisees," "the Law," and (most obviously) the role of "the Jews" in the Crucifixion. A friend of mine recently sent me a draft of a sermon on John 1 and Galatians 3. It was, generally, a lovely sermon, full of imaginative discussions of light, with references to Albert Einstein— until my friend suggested that we think of "the Law" as Newtonian physics.
share this page
RSS Feed
