It was not all unexpected that Reinhold Niebuhr’s essay on “The Relations of Christians and Jews in Western Civilization” (Pious and Secular America, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1958) should have been published first in a Rabbinic magazine (CCAR journal, the organ of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Reform, April, 1958) and applauded so vigorously by Jewish leaders. For even if they did not follow or agree entirely with his line of reasoning, it was enough that one of America’s distinguished Christian theologians had finally told his brethren in effect: stop trying to evangelize the Jew. Acknowledging “the stubborn will of the Jews as a peculiar people, both religiously and ethnically,” Dr. Niebuhr suggests that the Christian and Gentile majority “accept this fact and cease to practice tolerance provisionally in the hope that it will encourage assimilation ethnically and conversion religiously.”

“Such religious tolerance always produces violent reactions when ultimately disappointed …” says Dr. Niebuhr and so he advises his Christian readers, “the Christian majority can achieve a more genuine tolerance only if it assumes the continued refusal of the Jew to be assimilated.… That recognition involves an appreciation of the resources of Jewish life, morally and religiously, which make Judaism something other than an inferior form of religion such as must ultimately recognize the superiority of the Christian faith; and end its long resistance by capitulation and conversion.”

So Dr. Niebuhr cautions the Christian evangelist: the Jew is not at all easy to convert and not many of them will; and if the major factor in your relationship to him is in terms of your evangelical aspirations you are sure to provoke his “stiff-necked” resistance or at least add a dimension of tension to the Jewish-Christian dialogue. Furthermore, why should Christians try so hard to convert the Jew when after all there is not much difference between the two covenant faiths; and frequently as not Judaism adds a legitimate insight. So Dr. Niebuhr demonstrates time and again as he reviews the alleged differences between Judaism and Christianity that “there are differences in emphasis in both the diagnoses of the human situation and the religious assurances corresponding to the diagnoses, but there is no simple contrast.… It is almost inevitable that … Christians should claim uniqueness for our faith as a religion of redemption. But we must not claim moral superiority because of this uniqueness.”

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“In short,” concludes Dr. Niebuhr, “if we measure the two faiths by their moral fruits, the Jewish faith does not fall short particularly in collective moral achievement.…”

Oversimplifying A Dilemma

I must admit that I was among those who at first cheered Niebuhr’s prescription for the malaise in Jewish-Christian relations; although I suspected that if I were a Christian I should refuse to accept it. Then later I realized that I was applauding him not out of an unreasonable impatience with the methods of Christian evangelism but that quite frankly I did not completely agree with Niebuhr’s analyses of the Jewish-Christian dilemma, nor with his denial of the legitimate evangelistic mission, and above all I rejected his blurring the significance of the differences between Judaism and Christianity. (Naturally, of course, I believe the hard, earth-rooted revelations of Judaism to be profoundly more relevant to the kind of world in which we live—God’s world—than the other-worldly promises taught in the name of Christianity.)

The memories of enforced conversions, the tales of the inquisition, the inevitable bristling when confronted by a missionary who prays for your eternal soul but bothers little with your earthly body and your here-and-now woes, who loves you only as he can win you—these were the associations evoked for me upon my first reading of Niebuhr’s article. No wonder we Jews want Christian missionaries to leave us alone. They have bungled the job so badly! Conversion was too frequently used in history as the easy method of “getting rid” of Jews. At least half the Jews in the United States fled from Eastern Europe where the announced program for solving the Jewish problem was “to convert one third, to drive one third away, and to massacre the final third.”

Even when such an obviously hostile intention was not involved in the evangelistic encounter, the smug devaluating of Judaism by missionaries who claimed we were “without hope” or charged us with “legalistic sterility” or “Pharasaic hypocrisy” was enough to drive us to fury. No wonder Niebuhr’s sophisticated word of appreciation for a Judaism still vital and relevant is enough to provide an otherwise sober rabbi with a “heady” uplift. Nor can we forget that even in today’s America it is in the “Bible Belt” area, where missionaries are so actively engaged, that there is still to be found the largest number of members and supporters of the organized hate groups that foment anti-Semitic propaganda in addition to a whole repertoire of other hates and prejudices.

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There are other stumbling blocks, too, that make the work of a Christian missionary difficult even if the Jewish subject has questioned his faith and is attracted to Christianity. In today’s world the right of the Jew to live fully and freely as a Jew has become one of the criteria by which we measure the well-being of our democratic society. For the Jewish-born to abandon the Jewish people now in the moment of their struggle (and when was this not the case?) is to be traitorous. The redemption of society—if not by Christian theology, at least by historic fact—has seemed to be bound up with the destiny of the Jew; and Jews (identified as Jews—whether they liked it or not) have played such a conspicuous role in the shaping of Western civilization (Freud, Marx, Einstein, Baruch, Weitzman, Waxman, Salk) that even the Jew who wears his yoke as though in chains finds himself called to remain at his post by an obligation that transcends his reason and overwhelms his will.

Last but not least there is the sad fact that many Jews who have gone over to Christianity failed to find there a cessation from prejudice and finger-pointing. They carried the burden of their Jewish heritage even into the “enemy camp.”

Evangelism And Method

But it seemed to me finally upon the second and third reading of Niebuhr’s essay that these were no reasons for the Christian to cease from his missionizing. It is good reason, however, for him to rethink his whole approach to evangelizing the Jew, and thereby to revise drastically his methods. It will probably serve the Christian better to live his Christianity to the fullest and so witness to the Jew not through the transmission of literature or the distribution of New Testaments but by making the Testament a living reality in his life pattern. In my judgment the tension in Jewish-Christian relations derives not from the Christian’s desire to assimilate the Jew and the Jew’s refusal to be assimilated; it goes deeper and beyond. Niebuhr correctly understands the inevitable consequence of a faulty and sinful technique, but he does not speak to the motivating concern that remains in my view both valid and necessary.

Indeed there is a tension between Jew and Christian, but it has resulted not because we would share with each other, yea, convince each other, of our ultimates and our absolutes. The tension results when the Christian is not genuinely Christian in his relation to the Jew, when he is governed by his pride and acts not in accordance with the will of God but in response to the needs of his human sinfulness. Certainly Jesus did not ask his followers to use manipulative and coercive methods to achieve the “fullness of his time” among his own people. Certainly the Christian who ignores the fact of anti-Jewish discrimination as he proposes to the Jew that he escape from this burden through conversion is preaching a fragmented Christianity devoid of its relevance to this world; so he deserves to fail. Certainly the Christian who anticipates that he can sell the virtues of his faith by condemning another’s is only half-taught; he has failed to recognize that in Christian teaching there are to be found other lessons concerning the more effective communication of the gospel, particularly lessons that speak of charity and love and sacrifice.

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I suggest, therefore, that the harm that has been perpetrated in the historic relationship between Jew and Christian derives from the sinfulness of man and not from the essential doctrines of the Church—particularly that mission to go and preach to the world. Nevertheless those sins already committed in the name of the Christ now stand as judgments before the sensitive Christian who will have to acknowledge his failure penitently and in humility.

Sharp And Tragic Differences

There will always be tension between Jew and Christian for we both (certainly we ought to) believe that our particular revelations represent the Truth. And the differences in our understanding of the Truth are not, as Niebuhr suggests, merely matters of emphasis—they are sharp and firm and tragic and perhaps irreconcilable.

The Jews were persecuted mercilessly by Christian popes and priests particularly when we were successful at communicating the Word, and so we ceased; and we have entered into the dialogue ever since only reluctantly. But now that we have had a new kind of experience in America where the Christian (Protestant) ethos has merged so effectively with a secularistic democratic experiment calling for the separation of Church and State and the guarantee of religious liberty, the Jews are stirring. The Reform movement at least hears continually serious calls for a more ambitious program to present Judaism to the unaffiliated (Jews and non-Jews). It is not that we believe salvation is denied to the non-Jew. God forbid that we shall take upon ourselves his prerogatives and define or delimit according to fleshly appearance those who shall abide with the Lord in the time-to-come! So we anticipate that salvation will come to all of those who thirst for the living God of our fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob even though they are not Semite by flesh but only in spirit. But we believe that His Word entrusted to us is true; and it is true not for us alone. It is our mission to bear witness to that Word to all men to the ends of the earth.

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Perhaps in his wisdom God has ordained that several peoples each shall carry an aspect of his whole truth and that the challenge to man is to learn how to make a unity out of the disparate revelations. But I cannot know this. I know only that God revealed himself to my fathers and reveals himself still to his chosen people. In Jewish sufferings do I see the stripes of his love, in the birth-pains of Israel evidence of his hand at work in history. It is we who suffer the modern-day Crucifixion and not the Christian. It is we who have borne the sin of men and point to the redemption. I can do no other but live by His law and teach men of His way. And I believe that in the time to come the law shall be proclaimed from Jerusalem and the word of God from Zion; and the Jewish people shall be the ministering priests unto the Kingdoms of men. If I hold this view for myself I cannot deny it to another. So ultimately I reject Niebuhr’s denial of the evangelistic dimension in the absolute faith.

The Jewish Rejection Of Jesus

Of course, I have already suggested that the differences between Judaism and Christianity are more basic than Niebuhr has allowed. It is hardly possible now in the space allotted to define these differences at length. Let me, however, touch lightly upon that difference that is central and most troublesome.

For the Jew the world is not yet redeemed. The Messiah has not yet come. Law, therefore, is still utterly relevant and the individual cannot by faith attain a salvation that will permit him to escape the judgment rendered upon society. Furthermore man must evermore urgently dedicate his hands at shaping and reshaping the stuff of this life for the redemption is a gift that must be earned and deserved.

How the Christian will bristle at every word in the preceding paragraph! For the Christian the world is redeemed. The Christ has come. Law, therefore, is for the sinner and makes for sin. Salvation is achieved not by man’s works but in his faith—in his faith in a redemption here and present.

How sharply and strongly we differ at this point. Indeed there is a contrast here. It is more than a matter of emphasis. No polite language can hide the fact that Jews are convinced that Christianity, unfortunately, has enabled too many individuals to think that they can be saved even though their world is crumbling all about them, that Christianity has misled some men into believing that faith without works counts more than the agonizing appraisal and reappraisal by faithful men of the schemes, programs and formulas by which justice can be achieved in the concrete.

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So the debate begins … and will continue.

But Jews and Christians need to recognize that though our differences are painful there was once a time of oneness. Of one vine are these branches. And we thrive in a world of poor soil and strangling weeds. How much labor we must do together in God’s vineyard. Let there be no fences between us, therefore, and let us love deeply so that in our brother’s eyes we shall see not our own reflection but his light.

END

Rabbi Arthur Gilbert was ordained at the New York School of the Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion (Reform). He has held pulpits in New Jersey and has served on the staff of the Jewish Graduate Society of Columbia University. Presently he is serving as Director of Inter-religious Cooperation for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

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