The Delicate Diplomacy of Jewish-Christian Dialogue

To shun sharing Jesus with Jews constitutes an eternally damning anti-Semitism, but to share Jesus without love may have the same effect.

For all the radical differences between Judaism and Christianity, these two monotheistic religions share striking similarities. Theirs is a kind of mother-daughter relationship. Or, as the apostle Paul explains, Christianity is a branch grafted into the olive tree of Israel. Both faiths venerate the Old Testament as Holy Scripture. Both worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Both believe in a promised Messiah, whether as in the case of Judaism it is still a prospective belief or, as with Christianity, retrospective. Both subscribe to the same moral principles in the Ten Commandments; hence, both highlight love, justice, and personal responsibility. In addition, both religions recognize the duty of bearing witness and making converts.

As for Christianity, its very genius is evangelism. In Emil Brunner’s aphorism, “The Church exists by mission as a fire exists by burning.” Christians have become tireless evangelists, carrying their message to the ends of the earth, indiscriminately viewing every non-converted human being—pagan, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, animist, and atheist alike—as a soul for whom the Savior died and with whom the Good News must be shared. The apostolic teaching challenges Rabbi Alexander Schindler’s opinion that, “There is no clear New Testament basis or mandate to justify the efforts to convert Jews.” Christians cannot accept his assertion that Jews are “outside the need for a Christian form of redemption.”

This position, however, lays evangelicals open to the charge of being proud and arrogant. Christianity in its evangelical branch claims to possess Almighty God’s fixed and final truth. Their view of salvation also exposes evangelicals to the charges of dogmatism and exclusivism as well. Still further, evangelicals are accused of narcissism, a “vulgar group narcissism,” to purloin a phrase from John Murray Cuddihy. Evangelicals are accused, too, of triumphalism, or of what an early fundamentalist, Ford Ottman, called the imperialism of Jesus, a crusading mentality that engenders fanaticism and motivates an aggressive, coercing, high pressure proselytism. Consequently, in the name of God, evangelicals might be sowing the poisonous seeds of anti-Semitism.

Evangelicals are not unaware of these charges. While conscientiously thinking through and living out their faith, they struggle to prevent deep conviction from developing into the kind of deadly animosity that stoked the furnaces of Auschwitz. Not only that: they are compelled to deal with the question Rabbi Schindler raises. Why do we contend that Jews are not, definitely not. “outside the need for a Christian form of redemption”? Why do we teach and preach that Judaism as a religion fails to qualify Jews as noncandidates for evangelism? Alienated from God by sinful disobedience, Jews, together with all members of the human family, are lost. But in his unchanging faithfulness and fathomless grace, God has been redemptively at work in history reconciling the self-estranged race of Adam to himself. In doing that, he long ago challenged Abraham to enter into a unique relationship with himself and thereby to embark on a unique mission. In faith, Abraham responded.

The subsequent history of Israel issues from the covenant thus established. The Jews, God’s chosen people, became the recipients of supernatural truth and an efficacious system of atoning sacrifice. The Israelitish theocracy, however, was simply a framework within which God was providing the possibility of faithful relationship with himself according to the Abrahamic pattern. From among these people who were Jews ethnically he was drawing into redemptive fellowship with himself a people who were Israelites spiritually. Yet he intended that Judaism qua religion be temporary and preparatory, the foundation on which a new faith, a new covenant, and a new relationship would in the fullness of time be established.

Following the New Testament argument, therefore, as elaborated especially in the Letter to the Hebrews, evangelicals maintain that by the whole Christ event, Judaism qua religion has been superseded, its propaedeutic purpose accomplished. Since Messiah has come and offered his culminating sacrifice, there is no temple, no priesthood, no altar, no atonement, no forgiveness, no salvation, and no eternal hope in Judaism as a religion. Harsh and grating expressions as to its salvific discontinuity are called for—abrogation, displacement, and negation. Those expressions are set down here, I assure you, with some realization of how harsh and grating they must sound to Jewish ears.

Evangelicals who embrace a premillenarian eschatology foresee a prophetic future for the Jews as an ethnic entity, with Palestine as the center of Christ’s planetary kingdom. But this restoration nationally does not affect the destiny of Jews individually. God’s prophetic promises will assuredly be kept; but if a Jew is to experience the Abrahamic relationship to his Creator, it must be through faith—yes, faith in the Messiah who has already come. Jesus Christ. In short, as James Parkes, the distinguished Anglican scholar who was an authority on Jewish-Christian beliefs and a devoted friend of the Old Covenant people, summarized the relationship between these two biblical faiths, Judaism is “not an alternative scheme of salvation to Christianity, but a different kind of religion.” That is why from the evangelical perspective Jews qualify as candidates for evangelism: there is no “alternative scheme of salvation to Christianity.”

This evangelical position seems so offensive that some theologians and church leaders have been joining with Jews to bring about its modification or, preferably, its abandonment. The battle is going on along three fronts. First, civility: evangelicalism ought to consider far more seriously the virtue of a kind of henotheistic tolerance. Second, an appeal is made to history: evangelicalism ought to ponder far more deeply the horror of anti-Semitism. Third, an appeal is made to theology: evangelicalism ought to evaluate far more open-mindedly the option of doctrinal reconstruction.

Take the appeal to civility. Reinhold Niebuhr, the world-renowed Protestant ethicist, long a luminary at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, in a 1958 address on “The Relations of Christians and Jews in Western Civilization” opted outright for a permanent moratorium on the evangelization of Jews. He endorsed the view proposed by philosopher Franz Rosensweig that Christianity and Judaism are “two religions with one center, worshiping the same God, but with Christianity serving the purpose of carrying the prophetic message to the Gentile world.” This, Niebuhr avowed, is a far better view than those conceptions of the two faiths “which prompt Christian missionary activity among the Jews.”

He had his reasons for advocating this radical break with Christian tradition. After all, doubt, humility, and toleration on his reckoning are the earmarks of a truly religious person. Certitude, pride, and intolerance are, on the contrary, unacceptable. In Niebuhr’s judgment. “Our toleration of truths opposed to those which we confess is an expression of the spirit of forgiveness in the realm of our own virtue … toleration of others requires broken confidence in the finality of our own truth.”

Those reasons struck John Murray Cuddihy as specious. In his study, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste, he wonders whether the root motive for Niebuhr’s proposal is civility, a desire to avoid being a Pauline scandal and stumbling block to his numerous intercredal friends. Never once apparently does Niebuhr raise the issue of truth. Cuddihy answered his own question, “Why, then, was the Christian mission to the Jews abandoned by the Protestants?… Not because Christ and Paul had not commanded it (they had): not because it was false to Christianity (it was of its essence); but because of appearances; it was in bad taste. As Marshall Sklare notes, by 1970 the Jewish community was publicly opposing the Christian mission to the Jews ‘on the grounds that Reinhold Niebuhr had elaborated a decade before,’ namely—in Sklare’s words—because of ‘the unseemliness’ of such evangelization.”

However, I place more weight than Cuddihy does on Niebuhr’s epistemological skepticism. The inability to apprehend truth with certainty and finality means we can repose only a “broken confidence” in our faith formulations. Civility and relativism, in other words, are Siamese twins. Why risk social ostracism by insisting that one’s friends embrace his dubious surmises about reality and destiny?

In the second place, there is the modification (preferably the abandonment) of the traditional Christian assumption that Jews, like the adherents of all other religions, need to accept the gospel as being urged as an antidote to the recurrent malady of anti-Semitism. Thus an appeal is made to history. Evangelicals are rightly exhorted to ponder the heart-breaking pages of Israel’s tragic saga: realize that it is Christianity which at bottom has been either primarily, or at any rate largely, responsible for the centuries-long persecution that reached its nadir in the Nazis’ ghastly “final solution of the Jewish problem.” Trace the connection between New Testament anti-Judaism and the anti-Jewish pogroms in Christian (I choose to let the adjective stand without enclosing it in exculpating quotation marks) Europe and America. When you do that, you may find you come to the conclusion that a moratorium on the evangelism of your Jewish friends and neighbors is really in order.

Here, frankly, evangelicals are hard put to gain clear perspective: not regarding the incredible, emotion-numbing insanity of an Auschwitz, but instead, in evaluating objectively the allegation that the preaching of the gospel has inspired anti-Semitism and may—God forbid!—do so again in the future. How just is that allegation? And as we compel ourselves to examine the historical evidence, we are in turn compelled to confess that again and again a dark and destructive attitude toward Jewish people has developed as a concomitant of gospel proclamation. Israel has been a sort of lightning rod drawing down upon itself the sizzling flame of Christian wrath.

As evangelicals, what then is our responsibility? We have an inescapable obligation to do whatever we can to clear away the misunderstandings and misinterpretations that have dyed the pages of history with Jewish blood. We must point out, for one thing, that the nation of Israel as an entity was no more guilty of crucifying Jesus than we were. Suffice it to say that a careful examination of the Gospels puts the burden of responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus on the shoulders of the imperial government in Palestine. Hence, in refuting the charge that the Jewish people were Christ killers, evangelicals must attest with Roy Eckardt that “ ‘Roman responsibility’ is a purely historical, superseded matter, while ‘Jewish responsibility’ is hardly at all a historical matter: it is an existential one.” For what Christian today, he asks, would ever taunt a citizen of Rome with “You killed Christ!”? That would be the nonsensical equivalent of indiscriminately charging a crowd of contemporary Americans. “You killed Abraham Lincoln.” So evangelicals must attest that any Jewish guilt was limited entirely to a handful of corrupt leaders and their hangers-on.

Evangelicals must likewise attest that, since Jesus died for the sin of the world, every human being bears responsibility for the cross—Christians no less than Jews. The recognition of our personal responsibility for the Savior’s death is, as James Daane suggests, “the spiritual solvent that ought to dissolve anti-Semitism in the Christian community.”

Consider, in the third place, the appeal to theology as a ground for imposing a moratorium on the evangelization of Jews. In the aftermath of Vatican II and with the increase of Jewish-Christian dialogue, Catholic and Protestant scholars have pushed for a drastic revision of traditional Christology and the revision of traditional soteriology. For example, Rosemary Reuther in her book, Faith and Fratricide, boldly raises this explosive issue: “Is it possible to say ‘Jesus is Messiah’ without, implicitly or explicitly, saying at the same time ‘and the Jews be damned’?” Reuther’s purpose is to demonstrate that “The anti-Judaic root of Christianity cannot be torn out until the church’s Christology is rid of its negation of the ongoing validity of the Jewish faith.”

Reuther has an ally in John T. Pawlikowski, professor at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and chairman of the National Council of Churches Faith and Order Study Group on Israel. He finds fault with Paul’s vision of the Jewish future sketched in Romans 9–11 because it “ultimately ends on a conversationist [sic: conversionist?] note that I find unacceptable.” So, for him, “More radical surgery is imperative.” In his judgment “… parts of our traditional Christology [are] severely inadequate and should in fact be discarded … as Christians we should come to view the Jewish ‘no’ to Jesus as a positive contribution to the ultimate salvation of mankind, not as an act of unfaithfulness or haughty blindness.”

Pawlikowski is aware that his reformulated Christology “will profoundly alter Christianity’s self-definition,” but he is persuaded that it will “make possible a more realistic relationship to Judaism and to all other non-Christian religions.”

According to Thomas Indinopulos and Roy Ward, this reformulation has so distanced itself from historic Christian belief that what is presented as “Christological” will not “… prove intelligible, much less acceptable to any of the recognizable branches of Christianity.… The implication of our author’s Christological ‘reinterpretation’ is that in order for Christology to cease being anti-Semitic, it must cease being recognizable as Christology, that is, ‘salvific.’ To us, this appears as self-defeating—a case of stopping the disease by shooting the patient.”

Which is why Indinopulos and Ward warn the ecumenical advocates of reconstructionism that the “inherent contradiction” between the two divergent religions, Christianity and Judaism, cannot be overcome “without either the Christian quitting his faith or the Jew converting to Christianity.”

We come back, then, more or less full circle, to the problem of witness and conversion. Since Christianity, as evangelically construed, is of necessity evangelistic, can Christians earnestly share their faith with Jews and not come under censure for proselytizing? I think they can. As an evangelical, I draw a sharp distinction between proselytizing and witnessing, rejecting proselytism as a perversion of witness.

In his helpful analysis, “A Phenomenology of Proselytism,” James Megivern indicates three major dynamics that seem to underlie the proselytizer’s activity: first, the “necessary-for-salvation” motive; second, the “one-and-only-truth” motive; and third, the “obedience-to-a-divine-command” motive. Also, operating in the proselytizer may be latent and “less exalted motives, with consequences that no respectable religion could ever want to justify”—a “dominion motive,” an “insecurity motive,” and an “egocentric motive.”

However, while appreciating the subtlety and strength of these perhaps unconscious dynamics, I do not draw from them or Megivern’s other arguments a warrant for declaring “a moratorium on Christian missions as we have known them.” Instead, I am constrained to view positively the three major motives that he mentions. Christianity, as the flower and fulfillment of its Old Testament root, is both the one and only truth and the only saving religion. At the same time, we must not be obtusely insensitive to the enormous problems inherent in that conviction, and to the difficulties that our truth claim creates in intercredal dialogue. With regard to Megivern’s other motive, obedience to our Lord’s mandate, “Preach the gospel to every living person” (Mark 16:15), we must add to this the master motive in Christian theology, ethic, and mission—love.

Motivated by love and nothing but love, God has undertaken the whole process of creation and redemption in order to share the beatitude of his love which, at an incalculable cost to himself, God freely offers to all of us. Illuminated by God’s Spirit, we respond in faith. And having experienced personally the wonder of his love, we are motivated to love him and obey him. “If you love me,” Jesus said, “keep my commandments” (John 14:15). One of his commandments is universal evangelism.

If love motivates us (though its motivating power is confessedly often weak, ineffectual, and short-circuited), we rejoice to share with our neighbors the best we have to give, and that best is the gospel of Jesus Christ. George Knight, a sympathetic friend of Israel, speaks for evangelicals when he writes: “There is one thing, and only one thing that we must communicate to all men, and that is Christ. To refrain from doing so … is a form of religious anti-Semitism which is as basically evil as the philosophy of the Nazis.”

In the end the problem is not why but how: as undeserving recipients of redemptive love, how can we lovingly share the gospel with Jews? If we share it prayerfully, graciously, tactfully, honestly, sensitively, and noncoercively, we will not be guilty of the proselytizing that understandably disturbs Rabbi Brickner: “It is not the gospel that is a threat to the Jews. The threat is from those who use the gospel as a club to beat others into a brand of belief and submission with which they may disagree or find no need.” Our evangelism, if love-motivated and love-implemented, will fall within the category of witnessing approved by Rabbi Bernard Bamberger: “I see no reason why Christians should not try to convince us of their viewpoint, if they do so decently and courteously; and I believe that we Jews have the same right.”

One might devoutly wish for a theological genius and a sociological wizard capable of undoing the Gordian knot of Jewish-Christian relations. But that tangle will stay tied, I fear, until, as an evangelical might exclaim, the millennium has dawned. Meanwhile, Reuther charts the path that we must follow with a measure of resignation and a capitulation to realism: “Possibly anti-Judaism is too deeply embedded in the foundations of Christianity to be rooted out entirely without destroying the whole structure. We may have to settle for the sort of ecumenical good will that lives with theoretical inconsistency and opts for a modus operandi that assures practical cooperation between Christianity and Judaism.”

Is that too modest an agreement? Or can evangelicals oppose any least anti-Semitic innuendo, carry on their evangelistic mission, and still cooperate ecumenically with their Jewish friends and neighbors? My hope, my prayer, is that they can.

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