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Christians and Jews: Starting Over - Why the Real Dialogue Has Just Begun

Luke Timothy Johnson

Luke Timothy Johnson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. His article from the January 31, 2003 issue of magazine is posted here with the kind permission of the editors.

How should Christians think about Jews? Or better, how should Christians think about themselves with reference to Judaism? This will always be a necessary question for Christians to ask, and will never be an easy question for them to answer.

It is a necessary question because Christians and Jews each lay claim to the same body of sacred texts and the story found in them, but do so in such different terms that each claim appears to challenge the other. It is necessary as well because Jews and Christians share a history of internecine rivalry. The primal trauma experienced by the first Christians is expressed in the New Testament's polemic against non-believing Jews. Christian payback extends across the long centuries of anti-Semitism supported and even sponsored by the church. Figuring out how Christianity should approach Judaism is necessary also because the Holocaust of the twentieth century and the subsequent rise of the state of Israel have fundamentally altered the terms of the conversation.

Recent exchanges in this and other journals indicate that the question remains as difficult as ever. Even as many Jewish scholars and religious leaders seek a more informed and less inflammatory context for constructive conversation (see Christianity in Jewish Terms, Westview Press), others find additional reasons for rage, not only because of the uncovering of historical evidence concerning the church's role in the Holocaust, but because of the Vatican's obtuseness in pursuing the canonization of Pius IX, Pius XII, and Edith Stein (see "Continuing the Conversation: The Church and Daniel Goldhagen," Commonweal, March 8, 2002). Christian voices are equally divided and perhaps even more confused. A good example of the distortions introduced by supersessionism is a recent exchange in America ("Covenant and Mission," October 21, 2002) between – who thinks that, despite everything, Christians should still proselytize Jews – and members of the Christian Scholars Group on Christian-Jewish Relations (Mary Boys, Philip Cunningham, and John Pawlikowski) – who defend their statement that, "revising Christian teaching about Judaism and the Jewish people is a central and indispensable obligation of theology in our time."

I do not hope to answer the question of how Christians should think about Jews, because I think that is the wrong way to put the question. Instead, I hope to suggest a way that Christians might begin to think of themselves with reference to Jews. If Christianity is not supersessionist, is it anything? I think so. But discovering what Christianity is apart from supersessionism will require more work and clearer thinking than has usually been in evidence.

The charm of supersessionism

It is an odd word, supersessionism. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, a reference work that defines almost everything, has no entry for it. The term is traditionally used for the conviction that the church has replaced Israel as God's chosen people. Israel has lost its place and Christianity now occupies it. Supersessionism is shorthand for the dominant Christian theological position regarding the Jews.

The claim that supersessionism is explicit in the writings of the New Testament exaggerates. The New Testament, it is true, provides plenty of ammunition for later supersessionist arguments. Avery Dulles defends the idea, expressed in Hebrews 10:9, that Christ "abolishes the first [covenant] in order to establish the second," but the New Testament compositions were not written from a position of Christian superiority to Judaism. They were, rather, composed in the context of competition among sects within the framework of Judaism. For Dulles to speak of Hebrews as "the most formal statement on the status of the Sinai covenant under Christianity," is, at the very least, anachronistic.

Supersessionism in the proper sense emerges in the middle and late second century, when Christianity had become almost entirely Gentile, and when history seemed to be running against the Jews. The failed Jewish war against Rome in 67-70 and the suppression of the Bar Kochba Revolt in 135 meant the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple, and the apparently permanent scattering of the people. Justin Martyr, Origen, and Tertullian make the explicit claim that the Jews have been displaced as God's people and replaced by Christians.

The claim seemed to be magnificently confirmed by historical events. As the Gospels show, Jesus fulfilled the messianic prophecies of Scripture in great detail. In Matthew, everything from Jesus' virgin birth to his betrayal for money fulfilled specific prophecies (Matt 1:22-23; 27:9-10). The embarrassing fact that Jesus did not fulfill other messianic prophecies – in particular, those predicting a triumphant rule over Israel's enemies – was managed by hermeneutical sleight of hand: those prophecies, it was explained, concerned Jesus' second coming, not his first. Jesus' own prophecies had even more impressively been confirmed by history: the Temple had been destroyed just as he had predicted, and the people had been punished and scattered. The gospel, moreover, had been proclaimed to the Gentiles and received by them (see Mark 13:1-37; Matt 24:1-51; Luke 21:5-36). Real historical events confirmed Jesus' status as prophet. They also showed the emptiness of Jewish counterclaims. How could Jewish messianic expectations be accomplished when there were no longer a Temple and no longer a people on the land, and when the failed Bar Kochba uprising had proven how futile was the hope for a Jewish king?

As the sole legitimate heirs of the biblical promises, Christians had the right and the obligation – so they supposed – to define those whom they had supplanted, especially since Jews themselves seemed to ignore the clear lessons of history and insisted on persisting. How can such odd obduracy be understood? What might God have in mind? Do the Jews survive in order to bear the curse they brought on themselves for the death of Jesus? Is their continued presence an object lesson? Whatever conclusion Christian theologians reached, they assumed that their historical victory gave them the right to define Judaism in Christian terms.

History's Little Turns

Things have changed. Christianity today is the world's largest religion but it can no longer claim to be history's darling. Four developments in recent centuries suggest that history has abandoned Christians. First, world exploration revealed how tiny a territory - and how short a time span - Christians and Jews had been debating: history and geography no longer fit in the frame of the Bible. The majority of humans, who were wholly ignorant of the biblical story, also must be considered. Second, while the Enlightenment toppled revelation from its throne and installed human reason in its place, Christianity was secular reasons special target. Third, the age of revolution removed Christianity's political clout, making it no more than one more competitor for secondary allegiance within the secular state. Fourth, the Holocaust revealed the moral rot in Christian consciousness concerning Jews. The logic of isolation and exclusion that had been Christian policy for centuries found diabolical expression in the machinery of concentration camp and mass murder. In the face of these jolting historical realities, many Christians find it harder to maintain theological smugness toward Judaism.

Even worse - from the perspective of supersessionism - the same historical turns that toppled Christianity from its place gave Judaism a place of its own. The state of Israel is not only an unexpected, perhaps unprecedented, historical resurrection of an ancient nation, it enables Jews to read the Bible again as something more than the revelation of God's commandments. They can once more read Torah as the story of a people and a land pointing to a fulfillment in the reality of present-day Jews as a people on that land. A keystone of Christian supersessionism was the impossibility of reading Torah in terms of material and historical fulfillment. With the appearance of the state of Israel, that argument disappears (see E. Fackenheim, The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust).

Who's laughing now?

After the necessary time of silence and witness following the Holocaust, the classical forms of Jewish observance and thought have reappeared with new vigor and confidence. The Talmudic tradition thrives in the open market, and exercises political influence in Israel. Jewish scholars celebrate the breadth and fecundity of midrashic study in contrast to the narrowness and aridity of modern historicism. Although many Jewish scholars are deeply interested in Christianity as another way of reading Torah, they approach conversation not as the rejected but as the elder child, fully confident of the special place of this people before its God. They simply do not need to take Christians into account in order to account for themselves.

Christians, in contrast, find themselves deeply divided in their responses to the changed historical circumstances. On one side we find Christians acting as though nothing significant has changed. Many Evangelicals seek the conversion of Jews to Christianity. Many millenarians find the state of Israel a welcome bit of fuel for the final conflagration: having a literal landscape for Armageddon helps enormously when charting the course of the f