Clergy and Educators

ICJS Scripture Forum, 2004-2005
Session #3

Scripture Forum
Session #3
Goucher College
December 3, 2004

Introduction to the session by Rabbi Charles Arian:
   This third session will make the transition from the previous two discussions to an in-depth consideration of the second essay in Irving Greenberg's book For the Sake of Heaven and Earth. The essay is called "Cove-nantal Partners in a Postmodern World." In this essay Rabbi Greenberg tries to lay out a complete theology of the Jewish-Christian encounter from a Jewish perspec-tive.
   It seems somewhat surprising that this book has not yet achieved much notoriety. It may be the case that Greenberg is so suspect (given his history) that Ortho-dox rabbis simply aren't paying much attention. This situation is the opposite of what happened following the publication of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's book, The Dignity of Difference. That book was attacked for some of its statements about Christianity; and Rabbi Sacks was forced to put out a second edition, in which certain of his views were expressed more equivocally than they had been in the first edition. Rabbi Greenberg goes much further than does Rabbi Sacks in acknowledging the va-lidity of Christianity and the truth claims that Christianity makes.
   On February 8, 2005, Rabbi Greenberg will give a public lecture in the evening. He will also be spending the day with Jewish and Christian clergy and educators. He is anxious to explore issues his book raises with those who will be in attendance. There will also be a response from the Christian perspective by R. Kendall Soulen. In the meantime, ICJS scholars want to see what issues develop -- or problems arise -- in this Scripture Forum group in order to bring a better focus to the conversa-tion with Rabbi Greenberg.
   Greenberg has prepared a document entitled "Ten Key Points," in which he explains the things he was trying to focus on in the book. The goal of this morning's discus-sion is to look at these points in an attempt to get everyone on the same page regarding what Greenberg is saying. After that work is done, the group will circle back to discuss the areas that raise problems.
   Trained both as a rabbi and a historian, Irving Green-berg is uniquely qualified to do what he has done in this essay, namely, a theological reading of history. Rabbis are not trained in seminary to think in the way that Greenberg does.
   (Remark from a participant: There is a hint here of Hegelianism: All of history is God trying to figure out who He is, and so He creates a dialogue partner. The notion of history here is interesting -- trying to think in the way that the people of the time were thinking as a way to do history.)

Study of the "key points":
(Point #1 was not discussed: "It is the most comprehen-sive and positive theology of Christianity by a Rabbi (and an Orthodox one at that) in the past two thousand years.")

Point #2: "The book argues from a Jewish point of view that it was the will of God that Christianity be born out of Judaism and then separate so that the two faiths could work side by side to perfect the world. In many areas of faith and practice, the two can accomplish what each one separately (or alone) cannot."

• Question: Is God conducting two parallel tracks ("side by side"), or are we working together?
• Response and another question: Greenberg brings Islam up early in the essay, (which implies at least a third track, not taking into consideration any of the other world religions). Why does Greenberg say that Islam was born out of Judaism, rather than out of Judaism and Christianity?
• Returning to the question originally asked: Are Judaism and Christianity interacting, or do they work in parallel, according to Greenberg's view?
• Response from a Jewish participant: Judaism and Christianity interact, which, from a Jewish per-spective, is one of Greenberg's more controversial views.
• Response from a Christian participant: It is a delusion to maintain that they can be on two parallel tracks. Jews and Christians have been living together and interacting, although not always positively, for two thousand years. Moreover, perfecting the world is a collaborative endeavor, not the domain of any one particular tradition.
• The notion of interactivity is problematic for Jews. Historically the mission of Jews has been to be an exemplar for other peoples, to behave so well that others will see and try to behave in the same ways. Greenberg speaks of a much more profound interactivity.
• "Side by side" should be interpreted to mean work-ing "together" on a task given to both of us by God.
• If Jews and Christians can work together to achieve what each tradition cannot achieve
  alone, what is there in the work that is unique about Judaism? about Christianity?
• Jews and Christians share many of the same issues, but those things one tradition may em-phasize, the other may de-emphasize. Working together these issues become more balanced.
• Greenberg's presentation shows that the devel-opment of Judaism and Christianity has gone in stages. At first, there had to break a sharp break by Christianity away from Judaism, or else the Jesus movement would have stayed within Judaism and been unable to go off and reach the rest of the world. The problem lay in how the break was accomplished. He does not speak of the tragedy
  of the parting of the ways but the tragedy in the parting of the ways. Greenberg is saying that now we have a second chance to get it right and work together.
• Another Christian participant expressed some anxiety about the "will of God" language in point #2. In his book Moments of Crisis in Jewish-Christian Relations, Marc Saperstein argues that
  in pivotal historical moments Jews and Christians could have made other choices and subsequent history could then have been different. Green-berg's argument goes against that notion. There are no theological issues in good or bad choices. It's not simply a matter of historical circumstances and bad decisions; God actually has something in mind. Greenberg makes theological assumptions about what has happened historically.
• Reaction from another Christian participant: There seems to be a contradiction in what Greenberg is saying. He says that it's all God's will, but then he emphasizes the notion of human agency increasing over time in the work to perfect the world. I can live with the idea of God redeeming bad situations but not with the notion that it's all God's will.
• Response: Greenberg is saying that the separation was God's will. All the bad things that came out of the separation were not God's will.
• One participant (who had not had a chance to read the essay) wondered if Greenberg used models of Northern Kingdom/Southern Kingdom
  or male/female in making his argument.
• This comment pulled the discussion briefly off track as one participant took exception to the male/female example as a model of complemen-tarity, explaining that this model reinforces the idea that there are preordained roles that can
  only be filled by one or the other.
• Question: Is there an analogical bridge between Judaism and Christianity like the one between male and female? That is, are there non-interchange-able core pieces to both so that the two can never be collapsed into one another?
• Another participant sees the discussion as being about theories of interaction. For example, if process theology is right about the idea of the unfolding of the truth of God in history, then necessary to the perfecting of the world is a dialectic that needs two participants. It would
  be necessary to allow for the possibility that
  God is omniscient, and that there is still more
  for God to learn.
• Comment from a Christian participant: If the parting was a good, God-willed thing, it would be interesting to know what the disciples thought about it, and what Jesus thought about it.

Point #3: "Despite their ongoing differences, the two religions are much closer to each other and share com-mon core stories more than either has been willing to admit for fear of being undermined. Jesus was a Jew and only because early Christians were Jewish could they recognize that a resurrection is a sign of a messiah being present. The early Christians were thinking like Jews even when they made the religious interpretations that led them to separate and start a new religion. Similarly, Judaism's main teachings remain close to Christianity's. Even when they differ, often major themes in one are minor themes in the other and the spectrum of positions in each tradition run parallel."

• A Christian participant wanted to flesh out the no-tion that resurrection is "a sign of a messiah being present." This comment sparked a discussion of resurrection in general [no pun intended].
• Christianity does not reject the notion of the resurrection of soul and body.
• One participant took exception to Greenberg's use of the word "rewarded" in the following sentence: Thus Christianity's birth is a triumph of human fidelity in the face of tragedy that was rewarded with such powerful religious experiences as to enable the steadfast to know God's presence in the midst of the faith community" (p. 66).
• Another participant prefers "divine" fidelity to "human" fidelity in the same sentence.
• Response in defense of Greenberg: He's being careful here to make the point that the early Christians' experience of the presence of Christ was an authentic experience.
• Question from a Jewish participant: He's saying that it was an authentic experience, but also a mythic one. Would he say the same thing about the exodus? Does he understand both events the same way?
• Response from a Christian participant: To say that "real" and "mythic" are exclusive categories and that one trumps the other is to take a scientific view of the issue. Returning to the original ques-tion asked, this participant went on to restate Greenberg's point as "Judaism is the condition for the possibility of recognizing that resurrection is the sign that there was a messiah present."
• There were also longings for such a person in classical antiquity (i.e., apart from Judaism).
• Response from a Jewish participant: It is modernity that says that resurrection is mythical, but scien-tific advancements like cloning are changing our understanding of issues like resurrection. Resur-rection is a very complicated subject among the rabbis.
• Greenberg's discussion would benefit from his asking what Christians understand resurrection
  to be.
• A Christian participant has quibbles about some of the language Greenberg uses in points #2 and 3:
• In point #2 he speaks of Christianity's being "born out of Judaism." This language implies a parent-child relationship between the two faiths, which implies a certain prejudice about the superiority of Judaism over Christianity. This is the reverse of what Greenberg is trying to do in the essay.
• Greenberg's language in point #3 also expresses a certain bias: "The early Christians were thinking like Jews . . ."
  The early Christians were Jews.
• Response in defense of Greenberg: Greenberg
  is trying to preserve the language of Jewish discourse so that his [Jewish] audience will understand what he is saying.
• Response: So what? He's breaking ground here.
• Objection from a Christian participant: Greenberg is making the claim that we need to change the language of discourse, then he doesn't do it himself, which underscores the difficulty of the task he has set.
• Another Christian participant objects to the use of indefinite instead of definite articles in the phrase "a resurrection is a sign of a messiah."
• The resurrection of Jesus carries with it a univer-sal significance, like the general resurrection in Judaism.
• Returning to a point made earlier: Resurrection in the New Testament does not refer to the disem-bodied soul but to new life, to something like the dry bones in Ezekiel.
• Jesus is alive again in a new way, although in a way that is not detached from Jesus of Nazareth. This is the point where it becomes difficult to talk about things. Greenberg took on a new task, but he can't get this right speaking out of his own tradition.
• Again in defense of Greenberg: To say that the experience was authentic is breaking new ground, and at the same time treading close to heresy. This book is published by the Jewish Publication Society and is intended for a Jewish audience.
• There is a certain fear here about stepping over lines because the two traditions resemble one another so much.
• Greenberg argues a special relationship for Judaism and Christianity. This relationship is positive in the sense that it calls us to pay more attention to each other, but it is negative in the way that Judaism and Christianity are positioned in regard
  to Islam.
• Question from a Christian participant: The matrix out of which Christianity emerged is described as Jewish, but the category is so large and elastic that it can be problematic. Does one have to have Jewish sensibilities to understand what happened in Jesus?
• Understanding what happened in Jesus is why we have the Old Testament. One doesn't have to be Jewish, but it's not possible to understand the New Testament without understanding the Jewish story. Greenberg is referring not to today but to the early Christians and what they needed in order to recognize what God was doing in Jesus. But today to read the New Testament without the Old Testament is to misread the New Testament.
• In a time of messianic expectations, a resurrection would signal the presence of a messiah.
• That is exactly what turned things around for Paul: Jesus' resurrection was, to his mind, the beginning of the general resurrection, and so
  Jesus had to be the Messiah. Unlike later Chris-tians, however, Paul was fully aware that the world was unredeemed, so he reconfigured the notion of messiah, declaring Jesus to be not a failed messiah but an unfinished one (Greenberg offers both these possibilities in Key Point #9).
• Greenberg assumes that Christians and Jews understand the same thing by "messiah."
• The concept developed in Judaism in relation to what Christians were saying. The question is, What did Jews at the time of Jesus understand about messiah?
• It is problematic to assume that all Judaism had the same understanding of messiah.
• At this point there was a brief presentation of what Maimonides considered to be the "facts on the ground" that signaled the presence of the Messiah, which included the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem, the cessation of war and famine, universal knowledge of God, and contin-
  ual worship of God.
• What is important to know is not what Maimonides thought about the messiah, but what the common Jew walking around in 30 C.E. understood.
• Gentiles reworked the notion of messiah to fit with a savior figure, and they did so without thinking Jewishly.
• The notion of messiah did become something else, but the changes happened among a minority of Jews who decided that the facts on the ground were trumped by something else. Greenberg doesn't deal with this (How does one deal with this?).
• Certain Greek heroes were given the title soter (savior). There were gentiles longing for resur-rection and believing in life after death. These gentiles would not have used the notion of messiah.
• It is in that world that the two terms -- messiah and savior -- came together.
• Greenberg speaks of Christians spiritualizing or-ganic Jewish notions. For example, on p. 79 he notes that Christians spiritualized redemption in order to "explain away the contradictory state of the world." But what Greenberg doesn't realize is that there are political, economic, and social categories that are integral to the way notions
  like redemption take hold in Christianity.
• Greenberg claims that in the concepts that Christians have put forth for centuries, notions about the political and social order were only a minority voice.
• There has always been a powerful political theol-ogy embedded in the church and lived out in society, an earthy reading of the Christian story that Greenberg does not acknowledge.
• But it is still a minority voice. The main goal for most Christians is "me and Jesus working out the salvation of my soul." This is what Greenberg is mirroring, and shame on him! Living under the messiahship of the Lord is to repair the world, to carry out political and social reordering, and we learn this from the gospel.
• Question from a Jewish participant: Is the telos (goal) of the gospel assuming responsibility for
  the world?
• Answer: Absolutely.
• Another response to the same question: The dia-logue that God is calling from us has that as its end.
• A Christian participant protested mildly that this position is not evident when viewed on the basis of a catechetical orientation, which teaches that God will do something new to repair the world.
• On p. 74, Greenberg writes that "Paul found it
  hard to affirm that the divine plan included two independent channels of redemption, operating side by side." This is a fair statement, but it needs qualification. First, Paul expected the "age to come" to be ushered in very soon, certainly in his own lifetime, and so would have assumed there was no time, and no need, to repair the world as it was. Second, Greenberg himself explains that the move in Judaism to greater human responsibility for repairing the world was a product of the Rabbinic Era, which was essentially after Paul's time.
• Nevertheless, there is a tension in the Gospels between divine and human agency -- for example, in Matt. 25:31-46. It isn't a case of either/or.
• Nor is it either/or for Greenberg. The essence of Christianity is tikun olam ("repairing the world"), and we have a second chance to do this.
• Except for each inside of itself, removed from the other, neither Christianity nor Judaism is complete in itself. The gentiles needed a covenant in order to enter into relation with the God of Israel. Each on its own needs help for the sake of the world.
• Irving Greenberg's historical read is that God is becoming increasingly removed from the world, which is a spiritualizing of the secularization pro-cess. My community needs to be empowered to take on the repair of the world.
• Historically, you have to go on a trajectory of (divine) withdrawal when you go through the Shoah.
• But this is also how Greenberg sees greater room for human activity. Nevertheless, God ought to be able to be present, not withdrawn, for humans to grow in repairing the world. The models that Greenberg uses of the divine-human relationship
  -- parent-child, teacher-student -- are hierar-chical, and they are not good models.
• Christians taking communion would have trouble understanding that.
• Tzimtzum ("contraction" [of the divine]) sounds like a fresh notion, but I cannot integrate it into my own tradition.
• The doctrine of the Incarnation is 180° away from this notion.

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