Clergy and Educators

ICJS Scripture Forum, 2004-2005
Session #4

Scripture Forum
Session #4
Goucher College
January 7, 2005

Brief introduction by Rabbi Charles Arian:
   In this session participants continued their discussion of the essay "Covenantal Partners in a Postmodern World" in Irving Greenberg's book For the Sake of Heaven and Earth, but this time the group concentrated its focus on one subsection (pp. 64-69), "The Birth and Separation of a New Covenant," in the section called "Judaism and Christianity in Confrontation." This subsec-tion of the essay deals with questions of Judaism, covenant, and Christian claims about Jesus as Messiah.
   Greenberg speaks of Jews and Christians as two branches of the people Israel. This notion is a shocking one to Jews, but it argues for the legitimacy of the ICJS's distinctiveness, in that it suggests a unique relationship between Christians and Jews that does not apply to other religious traditions.

Discussion:

• Greenberg sees God as increasingly stepping outside of human history to give humans more responsibility. He uses a parent-child analogy to describe this process. The errors human beings make are often painful to God, but He realizes
  that humans need to grow.
• One participant voiced an objection to the parent-child analogy because human parents will help an adult child.
• Greenberg's point is that God is present in history in a different way than He was during the biblical era.
• A Christian participant spoke about Greenberg's recapitulation of the notion that there is a "Judaism" (not precisely defined) that precedes Christianity. She feels that Greenberg perpetuates a false idea that affects the discussion, and that he should have nuanced this theme more carefully.
• Question from a Christian participant: If Christian-ity is seen as the child of Judaism, does that mean that categories like "messiah" should be under-stood according to Judaism, who as "parent"
  ranks higher than the "child"?
• When Christians talk about "messiah," their discus-sion gets measured against what Jews say is right or wrong about the concept, rather than looking at how two traditions struggling to exist defined the term. Christian notions of "messiah" should not be measured against a Jewish template.
• If Greenberg had used the phrase "Second Temple Judaism" and named that the parent of Christian-ity, he would have been correct. By calling it simply "Judaism," he implies that Rabbinic Judaism is the more direct descendant of biblical Judaism. This doesn't help when Jews and Christians are having a discussion about their similarities and differences: Everything gets measured against Judaism.
• Greenberg's way of putting the issue implies that Judaism entails an unchanging essence, and that Judaism is all of a piece, a fixed revelatory tradi-tion that has been around since the people were called by God; therefore, it makes sense to privi-lege Judaism over Christianity.
• Response from a Jewish participant: This is not a scholarly book: There are few footnotes and no bibliography. This is a polemic, and it is cavalier with history across the board. Greenberg wants people to accept the statements he makes with-out questioning them. This book is for Jews.
• Greenberg is situated within contemporary Juda-ism with wolves on both sides of him weighing his every word. What would it have meant for him to have been more precise, more nuanced?
• You can read this book as a Jew with little histori-cal knowledge and still not know that there's a difference [e.g., between "Judaism" and "Second Temple Judaism"].
• Greenberg doesn't want to be labeled a "historicist."
• The Roman Church does the same thing; these are people who see the world on the basis of a revela-tion that is not time-bound.
• Are "revelatory" and "historical" mutually exclusive? This is a false choice, a false dichotomy.
• Greenberg has written himself out of Orthodoxy, but he's trying to cover his bases and write as if he is part of mainstream Orthodoxy.
• We should ask him what he meant.
• In making Judaism culture-bound, he's selling out to Christianity. He has to protect himself against this.
• The same caveat should be applied to Christianity, which isn't monolithic either.
• Comment from a Christian participant: A lot of Christians would drop the book as soon as they
  hit the term "failed messiah."



• An objection was raised to the penultimate sen-tence on p. 64, calling it a Jewish caricature of Christianity and unacceptable: "Thus, Christians focused more on the individual's salvation while Jews stressed the significance of the collective history of God's revelation and liberation."
• There was some disagreement among the Chris-tians present as to whether Greenberg is right
  or wrong on this point, because it is true that throughout most of Christian history many Christians have in fact put an emphasis on individual salvation.
• One Christian participant said in response to this: Christians have abused Christianity.
• Another Christian spoke of the tension between individual and communal aspects that runs through Christian history.
• Another Christian response: In the course of Chris-tian history there has been more emphasis on the individual, but in the founding documents of the tradition one finds the people seeing themselves as a corporate reality. The founding spirit includes both individual and communal elements: The indi-vidual is worthy because he or she is baptized into the community. Greenberg's statement on p. 64 panders to the Jewish way of understanding Chris-tians and is not helpful in furthering the dialogue.
• Question: Is there a similar tension in Judaism?
• Short answer: Yes.
• Longer short answer: The liturgy is overwhelmingly but not entirely in the plural.
• Question from a Jewish participant: In Christianity can one have an authentic experience of Jesus the Christ without being part of the community?
• Response: One has to be part of the community.
• Another response: The liturgy now focuses on "we" rather than "I."
• In Judaism one can genuinely experience God only in and through the community. Jews talk about communal salvation, not individual salvation.
• Christians are moving in a direction that corrects setting individual salvation apart from the larger collective reality. Salvation has to be construed
  in terms of all of creation.



• Question, referencing the first paragraph on p. 64: What was the content of missionary Judaism? A lot of the problems we're talking about go back to historical issues at the time of the parting of the ways. (This question was never really addressed.)
  [Paragraph 1, page 64: One may say that in the spread of Hellenistic civilization, the human ground was prepared for
  a new birth of religion. The reign of the gods of nature and paganism's hold over people were weakened. Millions of people were open as never before to good news about God's love for humanity and the unfolding of human dignity that must follow. This became clear in the remarkable wide-spread response to Jewish and Christian proselytization and in the differential positive response of downtrodden groups (including women) to missionary Judaism and Christianity. For its part, the Jewish community's capacity to take on a new stage of covenantal responsibility was in place as well. This was the fullness of time for a new unfolding of the divine plan to engage humanity more broadly in the cove-nantal process. Both Judaism and a new religion, born out
  of its body, organized to witness to the nations about a loving God; each brought instruction as to how to lead the good life.]


• Christianity was/is "Judaism lite" for gentiles.
• According to the Jewish template, everything good about Christianity is something we got right [from Judaism], and everything bad is something we got wrong.
• Remark from a Jewish participant: Greenberg implies that Jews were enthusiastic about the renewal of the covenant [p. 65: ". . . they heard a different call -- to a greater level of participation in a renewed covenant of Israel."]; in fact, Jews were dragged along, kicking and screaming. He makes statements like this across the board.



• Attention shifted to the first two paragraphs on
  p. 65:
     Was Jesus the fulfillment of the biblical hope for a mes-siah? To the overwhelming majority of Jews, then and now, who understood ultimate redemption to include the political, economic, and social liberation of humanity -- as well as the achievement of love and harmony between all humans and between God and humanity -- the answer to this question was clearly no. They experienced no restoration of political dignity and, spiritually, no transformation in God's availabil-ity. Given the facts on the ground, this person was no messiah. As open and anxious as they were for a new age, they heard no new signal of revelation. They were not deaf, but the heard a different call -- to a greater level of partici-pation in a renewed covenant of Israel. To many gentiles who heard the narrative of Jesus' life and experienced spiritual regeneration, Jesus became the Christ, a messianic figure who had come to them. To those who encountered God reaching out in a new way to forgive their sins, spiritu-ally creating a new heaven and earth, Jesus was the fulfillment of the biblical promises taught to them, and
  so they joined the faith in his name.
     One should not miss the nuances of the situation. Many gentile pagans went on with life as usual. Many Jews never heard of Jesus and his ministry in the first century. A minority of Jews embraced Jesus' life as a redemptive religious event for themselves and others. Some of these Jews were inspired to become missionaries to the gentiles; enough Jews followed this new articulation of their faith to keep it alive until it struck roots in Hellenistic culture, where it spread rapidly, eventually becoming the dominant religion and separating from Judaism.


• Response to this material from a Christian partici-pant: Was Jesus the fulfillment of biblical hope for a messiah? No, Jesus was something other than what the Bible expressed.
• Jewish response: There are plenty of evangelical Christians who want to play the proof-text game to show Jews that Jesus was the fulfillment of messianic expectations.
• There is a paradigm shift with regard to Jesus as Messiah, a shift to his being something other, but it's not taking hold everywhere.
• Question from a Jewish participant: Is Greenberg aware of the shift?
• There are other ways of understanding ultimate reality, which explains the paradigm shift.
• Greenberg's understanding of "messiah" comes from Maimonides. The question to ask is: Was there a variety of understandings of the word
  in the first century?
• The range of thinking in the first century was based on more than just the "scriptures." Excising the pseudepigraphical writings has impoverished our knowledge and understanding of the time. They had much more than the "scriptures" in
  their head.
• Paul's understanding of Jesus as Messiah was in large part based on a concept called "adaptability" that came out of the surrounding culture: The evidence of his letters shows that Paul believed that Jesus was the Davidic Messiah (Rom. 1:3), but that he renounced his power and authority and allowed himself to be crucified in order to meet the needs of those who could not measure up to his standard, which was Torah (but that's another story). That is, Jesus "adapted" himself to the needs of others. In response, God raised Jesus to new life and made him something greater than the Davidic Messiah -- "Son of God with power" (Rom. 1:4). Nevertheless, at the end
  of days when Jesus returns, he will fulfill some traditional messianic duties (see, for example,
  1 Corinthians 15:24-28).
• We Christians should put a moratorium on using the word "messiah" because the word does not describe what we understand by the word "Christ."
• Response: To put a moratorium on something that is misunderstood is repressive. What we need to do is to educate people into a more correct understanding.
• We need to be more clear about what the word does and doesn't mean.
• Question from a Christian participant: When Christians hear that "Jesus is the Messiah," what does that mean?
• In response, another participant cited Jesus quoting Isaiah to John the Baptist, where Jesus avoids giving a definite answer: "When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, ‘Are you
  the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Go and tell
  John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me’ (Matt. 11:
  2-6, NRSV)."
• As Messiah, Jesus has made it possible for Chris-tians in participate in the work of the world in a different way.
• Jewish response: A moratorium is a goal that
  is good but unattainable. At best you have miscommunication, and at worst, hostility.
• The Church needs to become more circumspect
  in how it uses the word; otherwise there will continue to be miscommunication and wrong expectations. The Church should take its war-
  rant from Mark's Gospel, where Jesus doesn't
  want the word used.
• It's easier to worship the title than it is to do the work.
• It was suggested that it would have been better had Greenberg written: "Was Jesus the fulfillment of a biblical hope for a messiah?" rather than "Was Jesus the fulfillment of the biblical hope for a messiah?"
• Response: This is not a scholarly book. The point would be lost.



• A participant wonders whether anyone was struck by the sentence: ". . . enough Jews followed this new articulation of their faith to keep it alive until it struck roots in Hellenistic culture, where it spread rapidly, eventually becoming the dominant religion and separating from Judaism."
• One response was to question the intent of "new articulation" and "struck roots."
• A Jewish participant questioned Greenberg's history on this point, since there were gentiles in the Jesus movement from very early on. He then went on to point out that Greenberg is saying that Christianity is a legitimate mutation, an outgrowth of Second Temple and biblical Judaism, in order to be able to claim later on that Christianity and Judaism are two branches of the people Israel.
• Rabbinic Judaism is a "new articulation." What precipitated the new articulation [i.e., the Jesus movement]? Would you say that it was because the Temple fell, or because God spoke a new word of revelation in Jesus Christ? It's not either/or.
• Who is "articulating"? Is it God? Greenberg wouldn't say so.
• Messianic Jews claim that they are an indispen-sable new articulation of the faith that bridges traditions and helps Christians to keep from losing their Jewish roots, that Christianity is most true to itself when it has an organic link to Judaism. This is a problem with Greenberg's text in the Presby-terian community.
• Response [speaking to such "messianic Jewish Presbyterians"]: You may be a new articulation, you may have an insight that we don't have. We cannot say you are wrong, but we can say that you cannot call yourselves Presbyterians.
• It is an odd way to define oneself as a Presby-terian, but within a Reformed tradition, what makes it difficult to say that the claim is wrong is that in the tradition there is only one covenant, one Israel. Israel combines Jews and Christians as covenantally connected to God, historically and theologically. The danger is collapsing the two, and Greenberg does this as well.
• What is needed is humility. I don't mind being part of a larger family as long as I don't have to think the same way as my parents do.
• Jews and Christians need each other to serve as correctives.
• Jews need Christians in order to be a light to the gentiles. Greenberg goes back and forth between the unique relationship between Jews and Chris-tians and the larger issue of religious pluralism.



• The conversation shifts to another portion of the text (pp. 65-66):
     What happened to turn a teacher who came to reclaim
  the lost sheep of the House of Israel into the focal point
  of a new faith whose disciples traveled over land and sea to spread the Gospel? What signal triggered the arrival of the Kingdom of God for a group of people, a sign so moving that it overrode the contradictory evidence that the world was as unredeemed as ever? Undoubtedly it was the aftermath of the crucifixion of a good man who died broken, feeling abandoned, crushing the hopes of his followers. Yet they clung to his message of a loving, redeeming God, his father; and before long, stunningly, they experienced his presence in their midst again. 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.


• Immediate Christian response: That is so not the way I understand it.
• Jewish response: This is a plea to Jews to rethink their views of Christians, to start a new relation-ship.
• But Greenberg has to get it right. To talk about resurrection as a reward for faith is wrong. It's
  not a reward for human fidelity; it's about God's initiative for humanity.
• One participant likes what Greenberg says except for "rewarded."
• Response: The Gospels are filled with exactly the reverse.
• The Gospels were written later. Why should we consider them as history?
• Of course the Gospels were written later, but why would they show the earliest Christians in a bad light?
• A Jewish participant despaired of the possibility
  of creating a proper book, one that gets things straight.
• What needs to be done is to identify our areas
  of disagreement and to show the range of re-sponses to those disagreements. Greenberg is trying to find a monolithic view that will win over Jews and Christians, and that is a misguided task. The conversation, and education, will continue.

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