Clergy and Educators

ICJS Scripture Forum, 2004-2005
Session #5

Scripture Forum
Session #5
Goucher College
January 28, 2005

Brief introduction:
   This is the last Scripture Forum session that will be held before the study day with Rabbi Irving Greenberg, so the goal of this session is to articulate issues that may be raised with Rabbi Greenberg.
   Two cautions were raised before the discussion start-ed: (1) All we can do is to raise the questions because Rabbi Greenberg is not here to answer them; and (2) we need to remember that this is a popular work, not a scholarly one, and Greenberg is sometimes sloppy or cavalier in making his argument.
   The discussion will be focused, at least in part, on how Jews and Christians have related historically to claims about Jesus as the Messiah. Greenberg first raised this topic by referring to Jesus as a "failed messiah," which he intended as an honorific and as a way to get Jews and Christians to reframe their thinking on this issue.
   The discussion got underway by looking at four ways in which Jews have historically responded to Christian claims (found in the essay entitled "Toward an Organic Model of the Relationship," pp. 151-152 in For the Sake of Heaven and Earth).

Discussion

• The first Jewish response -- to Jesus as messiah: "First, the Christian victory was not really a victory: ‘Look how evil the world is even after Jesus' career.’ This is the bedrock of Jewish response to Christianity, but it does not deal with the possibility that the nature of redemption is being rede-fined, widened, or partially realized."


• When Jews are asked to speak to a group of Christians, they are usually asked, "Why don't Jews believe in Jesus?" The proper response to that question is to tell people to look at the world and they will see that the world has not been redeemed. Rabbi Greenberg nevertheless finds a way to give credence to both Jewish and Christian claims: No, Jesus did not do what Jews expected the messiah to do, but maybe Jesus wasn't sup-posed to do what Jews expected.



• The second Jewish response -- to Christianity in general: "Second, Christianity is neither a gospel of love nor God's message, because look how cruel Christians are to Jews. Far from bringing redemption, Christianity has brought a whole new sum of evil and cruelty into the world. That is the best proof that Christianity is not a true religion."


• Greenberg is taking his cue here from Meiri, who said that Christianity and Islam were true religions to the extent that they inculcate ethical behavior in their followers. [From the note at the bottom of p. 93: "I call attention to Menachem HaMeiri's broad-scale views declaring that Christians (and Muslims) are a ‘people bound [or: restricted -- IG] by religion which removes their religion from the category of idolatry and places them fully within the universe of moral obligation of Jews.’"] There were rules that restricted contact between Jews and idolaters. Meiri was the first to say that Christians and Muslims were not idolaters, so the rules didn't apply to them. Greenberg's response: "Idolatry is as idolatry does."
• Question from a Christian participant: Is Greenberg saying that a religion is true only if and when its followers are true to the religion?
• Response: No. If a religion does not inculcate moral values in its followers, it is not a true religion.
• Response to the response: Then there isn't any true religion.
• He's talking about the majority of the religion's followers.
• That is one response to the Holocaust: The
  people who carried out the genocide said they were Christians, but they weren't.
• The two arguments don't connect. The standard that came out of the late Middle Ages says that the way to assess if a religion is true is to assess how it treats the Jewish people.
• The common bond is an overarching moral code.
• Maimonides would say that it is not enough to follow commandments because one discerns them intellectually; the commandments must be followed because they are revelation.
• Arriving at a moral code another way is all right, too.
• It isn't an either/or; one can arrive at a moral code through revelation or through natural law.
• Natural law can be revelatory as well.
• But this discussion is not the point that Greenberg is trying to make.



• The third Jewish response -- to Christian super-sessionism: "Third, Christians claim to supersede Jewry. Christians themselves say that if Christianity is true faith, then Judaism does not exist or has no right to exist. But Jewry knows that it is alive and vital. Obviously, Christianity must be false. If your truth means that I am not valid, but
  I know my own validity, then you must be false."


• Question from a Christian participant: What is meant by "validity"? Christians may have seen Judaism as a lesser religion but not an invalid one.
• Response from a Christian participant: The claim is that Judaism finds its terminus in Christianity; it is incomplete but not invalid.
• Jewish response: If Christians claim that a person cannot achieve salvation without Jesus, then they are claiming that Judaism is invalid.
• But the claim [that Judaism is invalid] is hard to maintain because of Christianity's roots in Judaism. To claim that Judaism is invalid is to cut off the limb on which Christianity sits.
• If God doesn't hear the prayer of a Jew [as a Christian claimed publicly years ago], isn't that saying that Judaism is invalid? Response: Yes.
• There is precedent in all religions for invalidating other religions.
• The claim that Judaism is invalid is a relatively recent claim. From the time of Constantine to the First Crusade, the Church did not treat Jews the way it treated pagans because of a belief that Jews were proof of the truth of Christianity. That is, Judaism was recognized as the root of Chris-tianity, but the degradation of Judaism proved that Christianity was true. Therefore, Jews were to be kept around [to provide the proof] until the end-time when they would see the truth of Christ and convert to Christianity. It was a case of the right God but the wrong worship.
• That reading is either too benign or too romantic, because Christian behavior toward Jews was simply too vile.
• But the activity and the policies were not genocidal.
• Christians did see Judaism as invalid. They believed that God had transferred His favor to the Church. God had moved His chips.
• But that was a negative witness. There was a great deal of interaction between Christians and Jews (e.g., in the time of Chrysostom), which was the reason for the legislation prohibiting Christians from associating with Jews.
• But that had nothing to do with Christians thinking that Judaism was valid.
• Perhaps what we should do is to bracket "valid" since Rabbi Greenberg isn't here to clarify it.
• Judaism is no longer the way to God. The only way to get to the God of Israel is through Jesus Christ.
• If that's what you say about us, then that's what we'll say about you. The problem was that Chris-tians experienced their religion as true and then assumed that it is universally true. What Green-berg says is that one should not think that one's tradition exhausts God's possibilities for revelation.



• Question from a Christian participant: Greenberg's point about Christian claims concerning Jesus be-ing wrong because of the evil in the world, how far back does that go?
• It's talmudic. There are some really nasty pas-sages in the Talmud about Jesus, e.g., he was
  the son of a prostitute, so he couldn't have
  been the Davidic Messiah.
• It's also inherent in Maimonides, who lays out
  the criteria for the messiah. It goes back at
  least 1,500 years.
• One Christian participant commented that she likes Greenberg's argument about what Christianity and Judaism can bring to one another.



• The fourth Jewish response -- about Christianity: "The fourth Jewish response was that Christianity triumphed among the gentiles. No Jew would fall for that fairy tale of a virgin mother. If you were pregnant from someone else, what would you tell your husband? This is fundamentally
  how medieval Jews handled Christianity. Joseph was a fool enough to believe. With one Jew, you can never tell. But the Jews as a whole would not buy it. That a whole world would buy it proves that gentile heads can be filled with anything. This understanding bred contempt for gentiles rather than appreciation for their joining in the work of achieving total redemption, i.e., both worldly and spiritual. Of course, the contempt was earned and reinforced by Christian mistreat-ment of Jews."


• The issues surrounding Jesus as Messiah are not as fundamental to Christianity as claims that we make about the Incarnation -- that God would be manifested in a single, unique individual. This is
  the claim that is most incredible to Jews, and it is unfortunate that Greenberg did not focus on it.
• Incarnational claims were made after claims that Jesus was the Messiah.
• A Christian participant expressed a belief that incarnational claims developed after the mes-
  sianic claims failed.
• Response: That makes the doctrine of the Incarnation a strategy rather than a revelation.
• But we need to find a place where both Jews and Christians can reach an understanding about mes-sianic language, about how each community uses the term "messiah." We've got to get agreement on something a little easier than the doctrine of the Incarnation.
• But Greenberg does not begin his argument with "messiah," he begins it with "covenant."
• A Jewish participant feels that Greenberg has the Incarnation in mind in the fourth response.
• A Christian participant thinks that Greenberg is challenging Christianity regarding the exclusiveness in its claims about the Incarnation. He wants both religions to move away from claims of exclusivity.
• The same participant said that she has a problem with the way Greenberg develops his argument as part of a progressive view of history. The notion of progress is not part of Christianity. Is it part of Judaism?
• Jewish response: Yes and no. The messianic idea, which is a key part of rabbinic Judaism, states that we are moving toward a future that is not just better but fundamentally different. Greenberg goes against that part of Jewish tradition that contains the notion of devolution -- i.e., the farther away one gets from the Sinai event, the worse things are, the more uncertain they are. This is the reason for the fossilizing of law in Orthodox Judaism.
• We have that notion, in a sense, in Christianity: Jesus was brought in because things were get-
  ting worse and worse, and since Jesus' time we understand better and better.
• Objection: But that's not historical.
• The idea that history will get progressively better stands behind the delay of the Second Coming: There is a delay of grace until we are ready for Jesus' return.
• Greenberg's stance is very progressive: God has withdrawn to give human beings greater and greater responsibility, and we're going to get better and better. This notion is really trouble-some.
• Greenberg does the same sort of thing in a book about the Jewish holidays: Jews go through the year to reach a certain [high] point.
• The Reformation wanted to look back to a golden age [the Apostolic Age] in order to purify the Church.
• Another participant disagreed with this remark, saying that Luther just thought it was necessary to fix what was wrong.
• But the idea of sola scriptura is an intention to go back and get beneath the accretions to find the real thing.
• But that's not a return. Luther was not seeking a return to the Apostolic Age. He relied on medieval scholars to make his argument.
• Harnack was very different, not like Luther at all. He wanted to wash everything away.
• A Jewish participant said that in Judaism there is
  a feeling of floating in between Sinai and the Messianic Age. He also mentioned that the people in his congregation would go for argument #4 and maybe a little of #3, but not for #1 or #2.
• Regarding the fourth response, a Christian partici-pant remarked that Christians gloss over the ill-logic of some of their claims.
• A Christian participant said that, as a Protestant, he has the same problem with papal infallibility that Jews have with the Incarnation.
• Question: Does Christianity have an analogue to the fourth Jewish response?
• Response: Yes, stupid Jews couldn't see who Jesus was.
• But reason alone doesn't get you there.
• Greenberg deals with crucifixion, resurrection, and messiah, but not with Incarnation, which is too fundamental to Christianity not to attend to it. In the past Jews had to self-define by saying that Christian claims were false. Now Greenberg is saying that those claims play out in a different way.
• But he fudges on the resurrection. Furthermore, he could have said that through Jesus the Christian experience of God is authentic, rather than saying that God is present in Jesus in a unique way.
• The real divide is the Incarnation, which is so contrary to Judaism it must be false.
• What Greenberg is saying is that there is more than one path. Pluralism is not relativism: The Incarnation is absolutely true for Christians but
  not for others. The mistake is in universalizing
  the claim.
• A Jewish participant explained that Greenberg says what he does because he comes out of the Ortho-dox community. He isn't willing to say that we have different mythic structures grounded in real events. For example, Greenberg would not say that the exodus as recounted in the Bible did not happen.
• Another Jewish participant said that Greenberg is limited in what he says about Christian historical claims because he doesn't want to give up his-torical claims for Judaism.
• Greenberg says that God wants or doesn't want certain things to happen; e.g., God wanted Christianity to happen. God doesn't "want." Religion is about having a relationship with God, but most of what is said about that relationship comes from the human side, not from God.
• Question: What does that say about who God is?
• Response: It doesn't take away the idea of relationship. Abraham Joshua Heschel says
  that both God and humankind are looking for
  the relationship.
• Christians might say that in the process of looking there was actually a meeting in Jesus. Jews could say the same thing about Sinai.
• Is there such a thing as an invalid mythic structure?
• Some mythic structures can be erroneous.
• What would be the criteria for determining validity?
• Revelation in the Old and New Testaments.
• A Christian participant objected to Greenberg's pushing resurrection in an other-worldly direction (even though lots of Christians do think it is other-worldly); the resurrection is this-worldly.
• Greenberg skirts a central meaning of "messiah" for Christians.
• Question: How much conversation has Greenberg had with Christians about Incarnation, messiah, etc.?
• It seems to be the consensus that we want to press Greenberg on the issue of Incarnation.
• The participant who asked the previous question wants to expect more from Greenberg. She wants him to engage theologically with Christians who think theologically, not with popular Christianity; but she realizes that this is not the purpose of his book, that if he did engage theologically, his book wouldn't sell and he'd probably be charged with heresy again.
• Another participant would be interested to know how far he would go if he felt free to do so.
• A Jewish participant suggested that if he could, Greenberg would say that the Incarnation and resurrection were not historical events.
• But Greenberg wants Jews and Christians to be able to work with one another without fear.
• Greenberg would say that to ask if it [Incarnation or resurrection] happened is the wrong question. The right questions to ask are: What does it mean, does it reveal something about the God of Israel, and does it lead to ethically sound living?
• If you say God wanted something to happen [e.g., Christianity], then you have to ask about other events [e.g., the tsunami] whether God wanted them to happen, too.
• Either God wills everything, or God wills nothing.
• One participant said that Greenberg has a theo-logical restraint that she likes. Did God raise Jesus from the dead? Whose question is that? If God has given a community all it needs to live well, then it's wrong to press Greenberg on whether the resurrection happened or not.
• Greenberg would ask how the resurrection leads to abundant life, and how that makes room for Jews and Christians to live together.
• Greenberg works under the restraints of his inherited tradition. Is there an analogue for how evangelical Christians can come to understand Jews?
• Our evangelical participant responded that he has to think about that question.
• Greenberg does not want to rely on natural law to judge the legitimacy or illegitimacy of different traditions. But he doesn't want a totalizing of revelation; he wants a modesty, a humility in the revelatory insights given to people.
• Question: Where are the boundaries?
• Response from the evangelical participant: The creeds form the boundaries. The Incarnation, atonement, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the fulfillment of Judaism. (This participant then admitted to being a supersessionist and that he does not try to avoid that charge.)
• Response: That challenges those who find dysfunction in supersessionism, who find it impossible to justify supersessionist claims.
• Question: If one believes in supersessionism, how does one prevent the abuses?
• Response: Teach good theology, stick to the text, engage respectfully with other faiths, recognize that God works in mysterious ways, and respect the dignity of other human beings.
• Thinking about the upcoming ICJS program on "Medicine, Mortality, and Morality," one partici-pant said that it would be interesting to require of theologians and religionists who come to the table to engage in dialogue a mandate to "do no harm" and a theological modesty.
• In his description of modernity, there seems to be a real disjunction in what Greenberg says about a move toward progress and the Shoah. Further-more, his description of imperialism is extremely generous to Western expansion. And where is a feminist perspective in all of this? He is really talking about only half of humankind.
• What Greenberg says about the Shoah is con-nected with the notion of tsimtsum and the
  abuse of human freedom.
• Response: This is shaky.
• It probably goes back to notions of what God wants and human freedom.
• What criteria do you use to identify a moment of God's self-revelation? You have to deal with the issue of ongoing revelation.
• The participant who asked this question was asked what she makes of Greenberg's musings about the Holocaust.
• Response: An emotional response is to say that this is part of Greenberg's experience, so he gets to muse. But it seems an easy way to deal with a serious problem -- good things are God's will, bad things are God moving back and human freedom gone amuck. That is intellectually unsatisfying.
• Do you need to find a revelatory experience in the Shoah?
• Response from a different participant: What Greenberg does is a move to resolve a huge tension between the horror itself and the ability to explain the horror. We should not try to remove that tension because that lets God off the hook.
• The participant asked the previous question would want to impose a set of criteria for revelation (e.g., Is it consonant with what my tradition says about God?). The Shoah may reveal a great deal about humankind, but to say God withdrew is a cheap answer. As Ricoeur said, there is some sin
  in the world that remains an open wound, and it
  is wrong to try to explain it.
• The point of the revelation is to learn from the experience in order to keep it from happening again.
• Greenberg would say that. But what does it say about God if these are the tools that God has to use in order to teach humankind?
• Another criterion would ask how big an event has to be in order to be called revelatory.
• The Shoah reveals the end of the possibility of theodicy. The questions theodicy is asking are
  all the wrong questions. They don't further our understanding.
• Another participant said she wouldn't go there. The tension is in struggling with the questions. The danger is in the resolution of them.

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