Since there has been a lot of talk about anti-semitism since the Passion, I figured I'd post this.
By the way, the advertising for Passion looks pretty good.
Christians and Jews
The season of the lambs
Apr 7th 2004
From The Economist print edition
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2571892
Bridgeman
Christians are trying to analyse their responsibility for anti-Jewish prejudice, and to examine their own faith's Jewish roots
Get article background
FOR the Judeo-Christian world, this is the week. For Jews, celebrations of Passover or Pesach—recalling the children of Israel's escape from Egyptian bondage—reach their central moment. Over a family meal, millions of households have remembered the lamb's blood which the Jews in Egypt daubed on their doors to escape the angel of death. All over the Christian world (this is one of those years when the western and eastern halves of Christendom celebrate on the same date), the story of Easter or Pascha, which draws deeply on Passover symbols, is being relived. As people hail the resurrected Jesus Christ, they rejoice in their own redemption “with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish”. Thus, in many corners of the world, there is talk of lambs being slain, either literally, or as a metaphor for God incarnate.
For many centuries, the Christians' season of hope was a time of fear in Jewish ghettos, as religious fervour spilled over in murderous anti-Semitic violence. Now, though the demon of anti-Semitism is far from dead—and is on the rise in certain parts—the sort of anti-Jewish sentiments that were directly inspired by Christian preaching are a thing of the past in most areas of the historically Christian world. This has been largely brought about by the deep and searching dialogue between leaders of the Christian and Jewish faiths, as both traditions struggle to make some spiritual sense of the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi death camps.
A token of the new Jewish-Christian understanding is the passage into common, unselfconscious use of the term Judeo-Christian to describe the religious heritage of the western world. Even now, admittedly, the word is not problem-free. Colin Powell, America's secretary of state, stumbled into a controversy last autumn when he said of Iraq that it was “an Islamic country by faith, just as we are Judeo-Christian”. Out of deference to Americans of other religions or none, Mr Powell quickly corrected himself, saying “we are a country of many faiths now”.
American Muslims nonetheless protested strongly, pointing out that in certain ways—in particular, its reverence for Jesus and Mary—Islam is closer to Christianity than Judaism is. They urged that some new, more inclusive term (Abrahamic, perhaps) be found to describe the commonality between all three monotheistic faiths.
But Mr Powell's use of the term does reflect something real in recent religious history. Over the past half-century, Christians have tried harder than at any time in the previous two millennia to analyse their own faith's responsibility for anti-Jewish prejudice and violence; and to look at their own faith's Jewish roots.
According to Mark Silk, an American scholar who has studied the Judeo-Christian concept in political parlance, the term has always had a rhetorical purpose. Its first use as a sort of political slogan was by President Dwight Eisenhower, in 1952, in a clarion call for a long war against Soviet communism. “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is.With us of course, it is the Judeo-Christian concept...”
A word of many meanings
As Mr Silk shows, this was not the first meaning of the term. It had come into currency before, and during, the second world war, to imply a tolerant kind of Christianity, and to eschew the Christian anti-Semitism that had a following among Roman Catholics in the 1930s.
Much later, in the cold war's final phase, the term Judeo-Christian was sometimes used as a counterpoint to secular humanism. Even more recently, it has been used in contrast to—though not necessarily in hostility towards—Islam. What the term seems to imply is that Judaism and Christianity are slight variations on a single theme; that they are natural allies over many moral and political issues; and that the differences between them are not all that significant.
Is that an accurate statement of the point which Jewish-Christian relations have reached? It is certainly true that relations between the main Christian denominations and the Jews have broken entirely new ground over the past half-century.
Wrestling with the Holocaust
Pope John Paul II has been described as the most pro-Jewish pontiff in history. He has prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem; spoken of the Jews as “elder brothers” of the Christians; and, earlier this year, he received Israel's chief rabbis at the Vatican. Under his guidance, the Catholic Church has wrestled harder than before—though not as hard as some Jews would like to see—with its own legacy of anti-Semitic pronouncements and behaviour.
One American Catholic and former priest has gone much further than his Church. In his bestselling book “Constantine's Sword”, James Carroll writes of his own agonised reflections on the Holocaust and the Church's legacy. He concludes by agreeing with the severest critics of the Church: anti-Semitism was not a distortion of the Church's mission, but was central to it. It was not a contributory factor in preparing the way for the Holocaust; it was a decisive factor.
Meanwhile German Protestant theologians have questioned and in some cases rejected the whole principle of “supercession”: the idea that the coming of Christ marks a new covenant between God and mankind as a whole which supercedes, and renders irrelevant, the older covenant between God and the Jewish people.
In this Protestant world, a concept called “theology after Auschwitz” has been pioneered by a German philosopher, Jürgen Moltmann. He has argued that the Jewish rejection of, and Christian acceptance of, Jesus as the Messiah—the promised Saviour—are at some level compatible. For many followers of either faith, that may be a step too far; but there is moral power in Mr Moltmann's assertion that Christians and Jews will never really meet one another until Christians have experienced mass persecution comparable to the Holocaust.
It is certainly true that even when both sides are being at their most conciliatory, Jewish and Christian responses to the Holocaust have not been the same. Roman Catholic pronouncements on the subject blame the “paganism” of Nazi ideology, which was inimical to all religions; and they stress the role played by some Christians in saving or protecting Jews, while acknowledging that many Christians were negligent or much worse.
Jewish readings of the Holocaust see a direct link between Christian anti-Semitism and the crimes of the Nazis. Jews acknowledge the role of “righteous gentiles” in mitigating the horrors, but these are treated as subsidiary facts only. Stories of gentile courage render Christian-Jewish dialogue possible, but do not make it easy.
Indeed, thorny new questions have risen since 1945. Among many Christians who have gone at least halfway towards withdrawing claims of “supercession”, there is often deep unhappiness over the policies of Israel. This is in part because the main Christian denominations have Palestinian adherents who have suffered dreadfully during the conflict.
Israel's curious friends
Fundamentalist right-wing American Christians, such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, do still believe in supercession. They insist strongly that people must make a commitment to Jesus Christ in order to gain salvation and avoid damnation. Yet these Christians are not simply pro-Israel; they identify with the toughest parts of the Israeli spectrum. Last December, Mr Robertson used a speech in Israel to denounce the principle of a Palestinian state. Calling Israel's military prowess a “miracle of God”, he told his hosts they would be letting the side down if they succumbed to the principle of land for peace.
Such talk enrages Palestinian Christians, who feel that compared with other faiths in the region—Jews and Muslims—they receive very little moral support from their co-religionists.
At the same time, the American right's strident Zionism is based on some fundamentalist beliefs that are hardly reassuring to followers of Judaism. They believe that the return of the Jewish people to their historic homeland brings closer the “end time” when Jews will either accept Christ as the price of being saved or face eternal damnation.
Are those the sort of Christians that religiously observant Jews would want as friends? Within the world of reform Judaism in particular, this poses a dilemma: the Christian right may be Israel's loudest backer, but its social agenda—along with its beliefs about the end times—are unattractive, to put it mildly, to liberal Jews.
Even so, in Israel itself the American Christian right is accepted as a badly needed ally. And the American right has been galvanised by the sense that the threat of terrorism facing Israelis and Americans alike is part of a broader, cosmic struggle. “In this world, theology and politics perpetually reinforce one another,” says Victoria Clark, a writer on Christianity in Jerusalem.
Apart from the curious crossovers between religion and politics, there are some tricky spiritual and theological issues which have arisen as a direct result of the post-1945 encounters between Jews and Christians. Judaism and Christianity are not discrete, coherent systems that can nod respectfully at one another and say “you do your thing and I'll do mine.” So closely intermingled are the histories of the two faiths that neither can really understand itself without entering deeply into the internal debates of the other.
According to Alan Segal, an American Jewish scholar at Columbia's Barnard College who has published nearly a dozen books on Christianity, “Christians talk a lot about Judaism but they often don't know much about it. Meanwhile Jews don't talk much about Christianity, but their own categories of thought and presentation have been influenced more than they realise by centuries of living in mainly Christian societies.”
Quarrelsome cousins
What is it, then, that Christians fail to realise about the nature of their own Jewish antecedents? One way of putting it would be this: Judaism and Christianity are not so much parent and child, or even siblings, as some romantic formulations would suggest; they are more like quarrelsome cousins with some very different readings of family history.
By the end of the first Christian century, as people responded to the trauma of the Jewish Temple's destruction by the Romans, there were at least two new forms of religious practice in Roman Palestine: Christianity and rabbinical Judaism. The latter was a relatively simple form of Jewish worship which placed emphasis on ethics and law, and dispensed with the need for a hereditary caste of priests.
It is from rabbinical Judaism that modern Jewish practice descends. On the other hand, the imagery used by Christians, whether they realise it or not, is steeped in the world of the Jewish Temple.
Scholars like Mr Segal, and Britain's Margaret Barker, have shown that many teachings of Paul, who fashioned Christianity into a world religion, can hardly be understood without reference to Temple mysticism. This applies to Paul's account of his own transcendental experiences; to his teaching on resurrection to eternal life, as a state of being which is “bodily” but quite different from ordinary physical life; and above all, to his description of Jesus as the “great high priest” whose self-sacrifice transcends all others.
Thus, while Christian teaching draws deeply on the mysticism in the religion of Israel, the modern expression of Judaism has been influenced by patterns of thought which come from the secular or post-Christian West.
Then there is the problem over texts. It is a commonplace of Jewish-Christian dialogue that both have a common root in the Hebrew Scriptures which Christians call the Old Testament. But in the early Christian centuries, there were furious arguments between Christians and Jews over the precise wording of Hebrew texts, with each side accusing the other of doctoring manuscripts to suit its own case.
Jews accused Christians of adding “Christian-friendly” references to ancient texts, while Christians complained that Jews were removing such references. Those arguments were reopened by the Dead Sea Scrolls, whose discovery 50 years ago provided a huge body of evidence on the history of monotheism.
In some ways, the scrolls have blurred the contours of Jewish-Christian discussion. Simply put, the new finds have shown, more clearly than before, the diversity and range of beliefs and practices in the Jewish world of 2,000 years ago. Jesus and his followers were by no means the only people who questioned the worthiness of the high priests who were guarding the Jewish Temple; nor were they the only people who sought a more authentic form of communion with God by retreating into the desert for asceticism and prayer.
So whatever was happening in Roman Palestine at the time of Christ, it was not a simple two-way contest between Jesus and the Jewish religious authorities; there were plenty of other people, then and before, who looked to the Temple as the ultimate source of holiness, but felt that its present incumbents were unworthy.
So much the better, one might think, for Jewish-Christian dialogue: it might even be argued that the two faiths were points on a spectrum rather than opposite poles. But there are still hard questions for anyone who takes the Hebrew Scriptures seriously. Jesus pronounced that all the law and prophets were fulfilled in his person; that is either an offensive piece of blasphemy or one of the most important statements ever made.
None of this matters at all to those who, like Eisenhower, “don't care” about the content of religions but do care about their moral effect: in other words their ability to galvanise Jews, Christians and other decent people against a common enemy (whoever that might be) and stop them quarrelling with each other.
In that context, the term Judeo-Christian serves an important ideological function. But as the current heated debate over Mel Gibson's film “The Passion of the Christ” shows, terminological tricks alone will not prevent ancient religious differences from resurfacing in highly contentious ways.
Approach with broken heart
What, if anything, can be done to ward off that danger? Perhaps it will help if Christianity and Judaism regard one another not as monoliths but as complex spiritual systems which meet and diverge in many different places. “Rationalist” Christians, such as German Protestants, feel much in common with the cerebral world of rabbinical Judaism. And among mystically minded Christians and Jews, there can be unexpected points of encounter.
In the mystical traditions of Christianity and Judaism (and indeed Islam) there is much reflection on the principle of “broken-heartedness”. This is not meant in the ordinary sense of sadness or despair. It is a spiritual state in which the hard shell of arrogance and self-centredness that encases the human heart somehow melts away in order for the light of divine love to come flooding in.
Through much of Christian history, Christians and Jews have encountered one another through the prism of arrogant, worldly power. If Christians can approach Jews with broken hearts—which is not the same as abandoning their own beliefs—the tragedies of history may, at some level, be transcended.
... I liked the movie, it was interesting, but not very emotinonally touching....or "converting"....and as I said in another post I'm an agnostic...
