Betrayal

by Robert P Ericksen

  Metz demands, as a consequence of Auschwitz, a new orientation for Christian theology, a renunciation of the role of 'victor' that Christianity had taken on to hide its own messianic weakness. In addition, this reorientation must recall the drastic deficiencies in the Christian record of political resistance, and, finally, it must welcome the practical consequences of true Christianity-consequences that would lead to the end of Christianity as a bourgeois religion. All this leads to an unequivocal demand that must apply to all future Christian theology-and for the systematician Metz, historical and exegetical questions play a secondary role-namely: "to do no more theology that is formulated in a way that remains or could remain untouched by Auschwitz."13

  During the same period, Metz's challenge was not only supported -as, for example, in the collection edited by Martin Stohr"-but it was deepened systematically by Protestant and Catholic theologians alike. Here the fields of New Testament exegesis, the history of Old and New Testament exegesis and, finally, systematic theology have proven especially fruitful. A reformulated New Testament exegesis wrestled with whether certain New Testament Scriptures are truly critical of Judaism, as those with an anti-Judaic interpretation claimed, or whether they in fact primarily represent a debate within Judaism at the time of Jesus. The historical study of Old Testament exegesis questioned the extent to which German Old Testament scholarship, greatly influenced by Julius Wellhausen, had promoted anti-Jewish cliches. In particular, to what extent had Protestant theology used anti-Jewish presuppositions in its emphasis on the contrast between law and gospel, its accusations about Jewish legalism, and its denial of the connection between the two Testaments? Systematic theology turned to a renewed reading of Paul's Letter to the Romans from a historical perspective. This made it possible to interpret the catastrophe of Auschwitz as a result of Christian indifference to Judaism and the people of Israel, thus bringing the Christian faith to its senses by recalling its Jewish roots.

  Thus, a renewed biblical theology arose that has approached the Hebrew Bible in its own context-where possible, by reaching back to the Talmudic and rabbinic sources, without reverting to New Testament interpretation. This approach has included New Testament exegesis as well, by offering a New Testament reading that takes into consideration Jewish interpretations. Such a reading regards the two Testaments together; it refuses to view the New as the fulfillment of the Old, and it attempts to read the Old Testament in such a way that it does not amount to an expropriation of Jewish faith.

  If this truly is to be a revision of Christian theology, based upon its own sources -and not a revision introduced externally from a humanistic point of view-then what matters most of all is finding a central point within the New Testament Scriptures. Here, attention has been directed primarily to the one author in the New Testament canon who wrestled explicitly with the relationship of Judaism to Christianity, namely Paul, particularly in his Letter to the Romans. Osten-Sacken provides an example. In a convergence with much of the Scandinavian and North American scholarship on Paul (that by Krister Stendahl, for example), he has emphasized the Jewish context of Paul's questions. He has also examined more closely the meaning of Paul's unwavering affirmation of God's promise to the Jews. The focus is on the central confrontation between law and gospel and the central role of the Jews in salvation history:

  Since the days of Paul, the existence of Abraham, as he depicts it in Romans 4, is not only lived out under eschatological circumstances in the connection to Jesus Christ, but also-and, indeed, to a far greater degree-in the Jewish people. If one holds before one's eyes the history of Jewish suffering, brought about to a great extent by Christians, it is for long stretches a singularly lived hope "in the God who awakens the dead," "hope against hope," so that its motto could be what Paul said of Abraham: "No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised" (Romans 4:20-21). A theological reception of Paul that includes Israel alone in the category of "works of law" in the Pauline sense, is incapable of recognizing the existence of this faith and hope among the Jewish people. Still less is it capable of recognizing that it is the Torah, the holy law, which brought Israel to such an existence in faith and hope. A reception of the kind implied [i.e., equating Judaism with law] must therefore ask itself whether in teaching the word of God it does not pose an obstacle to the power of this word and its freedom more than it promotes it."

  The exegetical result makes clear that all talk of Judaism and the Jews must begin with their ongoing election, because of which the Christian's relationship to Jews alive today has a central theological and not just an ethical-moral significance. This in turn intensifies the problematic nature of theodicy in light of Auschwitz.

  Berlin theology professor Friedrich W. Marquardt is the most radical representative of a renewal of Christianity based on its Jewish roots. His main theme involves the relationship, not only of the historical Jesus, but of the resurrected and proclaimed Christ to the Jews, who have been affirmed in their ongoing election. For if it is correct-as both Paul and the other New Testament Scriptures report-that Jesus was a Jew and only a Jew, then it must be asked to which tradition the essential characteristics of the resurrected Christ belong. For Marquardt, who began the revision of his thinking with a "dogmatic experiment,""' along with a study of the land of Israel, there is no doubt that the essential characteristic of Jesus for the redemptive God was his Jewishness. Because of this, the resurrected Christ, too, achieves his messianic power exclusively from God's commitment to the Jews. From this emphasis on covenant thinking and its corresponding promises, the subsequent anchoring of the living and the dead Jesus in the Jewish people and its language leads Marquardt to two conclusions about Christology. First, he develops a sharp critique of all attempts to elucidate the significance of Jesus by interpreting him outside the Judaic context and, thereby, falsely universalizing him. Second, he rejects all systematic attempts to assign Jesus significance through trinitarian doctrine gained from the patterns of Greek ontology. He then adds,

  But as a consequence this means that, biblically, the thought cannot be avoided: the "true people" are primarily the Jews elected by God and called to his service. They learn what it means to be human in their service-and others learn it from them. It is indeed important to the Bible that the "true people" understand themselves as coming from "Adam," that is, from all people; they are not only with them, but called upon their behalf and for this reason "present." But all people, in turn, must understand: the history of their descent from God boils down to their part in the history of Israel. Only thus do they become "true people." The "vere homo" is a Jew. The church's christology has not seen or has been unable to see this biblical fact. Established in mission, in its struggle for the broadest common ground, [the church] did not want to see [this point] in its unfounded pursuit of being understood and comprehended by everyone; and for that reason it chose an a-Jewish form. The Jewishness of Jesus did not speak to it, possessed no content of proclamation, and for that reason was simply not "worth naming." In this, clearly, [the church] at its core was unbiblical, because, considering the biblical scriptures, the Jewishness of Jesus is not only worth mentioning but worthy of notice in the sense of an arbitrary message. The scriptures about Jesus proclaim Jesus particularly as a Jew, summon him as a Jew before the forum of the peoples. In our opinion, this is even the elementary proclamation of Jesus Christ through the New Testament."

  Even if the messianic power of Jesus can still be spoken of, it refers to descent: it is through covenant, land, and language-the relation of the God of Jesus to the Jewish people-that the Gentiles may partake through the person of Jesus. This circumstance alone has saving power. The experience of Auschwitz forbids us, nonetheless, from speaking of Jesus himself as the Messiah of the Jews. As a result, the belief in him as the Messiah of the Gentiles becomes questionable.

  The historical examination of the physical c
atastrophe of the Jewish people and the moral crisis of a Christianity that, actively or passively, was part of the worst crimes in human history have thereby thoroughly discredited the message of Jesus. The extent of the evil prohibits all talk of historical messianism and salvation, and this can lead only to a reevaluation of the Jewish rejection of Jesus. This rejection, as is known, referred to the messiahship sworn to by the disciples. For this reason, on the basis of historical experience and for the sake of a new dialogue with the Jews, Osten-Sacken speaks of a necessary "renunciation of theological absolutism" by the church." With that, he has discovered the most succinct and at the same time extensive formula in the renewed Christian theology; to what extent this can be maintained is another question. Osten-Sacken's liberal theology, with its accent on the hope-giving power of the Torah and its theory of a renunciation of absolutist Christology, has left the area of Jewish-Christian conflict over promise and fulfillment behind. This makes possible a central role for the present in light of hope for the future.

  The crimes committed against the Jewish people in Auschwitz made it inevitable that the Holocaust would have an impact on theology on historical and ethical grounds. Systematic theology has also been affected. Berthold Klappert, in particular, has dedicated himself to this task of rethinking. The goal of Klappert's reflections is a special Christian solidarity with Jews and an attempt to move the extermination camps into a systematic context. As Klappert himself knows, these reflections are not immune from the danger of consecrating senseless, gruesome crimes by giving them theological significance, for example, equating Jewish suffering with the cross of Christian theology. There is an uncomfortable irony here: It is instinctive and virtually unavoidable to believe that the crimes of the Holocaust should never have occurred, yet that might have left Christian theology in its state of blindness. Klappert ties the fate of Jesus on the cross and the suffering of the Jewish people under National Socialism closely together, so closely that the idea already raised by John XXIII-that Israel, in a certain sense, is the Christ of humanity-is not far-fetched. The result, however, poses the acute problem of a Christian theology that plunders the Jewish fate, a practice Elie Wiesel commented on in A Beggar in Jerusalem, where he wrote that Christianity always occupied itself with the Jews when it became bored: "they call that theology.""

  It becomes clear that the different subdisciplines of a renewed Christian theology collide with each other. While Old Testament scholars like Rentdorff2° and New Testament scholars like Osten-Sacken attempt to allow Judaism to speak for itself by emphasizing Jesus in his Jewishness, it is apparently impossible for systematic theology to do anything but place Judaism on the margin of Christian salvation history or proclamation:

  In the experience of Auschwitz and the remembrance of Auschwitz, the messianic hope of Judaism and its anticipated confirmation in the story of Jesus led to the question that Elie Wiesel articulated in this way: "Why does the messiah not come when the world is so evil?" ... And if we assume that he were to come after Auschwitz, after these six million Jewish dead, would it not be too late, in particular too late for him, as the representative of the messianic and redemptive hope of Israel and the world? But does not the Jewish posing of this question have its Christian counterpart? If the history of Jesus is a unique anticipation and confirmation of the messianic hope of Israel, how then can the world be so devilish and evil as it was in Auschwitz and apparently still is? ... We have hardly begun to contemplate seriously the connection between the annihilation of God in Auschwitz, on the one hand, and the deprivation of God's rights in the crucified one, on the other."

  With this, the Jewish people become the star witness, even martyr, for the truth of the Christian message, providing an antidote for a Christianity that has been poisoned by Auschwitz: "For me, the fundamental dependence of the Christian church and theology upon the Jewish witnesses of the experience of God in Auschwitz is the distressing product of a theology after Auschwitz. Auschwitz is the most Job-like experience after the cross. The experience of the absence and presence of God there, the Jewish tale of the silence of God, from the terror of God up to the hanging and burning of God-which was only witnessed by Jews and can only be told by them, listened to in humiliation by us Christians-renders us dependent upon Judaism. Its storytellers and witnesses in Auschwitz reveal, as a fact, the eternal communion of the crucified with his suffering people."22

  In contrast to Klappert, Marquardt escapes this danger because, along with historically oriented exegetes like Osten-Sacken, he concentrates totally upon the historical Jesus. Like Klappert, Marquardt and OstenSacken almost equate Jesus with the Jewish people, but-with the Jewish experience of Auschwitz in mind-they renounce a pervasive Christology. It can be said that the more Jesus is placed into the milieu from which he came, the more he loses his christological characteristics, and with that, his suitability as the object of a systematic theology. In fact, Marquardt understands himself more as a dogmatist interested in the correct reading of the confessions than as a systematic theologian who wants to speculate, beyond the transmitted texts and their instructions for faith, about the being of God and world history.

  Anti-Jewish Reactions

  Unfortunately, the positions delineated here represent anything but a majority view. In fact, at all levels of academic theology opponents have arisen who, with varying degrees of thoroughness, defend the traditional stance, both in the academic arena and in church politics. Someone like Ulrich Wilckens, who has written a thorough commentary of the Letter to the Romans," represents the usual thesis that a certain degree of anti-Judaism necessarily exists in Christianity. The late Gottingen New Testament scholar Georg Strecker insisted upon the unbridgeable gap between Torah and Gospel, citing Paul and Bultmann, and lamented the degree to which Christianity had given way to Jewish reproaches. In addition, proponents of a somewhat apologetic systematic theology, confronted by Emanuel Hirsch's position on the Old Testament, want to differentiate strictly between his "National Socialist mistakes" and the theological cause he represented. As recently as 1993, this author heard the systematic theologian Joachim Ringleben express the opinion that Judaism had been superseded by Jesus himself and that this, in turn, constituted a lasting wound on the body of Judaism.

  Similar positions can be found in academia among those who oppose the renewal of the Christian-Jewish relationship that began in a number of regional Protestant churches after the Rhineland synod resolution of 1980. This resolution, with its renunciation of the proclamation of Christian belief among nonbelievers, particularly its renunciation of the traditional mission to the Jews, appears to question the core belief in the universality of the Christian message. The explicit renunciation of an absolutist Christology means more than an acknowledgment of Christian guilt toward Jews; it recognizes Judaism's own integrity of faith. The implications of this proposition can be found already in an interconfessional dialogue from before the First World War, specifically in Franz Rosenzweig's debate with his cousin Rudolf Ehrenberg.Z" Rosenzweig wrote that no one comes to the Father except through the Son, unless they are already with the Father, as are the Jews.

  We can only speculate on the motive behind the systematic and political resistance to a post-Auschwitz Christian theology. Is it fear of the fact that the Christian proclamation loses its core and its identity when it acknowledges Jewish doubts about Jesus? Is it that Christians, who secure their Christianity primarily through the Old Covenant, become painfully aware that they must live their faith not in its own right, but as participants on the periphery of Judaism-that they are in essence some kind of incomplete Jews? Or is it-as Strecker occasionally implied-that Protestant Christians surrendering their christological center also abandon their national identity as Germans at the same time? Is it possible that through this reorientation, Christians and Christianity would become so insecure that a new form of anti-Judaism could arise, as the expression of anxious self-assertion? Cannot an objective dialogue proceed more fruitfully when the p
artners can relate to one another on equal terms-eye to eye-and without a sense of guilt, particularly on one side?

  Several unusual examples illustrate the problems of an insistence upon Christian opprobrium. In fact, the heftiest protest against Judaism has not come from the realm of more conservative circles, but primarily from the progressive fringes of the Protestant church in Germany: from the spheres of feminism and pacifism, which in all other questions are in energetic conflict with the other critics named above. In fact, classic anti-Judaism has became articulated most clearly in these highly explosive and socially sensitive realms involving gender and international peace efforts. Ironically, although their ideas about Christianity seem radical, secular, and universal, these progressive spheres produced the clearest protest against taking the new Christian theology seriously. In the universal insistence upon the rights of women and the struggle for peace, Judaism once again appeared to these circles-at least for a time-as a particular troublemaker"

  This was especially true for the first wave of feminist theology, which in its early stages was primarily done on the popular level, not the academic. This movement raised questions about the Old and New Testaments and about systematic theology. At the end of the 1970s, books by Pastor Elga Sorge and by the religious educators Gerda Weiler and Christa Mulack criticized Judaism in a manner that seems not only anti-Judaic but antisemitic. In a work based upon the Old Testament, Weiler argued that tolerant matriarchal fertility religions in Canaan had been annihilated by patriarchal Hebrews. Incited by fanatic Levites from the south, whose monotheism made the humane belief in a holy marriage of the mother goddess and her young bridegroom impossible, the Hebrews had promoted a warlike society that was marked, above all, by the oppression of women. Such oppression was even described in terminological allusions to the Holocaust, as in the term Ausmordungen (a "murdering out"). These massacres are always identified as the deeds of Hebrews. lb Sorge, at the time a pastor, also became interested in a matriarchal religion, specifically the rediscovery of the goddess at the heart of Christianity. In this exploration, she proposed that the Ten Commandments in the book of Exodus be transformed into ten permissions. Repeatedly, Sorge offered the Jewish basis of the established Christian churches, especially its contemporary embodiment, orthodox Judaism, as proof of Christianity's animosity toward people and, above all, women.