Another Reformation

Postliberal Christianity and the Jews

Ochs, Peter

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441232038
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

How does Christianity relate to contemporary Judaism? In this book a respected Jewish theologian learns a lesson from recent Christian theology: God's love of Christ and the church does not replace his love of Israel and the Jews. Ochs engages leading postliberal Christian thinkers George Lindbeck, Robert Jenson, Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, Daniel Hardy, and David Ford, who argue this point in their work. He analyzes recent thinking in Christology and pneumatology and offers a detailed study of the movement of recent postliberal Christian theology in the US and UK. Ochs's realization that some Christian thinkers retain a place for the people of Israel opens up the possibility of new understanding and deepens the Jewish-Christian dialogue.

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Introduction

CHRISTIAN POSTLIBERALISM AND THE JEWS

This book introduces and tests one hypothesis: that as demonstrated through the efforts of a recent movement in Christian theology, there is a way for Christians to rededicate themselves to the gospel message and to classical patristic doctrines of the church without at the same time revisiting classical Christian supersessionism.[1]

Here supersessionism—or replacement theology—refers to a Christian belief that with the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, Israel’s covenant with God was superseded and replaced by God’s presence in the church as the body of Christ. Otherwise stated, this is the Christian belief that God’s love for the church replaced his love for Israel. Jews of the premodern period—and both Jews and Christians of the Enlightenment period—already expressed alarm at this doctrine. They argued that classical Christology was onerous because it was inseparable from supersessionism. Since the Shoah (the term is Hebrew for “Utter Destruction” and is the preferred term for the Holocaust), Christian as well as Jewish concern about supersessionism has grown more urgent. The argument is typically twofold. The first charge is that while classical supersessionism is not itself an expression of racial anti-Semitism, the doctrine has in fact engendered anti-Semitism among Christian populations. In turn, that anti-Semitism has in fact stimulated or justified Christian persecution of the Jews. The second charge is that while Nazism was itself anti-Christian, it inherited the anti-Semitism that was a de facto consequence of Christian supersessionism. Thus, whatever its formal, theological justification or nonjustification, supersessionism shows itself to be lethal as a public teaching.

After the horrible lessons of the Shoah, what should Christians do about this heritage of supersessionism? Rosemary Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide offered what I will label the prototypical response of liberal, modernist Christianity.[2] Reiterating the Enlightenment argument, she concludes that Christology itself is the problem: since it necessarily engenders supersessionism, Christians are faced with the either–or choice of affirming classical Christology or freeing themselves of the evils of supersessionism.

The premise of this book is that the movement I will label “postliberal Christian theology” offers an alternative to this either–or choice. It offers a way to reaffirm classical Christology while eliding its supersessionism. To be more precise, my basic hypothesis divides into three more detailed hypotheses.

Subhypothesis 1: There is a logic of postliberal Christian theology according to which the reaffirmation of classical Christology after modernity is inseparably associated with the rejection of supersessionism.

This first hypothesis shapes the way I have compiled the central chapters of this book. To test it, I made a list of what I consider prototypical postmodern theologians: in the United States, George Lindbeck, Robert Jenson, and Stanley Hauerwas; in the United Kingdom, David Ford and Daniel Hardy; plus those among the “next generation” of postliberal theologians who address the issue of supersessionism.[3] I then constructed a vague (not overdefined) model of the patterns of postliberal reasoning that appear in selected writings of all of these theologians. Observing that each of them also argues against supersessionism, I collected and compared their different arguments and constructed another vague model, this time of the shared features of postliberal nonsupersessionism. Finally, I observed that each of these theologians argued for postliberalism in a way that correlated 100 percent of the time with an argument against supersessionism. If the reader wonders why I have not yet defined what I mean by postliberalism, it is because I had no clear definition of it throughout the project. I used the term to label whatever appeared, by the end of the project, to be the primary characteristics of the theologians I guessed merited study. By the end of this book—in the epilogue—I shall indeed relent, sum up these characteristics, and then compare them to descriptions some scholars have offered of the “postliberal theologians” (my primary source will be the work of James Fodor).[4]

Subhypothesis 2: When evaluating a theology that claims to be “postliberal,” we can, in a vague sense, “measure” the consistency of the theology’s “postliberalism” by testing its nonsupersessionism. A theology that proves to be supersessionist will, on further inspection, prove to have been guided by some model other than postliberalism—that is, by a modern liberal or antiliberal model. Conversely, a theory that proves to be liberal or antiliberal will, on further inspection, prove to be supersessionist.

This second hypothesis offers a means of identifying “exceptions that prove the rule” of the first hypothesis, by alerting us to theologies that are postliberal except in ways that also correspond to their supersessionism (or that are nonsupersessionist except in ways that also correspond to their liberalism/antiliberalism). The hypothesis thus helps us identify persistently liberal or antiliberal tendencies within a theology that otherwise promotes a postliberal agenda: if the theology proves to be supersessionist, to that degree it will also display tendencies that work against its postliberalism.

To test this hypothesis in varieties of American Protestant postliberalism, I have added a chapter on John Howard Yoder, of blessed memory. Without explicitly naming it as such, Yoder offers his theology as an equivalent of what I call Christian postliberalism, and he associates that postliberalism with nonsupersessionism. In practice, however, his arguments about Judaism include some clearly supersessionist claims. Is this an exception to our rule? I argue that it is not, since these supersessionist claims also lead us to elements of his theology that replay liberal and antiliberal tendencies. To test the hypothesis for varieties of British postliberalism, I have added a chapter on John Milbank. Milbank’s critique of modernist and liberal postmodernist thinkers puts him self-consciously in the postliberal camp, albeit in a much more general sense. He is often critical of the others in my collection of postliberals, however, and he is unapologetic about a degree of Christian supersessionism. How then shall I account for his postliberal tendencies? Shall I accept his criticisms and reevaluate my collection as burdened by a combination of persistent liberalism and fideism? Guided by the second hypothesis, I say no, it is more likely the other way around: Milbank’s supersessionist claims lead us to elements of his theology that replay liberal and antiliberal tendencies.

Subhypothesis 3 tests the relative power of postliberal versus liberal versus antiliberal Christian theologies to provide a working alternative to Christian supersessionism. Its three claims are (a) that today’s antiliberal Christian theologies bring with them a contemporary version of classical Christian supersessionism; (b) that, as typified by Ruether’s analysis, liberal Christian theologies seek a form of nonsupersessionist Christianity but tend to give rise to unintended forms of supersessionism; (c) that postliberal Christian theologies provide the most reliable protection against formal or de facto supersessionism.

Hypothesis 3 cannot be thoroughly tested in this book, since I am commenting directly only on postliberal writings, without comparable text-work on liberal and antiliberal works. Within the limits of this book, I attempt only to show how the postliberal theologians endorse this hypothesis and how their detailed arguments against liberal and antiliberal theologies would enable us to test the hypothesis on another occasion.

What I mean by “postliberalism” will become apparent only through careful study of the works of the postliberal theologians, and there will of course be as many subvarieties of postliberalism as there are postliberal theologians. I am, however, also collecting these varieties from my own limited perspective, and it may help readers if I offer some introductory comments about the generalizations I tend to make about Christian postliberalism.

The Epoch of Postliberal Theology: A Typological Approach

I believe we are now in a new epoch of Christian and Jewish theologies and a new epoch of relations between Christianity and Judaism. According to the typology that informs this book, this is the epoch, at once, of postliberal Christian theologies, postmodern Jewish philosophies, and both Jewish and Christian theologies after the Shoah. Thinking typologically more than historically, I would also label this the third of three major epochs, thus far, in Jewish–Christian relations.

In these terms, the first epoch was and is the Epoch of Formation. This is the time of Jewish and of Christian communal self-definition, when each community defined the other only as other—as an offense to its self-definition or a threat to its ideological and social boundaries. The second epoch was and is the Epoch of Assimilation. This is the period of attempts by Christians and Jews to overcome the nastier consequences of mutual exclusion by assimilating their different scriptural traditions to a single religion of reason: a religion of ethics and enlightenment for the new nation-states and market economies of Europe.

The third epoch is the one we have just entered—at least according to the worldview I will attribute to both Jewish and Christian postliberals. This is the epoch of a relationality that invites both critical reason and a reaffirmation of scriptural revelation and the traditions of belief and practice that interpret it. This is a relationality, furthermore, that invites Jews to be Jewish in their way, Christians to be Christian in their way, and both to discover some complementary purpose in this relationality itself. The distinctiveness of the third epoch may be captured in this observation: that Immanuel Kant, along with the Neologians and other thoughtful contributors to the second epoch, also sought forms of relation that would enable at least some religious communities to affirm one another’s existence. They sought to construct these relations, however, as products of human reason and will, while the relationality of the third epoch is seeded by God alone. As critical thinkers, theologians of this epoch—I will label them “postliberal theologians”—argue against the a prioricity of any universal canon of human reason. They argue that the only reason we share as a species is God’s reason, and God’s reason is embedded in the orders of creation and the words of Scripture in a way that enables us to observe that it is there but not to articulate its universal character through any finite set of humanly constructed propositions. Despite their benevolent wishes, the Neologians and Kantians therefore constructed ideas of relation that tended to reproduce rather than replace the antimonies they sought to resolve.

Postliberal theologians do not, therefore, seek to construct any account of the overlapping purposes of Christianity and Judaism. Nor, however, do they presume that their respective religious pieties need be enacted in the fashion of first epoch “formations”: tightly defined by collections of theological propositions that identify the other religion as prototype of what is contrary to the purposes of one’s own religion. They believe, instead, that they are called at this time in salvation history to reaffirm the faiths of their primordial communities (rabbinic and early church), to reform their contemporary communities in light of these faiths, and to expect that their reaffirmations need not entail denigrating the religious purposes of the other community.

Because it is the focus of this book, I have introduced the third epoch, or Epoch of Postliberalism, with respect to its implications for Jewish–Christian theological relations. This epoch is, however, not first and foremost about these relations. It is first and foremost a time when Christian theologians and Jewish theologians both began to observe that their respective communities were no longer burdened primarily by the deep questions that stimulated the second epoch and no longer strengthened by that epoch’s answers. On the congregational level, postliberalism’s primary question is how to relocate a pattern of religious belief and practice that is free from the regnant antinomy of liberal humanism versus reactionary orthodoxy. On the level of philosophical and theological reflection, its primary question is how to rearticulate the rationality that emerges from out of the scriptural traditions, in place of the regnant dialectic between antimodern skepticism and fideism on the one side and, on the other side, various efforts to reassert the “universality” of rationalist discourses and arguments. Surprisingly enough, this dialectic cuts across secular and religious philosophies.

The Postliberal Critique: A Logical Approach

From a postliberal perspective, the hegemonic modern paradigms of reason (with all their attendant “isms”) unraveled because they had completed their time of civilizational utility, not because some new party of thinkers and ideologues foisted a postmodern or antimodern agenda on the West. This argument implies that, against some postmodernist claims, the modern paradigms had their sphere and time of usefulness. To say their time has passed therefore means neither that we can now “undo” the “modern error” and “get back to” various premodern orthodoxies, nor that we can now construct patterns of discourse and practice that will be free of the “pretensions” or “errors” of modern and premodern civilizations. Postliberalism refers to an activity of reformation directed at once to the church or synagogue and to the university (or, more broadly, the seculum as a public order). For postliberalism, “reformation” implies both reaffirmation and correction. Like other movements of reform or revitalization, it seeks to criticize certain institutions from within—from deep within, that is, which means according to norms embedded within the practices and histories of those institutions, but not necessarily visible to contemporary practitioners and leaders. Postliberals often attempt, therefore, to reclaim what they consider prototypical sources and norms of the church or synagogue and of the university (or seculum) and to offer their criticisms from out of these sources and norms. For this reason, they are not critics of modern or premodern civilization; these civilizations are constitutive of their own “flesh”—their assumptions, languages, and sources of belief. They are critical only of efforts to repair errant social and religious practices today by reapplying rules of reform that were shaped specifically to meet the needs and concerns of an earlier age, modern or premodern. Their surprising discovery is that such efforts tend to display the same logical form, whether they are placed in the service of a rationalist or antirationalist, or a religious or a secular, agenda.

This pervasive logical form is to define one’s position as the logical contradictory of a position one is criticizing: for example, defining one’s secular postmodernism as the logical contradictory of some religious dogmatism, or one’s rational neo-orthodoxy as the logical contradictory of some relativist postmodernism. Such efforts appear to trace steps like the following:

• collecting examples of an offending practice (a, b, c . . . n);
• suggesting that this collection displays a class character that can be defined according to a finite set of propositions, or, in other words, reduced to a relatively simple propositional function [P = (a, b, c . . . n), where P = f (x)];
• promoting another practice (Q) as both the desirable alternative to the offending practice (P) and the desirable means of repairing P (or of repairing institutions that errantly pursue P);
• assuming that Q can also be defined according to a finite set of propositions (which therefore corresponds to another relatively simple propositional function [Q = (x, y, z . . . n), where Q = g (x)]);
• intentionally or unintentionally, therefore, presupposing that Q and P are logical contradictories—in other words, that both P and Q refer to a domain of possible practices (W), such that the domain is served by either P or Q (W = P∪Q), where P ≠ Q.

Applied to the critique of lived practices, the law of the excluded middle, with its attendant propositional calculus, generates what we might call a hermeneutics of war. This is a mode of reparative argument that generates comparable sets of antagonistic postures regardless of the goal of one’s argument. It makes secularists, religionists, rationalists, and irrationalists all partners to exclusivist and dogmatic politics and positivist epistemologies. They are positivist because Q is knowable by way of sets of clear and distinct propositions; they are exclusivist because Q ≠ P, which means we know that practices will be either Q or P, that Q is correct and that it excludes P.

Postliberals accordingly get themselves into trouble with either side of the modern dialectic of rationalists versus irrationalists, secularists (or liberals) versus religionists (or neo-orthodox). Since proponents of any one of these four persuasions employ the logic of propositions and excluded middles, they assume that if postliberals object to given Q, then they must be affirming P—if not neo-orthodox, then secular; if not rationalist, then irrationalist, and so on. “Mediators” (to adapt Hans Frei’s term “mediating theologians”)—like Neologians, Kantians, or some liberal theologians today—also object to these four dogmatisms. They additionally...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Christian Postliberalism and the Jews
• Part 1: American Protestant Postliberalism
• Part 2: British Postliberalism
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources