BOOKS, FAITH, WORLD & MORE

IF JEWS AND GENTILES COULD FIND EACH OTHER
Reviews of The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, of Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, and of States of Exile

Daniel Hertzler

The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, by John Howard Yoder. Edited by Michael G. Cartwright and Peter Ochs. Eerdmans, 2003.

Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, by David Klinghoffer. Doubleday, 2005.

States of Exile: Visions of Diaspora, Witness and Return, by Alain Epp Weaver. Herald Press, 2008.

John Howard Yoder was a missionary. Not so much a street evangelist although he was not necessarily against that. In the late 1960s or early 1970s, Nelson Kauffman, director of Home Missions for Mennonite Board of Missions, conducted what he called "Witness Workshops." He invited some of us country people into Chicago and sent us out into restaurants to talk with people about the faith. Some of us found this daunting but possible. John Howard reported that when he spoke to people they would not respond to him.

Maybe his large presence intimidated them. Perhaps the questions he raised were not the kind to which they wished to respond. He was to find his mission rather in the classroom, the lecture hall, seminars, and particularly in writing.

His influence continues after his death. In a review of The Great Awakening by Jim Wallis, David Dark reports that "For all Wallis’ references to celebrities, activists, and politicians, the most quoted figure in this book is John Howard Yoder" (Christian Century, Aug. 26, 2008, 38).

Along with the problems of war and violence, Yoder had turned his attention to the break between Jews and Christians. This volume was published after his death in 1997. Cartwright from the University of Indianapolis and Ochs from the University of Virginia have published 10 essays by Yoder along with responses by Ochs, a professor of Jewish studies. Yoder, of course, is no longer able to respond as he surely would have done.

Yoder held that Jesus and Paul had not rejected Judaism but that the rupture was more the result of Constantinianism when the church became the official religion of the Roman Empire. He would make common cause with Jews on the basis that both Anabaptists and Jews were persecuted by the official church.

Some Jews have not been unaware of these similarities. In his memoir Land of Revelation (Herald Press, 2004) Roy Kreider tells of visiting a Jewish temple in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The rabbi welcomed students from Eastern Mennonite College and "detailed specific events of Mennonites being hunted down, arrested, and imprisoned because their beliefs differed from mainline denominations. He likened these experiences to the ostracism and pogroms the Jewish communities in Europe suffered" (29).

John Howard took his stand on Jeremiah’s letter to the Babylonian exiles quoted in Jeremiah 29, especially verse 7: "But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare." He held that the Jews who remained in Babylon were more creative than those who returned to Jerusalem and that exile or dispersion is the appropriate stance for both Jews and Christians. He would view the free church with voluntary membership and the exiled, voluntary practicing Jewish community as partners in witness.

In addition to Jeremiah 29, Yoder found the breakdown of the wall in Ephesians 2-3 and "the vision of reconciled humanity . . . displayed in Revelation 5, 7 and 22" (22) as key texts.

In an effort to get the discussion of Jewish-Christian relations on an even keel, Yoder needed to deal with the issue of "supersessionism" (in which Christians are seen as entrusted with fulfilling God’s promises earlier made to Jews) regarding the break between the two. He wrote that "Christians interpret this as supersessionism, whereby the Jews were left behind, no longer bearers of God’s story. Jews, on the other hand, interpret the same separation as apostasy, rebellion. Yet both parties agree on what happened and why. My claim is that they are wrong not where they differ, but where they agree" (31).

The first of Yoder’s 10 essays is entitled "It Did Not Have to Be." He opens with the assertion that "The first mistake Christians have tended to make—for the last thousand years when thinking about Jews—is to forget the ‘Jewishness’ of Christianity, in such a way that we take for granted that the relationship between the two faiths, the two strains of history could begin with their separateness" (43).

In his response to this essay, Ochs observes, "There is potential here for a supersessionist strategy. I read these contradictory tendencies in Yoder’s Jewish-Christian writings as signs of a pioneer’s work: both reproducing the old order that nurtured him (supersessionist order) and generating a new order (beyond supersessionism)" (68).

Essay two is "Jesus the Jewish Pacifist," and essay three is "Paul the Judaizer." In essay four, "The Jewishness of the free church Vision," Yoder compares Anabaptist and free church experiences of persecution with those of Jews. He finds common experiences and promotes a common cause. "The recovery of our sense of the Jewishness of original Christianity and especially of ‘free church’ renewal should give a second wind to the forces of renewal" (112).

In response Ochs comments that "post-liberal Jews can find in these areas of Anabaptist and Mennonite behavior highly instructive demonstrations and testings of the virtues of their own Judaism" (120).

In an afterword, Cart-wright proposes that Christians, Jews, and Muslims get together to read and discuss the Scriptures with "a renewed fellowship between those people who recognize ‘Abraham’ as ‘their father’ albeit in different ways for different reasons that are expressed in diverse languages" (233).

Finally there are two appendices. The first is a condensation of a sermon by Yoder, "Salvation is of the Jews," based on John 4. The second is an accounting by Cartwright of "Mennonite Missions in Israel and the Peacemaking of Mennonite Central Committee in Palestine (1949-2002)." Cartwright conveys some admiration of these Mennonite efforts but finds that the two programs "have not been able to find a way to collaborate within a unified missiological mandate" (267).

If we were looking for a counterpoint to the careful conversation in the Cartwright-Ochs book, we might find it in Why the Jews Rejected Jesus. Klinghoffer seems not to have heard of Anabaptists or the free churches but is quite aware of Mel Gibson’s film "The Passion of the Christ" and of evangelical Christians. One of them, a window washer, evidently tried to convert him.

He would likely reject most of what Yoder has written in The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited. Indeed, he perceives that the break between Jews and Christians was a good thing.

He considers that if the Jews had not rejected Jesus, what became Christianity might have remained a Jewish sect. "Had the Jews not rejected Jesus, had Paul not turned the church leadership to a new course, the nascent faith would in all likelihood have perished along with all the other heterodox Jewish sects that disappeared after the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. There would be no Christianity, no Christian Europe, and no Western civilization as we know it" (8).

Some of us in the free church tradition who remember the European persecution of Jews, the Crusades, and the Reformation wars are less enthusiastic than he. We also mourn the violence of "Christian" Europeans against the Native Americans and are not entirely convinced by his characterization of the U.S. as "the most tolerant and good-hearted in history. All this is the fruit of the Jewish rejection of Jesus" (8-9).

Having stated his case at the beginning, he develops it chapter by chapter. He critiques the New Testament Gospels, particularly the emphasis on Jesus as the fulfillment of messianic prophecies. He is particularly negative in his treatment of Paul due to Paul’s criticism of the Jewish torah. Indeed he wonders whether Paul really was a Jew. "I would suggest that many Jews found him to be an outrageous character not only because he led Jews away from the commandments. . . . They also sensed him to be a deceiver" (112-113).

He reviews medieval debates between Jews and Christians and moves on to the Holocaust. He quotes a number of Jews who hold the church ultimately responsible for this but then comes to Rabbi Heschel, who "pointed out that ‘Naziism in its very roots was a rebellion against the Bible, against the God of Abraham’" (191). A major concluding critique is of the position of a Jewish Christian, Michael L. Brown. Klinghoffer indicates that Brown has answered 124 Jewish objections to Jesus and cites 10 of them along with his own counter-answers. He observes that for all the effort and money spent, the Jews for Jesus movement has been remarkably unsuccessful.

In the end he comes back to his opening assertion that it was better for the world that the Jews rejected Jesus. He concludes that in the providence of God the Jews are priests and the Christians laity. "It would seem that the Christian Church now plays the role of congregation, as the Muslim umma also does, with the Jews serving in the ministerial position. Christians and Muslims alike know of the God of Abraham only because they met him in the Bible" (219). We can imagine that John Howard Yoder would have a comment on that.

From 1992 until 2006, Alain Epp Weaver was a Mennonite Central Committee worker in the Middle East, first as an English teacher and later as an administrator. The worker was also a theologian and reflected on the issues growing out of his work. In the foreword to States of Exile, Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin identifies him as "a true disciple of Yoder "but points out that he has moved beyond Yoder, who is perceived to impose upon Jews their own version of Constantianism (9-10).

Epp Weaver’s book is organized by the three topics in the subtitle: one section on Diaspora, a section on Witness and the third on Return. Regarding the Palestinian-Israeli dilemma, he asks "Must return for one people result in exile of another? Does Babylon stand in irreducible opposition to Zion? Or can exile and return instead be conceptualized as dynamically interrelated?" (17).

He proposes that exile is a style of life, that the three themes of the book "refer to intertwined states of being" and that "Genuine return . . . is not ultimately a departure from Diaspora, the restoration to a pure origin, but instead involves a homecoming in which exile shapes the meaning of home." Included in this will be to recognize that "to live lightly on the land is an integral part of Christian witness" (18).

This seems like a further development of a concept articulated by Yoder that the church should expect not to be in charge. It suggests that the so-called American dream has not been theologically responsible. From the beginning, European colonists saw the new land as available to them regardless of who was here before them. The Zionists appear to see Palestine in the same way.

Epp Weaver, stating his position early, observes that "whether in the context of one state or two, the Palestinian other, the Jewish other must no longer be viewed as a threat to be walled off or erased, but as an integral part of one’s own identity. Nationalistic projects of separation and domination might prove successful for years, even decades . . . but they will not create lasting security or the conditions for genuine reconciliation" (20).

Although Epp Weaver’s thinking rests on Yoder’s, he is troubled byYoder’s retaining of theological control in his dialogue with Jews.

While Yoder commendably highlights the convergence of some Jewish and some Christian understandings of how God’s people should live in exile, he does not provide a positive theological account of Jewish-Christian difference, with a possibility that Christians might be genuinely surprised by new discoveries in their encounters with Jews . (26)

His own perspective on the Palestinian-Israeli hiatus is that the only solution is to have one binational state. An example of the present unreality is what has happened to the Gaza strip, "turning Gaza into a large, open-air prison for nearly 1.5 million inhabitants" (119).

He indicates that some Israelis have anticipated the binational option and quotes Avraham Burg, who said, "‘ I am afraid of the day when all of them . . . would put their weapons down and say ‘one man, one vote"’ (117). Of course, a state combining both races would make Israelis a minority of the population.

Epp Weaver observes that Israelis and Palestinians are too tied up with the myth of violence. He holds that Christian pacifists have a role to play in helping them search for alternatives to violence (140).

An epilogue is entitled "Breaches in the Walls." He proposes that "the church that confesses faith in a Lord whose reign extends from the creation to the apocalypse" should be "prepared to relinquish control of theological conversations, to be a servant in its encounters with its neighbors, co-workers, and fellow-citizens in the city of its exile, ready not simply to testify to Christ’s lordship, but to receive God’s Word anew" (159).

In response we can only tremble and ask who is up to such a challenge. Yet it seems an answer to Klinghoffer who is too satisfied with things as they are. And in his gentle critique of Yoder, Epp Weaver has advanced the conversation.

—Daniel Hertzler, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, is an editor, writer, and chair of the elders, Scottdale Mennonite Church.