Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity by Gerald McDermott;

Author:Gerald McDermott;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christianity--Origin., Church history--Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600.
Publisher: Bellingham, WA
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

DID SOMETHING GO WRONG?

For Christians who esteem the Jewish tradition, it is self-evident that at a certain point or points in her history the ekklēsia took a wrong turn. Her proper consciousness of her own election expanded to include an improper judgment concerning genealogical Israel’s rejection. But this wrong turn can be understood in two different ways. The first accepts the separation of the two communities as a necessary, providential, and irreversible historical development. Many of the attitudes and behaviors that accompanied this differentiation were sinful, but the differentiation itself was divinely ordained. Such a perspective on the separation is commonly held by Christians engaged in Jewish-Christian dialogue, since it poses no threat to the current identities of each dialogue partner.

Philip Cunningham, a leading Catholic authority on Jewish-Christian relationships, articulates the position clearly:

I think most Christians and Jews unthinkingly assume that “something went wrong” with the parting of the ways—the origins of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism as separate communities. This separation is thought to have been contrary to God’s will.… I suggest an alternative presupposition to “something went wrong” in retelling the Christian story today. Why can we not suppose that the origins of our two traditions unfolded according to God’s will?2

Thus, God wills that the ekklēsia be “a Gentile assembly rooted in Israel’s story.”3 On one side stands the genealogical descendants of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs; on the other side stands a community of gentiles who share in the Jewish spiritual inheritance. This was the divine purpose all along.

The main problem with this construal is christological: it suggests that Jesus has no significance for the Jewish people apart from the creation of a new gentile assembly rooted in Israel’s story. Jesus may still have significance for individual Jews who accept his claims, but they then become part of a “gentile assembly,” and so presumably leave their Jewish identity behind. The Jewish people, on the other hand, continue on as they did before, untouched in their corporate life by the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. This is a strange way of construing a message concerning one who died with the words “King of the Jews” inscribed above his head, and whose name became forever linked to Israel’s royal title “Christos/Messiah.”4 But this christological problem also has ecclesiological consequences: if the story of Jesus has no significance for the Jewish people as a people, then the resurrected Jesus has no particular point of ongoing contact with his own kin beyond what he has with all human beings, and so also has no such point of contact to offer the “gentile assembly” gathered in his name.

The second approach to the wrong turn challenges the necessity of the separation itself. Christians who take this approach view the parting as a tragic schism rather than a providential differentiation. As Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it, “What providence intended was the unity of the two peoples, not the rift between them, the schism.… The divorce which uprooted the young Church from its mother-soil

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