The systematic destruction of six million Jews is an unprecedented horror in human history. The complacency of the Church during this episode and its complicity in the diffusion of anti-Semitic fervour which allowed the Holocaust to occur are damning indictments of Christianity. Yet the Christian world is largely silent in response. Such silence would be understandable, perhaps even commendable, if it were the silence of contrition, but in truth, it is the silence of disregard.
It has been suggested that in one respect the Holocaust is a greater trauma for Christians than Jews because it questions the moral credibility of Christianity, and thus, Christianity itself. With post-Holocaust theology ignored by ‘mainline’ Christian theologians, Christianity holds tenuously to its credibility by thin silk threads spun by a dedicated minority. It is the purpose of this paper to examine some of those threads in the hope that the finest may be woven into a new Christian fabric.
Christology and theodicy are the primary foci for post-Holocaust Christian theologians. To appraise the Christian response to the Holocaust we shall look briefly at the theologies of discontinuity and continuity, then address the issue of theodicy. In doing so we shall also consider the political nature of Church and the problems this creates in the absorption of new theologies into mainstream Christianity.
The predominant Christian theological response to the Holocaust has been to revisit Christology; to protect Jesus from the all-too-obvious realisation that death and evil were not defeated at the cross and the Messianic prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures have not been fulfilled in Christ. Amongst post-Holocaust Christian theologians a major concern is also to recognise and affirm the right of Jews to exist. Paul van Buren, with justifiable cynicism, contends that it was the restoration of Israel and the victory of the Six Day War which acted as the most powerful catalysts in urging the Church to review its theology. He asserts that the Holocaust itself was more readily absorbed into those aspects of existing Christian theology which depicted Jewry as suffering and despised for their rejection of Christ.
A.Roy Eckhardt has described theologies which address Jewish-Christian relations as falling into one of two categories: theologies of discontinuity or theologies of continuity. In this system, theologies of discontinuity are those which see Jesus as the Messiah, the fulfilment Hebrew Messianic prophecies, and Christians as the ‘faithful remnant’, thus the Church becomes the new Israel. In its crudest form, God is said to reject the Jews because they have rejected Christ.
A number of prominent and influential Christian theologians have espoused theologies of discontinuity; among them Karl Barth, Rudolph Bultmann, George A F Knight, and Jean Danielou, to name but a few. Their theologies deny a positive role for the continued existence of Judaism and the Jewish people. Non-Christian Jews are considered to be “an ontological impossibility, a wound, a gaping hole in the body of Christ”. Unfortunately such theologies have long been instituted within the traditions of the Church.
Christian hopes for Jewish-Christian reconciliation lie in theologies of continuity. Such theologies recognise that Jesus was not the Messiah, rather “the door through which the Gentiles enter into the knowledge of the one true God,” and Christians are not the new Israel, but ‘wild shoots’ grafted on.
Theologies of continuity can be themselves divided into Two Covenant theologies and One Covenant theologies. The former group understand Sinai and Calvary to be two different, yet complementary covenants. Within this theological camp are a diversity of opinions as to the similarities and differences between the two covenants.
One of the earliest two-covenant theologies comes from James Parkes who sees Sinai as a revelation that speaks to community and Calvary as revelation that speaks to individuals. He claims the tension between Judaism and Christianity is the tension “between the human person as social being and as individual” and that the two Faiths have complimentary missions: “Israel bears witness to the reality of an elected community while the Church testifies to the covenantal relationship with each individual person.”
Another approach is typified by Gregory Baum. Baum believes that the Christ event assures God’s victory but God’s victory is not yet reality. In this scenario Jesus will become Christ at the end of time. Similar positions are held by Peter Chirico, who maintains that both Jews and Christians await the Messiah but Christians know for whom they wait, and Eva Marie Fleischner, who asserts that on the final day all will be brought to Christ. These approaches seek to delay Christian-Jewish tensions rather than diffuse them; the insistence is still on the universality of Christ. Such two-covenant theologies emphasise the Christocentricity of the theologians who propound them; they promote a theology that inverts Jesus’ mission to call people to God. Rather than Christ lighting a way to God, they would have God turning all toward Christ.
Amongst the theologians who hold one-covenant theologies, Christianity is regarded in part as ‘Judaism for Gentiles’. Jesus is recognised as the mediator who provides the way for non-Jews to enter into Israel’s covenant with the God of Abraham and Moses. Theologians who maintain the One Covenant include Monika Hellwig, Paul van Buren, and A Roy Eckhardt.
Eckhardt recognises the inequity of the Jewish-Christian relationship in that Judaism is a religion complete in itself, whilst Christianity needs Judaism in order to understand itself. He regards Judaism and Christianity as in dialectical tension within the one covenant in which Jesus “embodies the paradox of uniting Jews with Christians and of separating Jews from Christians.”
Van Buren claims Catholic Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism are twins born of Pharisaic reform in the first century. The Church was called by God to provide a way for Gentiles “to enter along with the chosen people into the task of taking responsibility for moving this unfinished creation nearer to its completion.” He regards Christianity and Judaism as two essential branches of Israel with whom God holds a covenant and once Jesus returns his Gentile flock to the fold, Jesus will “step aside”.
Many Christian theologians feel Christianity is endangered by de-emphasising Christ. The variations that emerge within the theologies of continuity stand as testimony to the struggles within the Church to accord Jews the warranted recognition and affirmation without compromising fundamental beliefs in the redemptive power of the cross and the uniqueness and divinity of Christ.
The Second Vatican Council, convened in 1965, was a pivotal, but rather ambivalent, point in Roman Catholic, and indeed Protestant, thinking. Jews were now declared to remain ‘most dear to God’, albeit on ‘account of their fathers’. By recognising Judaism as a partner in dialogue, the Church’s missionary stance towards Jews was implicitly abandoned, however, the documents emanating from Vatican II continued to support a supersessionist doctrine by referring to the Church of Christ as the ‘new Israel.’
The Vatican II statements were highly politicised and failed to acknowledge the Church’s complicity in the Holocaust or recognise the State of Israel, yet they opened the doors for Catholic theologians (and others) to develop their theologies in terms of Christian-Jewish relations.
Ten years after the second Vatican Council, Catholic theologian Charlotte Klein looked at the various papers and directives that had since emerged from the Roman Catholic Church and observed:
“Judaism provokes us Christians to seek for a new theological explanation as to who Jesus was and what he brought into a world which after his coming acts much as it did before....Judaism need not apologise for its unbelief in a Messiah who has already come without apparently renewing anything.”
Rosemary Ruether is perhaps one of the more radical Christian theologians to address Christian-Jewish relations. She roots out the anti-Jewish messages inherent in the Christian tradition, both in the New Testament and the writings of the Church fathers and claims the “suppression of Jewish history and experience from Christian consciousness is tacitly genocidal.” She concludes that “what Christianity has in Jesus is not the Messiah, but a Jew who hoped for the kingdom of God and who died in that hope.” For her, Jesus provided a future vision; the cross and resurrection are only authentic paradigms for those who choose to accept them.
Not all theologians are as bold as Ruether. A fear of letting go of the absolutism of the Christ figure amongst many Christian theologians responding to the Holocaust appears to restrain theological progress. Such fear is reflected in John Pawlikowski’s criticism of Ruether’s relativist Christology. He claims “without maintaining some uniqueness and centrality for the Christ event there remains little reason to retain Christianity as a distinct religion....Ruether’s Christology....remains too minimalist for an authentic Christian self-identity.” Pawlikowski’s argument here implies that his purpose is not to gain an existential interpretation of the ‘Christ event’ but to justify the on-going existence of the Church.
Pawlikowski insists “any Christology which fails to provide for some unique, central role for Christ in the history of salvation barters away too much of the Christian covenant and stands little chance of acceptance by the Church at large.” Such a statement indicates that politics, rather than theological truth, is the name of the game. Surely to cast intellectual honesty aside for pragmatism and expediency is theological cowardice. This is an attitude that allowed individual Christians to remain silent through the atrocities of the Holocaust. When theological doctrine is decided on the basis of political leverage and popular appeal there is no space for the prophetic ‘voice in the wilderness’, the word of God. Christianity would do well to heed the words of German theologian Johann-Baptist Metz who repeatedly claims that after Auschwitz, it is not enough to revise the Christian theology of Judaism, rather the whole of Christian theology must be revised.
The problem of evil was never more sharply defined than in the hell of the Holocaust, yet an area of post-Holocaust theology that remains neglected in Christianity is theodicy. Kenneth Surin argues that the goal of theodicy is to render evil and suffering comprehensible and explicable whereas Christianity’s primary concern should be to “allow itself to be reinterpreted, to be ‘ruptured’, by the pattern of events at Auschwitz.” There can be no question that Christianity must be ‘ruptured’ by the Shoah, but theodicy cannot be so lightly dismissed. The Holocaust stood alongside the agony of Job and the suffering of Jesus on the cross is not to be seen as propitiation or sacrifice for sin but a witness that cries out against the doctrine of divine retribution. Job, Jesus and the Shoah all voice a resounding disclaimer to any theology that espouses such a doctrine. To take this approach to theodicy is not to spin words for Job’s comforters as Surin suggests, but to render those ‘comforters’ silent.
A number of theologians offer convoluted trinitarian interconnections to deal with the issue of evil and suffering. According to Jurgen Moltmann, God cries out to God, God disputes with God, and God dies in God, “Jesus suffers dying in forsakenness, but not death itself; for men can no longer ‘suffer’ death, because suffering presupposes life. But the Father who abandons him and delivers him up suffers the death of the Son in the infinite grief of love.” For Moltmann, all hope lies in the mystery of the Cross, thus the question of suffering can only be answered by the theology of the cross. But again, what answer is this to those who died and those who grieve? To answer the victims of the Shoah with theologia crucis in light of Christian complicity and complacency is nothing short of immoral. The doctrine of a God/man who chose to die offers no consolation or liberation to burning children. Possibly the most poignant statement to be made on the theology of the Cross comes from Nicholas Berdyaev:
“Perhaps the saddest thing to admit is that those who rejected the Cross have to carry it, while those who welcomed it are as often engaged in crucifying others.”
In unison with Lyn Gottlieb we ask “Where is the God of justice?”
“Antisemitism is born of the Devil, and the Devil is born out of antisemitism,” is the catch-cry of Eckhardt. He seeks his answers to the problem of evil in the concept of the Devil. Eckhardt believes that just as God elected the Jewish people to life, the Devil elects them to death; “while God grieves over the suffering of God’s people, the Devil delights in that suffering” Eckhardt then tries to avoid the trap of reducing human responsibility through demonic culpability but claims that “blameworthiness for radical evil and radical suffering is carried ultimately, if not proximately, by God....If there is to be any reconciliation between God’s culpability and God’s goodness, it has to come from beyond theodicy.”
A more radical approach is to question the need and desire for divine omnipotence, as has been done in process theology. Surin contends that it is not enough “for God to be a mere fellow sufferer”; that a God who is not an omnipotent God is not God enough. This is contested by John Puddefoot who suggests
“It may be part of the politics of religion to say that God is omnipotent, but it is not part of the logic of religion, and certainly not of revealed religion. In other words, to deny or at least question God's omnipotence may be to risk charges of heresy and religious ostracism, but that is a matter of politics, not theology.”
In contrast to the timidity of Pawlikowski, Puddefoot challenges the politics of religion, acknowledging that the political nature of religion is fashioned to inhibit theological enterprise. Ruether questions whether “anti-Judaism is too deeply embedded in the foundations of Christianity to be rooted out entirely without destroying the whole structure,” whereas van Buren believes that by shifting emphasis within classical Christian doctrines such as the Trinity, we can take Judaism positively in Christian theology without losing the heart of Christianity. Whether Ruether or van Buren is right, the solution is not to stay silent and narrow our vision that we might cling to our tainted base.
For traditional Christian theology, to redress Jewish-Christian relations is not a simple task. It would involve overturning the long-standing doctrine of Supersessionism and a revision of Jesus’ role as Messiah. Christian texts which lay blame for Jesus’ death on Jews of all generations and which vilify Jews as children of the devil must be purged from their position of sanctity. In an institution which accords authority to tradition and to traditional interpretations, such changes are painful to many and met with great resistance. In the light of the Holocaust, however, as Metz insists, we must be prepared revise our entire theology. Our theology must be free to challenge the doctrinal sacred cows.
“The Auschwitz catastrophe cannot simply be historically reconstructed, it must be remembered practically,” but the political culture of the Church is conservative in thought and stagnant in action. Pebbles tossed into its waters may cause a few ripples on the surface but they soon sink without trace into the murky depths. Back in 1975 Klein alleged that theological research was inaccessible or unacceptable to the public, and thus seminary education and sermons were generally unchanged. A further twenty years on and, woefully, the picture remains the same. Outside of academia, post-Holocaust theology has made few inroads. In theological colleges John Macquarrie’s Principles of Christian Theology is still recognised as a standard first year theological text, yet it makes no mention of Israel. In his six page summary of the ‘historical Jesus’, Macquarrie fails to record that Jesus, or any of his disciples, was a Jew. Indeed Macquarrie even suggests that in his historical context, Jesus was probably seen, by Jews and Romans alike, as “just another member of the human race”. Inside our churches, even in this the 50th anniversary year of the liberation of the German death camps, one does not need to listen to too many sermons before one hears reference to the 'legalistic Pharisees' and the rejection and crucifixion of Jesus by ‘the Jews’.
All too often the Church has shown itself to be a follower rather than a leader of sociological fashion. A rather acicular example of the inherently political nature of theological inhibition is provided by a lecturer in systematic theology whose students confessed, at the conclusion of a course on ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the German Church Struggle’, “that they had not pursued contentious issues through fear of the reactions of others.” Their ironic choice of silence bears grim witness to lessons not yet learned.
“No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made.” (Mark 2:21) Whether the tears in traditional Christianity can be patched with new post-Holocaust theologies remains to be seen. The flames of the Holocaust have burned six million holes in the cloak of Christianity. Perhaps, rather than darning and sewing on patches, the time has come for the Church to weave enough new cloth from post-Holocaust threads to fashion a new theological garment.
Bibliography
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