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Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity

Wed, 01 Nov 2000 00:00:00 -0500

Dabru Emet (“Speak the Truth”) is a statement by more than 170 Jewish scholars issued in September 2000.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic and unprecedented shift in Jewish and Christian relations. Throughout the nearly two millennia of Jewish exile, Christians have tended to characterize Judaism as a failed religion or, at best, a religion that prepared the way for, and is completed in, Christianity. In the decades since the Holocaust, however, Christianity has changed dramatically. An increasing number of official church bodies, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, have made public statements of their remorse about Christian mistreatment of Jews and Judaism. These statements have declared, furthermore, that Christian teaching and preaching can and must be reformed so that they acknowledge God’s enduring covenant with the Jewish people and celebrate the contribution of Judaism to world civilization and to Christian faith itself.

We believe these changes merit a thoughtful Jewish response. Speaking only for ourselves”an inter denominational group of Jewish scholars”we believe it is time for Jews to learn about the efforts of Christians to honor Judaism. We believe it is time for Jews to reflect on what Judaism may now say about Christianity. As a first step, we offer eight brief statements about how Jews and Christians may relate to one another.

Jews and Christians worship the same God. Before the rise of Christianity, Jews were the only worshipers of the God of Israel. But Christians also worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, creator of heaven and earth. While Christian worship is not a viable religious choice for Jews, as Jewish theologians we rejoice that, through Christianity, hundreds of millions of people have entered into relationship with the God of Israel.

Jews and Christians seek authority from the same book”the Bible (what Jews call “Tanakh” and Christians call the “Old Testament”). Turning to it for religious orientation, spiritual enrichment, and communal education, we each take away similar lessons: God created and sustains the universe; God established a covenant with the people Israel; God’s revealed word guides Israel to a life of righteousness; and God will ultimately redeem Israel and the whole world. Yet Jews and Christians interpret the Bible differently on many points. Such differences must always be respected.

Christians can respect the claim of the Jewish people upon the land of Israel. The most important event for Jews since the Holocaust has been the reestablishment of a Jewish state in the Promised Land. As members of a biblically based religion, Christians appreciate that Israel was promised”and given”to Jews as the physical center of the covenant between them and God. Many Christians support the State of Israel for reasons far more profound than mere politics. As Jews, we applaud this support. We also recognize that Jewish tradition mandates justice for all non“Jews who reside in a Jewish state.

Jews and Christians accept the moral principles of Torah. Central to the moral principles of Torah is the inalienable sanctity and dignity of every human being. All of us were created in the image of God. This shared moral emphasis can be the basis of an improved relationship between our two communities. It can also be the basis of a powerful witness to all humanity for improving the lives of our fellow human beings and for standing against the immoralities and idolatries that harm and degrade us. Such witness is especially needed after the unprecedented horrors of the past century.

Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon. Without the long history of Christian anti“Judaism and Christian violence against Jews, Nazi ideology could not have taken hold nor could it have been carried out. Too many Christians participated in, or were sympathetic to, Nazi atrocities against Jews. Other Christians did not protest sufficiently against these atrocities. But Nazism itself was not an inevitable outcome of Christianity. If the Nazi extermination of the Jews had been fully successful, it would have turned its murderous rage more directly to Christians. We recognize with gratitude those Christians who risked or sacrificed their lives to save Jews during the Nazi regime. With that in mind, we encourage the continuation of recent efforts in Christian theology to repudiate unequivocally contempt of Judaism and the Jewish people. We applaud those Christians who reject this teaching of contempt, and we do not blame them for the sins committed by their ancestors.

The humanly irreconcilable difference between Jews and Christians will not be settled until God redeems the entire world as promised in Scripture. Christians know and serve God through Jesus Christ and the Christian tradition. Jews know and serve God through Torah and the Jewish tradition. That difference will not be settled by one community insisting that it has interpreted Scripture more accurately than the other, nor by exercising political power over the other. Jews can respect Christians’ faithfulness to their revelation just as we expect Christians to respect our faithfulness to our revelation. Neither Jew nor Christian should be pressed into affirming the teaching of the other community.

A new relationship between Jews and Christians will not weaken Jewish practice. An improved relationship will not accelerate the cultural and religious assimilation that Jews rightly fear. It will not change traditional Jewish forms of worship, nor increase intermarriage between Jews and non“Jews, nor persuade more Jews to convert to Christianity, nor create a false blending of Judaism and Christianity. We respect Christianity as a faith that originated within Judaism and that still has significant contacts with it. We do not see it as an extension of Judaism. Only if we cherish our own traditions can we pursue this relationship with integrity.

Jews and Christians must work together for justice and peace. Jews and Christians, each in their own way, recognize the unredeemed state of the world as reflected in the persistence of persecution, poverty, and human degradation and misery. Although justice and peace are finally God’s, our joint efforts, together with those of other faith communities, will help bring the kingdom of God for which we hope and long. Separately and together, we must work to bring justice and peace to our world. In this enterprise, we are guided by the vision of the prophets of Israel: “It shall come to pass in the end of days that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established at the top of the mountains and be exalted above the hills, and the nations shall flow unto it . . . and many peoples shall go and say, ‘Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord to the house of the God of Jacob and He will teach us of His ways and we will walk in His paths’”(Isaiah 2:2“3).

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How Great Awakenings Happen

Sun, 01 Oct 2000 00:00:00 -0400

Historians have identified three Great Awakenings”notable surges of religious vitality”in American history. The first occurred in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the second in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, the third in the period following World War II. The term “Great Awakening” is loose and contested. Critics of the religious revival of the 1950s, for example”the names Peter Berger and Martin Marty come to mind”saw it as largely superficial and lacking in theological bite. Some observers of the current religious scene report glimpses of a Fourth Great Awakening, while others see only a secularist wasteland.

But whether or not current religious movements are powerful enough to make their way into the history books is of less moment than the question of whether they can have much of an effect on the way people actually live in their society. Does a renewal of religious conviction make much difference in the quality of life in a given society? Some of the most disquieting trends in America have taken place just when religious life, by some measures, has flourished. Widespread divorce, sexual antinomianism, rampant crime and bulging prisons, the belief amply demonstrated by polls that there is no such thing as a universal standard of moral behavior, and general boorishness and discourtesy”all coexist and grow along with the flourishing of religious activity. Moreover, some of the statistics show little difference in the indices of social pathology among people with a religious commitment compared to those without one. Is religion irrelevant to behavior, at least on the macro level? If so, contingently or necessarily irrelevant? Is it possible for private worship and associated activities to have much effect on the way society goes about its business? Or, to use the terminology associated with the Editor“in“Chief of this journal, must the public square remain forever naked despite the personal convictions of the inhabitants?

Gerhard Lenski, a sociologist of religion who has studied this issue, concludes that it is a mistake to measure the influence of religious associations on society exclusively by their success or failure in bringing about the institutional changes they advocate. He thinks that far more important than those organized campaigns are the “daily actions of thousands (or millions) of group members whose personalities have been influenced by their lifelong exposure” to religious influences. The Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield once remarked that the importance of Christianity in the history of the West cannot really be understood very well by the historian who draws his information exclusively from documents. It lies rather in the constant preaching to the multitudes”often illiterate multitudes”of love and humility week after week, so that the way people feel, think, and behave is vastly different than it otherwise would have been. Butterfield concluded that this phenomenon has tended “greatly to alter the quality of life and the very texture of human history.”

These cultural traits have powerful effects on the direction and force of a society. Who, for example, could calculate the magnitude of the effects of the replacement of honor as an ideal by humility ? A slight that might be taken as sufficient to require a duel can be forgiven by a man who newly thinks such affronts are best met by love. There is also a strong cultural force in repentance as a theologically sanctioned and socially accepted requirement because it permits the turning away from destructive behavior to a new beginning. When such acts are multiplied by the millions it cannot help but bring about large“scale change, the sort that the historian can only despair of trying to track and quantify.

Is that just a theory, or can it be substantiated by concrete historical events? As a test case, consider the society that occupied England for most of the nineteenth century. The stereotypes have become so embedded in our consciousness that the mere utterance of “Victorian” is enough to evoke for most educated people disagreeable images: not only smoky factories and ugly buildings and furnishings, but a kind of pervasive moral squalor. Contempt drips from the pens of many analysts, both contemporary and modern. H. G. Wells, a product of the late Victorian period called it “slovenly and wasteful,” with its contemptible dwellings, railways, furnishings, art, and literature. Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians showed the eminences to be ridiculous characters, not to be taken seriously, however seriously they seemed to take everything, especially themselves. A recent volume published by the Oxford University Press speaks of the “special place” that the Victorian age has in the present culture. “More than any other era it awakens in us our capacities to feel hostile toward a past way of life, to perceive the past as alien, unenlightened, and silly.”

Examples could be multiplied, but they seem to consist of two main complaints: the Victorian age for most of these critics was too capitalist and too religious. The critics focus, often tendentiously, on individual biographies and on institutional, aesthetic, and economic issues, less on cultural manifestations”the moral and interpersonal factors that determine the quality of life”that to Lenski and Butterfield were the essence of the thing.

Rather than assessing the Victorian age backwards, try to approach it as it came into being”from the preceding centuries. The restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 brought with it revulsion against the excesses of the Puritan regime that had expired with Oliver Cromwell; but it also ushered in the very different excesses of the court of Charles II. The new king was concerned enough to be rid of Puritan influences that he had Cromwell’s body ripped from the grave for public exhibition, but he was even more anxious to rid himself of the bother of having real, live Puritans, and he contrived to have them excluded from the ministry of the Church of England. After the next reign was brought to a hasty conclusion by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, William and Mary evicted from their livings staunch Anglo“Catholic clergymen who could not find it in their conscience to switch allegiances away from the deposed James II. Thus in the course of a generation both wings of the Church of England were lost. An historian reports the results:

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