Dismantling the Cross. - Review - book review

Commonweal, Jan 26, 2001 by Robert Louis Wilken

Constantine's Sword is behind the curve of history. Had this book been written fifty years ago it would have been noteworthy. But its message has been heard, digested, and acted upon. And the new openness of the church to the Jews has led to a dramatic transformation of relations between Jews and Christians. Just this last year a group of Jewish thinkers produced a remarkable document the first ever by Jews on Christianity and one that would have been inconceivable before the developments within Christian thinking a generation ago. Titled "A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity," it speaks directly to Carroll's concerns:

"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 exterminations 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."

Carroll knows about the church's response over the last generation to its dealings with the Jews in the past, but deems it insufficient. He will not be satisfied until the "foundational assumptions of Christian faith" are challenged. The "entire structure of the Gospel narrative," he says, "is unworthy of the story it wants to tell." The church must free itself from any claim that "salvation, redemption, grace, perfection" have come in Christ. Coincidentally I read these words two days after hearing the epistle from the Mass on Christmas Eve: "For the grace of God has appeared for the salvation of all men. . . " (Titus 2:11). For Carroll repentance can only mean renunciation of Christ and of Christian faith, as he puts it, repentance "without Golgotha, redemption or sacrifice."

At the end of the day, in spite of the enormous effort to lay bare the sins of the church over two millennia, Constantine's Sword is not really a book about Christian theology of the Jews. Its subject is Christian theology tout court and its polemic springs from the currently fashionable "ideology of religious pluralism," what might be termed horror at strong opinions. Carroll wants a Christianity that celebrates a "Jesus whose saving act is only disclosure of the divine love available to all," and calls for a pluralism of "belief and worship, of religion and no religion, that honors God by defining God as beyond every human effort to express God." What we have then is a rather conventional cultural critique of Christianity. The Jews are the victims par excellence of the excesses of revealed religion. But what Carroll forgets is that the Jews too believe in revelation. If Christians, on the basis of the Scriptures and Christian tradition, cannot confess Jesus as Lord, can the Jews, on the basis of the Scriptures and Jewish tradition, claim that they are the elect people of God? In Carroll's brave new world there will be neither Jews nor Christians.