Post-Holocaust Hermeneutics: Scripture, Sacrament, and the Jewish Body of Christ

Cross Currents, Winter, 2000 by Scott Bader-Saye

Relinquishment is Clapp's term for a second response to the demise of Christendom. Rather than seeing the church and gospel as intrinsically social, cultural, and political, this option concedes that the church is but a spiritual body with a spiritual message. The politics are best left to someone else. As Clapp describes it, this is a Christianity defined by being polite to the postman. He writes, "A Christianity reducible to therapy or activism is, in the end, sentimentality. It is therapy and activism performed by people who could as easily do what they do without talk of Jesus and Israel and the kingdom of God, but who have mouthed these platitudes so long they can't quite let them go." [13] Such a view does not need supersessionism to justify Christian political supremacy; rather, it acknowledges in good liberal style that all religions are equally valid and should be respected as such. This political vision has deeply influenced post-Holocaust hermeneutics by providing a warrant for toleration and inclusiveness.

However, even such an ostensibly philosemitic posture proves in the long run to be detrimental to a proper Christian understanding of and respect for Judaism. In a recent book that seeks precisely to combat anti-Jewish readings of Paul, Charles Cosgrove asserts, "Guided by the interpretive norm of the humane purpose of scripture, I take Paul to affirm that the Jewish people are true and irrevocably elect Israel." [14] While this affirmation seems just right, and on the surface contrasts so sharply with Himes and Himes, by the end of Cosgrove's book one wonders whether the affirmation of Israel given with one hand has not been taken back with the other. Cosgrove chooses the command to love God and neighbor as his interpretive trump card, but in Cosgrove's hands love is given a modern liberal make-over. Rather than being defined by the self-giving of Christ on the cross (as in 1 John 3:16), love is equated with "humane purposes," "respect for the dignity of all peoples and individuals," and "the Western tradit ion of human rights and egalitarianism." [15] These principles of political liberalism, which one might suspect are just what we need to combat anti-Jewish hermeneutics, in fact drive Cosgrove toward a universalism that relativizes Israel's election. For at the conclusion of his book he writes, "the only way to resolve the tension between divine impartiality toward all human beings and the special election of Israel is to infer that, with God, every people has the right to be Israel." [16] This, he suggests, does not take away from the Jews the right to be the "original and true Israel"; [17] it simply extends "Israel" as a symbolic title referring to all nations that are loved by God in their ethnic particularity.

By making every nation elect, Cosgrove diminishes the significance of Israel's unique election and conjures again the specter of nationalism underwritten by claims of election (e.g., the "manifest destiny" of nineteenth-century America). Certainly Cosgrove has no intention of justifying any imperialistic appeals to divine favor, and his careful reading of Romans is in many ways to be commended. But when he makes the leap from "neighbor love" to "every people has the right to be Israel," he shows his project to be underwritten by a relinquishment of the claim that the Jewish people of God carry a distinctive political significance. This relinquishment finally subverts his attempt to restore the people of Israel to their central place in the divine economy and it undermines his philosemitic hermeneutic. Although he comes from a very different set of political and theological assumptions, Cosgrove ends up standing alongside Himes and Himes.