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

Cross Currents, Winter, 2000 by Scott Bader-Saye

Retrenchment and relinquishment urge us toward particular canonical readings of the church's relation to Israel, both of which fail to do justice to the biblical significance of Israel's election and vocation. In contrast, the ecclesial and political posture which Clapp describes as radicalization may be precisely what is needed to shape a non-supersessionist hermeneutic in a post-Christendom world. Radicalization involves a return to the roots of the church's identity--a return that calls into question the Constantinian practices that shaped the church for centuries. Clapp describes the situation this way: "For radicals, postmodern pluralism is a social condition in which the Constantinianism that has always been a theological dead end now becomes a political and sociological dead end.... There is a place for the church in the postmodern world, not as a sponsorial prop for nation-states but as a community called by the God explicitly named Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." [18] He goes on to add the provocativ e claim that "much of the church's late Constantinian malaise comes from the fact that Christians all too quickly forgot how to be good Jews, yet Jesus and the earliest New Testament Christians did not." [19] Radicalization frees us from having to produce readings that justify Christian political dominance. Thus, the post-Holocaust and post-Christendom world creates an opportunity for Christians not only to affirm the ongoing validity of Israel's covenant with God, but in fact to recover our own identity by reading our story in closer continuity with the election and vocation of the Jews. Indeed, the ongoing validity of the Jewish covenant becomes a necessary affirmation of the church once Christians come to understand their own social and political life as an extension of the calling of Israel.

I take this to be the force of Karl Barth's claim that "the Bible as the witness of divine revelation in Jesus Christ is a Jewish book. It cannot be read and understood and expounded unless we openly accept the language and thought and history of the Jews, unless we are prepared to become Jews with the Jews." [20] Becoming Jews with the Jews is seen by Barth as a prerequisite for the proper understanding of scripture and of Jesus Christ himself. But how do we do this? How do Christians become Jews with the Jews as readers of the Christian Bible? How do we come to identify ourselves with Jesus' people so that we can more fully understand Jesus himself?

To answer these questions we must turn our attention to those practices of Christian life that train us as readers. Practices such as prayer, sacraments, and proclamation have long nurtured particular readings of scripture, though rooted in the soil of Christendom these have too often been anti-Jewish readings. This is not to say that these Christian practices have always been explicitly anti-Jewish. If this were the only problem, then the contemporary rejections of supersessionism and the careful prescriptions for how to speak of the Jews in preaching and liturgy would be enough to transform our supersessionist habits of mind. But in fact, a more dangerous form of anti-Judaism lurks in the "Israel-forgetfulness" [21] of Christian practice. We transact our liturgies as if the stories of Israel were but prelude or background to the Church's own story (the ecclesial equivalent of the "optional text" or "supplemental reading"). The Jews are not disparaged but ignored, and here lies the true problem. It is harde r to address and reform that which is unsaid than that which is spoken, harder to recover that which has been shrouded in indifference, erased (but not evacuated) from the palimpsest of Christian practice, than that which appears on the surface of the ritual transcript. In short, the church has enacted its liturgy and sacraments as if Israel's covenant were irrelevant to ecclesial practice. We have pushed the Jewishness of the Christian story in to the background, making Jesus' Jewishness insignificant to his sacramental presence. In so doing, we have become trained as readers to overlook the lasting significance of Israel's covenant in the overarching plot of God's economy.