Re-Envisioning Christianity: A New Era in Christian Theological Interpretation of Christian Texts

Cross Currents, Winter, 2000 by James F. Moore

Any post-Shoah theology must be constructed in dialogue and focused on dialogue, not on received traditions.

My work in various dialogues has given me the opportunity to see that theologians tend to incorporate only those materials that seem to be readily adaptable to the dialogue taking place. I have noticed that feminist theologians will often not be sensitive to the dramatic developments in the religion-science dialogue, while the people in that dialogue are generally unfamiliar with the basic criticisms posed by feminists about both religion and science. [1] I also see that many of the leading thinkers continue to work with theological ideas that fit in their domain of work but do not consider with any seriousness the radical challenges to theology posed by the Shoah and those theologians doing post-Shoah theology.

I was struck again by this phenomenon recently when I read John Polkinghorne's Belief in God in an Age of science. [2] Polkinghorne is surely one of the leading theologians in the science-religion dialogue, and this book adds to his many contributions to the development of a new theology in the face of the modern, scientific worldview. He poses one defense of traditional Christology (a Christian view of the nature of Jesus) as a challenge to other attempts to adjust such a view to fit more comfortably what we know about the world from science. That defense hinges on the necessity to provide an answer to a world full of suffering and evil, a world that produces Auschwitz. In making his defense, Polkinghorne turns to Jurgen Moltmann's claim in The Crucified God that "even Auschwitz is taken up into the grief of the Father, the surrender of the Son. and the power of the Spirit." [3] The point for Polkinghorne is that Christians need a strong affirmation of the divine and human natures of Christ in order to reta in hope in the face of such evil as Auschwitz.

Since such arguments are fairly common in theological literature, I was not surprised--but I was reminded that what seems to make sense in one context can be outlandish in another. Polkinghorne posits a universalizing of Auschwitz as a symbol of inhumanity against all humans. What he ignores in this claim is the particularity of Auschwitz, the bald fact that this was a killing place where the victims were primarily Jews and the perpetrators primarily, if only nominally, Christians. Even more troubling is the implication that there is comfort and hope in this position for those who believe in a traditional Christology but no such hope for all the rest, including the great majority of the particular victims at Auschwitz. If we stretch even further our analysis, we will surely come to realize that this traditional Christology was one of the important factors that led to the possibility of Auschwitz to begin with. [4] What is hope for some is death for others, a trade-off hardly acceptable in a post-Auschwitz wo rld.

Post-Shoah Theology

Polkinghorne's position is possible only if he and other theologians holding similar views -- and there are many -- fail to account for the implications of the Shoah for doing theology. The problem is not wholly to be found in the ignorance of religious thinkers outside of the dialogue on post-Shoah theology but may also be deeply imbedded in the very process of developing such theologies. This essay is an initial effort to explore this problem and to begin to move in a direction that can increase the impact of post-Shoah thinking on the full range of theological reflection.

Polkinghorne's argument reveals interesting clues about the central problem for any post-Shoah theology in that he fails to make clear his distinction between ontological and ontic claims. [5] I believe that he blurs the difference and that leads him toward a basic theological distortion.

Ontological claims are about the way things really are, so that to speak of the divinity of Jesus is to speak of something more than just a metaphor but rather to speak of a reality. The difficulty with this line of argument is that there seems to be little difference between the ontological (the foundation of reality) and the ontic (what we experience as real in the normal sense): to speak of divinity actually enfleshed in Jesus (a traditional Christian view of the Incarnation) is to make the ontological the ontic. This is the centuries-old problem that has faced Christian theologians since the Council of Chalcedon defined Jesus as being one person with two natures (divine and human). This claim means that the ground of all being is reduced to the ontic, to a specific event or set of events in our human experience. If this is more than metaphor but is a claim about reality, as Polkinghorne claims, then we have a serious problem for the Jewish-Christian dialogue.

The problem is obvious to many of us. Since such a claim universalizes the particular Christian belief about Jesus into an ontological reality, all efforts to be open to the other become impossible because there is always in such a christology a universalizing, supersessionist claim -- what Rosemary Ruether meant when she said that antisemitism is the left hand of christology. [6] There is no dialogic problem, even in post-Shoah dialogue, in making the ontic claim of the uniqueness of Jesus. In that way, Jesus can be compared with similar claims made by other religious traditions, including Judaism, regarding what is true about our experience of reality as we know it. Shifting the attention to the ontic Jesus has been the central driving force behind my development of a midrashic approach to post-Shoah Christian theology. [7] Such an approach breaks the universal claim for Jesus by beginning with the assumption that Jesus is for Christians the oral Torah, giving preference for the Torah as the prime source f or our understanding of reality. [8] Of course, what this means is a dramatically different kind of Christology than the one Polkinghorne wishes to defend.