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Nostra Aetate and Supersessionism: a Way Forward?

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Nostra Aetate and Supersessionism: a Way Forward? Louvain Studies 40 (2017): 184-196 doi: 10.2143/LS.40.2.3220914 © 2017 by Louvain Studies, all rights reserved Nostra Aetate and Supersessionism: a Way Forward? Marie L. Baird Abstract. — After a brief discussion of the Church’s orchestrated marginalization of the Jewish people, this essay will take up the fact of Christianity’s continued depend- ence on Judaism, a dependence that Nostra Aetate acknowledges in part. It will then discuss the problem, despite the promulgation of Nostra Aetate, of a “ghostly” supersessionism that continues to haunt Christianity. Finally, the essay will offer a suggestion for a possible way forward in Jewish-Christian dialogue that focuses on full legitimacy for both traditions in frank acknowledgment of the irreconcilability of their differences. Introduction The obvious importance of Nostra Aetate for Jewish-Christian dialogue cannot be overestimated. Its promulgation in light of the genocidal atrocity of the Shoah must be viewed as a most welcome, if indecisive, break with the Church’s triumphalistic and supersessionistic posture toward Judaism over the millennia. Far from regarding itself as “a perfect society,”1 whose signing of the Concordat with the Third Reich was viewed as a way to preserve German ecclesiastical structures and religious activities from the Nazi onslaught, the post-Shoah Church understood itself as being indebted to “that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles (cf. Rom. 11:17-24).”2 More recently, and in light of the papacy of Francis, the Church seems to have realized that an exclusionary pursuit of its ministry can no longer be defended, much less practiced, if doing so marginalizes and worse, demonizes, a targeted population as “other.” This is doubly true of its 1. Robert A. Krieg, “The Vatican Concordat with Hitler’s Reich,” America: The National Catholic Review, September 1, 2003; http://americamagazine.org/issue/448/ article/vatican-concordat-hitlers-reich (accessed 20/04/2017). 2. Nostra Aetate 4, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/ documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html (accessed 20/04/2017). nOstra aEtatE anD sUPErsEssiOnism 185 relationship with Judaism. As Pope Francis asserts: “a Christian cannot be anti-Semitic!”3 Although it is not possible to argue that Nostra Aetate is a ‘forgotten document’, it is possible to wonder about the degree to which its ­theological ramifications have been fully considered. The extent to which they may not have been realized is also the extent to which Nostra Aetate hovers over the Church in a continuous state of what we might call an ‘implementational ambiguity’. The causes of such potential ambiguity are manifold, ranging from the stark and unassailable fact of centuries of virulent Christian anti-Judaism to current musings on the possibility of a “soft supersessionism.”4 This article will commence by briefly considering the Church’s orchestrated ‘marginalization’ of the Jewish people that sought to exploit them as a ‘witness’ people whose decline confirmed the triumph of the Christian covenant. It will then take up the fact of Christianity’s ­continued dependence on Judaism despite such attempts at subjugation – a dependence that Nostra Aetate acknowledges in part. The article will then discuss what it considers to be the ongoing problem of a perhaps ‘ghostly’ supersessionism that continues to haunt Christianity and offer a suggestion for a possible way forward in Jewish-Christian dialogue, one focused on full legitimacy for both traditions in frank acknowledgment that their differences remain irreconcilable. I. The Jew as Witness and Wanderer It is surely unnecessary to rehearse the entirety of the dismal and often criminally violent history of the Christian persecution of the Jewish ­people. Its depressing contours, some of which have the capacity to appall, are so well known as to preclude the possibility of even the ­remotest form of denial. Yet one perspective on the so-called ‘fate’ of the ­Jewish people is too significant for this essay to pass over in silence. It was powerfully articulated by St. Augustine, and its ability to reverberate 3. “Francis: ‘It’s a contradiction for a Christian to be anti-Semitic’,” http://www. lastampa.it/2013/10/11/vaticaninsider/eng/the-vatican/francis-its-a-contradiction-for-a- christian-to-be-antisemitic-JbPXxL50obgCrMNTDJOnuI/pagina.html (accessed 20/04/2017). 4. George Hunsinger, “What Christians Owe Jews: The Case for ‘Soft Superses- sionism’,” Commonweal: A Review of Religion, Politics and Culture 142, no. 4 (February 20, 2015), https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/what-christians-owe-jews (accessed 20/04/2017). 186 mariE l. BairD through history is perhaps only bested by the infamous blood curse of Matthew 27. Augustine’s characterization of Jews as a ‘witness’ people to the truth of Christianity, in spite of their refusal to recognize the ­prophecies concerning Jesus that he believed animated their own ­scriptures, requires them to be dispersed but not killed, their backs bowed down but not broken: Therefore God has shown the church in her enemies the Jews the grace of His compassion, since, as says the apostle, “their offense is the salvation of the Gentiles” (Rom 11:11). And therefore He has not slain them, that is, He has not let the knowledge that they are Jews be lost in them, although they have been conquered by the Romans, lest they should forget the law of God, and their testimony should be of no avail in this matter of which we treat. But it was not enough that he should say, “Slay them not, lest they should at last forget Thy law,” unless he had also added, “Disperse them”; because if they had only been in their own land with that testimony of the Scriptures, and not everywhere, certainly the church which is every- where could not have had them as witnesses among all nations to the prophecies which were sent before concerning Christ.5 As James Carroll notes: “Jews came to be seen as witnesses in the very desperation of their status. They must be allowed to survive, but never to thrive … Their homelessness and misery are the proper punishments for their refusal to recognize the truth of the Church’s claims. And more − their misery is yet another proof of those claims.”6 The accoutrements of witness and dispersal that are foreshadowed, in Augustine’s assessment, led to the medieval ghettos, the identifying clothing, the exclusion from many occupations, yet another ‘dispersal’ with their expulsions from England, France, areas of what is now Germany, and Spain. And they were also ‘slain’, in response to the so-called ‘blood libel’ and other ­spurious slanders: the poisoning of wells, the spreading of the plague, the desecration of the host and, of course, the Crusades. All of this ­prefigured, in its turn, the pogroms, the Jewish ghettos of another kind, the deportations, all of the depredations that culminated in genocide − the product of a virulently racist anti-Semitism that found murderous ­inspiration in pagan sources but also in the Christian deicide charge and the myth of ‘dispersal’: “Clearly the Holocaust was unthinkable without 5. St. Augustine, The City of God, 18:46, trans. Marcus Dods, D.D. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2011), Book Eighteen, 594. While Dr. Dods was the overall translator of this edition, Rev. George Wilson translated Book Eighteen, as well as Books Four and Seventeen. 6. James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 218. nOstra aEtatE anD sUPErsEssiOnism 187 the ancient Christian legacy of deicide as well as the related idea that Jews were cut off from divine grace, destined to wander the earth until they turned to Christ.”7 Confronted with the fact of Auschwitz and another kind of witness − the mute testimony of its murdered and the eyewitness accounts of its survivors, dispersed yet again, first in DP camps and then worldwide − the Church was forced to think its claims about Jews and Judaism anew. John Connelly queries the meaning of Auschwitz: If the history of the Jews was a series of trials sent to punish them for failing to accept Christ, then what meaning did Auschwitz have? Were the Nazis instruments of God’s will, meant to make the Jews finally turn to Christ? To answer yes to this question was obscene, but it was the only answer Catholic theology provided as of 1945. In the years that followed, the converts [to Catholicism] had to stage a revolution in a church that claimed to be unchanging.8 His book From Enemy to Brother chronicles the developments that led to the promulgation of Nostra Aetate, developments that were largely the result of strenuous efforts on the part of two converts to Catholicism in particular, the Jewish convert John Oesterreicher and the Protestant con- vert Karl Thieme. But far from being a kind of resolution of almost two millennia of Christian supersessionism and triumphalism, Nostra Aetate unleashed a spate of ongoing questions about the post-Shoah relation between Judaism and Christianity − questions of serious theological importance whose ramifications, especially around the issue of covenant, have yet to be fully considered. The result is an ‘implementational ambi- guity’ that can leave the theologian and other scholars, not to mention the laity, in a considerable state of confusion. One struggles to discover a unified and coherent position on issues such as the status of Christian theologies of fulfillment and replacement, since any theological position that defends supersessionism, no matter how ‘soft’, relies on these ­theologies for its own coherence. One is confused by the number of ­covenants – one?, two? – that are under some degree of consideration. One wonders about the claims of equality that are made in relation to Jewish-Christian dialogue when it is obvious that the Christian perspec- tive cannot and will not ascribe full doctrinal legitimacy to the Jewish ‘no’ to Jesus.
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