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 dependence 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 everywhere 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 convert 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 ambiguity’ 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 perspective cannot and will not ascribe full doctrinal legitimacy to the Jewish ‘no’ to Jesus. In addition, how can the equality claim be seriously maintained when such dialogue remains unpurged of any evangelizing

7. John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews 1933-1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 9. 8. Ibid., 6-7. 188 marie l. baird motivation, however benignly it tries to present itself, with its assurances of respect for human freedom? This article argues that the full legitimacy of both traditions can be maintained only with the honest acknowledgment of their irreducible irreconcilability, despite the considerable aspects they hold in common, and that any dialogue going forward ought to proceed on that fundamental recognition. Surely Jon Levenson is correct to assert that “[e]ach system makes sense in terms of its own assumptions. How either could ever pronounce the other’s specific claims to be equally legitimate is a very large question indeed.”9 Yet recognizing the irreconcilability of both traditions would allow each to frankly abstain from pronouncing on the legitimacy of the other, while maintaining a sincere openness to dialogue as true, legitimate equals, despite the theological irreconcilability of their respective traditions. (The recognition of theological irreconcilability remains agnos- tic on the issue of which tradition has the greatest purchase on the claim of being ‘true’, since neither tradition would or could claim otherwise.) Only then can such dialogue result in the full ability of the representatives of both traditions to work together to advance causes and interests that they both share and to which they can both contribute positively.

II. Christian Dependence on Judaism, Judaism’s Independence from Christianity

The claim of irreconcilability this article is putting forth depends, in part, on the simple yet incontrovertible fact that Judaism is in no way dependent on Christianity for its tradition, its covenantal status, its observances, and so on. As Steven Englund asserts: “In fact, nothing in Christianity is necessary to Judaism; but the church, for its part, desperately needs its precursor faith.”10 Setting aside for the moment Christianity’s ongoing dependence on Judaism, which Nostra Aetate acknowledges in its focus on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the fact of Judaism’s independence from Christianity can allow the former chief

9. Jon D. Levenson, “Dual-Covenant Theology vs. Dual-Truth Theory: An Exchange on Catholic-Jewish Dialogue,” Collection “Getting Past Supersessionism,” Commonweal: A Review of Religion, Politics, and Culture, February 21, 2014, 21, https:// www.commonwealmagazine.org/dual-covenant-theology-vs-dual-truth-theory (accessed 20/04/2017). 10. Steven Englund, “‘What Our Church Has Inflicted on Judaism’: An Exchange on Catholic-Jewish Dialogue,” Collection “Getting Past Supersessionism,” Commonweal, February 21, 2014, 16, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/what-our-church-has- inflicted-judaism (accessed 20/04/2017). nostra aetate and supersessionism 189 rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, to note that “from the moment that I, as a Jew, am viewed as a prefiguration of something I never imagined, and in which I do not recognize myself, then I find myself despoiled of my identity.”11 Christians who insist on the evangelizing impetus, following Pope Benedict’s declaration in Dominus Iesus12 concerning “the necessity of conversion to Jesus Christ and of adherence to the Church through Baptism and the other sacraments” will need to confront the darker implications of that claim: a call for the disappear- ance of Jews as Jews, a spiritual genocide that would fulfill Jewish theologian Ben Zion Bokser’s ironic observation that for Christians, “Authentic Judaism is really Christianity.13 How is this anything other than a continuation, however sincere and well meaning by its adherents, of Christianity’s theology of fulfillment, of its dismal and often violent history of claims about Judaism’s blindness to the meaning of its own scriptures? − A claim that enabled Cardinal Michael Faulhaber to assert in one of his Advent sermons of 1933 that “even the Jewish people of ancient times could not justly claim credit for the wisdom of the Old Testament.”14 It is an irreconcilable situation such as this that enables George Hunsinger to assert that “[t]he presence of two faiths − in some ways diametrically opposed − represents a festering wound in the one people of God. Neither Christians nor Jews know how to heal this wound; only God does.”15 But perhaps this is Christianity’s “festering wound” more than it is Judaism’s, since Judaism does not need Christianity for its own legitimacy, however Christians might or might not choose to confront that fact. Indeed, the Pontifical Biblical Com- mission stated the following in 2001: … Christians can and ought to admit that the Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one, in continuity with the Jewish Sacred Scriptures from the Second Temple period, a reading analogous to the Christian

11. As quoted by Englund, “‘What Our Church Has Inflicted on Judaism’,” Commonweal, February 21, 2014, 18. 12. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church,” August 6, 2000, paragraph 22, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_ doc_20000806_dominus-iesus_en.html (accessed 20/04/2017). I will return to this document. 13. As quoted by Englund, “‘What Our Church Has Inflicted on Judaism’,” Com- monweal, February 21, 2014, 14. See also John Pawlikowski, “Fifty Years of Christian- Jewish Dialogue − What Has It Changed?,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 49, no. 1 (2014): 99-106. 14. As quoted by Eric Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, trans. Detlev Clemens and Brendan Purcell (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 190. 15. Hunsinger, “What Christians Owe Jews,” Commonweal, February 20, 2015, 12. 190 marie l. baird

reading which developed in parallel fashion. Both readings are bound up with the vision of their respective faiths, of which the readings are the result and expression. Consequently, both are irreducible.16

Turning briefly to Christianity’s ongoing dependence on Judaism, both the theologies of fulfillment and replacement, and thus the traditional supersessionism and triumphalism that these theologies engendered, required a particular interpretation of the Hebrew Bible that the Pontifical Biblical Commission has acknowledged was flawed: It would be wrong to consider the prophecies of the Old Testament as some kind of photographic anticipations of future events. All the texts, including those which later were read as messianic prophecies, already had an immediate import and meaning for their contempo- raries before attaining a fuller meaning for future hearers … Although the Christian reader is aware that the internal dynamism of the Old Testament finds its goal in Jesus, this is a retrospective perception whose point of departure is not in the text as such, but in the events of the New Testament proclaimed by the apostolic preaching. It cannot be said, therefore, that Jews do not see what has been proclaimed in the text, but that the Christian, in the light of Christ and the Spirit, discovers in the text an additional meaning that was hidden there.17 This statement highlights the degree of dependence that Christianity has on various texts of the Hebrew Bible; indeed, the theologies of fulfillment and replacement require complete dependence. We can also look at Christian dependence on the Hebrew Bible from another angle, that offered by John Pawlikowski: Any articulation of Christology in light of the relationship with Juda- ism must regard the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jewish literature of the Second Temple period, and later postbiblical Judaism as indispensa- ble resources for understanding the significance of the Christ Event. The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish teachings during Jesus’ lifetime were at the core of his own spiritual vision. Any attempt to build a Christology solely on the New Testament represents a truncated version of Jesus’ actual message for humanity.”18

16. pontifical Biblical Commission, “The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scrip- tures in the Christian Bible,” December 2001, paragraph 22, http://www.vatican.va/ roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/pcb_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20020212_pop- olo-ebraico_en.html (accessed 20/04/2017). Emphasis added. 17. Ibid., paragraph 21. 18. John Pawlikowski, “Christology and the Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Per- sonal Theological Journey,” Irish Theological Quarterly 72 (2007): 157. nostra aetate and supersessionism 191

One of the felicitous outcomes of the promulgation of Nostra Aetate was the new emphasis on the Jewishness of Jesus, the Jewishness of his mother, his disciples and the apostles, as stated in the document. This fact is obviously the single strongest indicator of Christianity’s dependence on Judaism, even leaving aside all other considerations. Nostra Aetate brought it front and center, stated it forthrightly, and caused what Thomas Stransky called “a 180-degree turnabout in Catholic negative teaching about the Jewish people.”19 Nonetheless, the indecisive nature of its break with the Church’s history of supersessionism and triumphalism was such that Nostra Aetate has helped to create a situation in which “[t]he church of our day claims to understand the Jews in the terms provided by Nostra Aetate, but its leaders keep reverting back to the pre- Vatican II period in their pronouncements.20

III. Post-Vatican II Supersessionism: Not So ‘Ghostly’ After All?

The ratification and publication of “Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church” in 2000 seemed to baldly reinstate an overt supersessionism that was omitted from the final version of Nostra Aetate, causing widespread consternation in the Jewish community.21 The title alone indicated what the text would put forward as its most central claim: “faith requires us to profess that the Word made flesh, in his entire mystery, who moves from incarnation to glorification, is the source, participated but real, as well as the fulfillment of every salvific revelation of God to humanity.”22 It would appear that any salvific efficacy was denied to other religious traditions, a sense reinforced by Dominus Iesus’s claim that “… belief, in other religions, is that sum of experience and thought that constitutes the human treasury of wisdom and religious aspiration, which man in his search for truth has conceived and acted upon in his relationship to God and the Absolute.”23

19. Thomas Stransky, C.S.P., “The Genesis of Nostra Aetate,” America: The National Catholic Review, October 24, 2005, http://americamagazine.org/issue/547/article/genesis-nostra-aetate (accessed 20/04/2017). Fr. Stransky was a staff member of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity and was involved in the development of what would become Nostra Aetate. 20. Connelly, From Enemy to Brother, 3. 21. See Connelly, From Enemy to Brother, 3; also, David Berger, “Dominus Iesus and the Jews,” America: The National Catholic Review, September 17, 2001, http:// americamagazine.org/issue/320/article/dominus-iesus-and-jews (accessed 20/04/2017). 22. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus, paragraph 6. 23. Dominus Iesus, paragraph 7. 192 marie l. baird

When statements of this kind were joined to the denial of equal doctrinal legitimacy as well as the evangelizing intent embedded in inter-religious dialogue, claims which also appear in the declaration, the dismay of Jews and other non-Christians was thoroughly justified. One wonders, however, if a coup de grace may have been administered with the 2008 amendment of the Good Friday prayer for the Jews: “Let us also pray for the Jews, that God our Lord should illuminate their hearts, so that they will recognize Jesus Christ, the savior of men.” This shift to an overt supersessionism continues to reverberate in Jewish-Christian relations, as it continues to raise the specter of a return to theologies of fulfillment and replacement, the issue of the covenantal status of Jews in relation to Christians, and the overall question of Judaism’s deficient doctrinal legitimacy in the eyes of Christianity, impacting the very notion of equality in Jewish-Christian dialogue. But was it always thus? Was a different route not possible? What happened to Thomas Stransky’s claim that with Nostra Aetate the Church made “a 180-degree turnabout,” a claim prefigured by Gregory Baum’s assertion in 1986 that “[i]t could be argued, I think, that the Church’s recognition of the spiritual status of Jewish religion is the most dramatic example of doctrinal turn-about in the age-old magiste- rium ordinarium.”24 After all, the Pontifical Biblical Commission did assert that “the Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one,” and that the Jewish and Christian readings are “irreducible.” Yet the ‘turn-about’ seems to have morphed at times into a ‘turning back’, as was seen in the controversy over the publication of the document Reflections on Covenant and Mission, a working paper whose Catholic part was developed by a group of scholars advising the Bishops’ Committee for Ecumenical and Religious Affairs in 2002.25 This document was never adopted by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, nor by the Bishops’ Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, yet managed to elicit a spirited defense of the evangelization of Jews by Cardinal Avery Dulles, a defense that assumed the correctness of

24. Gregory Baum, “The Social Context of American Catholic Theology,” The Catholic Theological Society of America Proceedings 41 (1986): 87. 25. Reflections on Covenant and Mission was made public on the USCCB web site on August 12, 2002, where it was “mislabeled as a statement of the ‘Bishops’ Ecumeni- cal and Interreligious Affairs Committee and the National Council of Synagogues’.” See “A Note on Ambiguities Contained in Reflections on Covenant and Mission,” by the Committee on Doctrine and Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, http://www.ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/ documents-and-statements/roman-catholic/us-conference-of-catholic-bishops/578-usccb- 09june18 (accessed 20/04/2017). nostra aetate and supersessionism 193

Christian supersessionism. Philip Cunningham’s response to Cardinal Dulles noted that there are “inconsistencies and tensions” in “current ecclesial thinking” that “is not entirely of one mind.”26 Perhaps Dominus Iesus was issued to put an end to such “inconsistencies and tensions”? If so, it seems not to have succeeded. In a recent article, John Pawlikowski notes the “meta-question” that continues to insist: “‘How can Christians affirm the continuing validity of the Jewish covenant, while at the same time proclaiming the universal significance of the Christ Event?’ This remains a central question for Christian theology and for the Christian-Jewish dialogue.”27 As the Christian Scholars Group recognizes, “[i]f Jews, who do not share our faith in Christ, are in a saving covenant with God, then Christians need new ways of understanding the universal significance of Christ.”28 All of the foregoing, which admittedly offers a greatly truncated catalogue of the “inconsistencies and tensions” that continue to insist, sets the stage for a recent proposal to engage a ‘soft supersessionism’ that iterates a theology of fulfillment but does so in a manner that its author claims “is neither anti-Judaic nor anti-Evangelical − one that eschews religious coercion, and respects the indispensability of a Torah-observant Judaism, while at the same time upholding the imperative that Jesus Christ should be acknowledged by all for who he is, and the hope that this imperative will one day be accomplished universally by the inscru- table grace of God.”29 But can any theology of fulfillment actually accomplish that goal? George Hunsinger proceeds on the assumption that some kind of supersessionism is necessarily based on his position that “there is only one covenant and only one people of God. It impos- sible to read Holy Scripture any other way; there simply is no other covenant than the one established by God with Israel, and thus no other people could possibly be the elect people of God.”30 There is nothing ‘soft’ about this claim except, perhaps, Hunsinger’s assertion that “[e]very possibility of Christian triumphalism was consumed in the fires of

26. See Avery Dulles, “Covenant and Mission,” and Philip A. Cunningham, “The- ology’s Sacred Obligation,” America: The National Catholic Review, October 21, 2002, http://americamagazine.org/issue/408/article/covenant-and-mission and http://americamagazine.org/issue/408/article/theologys-sacred-obligation (accessed 20/04/2017). 27. pawlikowsi, “Fifty Years of Christian-Jewish Dialogue,” 102. 28. Christian Scholars Group, “A Sacred Obligation: Rethinking Christian Faith in Relation to Judaism and the Jewish People, September 1, 2002, http://www.ccjr.us/ dialogika-resources/documents-and-statements/ecumenical-christian/568-csg-02sep1 (accessed 20/04/2017). 29. Hunsinger, “What Christians Owe Jews,” 15. 30. Ibid., 13. 194 marie l. baird

Auschwitz.”31 But even that atrocity can apparently be relativized for him since “what is true de iure in Christ overrides all that exists to the contrary in history.”32 Nevertheless, relying primarily on the thought of Karl Barth, Hunsinger believes that his brand of supersessionism is ‘soft’ because it rejects any proselytizing of Jews since they already worship the one God. Yet what about the Jewish ‘no’ to Jesus? Hunsinger appeals to St. Augustine’s claim that “in a strange and ineffable way, nothing is done without the will of God, even that which is done contrary to it,” to support the apostle Paul’s words about “the hardening of Israel” so that the Gentiles might be “grafted in” even as eventually “all Israel would be saved.”33 But he makes a telling comment immediately there- after when he asserts that “[i]t is to the abiding shame of Christians that almost no Jew today can hear these words without revulsion, dismay, and even horror.”34 Indeed, which makes the absurdity of his claims about the possibility “for some Jews to become Christians without ceasing to be Torah-observant Jews” that much starker.35 Surely he must realize that Messianic Judaism is deeply offensive to most Jews, as is his assertion that when Jews suffer, “[Jesus] takes them into his wounded body so that they might be given a share in his risen body. They are not without hope because through his sufferings he has overcome the world. If so, Jesus Christ has truly made the sufferings of the Shoah his own in order to establish a hope beyond hope.”36 One can only wonder when Christians will cease all attempts to appropriate Jewish suffering for their own proselytizing ends. Surely no one wants to revisit the “crosses at Auschwitz” debacle. Returning to Hunsinger’s claim that “[t]he presence of two faiths − in some ways diametrically opposed − represents a festering wound in the one people of God. Neither Christians nor Jews know how to heal this wound; only God does,” one wonders why Judaism should be expected to allow itself to become subsumed under Christian covenantal claims when the internal coherence of its own tradition would forbid it? And what does “the one people of God” signify from the perspective of a Jewish faith that Hunsinger admits is “in some ways diametrically opposed” to Christianity? Those questions, and others that inevitably arise in their wake, are indeed intractable enough to point yet again to

31. Hunsinger, “What Christians Owe Jews,” 15. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 14. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 15. 36. Ibid., 17. nostra aetate and supersessionism 195 the irreducible nature of Judaism’s and Christianity’s irreconcilability, one that perhaps only some future divine inspiration can truly overcome. In the meantime, we are left once again with Pawlikowski’s question: “How can Christians affirm the continuing validity of the Jewish covenant, while at the same time proclaiming the universal significance of the Christ Event?”37 This is an ongoing question for Christianity alone. It seems at this particular juncture that a way forward should embrace the fact of these great faith traditions’ irreducible irreconcilability as a given, and abstain from any judgments about the legitimacy of their respective doctrines. A way forward can embrace the reconciling spirit of Nostra Aetate while acknowledging the inability to overcome the intractable differences that divide the two traditions. Perhaps Hunsinger is right to state that only divine intervention can heal such differences, if in fact they are meant to be healed. Theologies of replacement and fulfillment − any form of supersessionism, no matter how ‘soft’ − will not heal and will inspire a return to the “revulsion, dismay, and even horror”38 that Jews have experienced for millennia in the face of Christian persecution. Finally, a way forward can embrace a mutual commitment to ‘tik- kun olam’ as a way of ‘repairing the world’ that is often associated with social action.39 An early and most welcome sign of repair has recently occurred. Bishop Heinrich Mussinghoff of Aachen, Germany has requested that “the Church revoke the Good Friday Prayer for the [Tridentine] Rite.” Claiming not to have “understood why Pope Benedict reintroduced it in the first place,” Bishop Mussinghoff declared that it was “a burden on Christian-Jewish relations and could easily be revoked.”40 He is correct and his request functions as an example of ‘repair’ that all Christians should emulate and that all Jews should welcome. It is a legacy of the reconciling spirit of Nostra Aetate and a ‘no’ to the easy hegemony of a supersessionism, no matter how ‘soft’, whose dismal and violent history alone calls for its permanent repudiation. Bishop Mussinghoff offers us a model of what an ‘implementational clarity’ of Nostra Aetate could look like if its break with supersessionism and triumphalism was finally deemed decisive. And who knows, perhaps his gesture is divinely inspired.

37. pawlikowski, “Fifty Years of Christian-Jewish Dialogue,” 102. 38. Hunsinger, “What Christians Owe Jews,” 14. 39. See http://www.reformjudaism.org.uk/a-to-z-of-reform-judaism/?id=152 (accessed 20/04/2017). 40. Cf., http://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/2183/0/german-bishop-wants-benedict- xvi-s-revised-good-friday-prayer-revoked- (accessed 20/04/2017). 196 marie l. baird

Marie L. Baird is an Associate Professor and Director of PhD Studies in Theology at Duquesne University. Her research interests include the theology of suffering, the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Gianni Vattimo, and the role of ethics in theology and spirituality after the Holocaust. Her current research is focused on the phenomenology of bearing witness. Address: Duquesne University, 600 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15282, USA. E-mail: [email protected].