Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

HOMILETICAL RESOURCES
What is meant by "not according to the covenant I made with their
fathers" is that they broke it. The "new" covenant will not be broken
because "I will put my law (Heb., Torah) in their inward parts, and in
their heart will I write it/' that it shall not be forgotten by them
forever.. . . Hence, the renewal of the covenant is merely its eternal
maintenance.
And behold, Malachi, the last of the prophets, in his closing
words states "Remember ye the law of Moses My servant, which I
commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel, even statutes and
ordinances." Certainly that passage refers to a future time, as
Malachi closed, "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet, etc."
Hence, there will never be a new Torah or covenant save the one
arranged at Sinai.
I have put all this forward in order to make it obvious that the issue
of Jewish-Christian relationships, especially at the religious and
theological level, is still an issue of texts and contexts. While we often
read a shared literature, the Hebrew Bible, what we see and hear there
is conditioned by what our particular faiths have taught us to expect to
find. Inevitably if we are to remain loyal to our faiths—and here I
mean also the inner faith each of us has in our particular system of
religion—we will continue to hear God's Word differently. The
question this raises about the meaning of interfaith dialogue is large.
What purpose does it serve? Don't the same essential differences
persist along with their inevitable polemical appendages?
The answer to the last question is yes if one assumes that the function
of dialogue is the creation of unified religious thinking and community.
That assumption means, at least to me, that all the dialogical partners
are on a gentle—but serious—conversionary mission. It is hard for me to
conceive that those who love and have rooted faith in their particular
traditions would even enter dialogue settings if that was dialogue's
manifest purpose. Indeed, some people do not join interreligious
dialogue because that is precisely their sense of dialogue's function!
If religious unity is not what dialogue is about, then what is it about?
Here I can only speak for myself. For me, the hopes placed in
dialogues with other religious groups besides my own—and
sometimes even in dialogues within my own faith community—are
best illustrated by a short hassidic interpretation of the first blessing of
the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy. The prayer begins, "Blessed
are You, our God and God of our fathers, the God of Abraham, the
God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." The hassidim said, "Why the
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