Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

QUARTERLY REVIEW, WINTER 1984
overcome the dismissals and divisiveness which weaken the role of
both religions. I turn to Christians in trust and love and depend on
them to prevent triumphalist abuses. Failure to prevent would only
prove that Christianity is not a valid hermeneutic on the biblical
covenant. It would suggest that the sum of woe brought into the
world by Christianity will go on and on, undermining its claim to be a
legitimate major step forward on the road to redemption.
By the same token, many Christians will find the concept that God
called Jewry to a new level of relationship in the covenant a denial of
their own belief in Christ as the ultimate event. I do not underestimate
the challenge in giving up the monopoly claims or in recognizing
Judaism as a form of independently valid relationship to God. Yet,
this model offers the affirmation of the fullest possibilities of Christ:
from God Incarnate to prophet or messiah or teacher—freed at least of
the incubus of hatred and monopolistic claims of owning God. For this
model to work, Jews as well as Christians will have to have faith in the
sufficiency of God's capacity to offer love enough for everyone and
that the Lord who is the Makom/Place, who is "the ground of all
existence" has many messengers.
IN A NEW ERA: AFTER MODERNITY AND
AFTER HOLOCAUST AND REBIRTH OF ISRAEL
The history which both religions denied in order to claim their own
absolute validity came back to haunt them. In the modern period, the
revolt of humans against oppression, suffering, and inequality led to
an enormous growth of secularism and rejection of religion. Both
Christianity and Judaism lost serious ground to revolt in the name of
the very goal they were pledged to achieve in the first place. And both
faiths were forced back into history by the overwhelming weight of
modern culture and scholarship which continually dug at their
claimed foundations, i.e., transcendent extrahistorical truth. Modern
scholarship insisted that the denial of history is false. Revelation is in
history. To deny that, one must ignore or contradict archeology,
anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history, which is to say, to be
judged to be false, nonfactual, by the standards of modern culture.
Reluctantly but inexorably, both religions have been forced to
confront their own historicity.
An event of great historical magnitude has now gone beyond
modernity in pushing faith back into the maelstrom of history. In the
Holocaust, Jews discovered they had no choice but to go back into
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