Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

QUARTERLY REVIEW, WINTER 1984
movement is toward learning and understanding as against hierarchy
and mystery. Christians—as Jews—will recover the true role of
Israel/Jacob who struggles with God and with people, for the sake of
God and of humanity.
Unless this shift takes place, those Christians who seek to correct
Christianity vis-^-vis Judaism will be blocked by the fact that within
the New Testament itself are hateful images of Jews. Therefore,
humans must take full responsibility—not out of arrogance, not out of
idolatry. It must be done without making God into the convenient one
who says what one wants to hear. Out of the fullest responsibility to
its covenant partner, Christianity can undergo the renewal which I
believe it must undertake.
The unfinished agenda of the Jewish-Christian dialogue is the
recognition of the profound interrelationship between both. Each
faith community experiencing the love of God and the chosenness of
God was tempted into saying: I am the only one chosen. There was a
human failure to see that there is enough love in God to choose again
and again and again. Both faiths in renewal may yet apply this insight
not just to each other but to religions not yet worked into this
dialogue. Humans are called in this generation to renew the
covenant—a renewal which will demand openness to each other,
learning from each other, and a respect for the distinctiveness of the
ongoing validity of each other. Such openness puts no religious claim
beyond possibility but places the completion of total redemption at
the center of the agenda.
Judaism as a religion of redemption believes that in ages of great
destruction, one must summon up an even greater response of life
and of re-creation. Nothing less than a messianic moment could
possibly begin to correct the balance of the world after Auschwitz.
This is a generation called to an overwhelming renewal of life, a
renewal built on such love and such power that it would truly restore
the image of God to every human being in the world.
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