Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

JEWISH "NO" AND CHRISTIAN "YES"
positions that denied the Jewish people any legitimate place in God's
design after the coming of Christ. The whole style of argumentation
signified a refusal to reconsider these theological positions, and a
tendency to a Christian thinking as if Auschwitz had not taken place.
In this regard the Bonn professors failed the theological criterion
which the Catholic theologian J. B. Metz had set forth: "not to engage
in a theology of any kind that remains untouched by Auschwitz or
could have remained untouched by it." Metz gave his students the
Metz, the Catholic theologian, advised his students,
"Leave alone any theology which actually could have been
the same before or after Auschwitz."
advice "Leave alone any theology which actually could have been the
same before or after Auschwitz." 3
A very different reaction on the
statement of the Synod of the Church of the Rhineland was given by a
German psychologist, Hanna Wolff, in her book New Wine—Old Skins;
Christianity's Problem of Identity in the Light of Psychoanalysis."* Her
answer to the synod's statement consists in the glorification of
Marcion, the church leader of the second century of the Christian era
who tried to detach Jesus from Judaism and saw him as the
manifestation of a different God than the God whose will was
revealed to Israel. According to Wolff, Christianity has until now
never really got out of the shadow of Judaism. That is its guilt, its
tragic and existential problem. To cut all ties with Judaism would, in
her opinion, be the proper consequence to be drawn from the
guilt-laden history of the Christian relationship toward the Jewish
people, a relationship which has culminated in Auschwitz. She
knows that something is very wrong in the traditional attitude of the
church to the Jews, and she quotes a remarkable statement by the
famous church historian Adolf von Harnack, whose theology
displayed Marcionite tendencies. It was quoted by the Jewish
theologian Pinchas Lapide: "Such injustice as perpetrated by the
Gentile churches towards Judaism is almost unheard of in world
history. The Gentile church denies it everything; takes its holy book
away from it, and while she herself is nothing else than a transformed
Judaism, she cuts off every connection with it: the daughter rejects the
mother after having plundered her." 3
The mere thought that Christianity might be a transformed Judaism
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