Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

QUARTERLY REVIEW, WINTER 1984
is horrifying for Wolff, and tendencies in contemporary Christian
theology to seek what Jews and Christians may have in common fill
her with anger. She writes a book in which the whole Hebrew Bible
and all Jewish elements in Christianity (or in any case the caricatures
she gives of Jewish elements, since she shows herself to be very
ill-informed about Judaism!) are thrown overboard. In this way she
hopes to solve the identity problems of Christianity. Since the Jews,
during the Second World War, were physically removed and
exterminated from Germany, she now wants a Christianity in
Germany "purified" from all Jewish traces. It is not surprising that the
Christianity she presents is a rather meager extract of some sayings of
Jesus adapted to psychotherapeutic needs of individuals in distress.
She has, however, rightly seen that Christianity had developed a
very complicated, ambivalent, and almost pathological relationship
towards the Jewish people. She is aware that, in the words of von
Harnack, Christianity has plundered her mother, Judaism, by
claiming to be the true Israel and by denying the Jews the ability to
read their Scriptures validly and correctly. But her solution of simply
rejecting the mother is self-destructive and at least as pathological as
the traditional Christian relationship to the Jewish people, especially
in view of the post-Holocaust situation in Germany.
From both these types of reactions to the statement of the Synod of
the Rhineland it becomes clear that the relationship to the Jewish
people is still a very sensitive matter to German consciousness.
Christians in Europe are confronted with the empty place left in their
countries by the disappearance of many Jewish communities. In the
first decades after the Second World War, awareness of this absence
was suppressed by the feverish reconstruction of the devastated cities
of Europe and the rebuilding of the economy. Now after forty years
the victims of the Holocaust are more hauntingly present than
immediately after the war, despite all the pronouncements that the
time has come to forget and to forgive. The statement of the Rhineland
Synod is a courageous attempt to come to grips with the real questions
posed by the Holocaust to the churches. It is the result of serious and
engaged Christian rethinking in relatively small circles of people who
dared to expose themselves to painful self-examination.
The center of this movement has been the working group of
Christians and Jews at the German Protestant Kirchentag. The
Kirchentag is a large gathering of Protestant Christians convening
once in two years and attracting, in recent years, several hundred
thousand participants, most of them young laypeople. They have
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