Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

JEWISH "NO" AND CHRISTIAN "YES"
to Jesus Christ, accept and affirm the Jewish people as still called by
God to fulfill its God-given mission and Judaism as a valid response to
this calling? The German theologian Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt
has concisely formulated the problem as follows: "We will have
Christian anti-Judaism only then behind us, when theologically we
will have succeeded in making positive sense of the Jewish 'No' to
Jesus." 8
But let us first see, how we can say "yes" to the Jewish people on the
basis of our belief in Jesus Christ. Only then can we deal with the
Jewish "no" to Jesus.
Common to Judaism and Christianity is the belief that the human
person lives by the Word of God. But as we consider how God speaks
to us, Jews and Christians do not seem to have anything in common
anymore. For Jews, the Word of God par excellence is the Torah given
to Israel on Mount Sinai in the double form of the written Torah and
the Torah orally transmitted in tradition. According to the Midrash,
the voice of God on Sinai was echoed in seven voices, and the seven
voices changed into seventy languages, so that all nations could hear
the Word of God. Therefore everybody can live by the Word of God.
For Christians, the Word of God par excellence is Jesus Christ, the
Word of God that became flesh, a human person, in Jesus Christ.
God's Spirit was poured out on all flesh, according to the Pentecost
story in the Acts of the Apostles, so that each in his own language
heard about the mighty works of God. Everybody, therefore, can live
by the Word of God. The Word of God, whether understood in a
Jewish or a Christian sense, has universal meaning: Jews say it is the
Torah; Christians say it is Jesus Christ. This disagreement is even
exacerbated by the traditional Christian claim that Jesus is the true
Word of God, superseding and replacing the Torah. This claim has
made possible "the greatest injustice in world history" about which
von Harnack spoke in the above quotation.
The preservation of "Judaism despite Christianity" which is
inexplicable from a traditional Christian standpoint must be a "finger
of God" for us, forcing us to rethink our traditional views. "Judaism
despite Christianity" comes from the title of the English translation of
the profound correspondence between the Christian Eugen Rosenstock
and the Jew Franz Rosenzweig written at the front during the
First World War. Let us therefore start again with what is common to
Jews and Christians despite everything: the Word of God. What does
God say to us? One of the first attempts to express this in a short,
concise statement is made in Micah 6:8: "He has told you, O
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