Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

THE RELATIONSHIP OF
JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY:
TOWARD A NEW ORGANIC MODEL
IRVING GREENBERG
"This paper is an attempt to ask Jew9 and Jewish thinkers
to focus not only on Christian failure and the Christian
tradition of teaching of contempt . . . [but] whether it is
possible for Judaism to have a more affirmative model of
Christianity/'
This paper does not focus on the Holocaust but in part it is a
response to the Holocaust. In the light of the Holocaust, the
willingness to confront, to criticize, and to correct is the ultimate test
of the validity and the vitality of faith. One might say that that religion
which is most able to correct itself is the one that will prove itself to be
most true. Those who claim they have the whole truth and nothing
but the truth and there is nothing to correct thereby prove how false
and how ineffective their religious viewpoint is. The most powerful
proof of the vitality and the ongoing relevance of Christianity is the
work of people like Alice and Roy Eckardt whose fundamental
critique of Christianity is surely one of the most sustained and
devastating moral analyses in its history. But their work, and that of
others like them (Paul van Buren, Rosemary Ruether, Eva Fleischner)
is both healing and affirming of Christianity.
In that spirit, this paper is an attempt to ask Jews and Jewish
thinkers to focus not only on Christian failure and the Christian
tradition of teaching of contempt. "The Holocaust cannot be used for
triumphalism. Its moral challenge must also be applied to Jews." (See
my "Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and
Modernity after the Holocaust," in Eva Fleischner, Auschwitz:
Beginning of a New Era? [New York: KTAV, 1977], pp. 20-22.) This
paper asks whether it is possible for Judaism to have a more
Irving Greenberg is an Orthodox rabbi and is president of the National Jewish Resource
Center, an organization devoted to leadership education, policy guidance, and
intra-Jewish, ecumenical spiritual renewal. Rabbi Greenberg has written extensively on
Judaism and Christianity after the Holocaust.
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