Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

QUARTERLY REVIEW, WINTER 1984
HESCHEL'S INFLUENCE ON CHRISTIAN THOUGHT
I believe that Heschel's impact on Christianity goes beyond his
involvement in the ecumenical movement and his work at Vatican II. I
shall summarize it in three brief points.
First: We have already seen that Heschel's books were read by
Cardinal Bea and Pope Paul VI. Long before, however, as early as
1951, Reinhold Niebuhr hailed Heschel as a "commanding and
authoritative voice. . . in the religious life of America." 47
As the body
of Heschel's work grew, so did his influence on Christian theologians.
J. A. Sanders has proposed the intriguing thesis that Karl Barth's
Humanity of God, published in 1956, was influenced by God in Search of
Man, published the year before. 48 Whether through personal
friendship or his writings—and frequently through both—Heschel
affected the very fabric of Christian thought.
Second: Because God was a shattering reality for Heschel, because
the world of the Hebrew prophets was uniquely his own, Sanders
wrote, "many Christian thinkers learned that God already was, and
had been for a long time, what traditional Christian dogma taught was
Precisely because he was steeped in his own tradition,
because he was Jewish in every fiber of his being, Heschel
was able to mediate to Christians the riches of what is also
their biblical heritage.
revealed only in Christ." 49
Precisely because he was steeped in his
own tradition, because he was Jewish in every fiber of his being,
Heschel was able to mediate to Christians the riches of what is also
their biblical heritage. He saw more clearly than some Christian
theologians that the battle with Marcion has not yet been won, that all
too often the Hebrew Bible still takes second place to the New
Testament. He gave a vivid illustration of this from Vatican II, where
each morning after Mass an ancient copy of the Gospel was solemnly
carried down to the nave of St. Peter's and deposited on the altar. "It
was the Gospel only, and no other book." 50
A simple pious practice,
or the expression of a still deep-rooted theological view that the
Hebrew Scriptures are not fully equal to the Christian Scriptures?
The latter, it would seem, in light of a text Heschel quotes from
78