[Oe List ...] Re - Spong on Christian anti-Judaism

[John Montgomery]

Thanks to Dick for sharing Spong's latest post. As a movement, we would do
well to reflect for some time about these questions. For example, while I
loved JWM's Christ of History, many of the terrible stereotypes we
perpetuated as we taught that paper about Jews, Judaism and Jewish thought,
relying as we did on an existentialist perspective, are nowadays downright
embarrassing. I just posted the following review of four recent books that
address these concerns on my blog - I hope I can fit it into this e-mail
without it crashing.

Summer Books! - Four Great Reads about Jewish/Christian Relations

Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages

Jaroslav Pelikan (Viking - Penguin Group, New York) 2005

This represents one of the last efforts by the eminent late Yale historian,
Jaroslav Pelikan, and like the bulk of his former work it both challenges
our too easily repeated assumptions and yet provides a framework that allows
us to see his new proposals in the broader historical context. Two important
themes play the part of sub-text in what, in the first instance, is a
history of the development and evolution of scripture and its interpretation
over the past two millennia. 

The first is captured by the title and confronts us with the fact, that we
often lose track of, that there is great diversity in terms of what we mean
by Scripture. Personally, I will never forget the day when my former
professor at Chicago, now Harvard, Jon Levenson suggested that even if we
had a Jewish text and a Christian text, what some call the Hebrew scripture
and the Old Testament, side by side, words exactly the same (and, of course,
they are not), but even if they were physically identical - they are still
two different books.

The second theme has to do with the notion of the "Word" of God and the
relationship between the spoken and oral traditions. Having read this book,
you may find yourself less comfortable with the liturgical response
repeatedly mumbled in our churches following the readings of the lectionary
texts, "The Word of God for the People of God." 

Maybe, and maybe not! 

The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus

Amy-Jill Levine (HarperSanFrancisco, San Francisco) 2005

While I often recommend a variety of books for study and reflection, I
seldom find myself saying that you should not pass go until you have read a
copy of this highly provocative work. Amy-Jill Levine, a self-styled "Yankee
Jewish feminist - with a commitment to exposing and expunging anti-Jewish,
sexist and heterosexist theologies," is an Orthodox Jew teaching New
Testament at Vanderbilt. She has written what is perhaps the most disturbing
yet insightful book to emerge in the religious publishing market for some
time.

Levine's book is a carefully crafted mix of wry humor and severe criticism.
It is a challenging discourse on the problem of latent Christian
anti-Judaism and concrete suggestions about what to do about it. This is not
about blatant bigotry and religious prejudice, but a scathing critique of
well-meaning progressive gestures such as Sunday readings taken from "the
Hebrew Scriptures" and the celebrating of Christian Seders.

Not since Rosemary Ruether published her watershed study, Faith and
Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, in 1974 have these
issues been examined so carefully. This is a book written for lay people.
While it is about theology, more importantly, it is about how we live our
faith in a world where not only the globe is a village, but the where
village is the globe.

The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament's
Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book

Julie Galambush (HarperSanFrancisco, San Francisco) 2005

In the previously mentioned book, Amy-Jill Levine comments how little the
issue of Christian anti-Judaism is broached in college and seminary
classrooms, partly because it is not generally addressed in the text books
commonly used. While her book is written primarily for Jewish readers,
Galambush's text begins to close that gap for Christian students of the
Bible as well. In the first instance, this book is an "Introduction to the
New Testament" and after the first several chapters, the next 27 essays take
her basic theme and apply it book by book on a journey through the Christian
texts. The book's origins are found in synagogue classes that Galambush
taught to fellow Jews (she is a converted Baptist preacher) about the New
Testament. One of her students even named playfully the project "The New
Testament for Jewish Dummies." 

In what can be seen as a radical proposal, Galambush begins with the
assumption that all, not just some, of the writers of the New Testament are
ethnically and religiously Jewish. She then proceeds to make her case book
by book. Reminding us that the followers of Jesus initially were simply "one
more sect in an era of Jewish sects," She writes:

"From the Jewish perspective, the story of Christian origins is not a tale
of heavenly triumph; in Jewish terms, the Jesus movement was a failure: more
Gentiles than Jews signed on, and eventually the group was denied any place
within the larger Jewish community"  Again she notes, that  "the New
Testament authors fought, ultimately in vain, to maintain their legitimacy
as Jews. Read as a Jewish book, the New Testament becomes the story of a
reluctant parting - the closing argument, the last hopes - before Christians
ceased, sometimes angrily, sometimes sadly, to be a part of the Jewish
people.

Of course, at the point that these Jewish texts became scripture for what
finally emerges as the Hellenistic pagan cult known as the Christian
religion from which our modern sensibilities, dogma, theologies, and
liturgies are drawn. They become the seedbed of virulent anti-Jewish
prejudice that is at the base of centuries of horrific genocidal persecution
of those who are essentially family.

Tenebrae: Holy Week after the Holocaust

Theresa Sanders (Orbis Books: Maryknoll, New York) 2006

I have shared this story on several occasions, but for me it powerfully
illustrates the concern that all of these books address. Several years ago,
one of our local United Methodist ministers provoked intense public debate
by "dis-inviting" a prominent Rabbi who had been nominated by several
students as the keynote speaker at their high school baccalaureate ceremony.
The service was to be held in the growing suburban church to which that
pastor had been assigned by the larger Methodist conference. The point of my
story is not forwarded by examinations of the pastor's logic or theology; it
suffices to say that many Methodists were quite upset and embarrassed. For
several years, our family has regularly attended Glenn Memorial United
Methodist Church located on the campus of Emory University. On the Sunday
following this public uproar, our then senior pastor made a well-crafted and
conciliatory statement prior to the morning service of worship. It was a
statement that seemed to clear a lot of the air in our predominantly liberal
congregation. I remember a palpable feeling of relief. 

Now that morning, our children's choir shared a short anthem that served as
the "gradual" between the morning's first scriptural lesson and the second.
The children had remained in place at the front of the chancel to hear the
second text taken from the Gospel of John. The text is about the well-known
resurrection encounter between Jesus and Thomas. Yet disturbingly, I watched
as those children listened to the reading of a passage that essentially told
them (and all of us), that the disciples were gathering behind locked doors,
because the Jews were out to get them.

Sander's book, written from a Catholic perspective, but applicable to us
all, raises the question how our worship practices, particularly during
so-called Holy Week must be re-imaged on the other side of the Shoah to
incorporate the churches' genuine repentance at our participation in and
justification of centuries of  Jewish persecution and the project of
genocide that eventually emerged.

One of Amy-Jill Levine's concrete proposals is that as we worship in our
churches, we imagine that she is sitting there in the front row and we ask
whether we really want to read that particular translation of scripture
without careful commentary, or whether we really want to repeat a particular
liturgical practice. For example, in that context, I find myself very
uncomfortable recently with the elevation of the so-called Gospel reading as
it has moved in our services through a liturgical cycle beginning with the
Old Testament, then the Psalms, through the Epistles and other writings,
finally to the Gospel where we stand and sometimes parade the book around
the altar. In spite of the subtle supercessionism, we miss the point, of
course, that those four books are not theologically the only vehicle of the
gospel proclamation. I look forward to the day when our liturgist might say,
"This morning's Gospel reading comes from Exodus."

Sanders study examines these questions looking both at the Scriptures
associated with each day of Holy Week and the liturgical practices as well.
She provides us with the chance for creative liturgical planning and
appropriate post-Holocaust worship celebration.

Happy reading!

 

Grace and Peace!

 

 

 John C. Montgomery

monkeyltd at comcast.net

john.montgomery at acfb.org

678-468-4913 (personal)

 

Visit My Blog - Notes From the Balcony

www.monkeyltd.blogspot.com

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/oe_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20070725/5edbd09f/attachment.html