Currents in Twenty-First-Century Christian Apologetics

Challenges Confronting the Faith

John J. Johnson

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9781556355394
  9781498249706
• eBook ISBN:
  9781725244047
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In this book, Johnson avoids the standard approach of many apologetic works that seek to "prove," in systematic fashion, that Christianity is true. Rather, he takes the position of orthodox Christianity and looks at various challenges that have been raised against it. For example, should the horrors of the Holocaust force Christian thinkers to alter their view of God's goodness? Is Christianity inherently anti-Jewish for claiming that Jews must embrace Jesus as Messiah? Are revived "hallucination theories" about Christ's resurrection tenable explanations of the birth of the Christian movement? Is the "presuppositional" approach of certain Reformed thinkers useful for doing Christian apologetics? These and similar questions are addressed in this book.

8

A New Testament Understanding of the Jewish Rejection of Jesus: Four Theologians on the Salvation of Israel

Is Christian theology inherently anti-Semitic? Are the fundamental teachings of the New Testament blatantly anti-Jewish? Is the church’s historical oppression of Judaism responsible (at least in part) for the Holocaust? More importantly, does the Holocaust force Christians to re-think the matter of Jewish salvation? A growing number of scholars, both Jewish and Christian, are answering “Yes” to these questions, and are seeking alternative understandings of the Christian message which they believe will avoid the anti-Semitic trappings of the past.

The landmark work in this area is Rosemary Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide. This book examines how Judaism has been demeaned and vilified by the New Testament, the Church fathers, and the states of Christian Europe. Ruether called for a radical new openness on the part of Christians toward Judaism in order to make amends for these sins: “Christians must be able to accept the thesis that it is not necessary for Jews to have the story about Jesus in order to have a foundation for faith and a hope for salvation.”1 The solution to Christian anti-Judaism, Ruether claimed, lies in a “revitalization of Christian absolutism which can accept the independent salvific validity of the Jewish tradition.”2

Ruether’s book has had a tremendous influence on the contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue. The extent of this influence can be judged from the fact that Gregory Baum, who wrote a powerful apologetic work in 1968 vigorously defending the New Testament against the charge of anti-Semitism, penned the introduction to 1974’s Faith and Fratricide. He there admitted that the apology he presented in his earlier work was untenable.3 Baum stated he had come to believe that, in light of the history of Christian anti-Judaism, especially the Holocaust, Christian theologians must “look for a formulation of the Christian faith that does not negate Jewish existence.”4

Baum is not alone in his abrupt change of position. For example, Krister Stendahl no longer believes that Paul’s letter to the Romans teaches that Jews must receive Christ as their Savior in order to experience salvation.5 There is a host of prominent thinkers, many of them Christian, who share Baum and Stendahl’s views, and they continue to have an enormous effect on the ongoing Jewish-Christian dialogue. 6

This article is an attempt to understand, from a decidedly New Testament perspective, some of the ways in which the Jewish people’s rejection of the messiahship of Jesus Christ has been understood. My aim is to challenge the new orthodoxy that now prevails among many mainline Christian theologians regarding the matter of Jewish salvation. This new orthodoxy is largely a result of theological reflection upon the Holocaust. Due to the sheer horror of Jewish suffering, and Christian complicity in that suffering, many now consider any attempt to link Jewish salvation with the Christian Savior theologically untenable, if not dangerously anti-Semitic.

I wish to demonstrate that the traditional claim that Jesus is the Savior of the Jews is not anti-Semitic, and that it is in fact a requirement if an honest interpretation of the New Testament evidence is to be maintained. Christian theology must be based on revelation, not on human experience, however tragic and far-reaching that experience may be. To assume that Christian theology must change as a result of the Holocaust is to base our theological thought on the tragedy of human evil rather than on the revelation of God. And while the Holocaust is a particularly obscene example of human depravity, it is different only in degree, not in kind, from all the sins of mankind throughout the centuries. C.S. Lewis, responding to the alleged “new urgency” brought about by modern man’s recognition of the riddle of evil, cogently remarks, “[W]hat new urgency? . . . it is no more urgent for us than for the great majority of monotheists all down the ages. The classic expositions of the doctrine that the world’s miseries are compatible with its creation and guidance by a wholly good Being come from Boethius waiting in prison to be beaten to death and from St. Augustine meditating on the sack of Rome.”7 And while Lewis was not writing about the Holocaust per se, his comments are plainly relevant to our discussion. Terrible examples of evil have plagued mankind throughout the ages, but Christians never radically changed their soteriology as a result. Why should the Holocaust be treated differently? What the Holocaust should do, and largely has done, is to make Christians realize that their old anti-Semitic prejudices must go, that the vilification of Jews as “Christ-killers,” etc., must be repudiated for the sin that it is. But this is far different from altering the central message of the New Testament: the gospel of salvation through Christ is for all, Gentile and Jew alike.

The first two theologians I address are Clark Williamson and Sidney Hall, both of whom can be considered contemporary representatives of the paradigm shift in Jewish-Christian relations that was inaugurated by Ruether some twenty years ago. They are both proponents of the so-called dual covenant theory, which holds that Christ is indeed the Messiah, but only for Gentiles, not for Jews. They differ somewhat in their reasons for advocating this view, but the Holocaust is the primary motivation in the thought of both men. The next two theologians I treat are Karl Barth and Jakob Jocz. They represent the more conservative, pre-Ruether view that Jesus cannot really be called the Christ if he is not truly Messiah for both Gentile and Jew. These two (especially Jocz) rely more heavily upon the New Testament for the formulation of their views, but they differ ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• How Do We Adjudicate Religious Truth-Claims?
• Is Cornelius Van Til’s Apologetic Method Christian, or Merely Theistic?
• How a Muslim Could Employ Van Til’s Apologetic System: A Response to Frame and Hays
• Is John Hick’s Concept of the “Real” an Adequate Criterion for Evaluating Religious Truth-Claims?
• A Case for “Reformed Evidentialism”
• The Implausible Foundations of Nietzsche’s Attack Upon Biblical Religion
• What Can We Believe about the Resurrection of Jesus?
• Were the Resurrection Appearances Hallucinations? Some Psychiatric and Psychological Considerations
• Hans Frei as Unlikely Apologist for the Historicity of the Resurrection
• Christianity, Judaism, and the Holocaust
• A New Testament Understanding of the Jewish Rejection of Jesus: Four Theologians on the Salvation of Israel
• Should the Holocaust Force Us to Rethink Our View of God and Evil?
• Are We Asking the Wrong Questions about the Shoah? Eliezer Berkovits as Post-Holocaust Jewish Apologist
• Bibliography