Strangers or Co-Pilgrims?

The Impact of Interfaith Dialogue on Christian Faith and Practice

S. Wesley Ariarajah

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506433677
• eBook ISBN: 9781506433684
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This book argues that interfaith dialogue begins with the basic goal of improving Christian relationships with people of other religious traditions. But gradually we become aware that this new ministry, when taken seriously, presents many new challenges, forcing us to reexamine our approach to religious plurality and our theology of religions. It also raises questions on how we read the Bible, understand Christian mission, and do theological reflections in a multifaith context. As the title of the volume suggests, the emergence and growth of interfaith dialogue has been looked upon by some as a threat to the future of Christianity and its mission in the world. Others consider dialogue a phenomenon that will give new vitality and relevance to Christianity in a religiously plural world.

The articles included here were delivered as lectures at conferences or written for periodicals, mainly in Asia, at different times and in response to a variety of circumstances. The unity of the volume lies in the fact that each of the articles addresses one of the issues crucial to interfaith relations.

V

Dialogue and Religions

9

Jewish-Christian Dialogue: Toward a Fourth Phase in Jewish-Christian Relations: An Asian Perspective

Where Do I Come From to This Discussion?

I must begin with the admission that even though I have worked in the field of interfaith relations for some three decades, I am not an expert in Jewish-Christian relations. My own field has been Christian-Hindu, Christian-Buddhist relationships. In 1981, I was invited to work in the Interfaith Dialogue program of the World Council of Churches, and served as the Director of the program for ten years.

All through those years an immediate colleague was responsible for Jewish-Christian Relations. However, as the Director of the overall dialogue program, I had been part of the joys and frustrations of my colleague responsible for Jewish-Christian relations, and had to relate at different levels with our Jewish partners. Much has been achieved through the WCC program to establish and sustain Jewish-Christian relations. We should also acknowledge the contribution of many Christian and Jewish theologians that have devoted their life to rebuilding this relationship ravaged by the vicissitudes of history.

I had also been part of the struggle to produce the ‘Ecumenical Considerations on Jewish Christian Dialogue’, drawn up by the WCC Dialogue Program along with the Consultation on the Church and the Jewish People (CCJP) and the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (IJCIRC). It has also been my role to be at difficult meetings between the WCC and the World Jewish Congress on attempts to resolve difficult problems in our relationships. I have also tried to keep abreast with the thinking that has been going on in Jewish-Christian dialogue.

I say all this to indicate that I am both an ‘outsider’ and an ‘insider’ to this relationship. I come from a country (Sri Lanka) where there is no resident Jewish community, but with a work history that has helped me to watch this relationship from close quarters. This may well be the reason why I, as an Asian, have been invited to give some reflections on this relationship and on my sense of the directions in which Jewish-Christian dialogue might move as we look to the future.

Disquiet over Jewish-Christian Dialogue

My own sense during these years has been that, despite the advances made and the relationships that have been built, for one reason or another, the Jewish-Christian dialogue lacked promise and vitality. For all the closeness claimed for the two traditions, this particular dialogue, especially at the global level, lacked spontaneity and appeared to lag behind in comparison to other relationships. In this relationship there were ‘no-go’ areas, boundaries that had to be observed, language that had to be watched, sensitivities that had to be respected, and politics that had to be mediated. These realities were, of course, present in other relationships as well, but in this dialogue, at least at the moment, the problems appear to stand out more than the promises.

The reasons for the difficulties that trouble Jewish-Christian relations are of course well-known: the polemics that attended the growth of Christianity from within Judaism, the troubled history of European Christianity and the Jewish people, the horror of the Holocaust, the political realities in the Middle East, pronounced internal diversity within both Judaism and Christianity on the appropriate approach to one another’s religion etc., loom large, none of which needs elaboration here.

Much pain had marked this relationship and much healing needed to take place. But as we look to the future, are we going in the right direction to bring about a new, lasting, and creative relationship between Christians and the Jewish people? What lessons have we learnt from our nearly sixty years of relationship and dialogue? What light do the emerging new relationships between religious traditions in general throw on this particular relationship? What do I, as a Christian from the ‘third world’ and from churches that have not had immediate relationship with Jewish communities, make of the current trends in Jewish-Christian dialogue?

It is these questions that lead me to indulge in these tentative reflections on what I have called the need for a ‘fourth phase’ in Jewish-Christian relations.

Christianity in Jewish Context

Much has been written and said about the first two phases. In the first phase, Christianity, which originated as one of many movements within the Judaism at that time, had to cope with the vicissitudes faced by all reform movements in the hands of those who seek to maintain the status quo. There is every reason to believe that, under different set of circumstances, Jesus Movement may well have ended up as one of the streams within Judaism. But three reasons appear to have led progressively to the alienation of the Jesus movement within the Jewish milieu.

First has to do with Jesus himself. We are of course in much difficulty here, because scholars of the Christian scriptures are not agreed on how much we do in fact know about the historical Jesus. Most scholars agree that the Gospel narratives are interpretations of the ‘Christ of Faith’, and to that extent compromise history. They are undoubtedly affected by the interests of the writers and the circumstances and the audience to which they wrote them. Yet, I am convinced that despite reasonable doubts about the authenticity of many sayings attributed to Jesus and interpretation of events related to his life, we have a reasonable picture of the man, his life, and the direction of his overall teachings.

Jesus that emerges from the narratives, in my own assessment, is not just another teacher, prophet, or reformer, but someone who called for a radical reorientation of the prevalent understandings of God, attitude to one’s neighbor, one’s religious practices, and the place and role of the Temple. There is also no doubt that Jesus looked upon his ministry as an internal struggle within the Jewish community, to which he belonged, in order to challenge the community to move toward what he considered a more authentic practice of the intentions of the Torah.

It also appears to me that his teachings and ministry took him to the margins of Judaism. One of the central issues in this regard had to do with Jesus’s understanding of universalism, which was in conflict with the eschatological universalism of the Jewish tradition. This is of course a much-debated issue and we need to return to this at a later stage.

The second is the conviction among Jesus’s Jewish followers that he had been raised from the dead, that he was indeed the long expected Messiah, and that in his person the coming of the Messianic Age had already been inaugurated. There is disagreement on the extent to which this claim led to the eventual separation between the Jewish community and the Christian community that was evolving within Judaism. Some would place greater emphasis on the Hellenization of the Christian community, although it clear that Judaism of the first century was also undergoing considerable Hellenization before Christianity became incompatible with Judaism.^[1]

The third, which was to be the decisive role, was the actual incorporation of Gentiles into the church, which had until then been a Jewish sect, without the requirement that they come under the Torah and be circumcised as a mark of belonging to the Covenant community. This first period was the painful period for the church, facing opposition from the Jewish community on the one hand and from the Roman emperors on the other.

There were many Jewish followers and others with Jewish leanings that attempted to hold Judaism and Christianity together. Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, and some of the early church ‘Fathers’, made Herculean efforts to give new interpretations to both Christianity and Judaism in their attempt see them as part of a single tradition, eventually to no avail. Gradually the new church became Gentile, and with it the Hellenization of its theology and especially its social life, it had moved far away from the religious tradition from which it had emerged.^[2]

One of the divisive debates within the church was whether it should completely divest itself of its Jewish roots and become a religion in its own right. Marcion, for instance, fought a losing battle on removing the Hebrew scriptures as part of the scriptures of the church. However, since all the early followers and the leaders of the emerging church had been from the Jewish tradition, and since much of the early interpretation of the significance of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus had been made by Jews who had become Christian, and since much of the interpretations of Jesus were based on Jewish symbol system, it was too difficult for the church to admit the reality that it had become Gentile, and that by continuing to interpret Christianity within Judaism it was increasingly doing violence to the Jewish tradition itself and its own self-understanding.^[3]

The Christian ambivalence over this issue continues to plague Christianity to our day.

Judaism in the Christian Context

The fortune of the church changed with the conversion of Emperor Constantine. In this second phase of Jewish-Christian relations, Christianity as the powerful imperial religion began to deal harshly with Judaism—theologically, psychologically, and even physically. The supersessionist understanding became part of Christian theology, leading to anti-Jewish polemics, anti-Judaism, anti-Semitism, and eventual ‘hatred’ of Jews within sections of European Christianity, leading to massive injustices to the community, paving the way that made such a horrendous event as the Holocaust possible.

Again, the complicated social, political, economic, psychological, and theological circumstances that led to this deepest wound in Jewish-Christian relations has been studied and written on and needs no repetition here. Suffice to say that the holocaust, and the circumstances that made it possible, left the conscience of the European and North American churches deeply shaken. After the Second World War, the founding assembly of the World Council of Churches, meeting in 1948 in Amsterdam, which was at that time composed mainly of the churches of the European and North American parts of the world, confessed that “We have failed to fight with all our strength the age-old disorder of man which anti-Semitism represents” and called upon the churches “To denounce anti-Semitism as absolutely irreconcilable with the Christian faith. Anti-Semitism is sin against God and man.”

Out of this conviction arose the agenda of ‘theological reparation’: the attempt to clear Christian theology and liturgy of its anti-Semitic elements, the attempts to re-understand both Judaism and Christianity in ways that do not exclude each other, and the building up Jewish-Christian relations on new foundations. The third phase of relationship had been put in place.

Jews and Christians Defining Themselves

This third phase of relationship was very important. Here the Jewish community called the churches to account, and churches have responded with repentance and theological reparation. I am not unaware that there are different levels of satisfaction within the Jewish community about the degree and extent to which Christian repentance has been openly manifested. However, much must be said in praise of those Christian scholars and leaders that have done the patient and difficult task of attempting to rebuild Christian-Jewish relations and to interpret the Bible and the Christian faith in ways that moves away from anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. We should also acknowledge the courage and fortitude of our Jewish partners who, despite doubts and reservations on the part of some within their own community, have worked alongside Christians toward building a new relationship. A number of churches and interfaith groups have made important Statements and much theological work has been done.

Despite the admiration I have for these efforts, as someone coming from the churches in the ‘third world’ and as one who has given much thought to the theory and practice of interfaith dialogue and the Theology of Religions, I have begun to feel that this third phase was a necessary and important, but must eventually give way to a fourth phase of relationship. The third phase, despite the contributions it had made, has also become the reason for the stagnation of Jewish-Christian dialogue, with little hope of moving this relationship to higher levels of interaction.

The Limitations of the Third Phase

There are four reasons why I believe we need to move beyond the third phase. First, much of the Jewish-Christian relations and dialogue in this phase is overshadowed by the unfortunate history of the relationship between the European churches and the European Jewish communities. It is, of course, natural and normal that such a devastating event like the holocaust, and the history of Christian attitude to Jews in European history that contributed to it, has shaped, colored and set the parameters of much of the conversations since then. Addressing Jewish-Christian relations from that perspective was necessary to bring the needed correctives to the interpretations of Christian faith and practice in relation to the Jewish community.

It must be remembered, however, that Christianity is a world religion, and that the center of gravity of the Christian religious traditi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Introduction
• The Theory and Practice of Interfaith Dialogue
• Dialogue and Scriptures
• Dialogue and Theology
• Dialogue and Mission
• Dialogue and Religions
• Three Relevant Issues to Interfaith Relations
• Index