Converging Destinies

Jews, Christians, and the Mission of God

Dauermann

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781498244640
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

While all have reason to celebrate the greening of Christian-Jewish relations since the Shoah and the promulgation of Nostra Aetate (4), few will deny that much work remains to be done by Christians and Jews seeking the best way forward that they might best serve God's purposes in the world, the mission of God. This book addresses that need by first surveying how each community has historically conceived of its own mission and from that stance assigned an identity to the other. The text illuminates how such construals have often impeded progress and therefore need to be upgraded and supplemented. But how shall this be done? Converging Destinies proposes an eschatological vision and practical suggestions to summon Jews and Christians to prepare for that day when each will be both commended and reproved by the judge of all, sounding a call for more determined action, greater humility, and cooperative effort as together Jews and Christians serve the mission of God, accountable to him for how they have served him and each other in the world that he has created according to his will.

Part One

What Is Our Starting Point?

1

God’s Everlasting Love for Israel

Surrounded by rolling farmland, looking like some harmless recreational campground, Auschwitz waits. We arrive only to be swallowed up by the silence. Shuffling along, instinctively quiet, mirroring in life the ringing silence of death, we listen to bored tour guides regurgitating rehearsed explanations decrying “what Nazi Germans did on Polish soil.” But such learned scripts fail to drown out the sound of the silence sobbing about absence, millions of voices gone in a moment, and myriads of descendants of the holy seed of Israel forever unborn. Even on this sunny day, the darkness overwhelms us, while the silence screams, there, at the edge of that foul maw that swallowed the holy nation, the royal priesthood, God’s treasured possession.

Horrified, we strain our ears for sounds of life, and our eyes for light, any light to lead us away from this infernal vestibule. A voice pierces primordial night: “Let there be light.” Darkness flees before unquenchable brightness: the voice of God on the lips of man.

Auschwitz opened a new intercommunal dialogue for Jews and Christians, like endless caverns suddenly unearthed, aflood with the light brought by spelunkers from above. Having stood together at the brink of extinction, one community as victim, the other as bystander, each knows that after the Shoah, further silence only increases the darkness.23 Light-giving words must be spoken, united with deeds. The “never again” carved by Christians and Jews is the only fitting monument to the six million. It requires the hammer and chisel of words spoken in communal self-examination and courageous, determined dialogue. Like a hammer pinging on the anvil of a bright new morning, it is only such living voices that can drown out the silence of the dead.

A phoenix arising from crematoria ash, the modern State of Israel gave Jews a new voice in the council of nations, while repudiating two millennia of Christian assumptions. Facing unprecedented horror on the one hand, and ecstatic fulfillment on the other, both communities cry out, “Surely the LORD is in this place; and I did not know it” (Gen 28:16). Suspecting that God is breaking through the confines of comfortable provincialisms, like the congenitally deaf with cochlear implants now learning to hear for the first time, each community struggles to discern and interpret the voice of God as he speaks through the “foreign lips and strange tongue” of the other (Isa 28:11; cf. 1 Cor 14:21).24

But how do we discern the way out of an abyss where even God was given up for dead? And what is the right response to dry bones resurrected, realizing a prophetic hope sustained in prayer, marinated in blood, awash with the tears of two thousand years? Is it even possible to discover what God is up to in the world, and the roles he has assigned to Israel and the church at a time when graves split asunder?

Increasingly, Jews and Christians are realizing that we must find answers to these questions, and must do it together. It is as if the Holy One has given to each community half of a treasure map indecipherable apart from the piece held by the other. Unless Jews and Christians can come together and form a respectful, trusting, and communicative partnership, the map will continue to remain obscure and its treasure buried, inaccessible to all.

Before she can partner with Israel and rightly interpret the treasure map of the purposes of God, the church must first hear as if for the first time God’s word concerning Israel’s enduring election, for she can neither accompany nor learn from her Jewish partner apart from this radically transformative hearing. In its early youth, the church became blind and deaf to these things. It is time to be healed, and the first signs of healing are already among us.

Mark’s gospel portrays the leadership of Israel and the church as each in process, blind and seemingly unable to comprehend the truth about themselves, each other, and the mission of God. The text provides both diagnosis and cure.25 In Mark 8:22–26, Jesus heals a blind man, not suddenly, but in stages. After first putting saliva in his eyes, and laying hands on him, Jesus asks, “Do you see anything?” Looking upward, the man reports, “I see men; but they look like trees, walking.” Jesus lays hands upon him again, and it is only then that “he looked intently and was restored, and saw everything clearly.”

At its birth, the church was already touched by Yeshua. And propelled by the convulsive impetus of the Shoah and the founding of the modern State of Israel, churches and theologians are reaching conclusions, issuing statements, and adopting policies denouncing anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism, affirming the continuing election of the Jewish people. Yet, some view these developments with suspicion, dismissing such theologians as trendy post-Holocaust theological revisionists, as if theology must never be revised, even if it is known to have undergirded genocidal horrors. Even in those circles where such revisions are officially embraced, a paradigm shift is one thing, a shift in practice, quite another. It is hard for the church to see things differently, after two thousand years of skewed perceptions. It is harder for her to detect and uproot habits and reflexes shaped by millennia of supersessionist triumphalism.

The church needs a second touch if it would see herself, Israel, and Messiah as they really are, instead of in the distorted manner to which she has become accustomed. Indeed, both church and synagogue must learn to doubt their misperceptions as just so many walking trees, seeking a second touch from God bringing them into a new partnership. God has decreed that neither community can enter into the consummation of all things apart from forming this respectful, attentive, and communicative alliance. The first sign of their healing will be when church and synagogue see one another differently than before.

This chapter highlights what Israel remembers and the church forgets, that the people of Israel are eternally beloved. The church needs to learn this lesson, review it constantly, and explore its implications deeply. Israel is destined to be her senior partner in the consummation of the mission of God. The idea of Israel being the church’s senior partner will be quite jarring and even offensive for many Christians, but far less jarring and offensive than when Jews continue to endure the cacophony of the church’s claim to be the new Israel—words that seek to unmake the “let there be light” of Israel’s creation.

As a lesson for us all to consider, here I will speak of how Israel’s election persists despite supersessionist arguments to the contrary, such as those of N.T. Wright, a man worthy of great respect, but wrong on this issue.

The Nature and Grounds of Israel’s Election

Because he roots his views in the text of Scripture, Orthodox Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod is widely read and appreciated by many Christians. But not all can digest what he says in passages like this. Many reflexively recoil:

The people of Israel pursues its course in history in the faith that it is the people of God. Because God loved Abraham, he chose him and his seed as the people of his Covenant. Because this people is a human family with all the frailties and failings of humankind, the people of Israel has never ceased to prove unworthy of its election, rebelling against the mission laid upon it by God, more often than is seemly to say. God, in his infinite mercy, nevertheless continues to love this people above all others. To it, he has given his name so that he is known to all the families of the earth as the God of Israel.26

Such unequivocal, stirring words, warmly resonant for most Jews, meet a far different reaction from many Christians who react with caveats, reservations, and categorical denials. Joel S. Kaminsky attributes this reflexive dismissal to two legacies. The first is the Christian West’s post-Enlightenment preference for the universal over the particular, assuming ultimate truth to lie always beyond and above the particulars of human experience and perception. The second is the historical and theological legacy of supersessionism.27

A Particularist Election

Will Herberg nicely summarizes the West’s aversion to particularist election.

A truly rational and universal God, it is maintained, could not do anything so arbitrary as to “choose” one particular group out of mankind as a whole. . . . God is the God of all alike, and, therefore, cannot make distinctions between nations and peoples. To this is added the moral argument that the doctrine of “chosenness” is little better than crude ethnocentrism, in which a particular group regards itself as the center of the universe and develops doctrines that will flatter its pride and mi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword by Calvin L. Smith
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: A Missiological Biography
• Part One: What Is Our Starting Point?
• Part Two: Where Have We Been?
• Part Three: Where Are We Going?
• Epilogue: Can Two Walk Together Unless They Be Agreed?
• Bibliography