The Church And The Jews

A summary of the work of the Cologne Ecumenical Study Group, winter semester 1998-99.

In the winter semester 1998-99, the Cologne Ecumenical Study Group took as its subject relations between Christians and Jews. Rather than studying the many documents that have emerged from Christian-Jewish conversations so far, the group set out to examine the new relationship between Christians and Jews that has developed out of such conversations, and the consequences this may have for Christian self-understanding and doctrine. Until well after the second world war, official Christian pronouncements on Judaism were based on a premise that can be summarized more or less as follows: "Israel has been rejected; God has cancelled his covenant with Israel; God has chosen the church instead; the church is the new Israel, the new covenant." With this theological presupposition, it is obvious that no serious new Christian theological approach to Jews could be found.

The latter only became possible once Christians were prepared to drop their doctrine of God's rejection of Israel and to discover that God has never cancelled his covenant with Israel, which is irrevocable. However, Christians could make the breakthrough to this theological insight only after they had come to realize their own involvement in modern racist anti-semitism, in the form of the age-old Christian anti-Judaism which is an integral part of it. They then also understood that they could not simply walk away from responsibility for the Shoah, even if their own anti-Judaism had never endorsed it. Since the 1960s, many Christian documents on Judaism have been produced in the churches around the world, as well as joint Christian-Jewish documents testifying to this new theological approach which culminates in the statement that God's covenant with Israel is irrevocable. In our work we reflected on what this theological proposition means for the self-understanding of the Christian faith, examining it in relation to various themes ...

1. Old Testament

The Old Testament together with the New Testament is the holy scripture of the Christian churches and as such the criterion and norm of their whole life and doctrine. But does the Old Testament speak to the churches only in its christological reception and focus in the New Testament, or does it have an essential, independent message of salvation of its own for them, prior to and alongside the New Testament? If God's covenant with Israel is irrevocable, as Christianity teaches today, and Israel bases its faith and confession on the Torah, the prophets and the Psalms, then the Christian churches have to recognize that, without the New Testament and without the christological reading of the Old Testament, Jews hear God's word of salvation in the same powerful way as Christians do with the help of the christologically interpreted Old Testament and the New Testament.

Christian dogmatics therefore has to include in its reflections Israel's teaching about God and God's action, salvation, redemption and liberation, God's people, the land, eschatology, etc. -- as this teaching is variously described and attested in living witness in the Old Testament and in the whole Jewish tradition of interpretation down to the present day. Christians should do likewise and bear in mind the presence of God's enduring covenant with Israel, which should automatically exclude any hint of an idea about mission to the Jews. However, Jews who wish of their own free will to join the Christian church could, as Jewish Christians within the Christian church, keep alive the rich Jewish heritage within Christianity inside the Gentile Christian church.

2. Christology and doctrine of the Trinity

The fundamental Christian dogmas of the 4th and 5th centuries were all developed in the Gentile Christian church. While the basic structure of the language of the Christian faith stems almost without exception from the traditional language of the Jewish faith, the Jewish conceptual world, Jewish thinking and experience, Jewish oral and narrative style -- all of which shaped the earliest Christian literature in the first century, which was collected to form the New Testament canon at the end of the 4th century -- the doxologically permeated dogmatic language of the 4th and 5th centuries is different, for it was moulded by Hellenism and its thinking and experience, its image of God and the world, its conceptual world, etc. What Jews and Jewish Christians spelled out at the level of history in the first century, the people of the Hellenistic world in the 4th and 5th centuries tried to explain in metaphysical terms, i.e. the unique, once-for-all and irreplaceable nature of Jesus Christ.

In this way, the Gentile Christian church tried to do justice to its Jewish origin, given in Jesus Christ, and to remain faithful to it. For people from the world of nations Jesus is, historically speaking, the bridge to the God of Israel whom Jesus revealed so powerfully to his Jewish disciples. The message of this God of Israel who saves and sets free, who wants the salvation of this world, etc. reached the world of nations by way of this "bridge", Jesus Christ. Without it, they could not have called upon the God of Israel, and would not have been able to do so in the Spirit of this God, rather than in the spirit of the gods of Greece, Rome, Egypt or Babylon.