Post-Holocaust Hermeneutics: Scripture, Sacrament, and the Jewish Body of Christ

To answer these questions we must turn our attention to those practices of Christian life that train us as readers. Practices such as prayer, sacraments, and proclamation have long nurtured particular readings of scripture, though rooted in the soil of Christendom these have too often been anti-Jewish readings. This is not to say that these Christian practices have always been explicitly anti-Jewish. If this were the only problem, then the contemporary rejections of supersessionism and the careful prescriptions for how to speak of the Jews in preaching and liturgy would be enough to transform our supersessionist habits of mind. But in fact, a more dangerous form of anti-Judaism lurks in the "Israel-forgetfulness" [21] of Christian practice. We transact our liturgies as if the stories of Israel were but prelude or background to the Church's own story (the ecclesial equivalent of the "optional text" or "supplemental reading"). The Jews are not disparaged but ignored, and here lies the true problem. It is harde r to address and reform that which is unsaid than that which is spoken, harder to recover that which has been shrouded in indifference, erased (but not evacuated) from the palimpsest of Christian practice, than that which appears on the surface of the ritual transcript. In short, the church has enacted its liturgy and sacraments as if Israel's covenant were irrelevant to ecclesial practice. We have pushed the Jewishness of the Christian story in to the background, making Jesus' Jewishness insignificant to his sacramental presence. In so doing, we have become trained as readers to overlook the lasting significance of Israel's covenant in the overarching plot of God's economy.

Eucharist and Hermeneutics

The post-Christendom posture of radicalization thus requires communal practices that train us to map our social vision not in relation to states and empires, but in relation to the calling of Israel to be a light to the nations. I will focus here on one particular practice, the celebration of the Eucharist, for this sacrament is uniquely able to shape the community both politically and hermeneutically. The Eucharist enacts the pattern of Christ's presence in our midst and thus shapes how we understand the biblical words which witness to him. In this practice the written Word becomes the sacramental Word; the Word read becomes Word consumed. By re-Judaizing this sacrament and reclaiming its Jewish elements, Christians will come to see what it means to be Jews with the Jews or, in Paul's terms, to be grafted into Israel. In this way our experience of the Word in the bread and wine may transform our reading of the Word in the text.

Attention to Eucharist as determinative for right interpretation is something that may not appear obvious, at least to most Protestants. But as the Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky writes,

Christ appeared and still appears before us not only in the Scriptures; He unchangeably and unceasingly reveals Himself in the Church, in His own Body. In the times of the early Christians the Gospels were not yet written and could not be the sole source of knowledge. The Church acted according to the spirit of the Gospel, and, what is more, the Gospel came to life in the Church, in the Holy Eucharist. In the Christ of the Eucharist Christians learned to know the Christ of the Gospels, and so His image became vivid to them. [22]