God of Israel and Christian Theology, The

The God of Israel and Christian Theology. By R. Kendall Soulen. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996. xii + 195 pp. $19.00 (paper).

Can Christians truly remain Christian without being triumphalist toward Jews? Since the Nazi Holocaust, this question has become very difficult for Christians. As a response, many have rejected the church's traditional "supersessionist" stance-the view that Christianity, as the new "spiritual" Israel, has superseded the old "carnal" Israel in God's design. Soulen concurs with this rejection, but urges that Christians do it not simply "out of a desire to avoid offense or in a spirit of `theological reparations"' but out of a "reasoned conviction that in doing so they are being more truthful and more faithful to the God whom they worship and confess" (p. 4). His argument obviously contributes to theological conversation between Jews and Christians. But its systematic implications are profound. It brings to light how the doctrine of supersessionism has infected Christian theology with a historical (as opposed to an ontological) gnosticism. By proposing a framework for rethinking the unity of the biblical narrative, Soulen not only rethinks the unity of the Christian Scriptures, but offers Christians a fresh way of understanding how God is actively engaged in the public and corporate dimensions of human history.

Soulen's chief contribution is his proposal of an alternative framework for interpreting how the two parts of the Christian Bible are related-the "Scriptures" (what Christians call the Old Testament) and the "Apostolic Witness" (the New Testament). Such a framework is important because it rethinks how Christians understand God's involvement in the world as "Consummator" and "Redeemer." Soulen's starting point is a serous engagement with the Jewish theological claim (via the work of Michael Wyschogrod) that God has irrevocably elected Israel to be the people of God. Thus, he rejects a supersessionist stance because it renders the heart of the Hebrew Scriptures, God's eternal covenant with Israel, virtually irrelevant for Christian understandings of God's work in creation and history. In addition to reinforcing a triumphalistic attitude toward Jews, such a view tends to interpret the gospel in primarily metaphysical and individualistic ways. Soulen traces the roots of this "standard" supersessionist view of the Bible's unity back to Justin Martyr and Irenaeus of Lyon. In the modern period, its tendency to interpret God's activity in individualistic terms was intensified by Immanuel Kant's and Friedrich Schleiermacher's presumption that God's promises to the Jews were theologically indifferent for Christians. Even Karl Barth and Karl Rahner, who were concerned with the "living God" of history, failed to deal adequately with God's work in history: Barth collapsed God's consummating work into the single person of Jesus Christ; Rahner collapsed it into the inward dynamism of human consciousness.

Soulen's constructive proposal offers a radical alternative to the "historical gnosticism" of supersessionism. The hermeneutical center of the Apostolic Witness is not the antithesis of sin and redemption but the "irreducibly double foci" of "the good news about the witness to the Kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ" (Acts 8:12). This dual focus has as its interpretive context the eschatological reign of the God of Israel, a context which presupposes God's history with Israel and the nations. Soulen describes the "relation of distinction and mutual dependence" that exists between Jews and Christians in God's "economy of consummation" in this way: God's history of healing judgment and reconciliation with Israel and the nations "does not prepare for the gospel but surrounds the gospel as its constant horizon, context, and goal" (p. 176). The "offense" of the Christian witness to Jesus' cross and resurrection is not that it annuls Israel's national privilege but that God preserves this "economy of mutual blessing"-to which both Jew and Greek are called-by means of suffering love.

This book makes a very important contribution to Christian theology. Not only does it advance Jewish-Christian theological conversation, but it demonstrates how important God's promises to Israel are for Christian understandings of God's activity in the corporate and public dimensions of human history. Soulen's proposal has profound implications, for example, for Christianity's relation to other religions and, in turn, the relationship between systematic theology and apologetics or natural theology. More importantly, it suggests how Christians might rethink what discipleship-following the way of Jesus' cross and resurrection-means for all aspects of their lives (at work, as families, as citizens, as consumers, and so on). In sum, this is a subtle and rigorous argument about God's active engagement with human history. It whets our appetite for its next phase: how Soulen uses this framework in an account of the truth of classical trinitarian and Christological affirmations.