Beyond Left or Right
ANY OF MY Readers and friends will be aware of my attachment and love for Judaism and my sense that Christianity is supposed to be Judaism for Gentiles. Laying aside, for a moment, questions of Trinity or Incarnation or our tradition of anti-semitism, I think our clearest sense of who we are is to be found in understanding the religion of Jesus.
I think our Gospels and Epistles are, essentially, Christian Rabbis debating the meaning of the Torah for Gentiles. I think our liturgy is Gentile adaptations of Jewish customs. I’m reasonably certain our theology – especially our anthropology and our synergistic soteriology – is Jewish to the core (especially in the Eastern Rite). To be clear, I don’t think that the rites performed in the Byzantine Liturgy are “descended” from Judaism… although I know some have made that claim. I do think our ideas about holidays, about feasting and fasting, about “working out our salvation in fear and trembling” are far more Jewish than we admit in our anti-semitic urge to define ourselves as over and against the other.
(Even as I say that, I know that reader OneJew is either laughing or getting ready to correct my mistakes!)
When I hear Christian East and West debating papal power or liberals and conservatives debating women clergy or the place of gay persons in the community, I hear Rabbis around the table. And, in my better moments, I’m willing to acknowledge all the debaters as better Christians than I even when I disagree deeply with some of them.
When I look at the spectrum of Judaisms available – from Orthodox to Modern Orthodox, Jew-Bu and Hin-Jew, Cultural Jew, and “Renewal” and whatall – and yet all in the Tribe… that’s what I see when turn and look at the Church. Is there a way for all of us to sit down together – if only to debate – provided that when we stand for prayer we call on God as Our Father, and when we eat we break bread in Jesus’ name and memory?
This is why Reconstructionist Judaism appeals to me as a model.
Is there a way to live a Christianity – Eastern Rite or Western Rite – that is built along the lines of the Reconstructionist movement? Reconstructionism has a bad name amongst Christians, and rightly so. The word has been claimed by the lint on the fringe of the fringe of the Christian Right. So it may be the model, but it can’t really be the name. But Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan had some amazing ideas about what his people’s faith tradition might offer to the world and how it might be lived out. I’m wondering if that same concept could be brought to those who follow God in the way of Rabbi Jesus?
Tags: jesus, Judaism, reconstructionism | Category: Judaism, church geekery
Discussion: You came too late to this party
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slightly off topic: a friend came to St G’s with me the other day — he was in town for a convention. Friend would not claim to be orthodox but worships at an Orthodox shul. I was reading Job, which in the translation we used included reading the name of YHWH. Friend was pleased that we sang the Sh’ma, but pretty offended about our presuming to pronounce the unpronounceable. He had a bunch of historical stuff about why nobody knows HOW the word is pronounced, but I think the base of his objection was that if the Name is too holy to speak for Jews, it’s a presumptuous insult for Christians to glibly toss it off. I’ll admit that I have never been comfortable with it myself — not from the pov of using God’s Name lightly, but because using it might be offensive.
So, do you have any history or insight on why, somewhere between the RSV in 1946 and New Jerusalem, we began pronouncing YHWH in scripture, rather than the old LORD?
I don’t know… I’m sure it was never a taboo making the name unpronounceable. The LORD thing in the KJV and RSV was more of a text marker: here it says YHVH. There it says adonai. But I think the JB, especially, did that in some way to make the text more mysterious, more “hebrew” sounding. Maybe?
I hope so, Huw! I was recently debating with my fellow Christians on the Touchstone Blog site. Usually such an exchange would mean an exchange of insults (you’re a bigot! you’re a licentious heretic!). Something was different about this time, though. I think an actual conversation is taking place where we (or at least me) is trying to figure out what the other side means (and agreeing with some of what they’re saying), and in the process explain what I mean. Not sure it will go anywhere, but this particular conversation actually felt like a conversation, like rabbis debating scripture around a table.
It seems as if the main difference between Christianity as it has developed apart from Judaism and Judaism is that Christians tend to view the God/human relationship as a sermon from God to us humans (Do this, don’t do that) – rather dictatorial; whereas Judaism views the God/human relationship as a conversation – just look at the example of Abraham, Jacob and Moses. Actually arguing and bargaining with God! We Christians need to be doing more of the same!
Interesting set of images, my brother: “As a sermon” vs “as a conversation”. I note, first off, that both a conversation and a sermon require words… but a sermon requires only hearers. A dialogue requires listening… But yes, you have exactly the point, I think. That is a well-discerned difference!
What we assume in a sermon is that we’ve all heard the same thing. It’s been spoken once (perhaps recorded) and we’ve all heard and responded to the same thing. CLearly some folks heard wrong. We can ignore them.
What we assume in a conversation is that there are questions, things to ask about, things to hear over and over. ANd that both parties are involved, equally vested. Israel means to wrestle with God. I remember the story of Rabbi Eleazar’s oven where the Rabbis argue and even a voice from heaven tells them they are wrong: but they reply “the Torah is not in heaven but here…” and God laughs and says, “My Children have bested me…”
In that same context, What does it mean that the church is to be “The Israel of God” or the Spiritual Israel? Should not the Church be wrestling with God as well?
I think the conversation started in the Gospels and Epistles. It’s there: the Jerusalem Council… and Paul calling “BS” and saying he’s doing his own thing (Did we ever hear about blood again?) Is the church – the community of the church, all of us baptised laity (some who are called to other offices) missing out on growing into our full stature because we’re listening to a sermon instead of participating in a conversation?
I think so.
But how does this model work? Can you and I and the folks at Touchstone sit down and break bread? Not yet. And if I imagine a “Messianic Reconstructionism” or “Rabbinic Christianity” (or whatever…) can that be a model that appeals to conservatives as well as liberals? Both seem to want to walk away from the other…
“Can you and I and the folks at Touchstone sit down and break bread? Not yet”
You and I can, but not with the folks at Touchstone. They want a sermon – they want to be told a list of propositions to obey based on an infallible source. I want a conversation based on a story and tradition where the people of God struggle together to know and be known by God. Two very different things. I wonder if Christianity’s obsession with the sermon springs from its moving away from Hebraic to Greek thought with its emphasis on coherent, linear ways of thinking? That would be an interesting study, and conversation.
The transition from Hebrew to Greek alone won’t do it, I think…. Basil was talking about evolution, Origen & the other Fathers saw mystical meanings in the scripture. Gregory of Nyssa thought of God as mother at points in his writings because it was a useful image.
But certainly these folks were also worried about “(o)rthodoxy” and creedal statements.
I think it’s part of the political bargain I referred to in the post “partial collapse of empire.”
When the church sold out to the Roman state, part of the usefulness of the church was in her ability to provide Constantine with a unifying force. Nicea was there to sort out the problems. If Christian teachers could not agree amongst themselves (and we were fighting even then) than we were really rather useless as a unifying force. Constantine says “I don’t care if you’re Arian or Trinitarian. Gnostic or whatever. Come to one definition and one controlling structure and you’ll do me some good…. otherwise… bleh.”
Since that time we’ve gradually given up the debate format and taken to cutting each other out. That’s the model of a state religion rather than an organic religion. Judaism really never started doing it (minus a few messianic cults) until Modern Israel opened her doors to “all Jews” and the very-conservative Rabbis in Israel, using their State-Church position, began to decide who *really* was a Jew.
So… I think it’s a state-church issue… and the longer we were state churches… the more uptight we got (See Russians burning down the church “desecrated” by gay marriage.)