Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (100 page)

Here is how the Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson summarizes Anselm's significance:

In the eleventh century the biblical and patristic pluralism so characteristic of interpretations of Jesus and salvation began to recede in the West due to Anselm's brilliant restructuring of the satisfaction metaphor into a full-fledged ontologically based theory. To wit: God became a human being and died to pay back what was due to the honor of God offended by sin. I sometimes think that Anselm should be considered the most successful theologian of all time. Imagine having almost a one-thousand-year run for your theological construct! It was never declared a dogma but might just as well have been, so dominant has been its influence in theology, preaching, devotion, and the penitential system of the Church, up to our own day.
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Anselm's idea is that the work of Jesus was "salvation"—saving those who believed in him from the impossible abyss that separated God from humanity, bridging it with his own body. But just as previous generations had forgotten the invented character of their sacred narratives, the heirs of the world shaped by Christian Platonism assumed that the gulf across which Jesus had to lay his body was created by God in reaction to the Fall, and not by the ancient interpreters of Plato. Religiously, they would have said it was the sin of Adam that had made an enemy of God, but actually their religious language was conditioned by a philosophical presumption that was enshrined by now in piety, if not dogma, that divided heaven from earth. Just because an intellectual schema dubbed God as hostile and unavailable did not mean God was any such thing. But who was to say that?

We saw that, because Anselm was operating out of the belief system of feudal politics, he took God to be an overlord whose insulted sense of justice required an act of "satisfaction" equal to the initial affront he had suffered, the original sin. Since the one affronted was infinite, Anselm reasoned, the one offering satisfaction had to be infinite, which is why Jesus had to be divine. And since the affront was an abuse of human freedom, it could be overturned only by an act of human freedom, which is why Jesus had, equally, to be human. Death is the wages of sin, and since Jesus was without sin, he in no way deserved to die. Therefore only by his free choice could he die, but that free choice was the only thing that would satisfy the affronted God. So ran the links of Anselm's chain of reason.

By choosing his fate on the cross, Jesus was, as Jaroslav Pelikan helped us to understand, getting God to change his mind about creation, getting the punitive God of the Old Testament, that is, to stop being the enemy of all that he had made. Jesus, the bridge between the otherwise irreconcilable human and divine, was "saving" creation by getting God to love it again. The Gospel replaced the Law. Grace replaced sin. The new Adam replaced the old. This dualistic progression perfectly matched the supersessionist assumption that by now was the central pillar of the Church. And not incidentally, the locus of this transformation was a particular place. The execution precinct outside Jerusalem, where the cross was planted, was itself the site of the defeat of doom, but doom defined as within the scope of Judaism. When Pope John Paul II called Auschwitz the "Golgotha of the modern world," he was thinking of Anselm's Golgotha, where God had intruded in time, turning time against the Jews. At Golgotha their time was up. And why should Jews not have been offended to hear Auschwitz so referred to?

The first result of Anselm's theology of salvation (soteriology) was, as we saw, to solder the faith to the cross, and to make the death of Jesus more important than anything he had said, despite his clear statement that "the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life."
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His death counted for more than his having been born, having lived as a Jew, having preached a gospel of love in the context of Israel's covenant with a loving God, having opposed the imperium of Rome, even having been brought to the new life of Resurrection. The death obsession of the flagellants was deemed holy, and the blood lust of the crusaders was sanctified. God, too, had blood lust. Christ's agony on the cross would now become the black flower of the Western imagination—on armor, in Passion plays, in paintings, in altar carvings, in rituals like the Stations of the Cross, and ultimately in the cross at Auschwitz.

But the second result of atonement soteriology was even more damaging—for Jews and for everyone else who declined to put Jesus at the center of hope. Jesus Christ was defined as the one solution to a cosmic problem. Understood as reordering creation, as redeeming an otherwise doomed world, he was seen as the only way to God. Because of this cosmic and ontological accomplishment of Jesus Christ, understood as bringing about an "objective" adjustment in creation and a change in the Godhead, Christianity understands itself, in the words of Karl Rahner (1904–1984), the great twentieth-century Catholic theologian, as "the absolute and hence the only religion for all men."
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When the Vatican issued its apology in 2000 for using "methods not in keeping with the Gospel in the solemn duty of defending the truth,"
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it seemed content to acknowledge the flawed character of "methods" without confronting the problem of the "truth" that was being defended, which was this absolute claim for the Catholic religion. In fact, the flawed character of the "methods" (the Crusades, the Inquisition) revealed the flawed character of the "truth."

Karl Rahner saw this. He was a German Jesuit whose first professorial post, at Innsbruck, was eliminated when the Nazis closed the Catholic universities in 1936. He spent the war years teaching religious education in Vienna,
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and after the war his openly expressed appreciation of the need for a basic reconsideration of Catholic dogma led to his being silenced by the Vatican. No theologian's rehabilitation by Pope John's Vatican II was more dramatic. Rahner's great effort, toward the end of his life, was to reconcile the traditional claim for Jesus as the universal source of all salvation with its plainly negative effects. "The West is no longer shut up in itself," he wrote; "it can no longer regard itself simply as the center of the history of this world and as the center of culture, with a religion which ... could appear as the obvious and indeed sole way of honoring God ... Today everybody is the next-door neighbor and spiritual neighbor of everyone else in the world ... which puts the absolute claim of our own Christian faith into question."
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Puts into question, that is, the idea that only the freely chosen death of Jesus appeased the condemning wrath of God. If Anselm is right, in other words, then there is no salvation apart from the Church (as the popes would say), or, at the very least, apart from an "anonymous" (as the more liberal-minded Rahner dubbed it) relationship to Jesus—a relationship, say, that a Torah-revering Jew might have, even without knowing it. The "absolute religion" must regard all other religions as inferior, if not venal. "Anonymous Christians," by virtue of their good conscience whatever its religious context, are conscripted into the Church without knowing it, whether they want to be or not.
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Here is where the work of a Vatican III would begin, for it is impossible to reconcile this Christology, these cosmic claims for the accomplishment of Jesus Christ as the one source of salvation, with authentic respect for Judaism and every other "spiritual neighbor." The Church's fixation on the death of Jesus as the universal salvific act must end, and the place of the cross must be reimagined in Christian faith. We will return to the starting point of this long reflection, but here we should note that nothing calls the traditional Catholic emphasis on the cross more powerfully into question than its presence at the death camp. "Perhaps the greatest question that Auschwitz raises for the tradition of Christian teaching about the cross," Paul van Buren wrote, "is whether we can continue to say with Hebrews (and perhaps with Paul in Rom. 6:10), that it happened 'once for all.' The price of doing so is to set God's authorization of Jesus on a radically different plain from his authorization of the Jewish people ... A Church that affirms the Jewish people as the continuing Israel of God cannot coherently define the authorization of Jesus so as to undercut God's authorization of the people Israel. In a world that has known Auschwitz, consequently, the cross can only be presented as a world-redeeming event in more qualified terms than those of' once for all.'"
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As long as an understanding of God as having been changed from wrathful to loving by the freely chosen death of Jesus maintains itself near the center of Church attitudes, any effort at interreligious amity will be false, for below the universalist claim of this "absolute religion" abides the flinty substratum of the old contempt. This is why Rahner could observe that "the pluralism of religions ... must therefore be the greatest scandal and the greatest vexation for Christianity."
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And so, among key Catholic prelates, it is. In October 1999 there convened a synod of European bishops. A working document
(instrumentum laboris)
prepared by Vatican officials included this statement:

Pluralism has taken the place of Marxism in cultural dominance, a pluralism which is undifferentiated and tending toward skepticism and nihilism ... In the context of the present increasing pluralism in Europe, the synod also intends to proclaim that Christ is the one and only savior of all humanity and, consequently, to assert the absolute uniqueness of Christianity in relation to other religions ... Jesus is the one and only mediator of salvation for all of humanity. Only in him do humanity, history and the cosmos find their definitively positive meaning and receive their full realization. He is not only the mediator of salvation, but salvation's source.
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The Vatican of John Paul II was so intent on defining religious pluralism as the great modern evil that, in 1997, it excommunicated a Sri Lankan theologian, Tissa Balasuriya, an "Asian Rahner" whom the Church he had served for half a century denigrated as a "relativist." Balasuriya's offense? Daring to imply that Hinduism and Buddhism might be authentic ways to God. Not even Hans Küng had been excommunicated (nor, for that matter, as we saw, had Hitler).
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This campaign against "the rapid spread of the relativistic and pluralistic mentality" was carried forward even more vigorously in September 2000 when the Vatican issued "
Dominus Iesus:
On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church," a surprising reiteration of the Roman Catholic triumphalism most thought had been buried at Vatican II.
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We will have more to say about pluralism in the next chapter. What is important here is that the first shift required toward a genuinely "open Catholicism" (in Rahner's phrase), a Catholicism that is, first, no threat whatsoever to Jews, involves what is believed and proclaimed about Jesus. An initial stab at that shift occurred, in fact, not long after Anselm had constructed his theology of Jesus as the universal source of salvation. Recall that Anselm was rebutted almost at once by Abelard, and the issue between them was the question of whether salvation was what Jesus came for in the first place. Salvation, as we just saw, is the solution to the hopeless divide between Creator and creatures, but Abelard, the author of
Sic et Non (
Yes
and No),
was not readily given to such discontinuities. For him, the natural world and, more to the point, the natural power of reason were occasions of connection with God, not division from God. The coming of Jesus was for the purpose of revelation, not salvation—revelation, that is, that we are all already saved. Creatures are saved not by virtue of the loving act of Jesus but by virtue of God's prior and constant love. The love of Jesus was "exemplary," a manifestation of God's love.

If this is so, then respect for human beings follows, whether they associate themselves with Jesus or not. This affirmation of the basic principle of pluralism brought to Abelard the opposition of the powerful Bernard, who accused him of opening up the "One Way" to Jews and other infidels, regardless of their attachment to Christ. "A new gospel is being forged for peoples and nations," Bernard complained. When Abelard was formally condemned, the new gospel was unforged. It would appear again with Nicolaus of Cusa's vision of peace among religions. Mostly the currents of the new gospel remained hidden, yet this is the very gospel that Vatican III must retrieve. As Genesis declares, God looked at everything God had made and saw that it was very good. That goodness remains, and so does God's unconditional positive regard for it. God loves the people no matter who they are, what they believe, or how they worship. Or, as Jesus himself put it, God "makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust."
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And recall that, for Jesus, being good or just was not a matter of being a believer but of caring for the neighbor. There is no ontological difference between the evil and the good, nor is there, with God, a hierarchy of the loved.

All that exists, and in particular all persons who exist, participate, by virtue of mere existence, in the existence of God. There is no question here of an unbridgeable gulf between the human and the divine. Christian Platonism yields to biblical faith. In this view, the Creation, more than salvation, is the pivotal event of being and of history, because the Creation is nothing less than God's self-expression. As Rahner explained, "God does not merely create something other than himself—he also gives himself to this other. The world receives God, the Infinite and the ineffable mystery, to such an extent that he himself becomes its innermost life."
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Human beings are the creatures who instinctively respond to that innermost life. "This mystery," Rahner writes, "is the inexplicit and unexpressed horizon which always encircles and upholds the small area of our everyday experience ... We call this God ... However hard and unsatisfactory it may be to interpret the deepest and most fundamental experience at the very bottom of our being, man does experience in his innermost history that this silent, infinitely distant holy mystery, which continually recalls him to the limits of his finitude and lays bare his guilt yet
bids hint approach;
the mystery enfolds him in an ultimate and radical love which commends itself to him as salvation and as the real meaning of his existence."
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