Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (101 page)

For Christians, Jesus Christ is a revelation of that mystery. But Jesus did not come to put a fence around it, defining the corral gate as the way to salvation. There are numerous revelations of the mystery of God, and the shift initiated by Vatican III will be from, at most, a grudging tolerance of other religions to an authentic respect for other religions as true expressions of God "beckoning" the human heart.

Yet we saw that there was a kind of corralling of the meaning of Jesus when Hellenistic philosophical categories were pressed into service to explain it. The same would be true today, of course, if the new Christology were a product only of a reinterpretation in terms of the philosophical categories that have currency now. The most obvious such approach would take its cues from, say, the language philosophy of Wittgenstein, the existentialism of Kierkegaard, or the political gravity of Marxism. Evidence of all of these systems salts this book. The project of narrative theology, reflected in my method; the theological preoccupation with hermeneutics, which gives me my interest in social and political context; my preference, in defining Christ's purpose, for the "subjectivity" of a change in human knowing over the "objectivity" of a change in the structure of the cosmos—these are manifestations of current philosophical assumptions. Nevertheless, the emphasis I am giving to Jesus the Revealer as opposed to Jesus the Savior—giving, that is, to Jesus as the "expressive Being" of God, to cite the term the Anglican theologian John Macquarrie uses
²⁰
—is rooted in the Christian tradition. Nothing I assert about Jesus, or the new way we should think of him, is unrelated to the theology we have explored in this book. Indeed, my call for a revised Christology comes from within the countermemory of the tradition itself.

Moreover, the retrieval of a Christology that does not assume anti-Judaism for its other side requires a careful measuring of every affirmation about Jesus against what can be known of his life as a faithful Jew. The categories of philosophy, however instructive, are not enough to tell us who Jesus was—and they never were. In Anselm's schema, as in Nicaea's for that matter, the Jewishness of Jesus was lost, and so was the context of Israel's hope, apart from which Jesus can have no meaning. This is the essential part of what Vatican III must retrieve with its new Christology. It is impossible to understand the disclosure Jesus offers without knowing that the One being disclosed is none other than the God of Israel. Likewise, the suffering and death of Jesus must resume its place along the continuum of his entire experience. If the death of Jesus is no longer seen as the trigger of a transformation of a wrathful God, then the false idea of "the Jews" as perpetrators of that death will cease to have weight—then and only then. That is why the cross must be reimagined, and deemphasized, as a Christian symbol.

A new Christology, faithfully based in the Scriptures and available from a tradition that includes an Abelard, will in no way support supersessionism. A new Christology will banish from Christian faith the blasphemy that God wills the suffering of God's beloved ones, and the inhuman idea that anyone's death can be the fulfillment of a plan of God's.

Equally important, a new Christology, celebrating a Jesus whose saving act is only disclosure of the divine love available to all, will enable the Church at last to embrace a pluralism of belief and worship, of religion and no-religion, that honors God by defining God as beyond every human effort to express God. In Rahner's image, God is the horizon, equally bidding all people to approach, yet equally distant from all people, Christians included. Vatican III will thus return to Jesus by returning to Rabbi Heschel and his liberating affirmation: "God is greater than religion ... faith is greater than dogma."

59. Agenda Item 4: The Holiness of Democracy

M
Y DEAR FELLOW CITIZENS,
for forty years on this day you heard from my predecessors the same thing in a number of variations: how our country is flourishing, how many millions of tons of steel we produce, how happy we all are, how we trust our government, and what bright prospects lie ahead of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, should lie to you."

So began the address with which the playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel assumed the presidency of Czechoslovakia. The speech was delivered on the first day of 1990. The momentous events of the previous months in the nations of eastern Europe, symbolized by the breaching of the Berlin Wall in November 1989,
¹
had amounted to an unpredicted outbreak of democratic fervor. As Havel put it, "Humanistic and democratic traditions, about which there had been so much idle talk, did after all slumber in the subconscious of our nations and national minorities."
²
In that period, the social structures of totalitarianism were transformed not only in the satellite states of the Soviet Union but in Russia itself, not only in Europe but in South Africa. And the dramatic changes came about almost completely without blood in the streets, because the masses of ordinary people in many nations discovered within themselves an irresistible civic identification, an urge to participate in the public life of society, a readiness to claim those nations as their own.

Citizens of the nations of western Europe and America, where democratic traditions were already established, could only behold the political transformations of the Velvet Revolution with an unbridled sense of wonder. What we saw played out again and again in those years, often with staggering courage—Havel declining a strings-attached release from prison, Lech Walesa openly convening meetings of the outlawed Solidarity movement in Poland, Boris Yeltsin standing on that Russian tank, saying, in effect, You will have to kill me first—was the drama of democracy itself, entire peoples taking responsibility for themselves and their societies. We in the West had never before seen so clearly how the political system under which we lived, and which we took for granted, counted as a moral absolute. Democracy was a value of the highest order, and the impulse to embrace it, at great cost, lived unquenchably in the human heart. In 1989, the world beheld something sacred, and the business of Vatican III must be to honor that sacredness. Vatican III must end the Church tradition of opposition to, or at best ambivalence toward, democracy. Vatican III must, that is, celebrate the dignity of every human life. Vatican III must uphold the importance of treating each one equally. Vatican III must affirm the holiness of democracy.

To their everlasting credit, the Christian churches of Europe supported, and in some instances sponsored, the 1980s flowering of the democratic spirit. The churches were especially helpful in keeping violence at bay. Lutheran pastors in East Germany played crucial roles in challenging the German Democratic Republic. And the Catholic Church, especially in Poland, was a source of spiritual, and at times political, inspiration and sustenance to the dissidents. Pope John Paul II was himself an avatar of anti-Communist resistance. His biographers uniformly credit him, sometimes with Ronald Reagan, as the man who did the most to bring down the totalitarian system he had opposed from his youth in Krakow.

Opposition to Stalinism is not the same thing as support for the principles of constitutional democracy, however, and the Roman Catholic Church has yet to shed its suspicion of, and even its hostility to, governments that invest the people with ultimacy—or rather, governments in which the people do the investing. This has been especially true in the Vatican's suppression of liberation theology, which is a religious affirmation of the political ideal of rights for all. Thus, in opposing Soviet totalitarianism, the Church nevertheless maintained its internal commitment to methods that undergird totalitarianism, which was why, even as the Soviet system crumbled, the Church was doing its part to shore up Latin American oligarchies.

The same John Paul II who sponsored the most politically engaged Church of modern times in Poland, even to the extent of funneling large sums of money from the Vatican to Solidarity, condemned, silenced, and disciplined priests and nuns in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Haiti, and Mexico because of their so-called political activity. The pope who wants to make Pius XII a saint is reticent about Oscar Romero, the bishop of El Salvador who was slain at the altar. The pope who railed against the ruthless dictators of Communism was the first and only head of state in the world to recognize the legitimacy of the military junta that overthrew the democratically elected president of Haiti (and former priest) Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
³
I say "so-called political activity" because the priests and nuns of the liberation insisted that their actions had more to do with their reading of the Gospel than any political tract. Observers of the difference between responses by the Catholic hierarchy in, say, Poland, where the Church lent support to Solidarity, and in Nicaragua, where the Church was a putative channel for money from the CIA during Ronald Reagan's Contra war,
⁴
were left with the feeling that it wasn't totalitarianism as such that the Church opposed, only totalitarianism that was unfriendly to the Church.

It was one thing for Pope Innocent III to declare the Magna Carta null and void in 1215 because it violated the divinely instituted order of hierarchy, and quite another for the Vatican, in its
instrumentum laboris
for the European synod of 1999, to equate pluralism with Marxism. It is impossible to reconcile a rejection of pluralism with an authentic commitment to democracy, and a Catholic devotion to the eradication of pluralism remains dangerous. Internal Church policies have relevance here because the use of anathemas, bannings, and excommunications to enforce a rigidly controlled intellectual discipline in the Church reveals an institution that has yet to come to terms with basic ideas like freedom of conscience and the dialectical nature of rational inquiry.

As we saw in our consideration of Spinoza, the very idea of constitutional democracy begins with the insight that government exists to protect the
interior
freedom of citizens to be different from one another, and to cling, if they choose, to opposite notions of the truth. The political implementation of this insight requires a separation of church and state, since the state's purpose is to shield the citizen's conscience from impositions by any religious entity. And we saw that Spinoza's arrival at this position came as a direct consequence of his family's experience with the Inquisition. The Church repudiated the violence of the Inquisition, but it continued to hold to the ideas that had produced it. The panic-stricken Vatican's sequence of condemnations in the nineteenth century—socialism, Communism, rationalism, pantheism, subjectivism, modernism, even "Americanism"—added up to a resolute denunciation of everything we mean by democracy. From the standpoint of the hill overlooking the Tiber, all of this was simply an effort to defend the key idea that the worlds of science, culture, politics, and learning—all worlds that could be easily associated with Jews—were apparently conspiring to attack. Spinoza himself had seemed to attack it—the idea that there is one objective and absolute truth, and that its custodian is the Church.

Again, we think of the papal apology of March 2000. That was the beginning of a process, not the completion of one, because, while John Paul II confessed the sin of "the use of violence that some have resorted to in the service of truth,"
⁵
the apology did not confront the implications of that still maintained idea of truth. Universalist claims for Jesus as the embodiment of the one objective and absolute truth, launched from the battlement-like pulpits of basilicas, have landed explosively in the streets for centuries. Nothing demonstrates the links joining philosophical assumptions, esoteric theology, and political conflict better than the course of the story of Christology that we traced in the previous chapter. The violence of the heresy hunts of the fourth and fifth centuries is tied to that story, and so, at its other end, is the violence of Europe's imperialist colonizers who, even into the twentieth century, felt free to decimate native populations—"poor devils"—because they were heathens. Hanging from the line joining those two posts, in addition to the Inquisition, are the religious wars waged in the name of Jesus, not only against heathens and Jews, but against other Christians who believed, but wrongly.

Underlying all this is a question that Vatican III must confront, a question the answer to which shapes attitudes toward democracy, a question the answer to which has profound relevance to the Church's past and future relations with the Jews. It is a question the answer to which shapes the meaning of Judaism's notions of monotheism, election, and chosenness, as well as of the Church's self-understanding as, in Rahner's phrase, the "absolute religion." It is the question that was put most famously by Pontius Pilate, in the Pilate-exonerating Gospel of John. This was an instant before Pilate told the Jews that Jesus was innocent, preparing the ground for Judaism's permanent blood guilt. "Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice," Jesus had just told Pilate. To which the Roman replied, "What is truth?"
⁶

Latin philosophy had long answered that question by appealing to an objective and external order. We have seen that the various traditions claiming Plato and Aristotle as patrons had given shape to Christian theologies. The dualism of Christian Platonism posited a divide between nature and grace, with grace the realm of truth approachable only through faith. The more rationalistic tradition of Thomas Aquinas affirmed the compatibility of nature and grace, the knowability of God through reason. But in asserting the absolute character of truth, Thomas took note of the problem that occurs when a contingent, nature-bound creature attempts to perceive it. Truth, he said, is perceived in the mode of the perceiver. Human perception can take in the absolute truth, but not absolutely. Thus Thomas makes a modest claim for human knowing, with room for ambiguity—which means room for diverse claims made in the name of truth. Alas, this aspect of Thomas Aquinas's subtlety would be lost in the rigidities of the Catholic response to the Reformation.