Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (96 page)

When one reads of a Newman, who was able to criticize the Church from within, one feels the sad tug of the absence of all those who were lost to Catholicism's endless argument with itself, especially when they were hounded out by a rigid Church establishment. The conciliar tradition, like the narrative we have traced, suggests that there are places among this people for an Abelard as much as for an Anselm, for a Nicolaus of Cusa as much as for a Thomas Aquinas, for a hedonistic Renaissance pope friendly to Jews as much as for a puritanical grand inquisitor pope who establishes the ghetto. Michelangelo could place a pope in hell in his
Last Judgment,
and as he acted from within the Church, the weight of his critique could be felt, as it is today whenever anyone enters the Sistine Chapel; while Voltaire, say, damning the entire apostolic succession, but from outside, remains forever ignored by those who most need to hear his complaint. The great tragedy of the Reformation is that Martin Luther, apparently by a combination of his own impatience and the Church's intolerance, launched his strongest challenges to a decadent Catholicism from outside it.
²³
In part for that reason, the Reformation is still waiting to fully happen within the Catholic Church, and it came not enough to the so-called Reformed churches, which, cut adrift, became all too sectarian. Nothing demonstrates that twin set of disappointments better than the post-Reformation fate of the Jews, at the hands of Catholics and Protestants both.

Luther should have been at the great council of the Church that was convened to take up his challenge. At Trent, he might have made his case in a way that prompted something positive from Catholics. Alas, he was long excommunicated by the time that council convened in 1545, and in any case, Luther died the next year, with, as we saw, an anti-Jewish slur on his lips. It is impossible to look back at the Council of Trent without regret that its genuine and partially successful effort at internal reform of Church theology and practice was overshadowed by all that it did to "counter" its enemies outside the Church. Trent responded to the challenge of the reformers by shoring up the battlements—embodied in the rigidity of the Roman catechism, the casuistry of canon law, the violence of the Inquisition, the censorship of the Index, the hatred of nonconformist outsiders, the obsessiveness of rubrical liturgy, the elitism of the clerical estate, and, above all, in the formal establishment of the Roman ghetto—instead of addressing the continent-wide spiritual crisis that Luther, Calvin, and the others had made so dramatic.

Because of the chaos of post-Reformation denominational conflict, the contingencies of revolution, and the philosophical and cultural mutations that accompanied the Enlightenment, the next council, when it finally came in 1869–1870, was unable (to stay with Newman's metaphor) to trim the boat at all. Instead, Vatican I hauled the Church higher into the misanthropic wind, a course from which not even John XXIII, given his successors, was able to bring it about. Still, in this post-Shoah era, there are reasons to look not only for trimming but for a major tack in fundamental beliefs and practices of the Church, which is why the first conclusion a faithful, if critical, Catholic draws from this narrative is that the time has come to reenvision this religion and the way it relates to the world. The time has come for a gathering of those invested in the future of this Church, which, as is clear by now, means a gathering more broadly defined than any in Church history. Centrally Catholic, it will also include Jews and Protestants, people of other faiths and of no faith, clergy and laity and, emphatically, women. The time has come for the convening of Vatican Council III.
²⁴

55. Agenda for a New Reformation

O
NE REASON
to be grateful to the Church of the Counter-Reformation is its resounding rejection, not of Martin Luther—I agree with Hans Küng, who proposes a formal lifting, even now, of Rome's excommunication of the reformer,
¹
despite his antisemitism—but of Luther's primal idea that the Christian is to be guided by
sola scriptura,
Scripture alone. In reaction to the abuses of Church authority that drove Luther to his radical stance, he appealed to the ultimate authority of the Bible, as if the texts preceded the community that reads them. But the Catholic position was, and remains, that the community, albeit an inspired community, produced those texts
as
inspired texts, and they are nothing without the readers who take them in. To Luther, Bible readers are individuals who submit to the Word of God as each one understands it, but also as each one bows before it. Luther rejected what appeared to him to be the Church's idolatry of its own hierarchy, but despite his best intentions, he replaced it with a deference to the Word that slips all too easily into an idolatry of its own. Biblical fundamentalism is a manifestation of this. The Catholic-Protestant disagreement goes far deeper than any complaint over indulgences or any political arrangement made with competing princes. Luther "brought the very essence of the Catholic Church into question when (this was the real innovation) he set his personal, subjective, and yet (by his intention) universally binding interpretation of the Scriptures
in principle
above the Church and her tradition."
²

To Catholics, the understanding of the Scriptures is mediated to the individual by the teaching authority of the Church, which claims primacy over the Word. The Church, after all, began as the communities to which Paul wrote his letters and out of whose oral traditions the Gospels evolved. The Catholic Church understands itself as having canonized (literally, "made a list of") the Word of God, not vice versa. In the twentieth century, when Scripture scholarship blurred the lines between denominations, and when the critical-historical method made many of the arguments of the Reformation moot, the Catholic-Protestant difference could seem more a matter of emphasis than substance. But even into the twenty-first century, this difference remains, and is apparent, for example, in the continuing divergence in practice and liturgy, if not theology, that still separates the "Catholic" tradition, with its sacrament-centered cult, from the more "Protestant" tradition, with its Bible-centered cult. But this difference also means that now the community of the Catholic Church, with its claim to authority even over the inspired Word of God, is in a position to confront the problem of foundational texts that have proven themselves to be sources of lethal antisemitism.

That brings us not only to the first item of the agenda a Vatican III must at last take up—the anti-Jewish consequences of the New Testament—but to the recognition that such a council's agenda has, in fact, already been indicated by the history of Church hatred of Jews. What we have illuminated throughout this history, despite its overwhelmingly negative character, are the signposts of the roads not taken, those times and places when other choices might have been made, leading to consequences of love instead of hate. The purpose of retracing a way to such forks in the road is not to deny the givenness of history, but to suggest that history is not finished. The possibility of human recovery from the tragedies of the past adheres, permanently, in the future. Thus, in addition to anti-Jewish texts, a Vatican Council III would take up the unfinished questions, perhaps even in the order of the chronology we followed, of power (Constantine, Ambrose, Augustine), of Christology (Crusades, Anselm, Abelard), of Church intolerance (Inquisition, Nicolaus of Cusa, the ghetto), of democracy (Enlightenment, Spinoza, modernism), and only then of repentance (Holocaust, silence, Edith Stein). As this book has demonstrated, the Church's attitude toward Jews is at the dead center of each of these problems, and a fundamental revision of that attitude is the key to the solution of each problem, too. "Salvation is from the Jews," Jesus said in John,
³
a problematic formulation, perhaps, if it means Jews are blamed for conditions short of salvation. But it seems clear that authentic Church reform, defined as shaping something according to its own essential being, is tied to the Jews, if only because the perversion of that essential being, the perversion, that is, of the message of love preached and lived by Jesus—has so clearly been tied to the Jews from the beginning.

56. Agenda Item 1: Anti-Judaism in the New Testament

H
OMO SAPIENS
is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority," the novelist Joyce Carol Oates once commented, "then forgets that symbols are inventions."
¹
The first followers of Jesus were no less human than the rest of us, and we saw that this is more or less what they did. Recall that after Jesus died, his friends quickly came to understand him in Jewish apocalyptic terms, expecting him to return soon, ushering in the End Time. This is why, for example, Paul counseled his readers to forgo marriage, not because he was antisex but because so little time remained that procreation, an ultimate investment in the open future, had ceased to have meaning. The assumed imminence of Christ's return informed the first Christians' readiness, even eagerness, to offer their lives as martyrs. The cult of martyrdom and apocalyptic longing go hand in hand.

It may help to review here what we saw before. The first true crisis facing the Jesus movement was that its first generation began to die off without seeing the return of the Lord. The Second Coming had proved to be not nearly so imminent as expected. What did it mean, in light of this new experience, to say that Christ's Kingdom had already been established? All at once, this became a pointed question, since whatever else that Kingdom was, the Jews who identified with Jesus assumed it involved a liberation of Israel from the oppression of Rome. Around
70 C.E
., of course, Rome's oppression intensified, with the destruction of the Temple, which compounded the Jewish-Christian crisis of faith. Throughout these years, his followers were telling each other the story of Jesus, in terms taken in part from his biography as they knew it and in part from the Scripture. We saw that the seed of Christian Jew-hatred was planted here, with the old set against the new, with Jews defined as the enemy not only of Jesus but of God, and with Judaism defined as the religion that had outlived God's covenant. Thus the story, especially the core of it known to us as the Passion narrative, was, in Oates's term, "invented." We saw how the Seamless Robe of Jesus featured in this sacred exercise of imagination.

But after the crisis of the Temple's destruction, after the followers of Jesus had begun to adjust to the obvious fact that the Lord's return was not imminent, and after the expressly "Jewish" character of the movement was changed by the loss of the cult center of the Temple and by the influx of Gentile converts, the followers "forgot" that the Passion narrative was invented. Since Jesus had not returned, they had to do something the first generation had never expected or sought to do, which was to create an apologetic kerygma, or Jesus story, designed to bolster the faith they had in Jesus, both as a way of reassuring each other through the period of crises and as a way of explaining what they believed of Jesus to others, whom they now had to recruit to the movement.

It was at this point that the details of the narrative that had their origins not in the historical life of Jesus but in the Jewish Scriptures were reimagined as "facts." Now the Seamless Robe of Jesus, say, was understood as having actually existed, and the "facts" of its seamlessness and of the centurions' having rolled dice for it were understood as "fulfillments" of the Jewish Scriptures in which those details had first appeared. This perception was pressed into service of the apologetic impulse, and all at once the details of the Passion narrative and the pattern of Jewish "foreshadowing" and Christian "fulfillment" became understood as proving the claims that followers of Jesus were making for him. Such proof would have been unthinkable in the first years after the death of Jesus, not only because the invented character of the story was so well known, but because proof was unnecessary in any case, since Jesus was coming back so soon.

Once the story of Jesus took this shape, its rejection by other Jews—who themselves were responding to the trauma of the destruction of the Temple—had unprecedented bite. Recall that, in this post-Temple period, only the synagogue-based movement generally associated with the Pharisees had survived to compete with the Jesus movement for the legacy of Israel. When these rabbinic Jews, who were building their identity around the Scriptures, rejected the claims being made by the Christian Jews, the Christians felt threatened because those same Scriptures functioned as their proof. This conflict found its way into the second, third, and fourth iterations of the story Christians were telling each other and newcomers, which is how the Pharisees came to be pressed into service as the main antagonists of Jesus, even though they had been no such thing.

As Christians died, the excruciating death of Jesus took on a meaning, in isolation from his message and life, that it had not had at first. In Luke, Jesus says to the men on the road to Emmaus, "O foolish men ... Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer?"
²
Of course, this is not the voice of Jesus but that of his followers, confronted years later with the problem of how to make sense of the suffering they themselves were undergoing. Surely it was suffering at the hands of Rome, as ever. But even more, at the level of meaning they were so desperately clinging to in that traumatic time, it was suffering at the hands of their fellow Jews who alone could call that meaning into question. So as Christians felt themselves and their movement to be mortally challenged by the refusal of their fellow Jews to affirm their messianic understanding of Jesus, it was a small step to lay the actual death of Jesus at the feet not so much of Rome as of these rejecting Jews. Christians accounted for the rejection they were experiencing by making a version of that rejection—"his own people received him not"
³
—central to the experience of Jesus, not just in his Passion but throughout his life.