Wednesday, February 15, 2006
THE JEWISH COVENANT
We seem to be talking past each other on this topic.
I would refer everyone to an explanation by Father James V. Schall, S.J., titled "A Man from Mars" which can be read at the website of the Association of Hebrew Catholics. Shall is commenting on the document "Reflections on Covenant and Mission." There you can read:
*** The Roman Catholics think that they have something to do with the Old Testament, but affirm that the original covenant is not revoked. The Jewish covenant is the origin of Jewish spiritual vitality. The argument is made from Gamaliel that “only undertakings of divine origin can endure” as a justification for respect for Judaism. This same principle would justify also religions older than Christianity or even Judaism. This principle is in fact used by some theologians to leave the older religions unevangelized also.
*** Interreligious dialogue is "devoid of any intention whatsoever to invite the dialogue partner to baptism."
*** The Jews already have a covenant with God. The Jewish covenant is salvific for them. A twofold "mission" seems to exist within one "covenant."
*** Evangelization "no longer includes the wish to absorb the Jewish faith into Christianity and so end the distinctive witness of Jews to God in human history." The Jews already have a "saving covenant with God."
*** The conclusion is that "Jews already dwell in a saving covenant with God."...Their witness to the kingdom which did not originate with the Church's experience of Christ crucified and raised, must not be curtail3d by seeking the conversion of the Jewish people to Christianity.
=========================
Eschatology and Dual Covenant Theology
In a recent New York Review of Books essay on Rosenzweig Mark Lilla neatly formulates the dilemma of redemption. "If redemption is wholly God's work, we are tempted to leave him to his work and ignore our own; if, however, we participate in this redemptive labor, the temptation is equally great to think we can redeem ourselves through temporal activity." (5) Does redemption come from outside or is it initiated from inside human life? According to Lilla, Rosenzweig gives an "ingenious explanation": the Jewish covenant is unconditional and passive whereas the Christians covenant is conditional and active. (6) Yet this alleged solution does not, in my view, adequately account for Rosenzweig's complicated, ambivalent position.
As befits a dual covenant theology, on Lilla's (and others') interpretation, Christianity and Judaism each play a complimentary if not a cooperative role with the other. Typically this program maintains that Judaism assures redemption by a covenant once made between God and His chosen People, Israel, while Christian salvation is secured with a new dispensation granted by God to those who declare their faith in the savior, Jesus Christ
===============================
From the Jewish-Christian Relations website: "Dabru Emet: Sic et Non" by Michael A. Singer
Let me conclude my Responsio in the spirit of Isaiah as understood by the first section of the Babylonian Talmud tractate Avodah Zarah, "Let them give their testimony and be justified." The final evidence that a shift in Christian theology is in process comes from the Christian Scholars Group, an ecumenical and voluntary organization of Christians. They have recently issued a statement, A Sacred Obligation that was composed as a response to Dabru Emet. Some of their propositions speak directly to the themes that have been most vexing to Jews. Let me present them as further testimony.
"God’s covenant with the Jews endures forever." This proposition moves to the heart of the issues that arise from Christian supersessionism. For generations the Christian community has asserted that the coming of Jesus Christ offered a new covenant to the world that cancelled the covenant God had made with the Jews. The problem for Christians has not been so much that" Christ lived and died a faithful Jew," but what are the implications of that reality after Christ died? What happened to the Jewish covenant? What happened to the Jewish people? Affirming the eternal reality of the Jewish covenant will have implications for Christian theologians as they continue to think about their eschatology and soteriology.
==============================
At the website of Commentary Magazine - "Cynthia Ozick, Jewish Writer". From the website:
She calls herself a Jewish writer because, first, she has given up "the religion of Art," and, second, takes seriously the Jewish covenant and its commandments...
...the 19th-century novel, at its pinnacle, was "a Judaized novel," adding: "george Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant...
==========================
Conference Proposal Abstracts for the 34th Annual Conference, Association for Jewish Studies, Brandeis University
Strange Bedfellows: Eugene Borowitz and Feminist Judaism
S. Daniel Breslauer (University of Kansas)
In several places the Reform Jewish theologian, Eugene B. Borowitz confesses that he has learned much from Jewish feminists. He listens in respectful silence as they offer a new challenge to Jewish thinking. Silence, however respectful, allows for ambivalence. This paper examines how that ambivalence plays out in Borowitz's view of ethics and the Jewish covenant.
=========================
Google even found the term "Jewish covenant" in Mark Shea's blog.
There are many more references to "Jewish covenant", but this sampling gives you the general flavor of the term.
I take this reference to the "Jewish covenant" to mean all of Judaism from Adam and Eve until Jesus began His public ministry. Interreligious dialogue as described in the Catholic document "Reflections on Covenant and Mission" seems to be saying that this is a parallel covenant that will save the Jews--something apart from Christ's gift of salvation, and having nothing to do with Jesus.
