The Samaritan woman said, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain; and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.” Jesus responded, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.” (John 4:19-22) The salvation that is from the Jews cannot be proclaimed or lived apart from the Jews. This is not to say that innumerable Christians, indeed the vast majority of Christians, have not and do not live their Christian faith without consciousness of or contact with Jews. Obviously, they have and they do. The percentage of Christians involved in any form of Jewish-Christian dialogue is minuscule. Not much larger, it may be noted, is the percentage of Jews involved. In addition, significant dialogue is, for the most part, a North American phenomenon. It is one of the many things to which the familiar phrase applies, “Only in America.” In Europe, for tragically obvious reasons, there are not enough Jews; in Israel, for reasons of growing tragedy, there are not enough Christians. Only in America are there enough Jews and Christians in a relationship of mutual security to make possible a dialogue that is unprecedented in two thousand years of history. The significance of this dialogue is in no way limited to America. The significance is universal. we live in the house of the one people of God only as we live with the Jews of whom Jesus was”and eternally is”one. “But if some of the branches were broken off and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you . . . . So do not be proud, but stand in awe” (Romans 12:17ff). “Salvation is from the Jews.” This people is not, as the aforementioned Bible commentator suggests, a “point of departure” but remains until the end of time our point of arrival. When we Christians do not walk together with Jews, we are in danger of regressing to the paganism from which we emerged. With respect to Judaism, Christians today are exhorted to reject every form of supersessionism, and so we should. To supersede means to nullify, to void, to make obsolete, to displace. The end of supersessionism, however, cannot and must not mean the end of the argument between Christians and Jews. But along the way to that final fulfillment we are locked in argument. It is an argument by which”for both Jew and Christian”conscience is formed, witness is honed, and friendship is deepened. This is our destiny, and this is our duty, as members of the one people of God”a people of God for which there is no plural. Leighton is surely right to say, however, that along the way we should engage the Jewish people “as a mystery in whose company we may discover our own limits and in whose midst we may also discern new and unsuspected insights into ourselves, the world, and God.” Dialogue between Jews and Christians should be marked by an element of curiosity, by shared exploration of what we do not know, and perhaps cannot know until the End Time. Richard John Neuhaus is Editor-in-Chief of First Things . This essay is adapted from a paper delivered at a Jewish-Christian conference sponsored by the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 01:01:32 +0000
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