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Torah and Dogma: A Comment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
Extract
The suggestion has often been made recently that the relationship between Judaism and Christianity can be adequately described in terms of a “schism.” This suggestion is worthy of serious consideration. It has much to commend it. It promises new possibilities (badly needed in view of past history), because “schism” can be healed. But its mere attractiveness and beneficial potential should not blind us to the problems involved. Because the term “schism” presupposes an underlying unity, its use to describe the relation between the two faiths preserves an emphasis which, in our given situation, where the dependence of the Church on the Synagogue is not sufficiently recognized, is too easily lost. And yet, without very careful definition, the term “schism” may be misleading. Who are to be called schismatics? Is it Christians for leaving Judaism or Jews for rejecting the Christian Messiah and his people? As will become apparent in the following pages, there are two extreme positions to be avoided. On the one hand, that which regards the relationship between Judaism and Christianity at the present time as so close that that relationship is merely schismatic, and, on the other hand, that which regards that relationship as one of unrelieved antithesis.
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1968
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* Editor's Note: Professor W. D. Davies' reflections on Torah and Dogma were presented as a comment on a paper which Professor Kornelius H. Miskotte — author of Wenn die Götter schweigen — presented to the Colloquium. In his paper, entitled “The Great Schism,” Miskotte surveyed the history of Jewish-Christian relations and opted for the term “schism” as theologically adequate and mutually beneficial in present and future dialogues between Jews and Christians. Be did so with special reference to Rosenzweig and Barth (see below, note 23). Here we present Professor Davies' comments as an independent contribution to the main theme of one of the Seminars which made up the Colloquium, viz., Torah and Dogma.
1 By dogma I understand a truth necessary for Salvation propounded by an authoritative council or organ of the Church.
2 This emerges clearly in the recent lectures by Blau, Joseph L., Modern Varieties of Judaism (Columbia University Press, 1966)Google Scholar.
3 Joseph, Morris, Judaism as Creed and Life (Macmillan, London, 1903)Google Scholar.
4 In the discussion at Harvard, Professor Judah Goldin drew a conclusion exactly opposite to mine from this fact. That the “anathemas” are inserted without special introduction or emphasis means, in his view, that their outstanding importance was assumed. I hesitate to differ from such a Rabbinist, but I fail in this instance to be convinced.
5 A Biblical student cannot but ask whether, if the same standards were applied to the Old Testament as are applied to the Rabbinic sources to deny the possibility of a Rabbinic Theology, Biblical Theology, as it has developed in our time, would ever have been possible. Does not it too often imply a system or connections between various documents and figures where none existed?
6 Cohen, A., Everyman's Talmud (1932), 132Google Scholar. See Herford, R. T., Pharisaism (1912)Google Scholar, chapters 1 and 2; Bonsirven, J., Le Judaism Palestinien, vol. I (1834), 248f.Google Scholar
7 See, for example, J. Goldin on The End of Ecclesiastes: Literal Exegesis and its Transformation, in Studies and Texts, vol. iii, Biblical Motifs, ed. Altmann, Alexander (Harvard University Press, 1966),CrossRefGoogle Scholar 135–38.
8 I owe this phrase to A. Heschel's work, A Philosophy of Judaism: God in Search of Man (1955), 323, 328.
9 Two volumes of Heschel's work on this theme have already appeared (unfortunately only in Hebrew) and another is in preparation; Torah min ha-shamayim, vol. I (1962), vol. 2 (1965).
10 There is a review of the second volume by Jacob Neusner in Conservative Judaism 20:3 (1966), 66–73.
11 Perhaps Heschel himself would agree with this statement. He has written eloquently of the “divinity of deeds” and the “wonder of doing” in Judaism. “A Jew is asked,” he writes, “to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought” (A Philosophy of Judaism, 283). Heschel is concerned, of course, not to deny or even minimize the significance of halakah for Judaism, but to hold it in proper balance with haggadah. He traces the pan-halakic emphasis back to Spinoza down through Moses Mendelssohn: “With Spinoza, [Mendelssohn] maintains that Judaism asks for obedience to a law but not acceptance of doctrines. ‘Judaism is no revealed religion in the usual sense of the term, but only revealed legislation, laws, commandments, and regulations, which were supernaturally given to the Jews through Moses.’ It demands no faith, no specific religious attitudes. ‘The Spirit of Judaism is freedom in doctrine and conformity in action.’” [Heschel's text is here reproduced as it stands. Both quotations apparently are from Mendelssohn's Jerusalem, chapter 2. This is the only reference given by Heschel, who also refers to Hermann Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft, 415ff. See A. Heschel, op. cit., 321, 333.] How the question is exercising modern Jewry can be quickly gleaned from DAVID ARONSON, Faith and Halakah, Conservative Judaism 21:1 (1966), 34–48.
12 See Leo Baeck's chapters on The Faith of Paul, Mystery and Commandment, Romantic Religion, in Judaism and Christianity, transl. Walter Kaufmann (1959), 139–292.
13 Hans Joachim Schoeps, The Jewish-Christian Argument: A History of Theologies in Conflict, transl. D. E. Green (1963), 40.
14 The School of St. Matthew (1954; 19682).
15 For the justification for most of the above paragraph, see my The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount (1964). Unfortunately I have not seen Eero Repo, Der Weg als Selbstbezeichnung des Urchristentums (Helsinki, 1964). Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, however, warns me of the dangers that lurk in the sentence: “Christianity too is a halakah.” He reminds me of the radical criticism of the Law implied and sometimes expressed in the ministry of Jesus and in the Epistles of Paul. His point may be met, I think, by claiming that halakah in Christianity is not the means of salvation so much as its accompaniment. Christianity must always be antilegalistic even though it must never be antinomian. On the other hand, it should not be overlooked that for Judaism the Law is an expression of grace as well as a means to grace. The true emphasis in this matter is difficult of achievement.
16 See N. P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin (1927), ad rem.
17 See, e.g., the closing psalm of the Manual of Discipline. The pertinent passage reads as follows in Millar Burrows' translation (The Dead Sea Scrolls [1955], 388):
But I belong to wicked mankind,
to the company of erring flesh
my iniquities, my transgression, my sin,
with the iniquity of my heart
belong to the company of worms and those who walk in darkness.
For the way of a man is not his own, … (I QS xi.gf.)
18 See my article on Conscience in The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible.
19 In the Colloquium I said, “It is Sin that makes the theologian” — using a shorthand for: “It is the awareness of Sin that makes the theologian.” The phrase “Sin makes the theologian” (Peccatum facit theologum) is an unconscious corruption on my part of a Latin scholastic tag which I learnt, long ago, at the feet of J. S. Whale; that is, “Pectus facit theologum.” I did not recall that he gave the source of the tag, so I wrote to him, and he replied: “I don't know how we've managed to get this a bit muddled, — as though the old tag said Peccatum rather than Pectus. And I don't know who first used [or, should I say, coined] this enduring phrase. I shouldn't be surprised to find it in Jas. Denney's Cunningham Lectures on Reconciliation — in the chapter on Augustine, where the great saint/sinner is described as ‘an experiencing nature.’ You must drop the actual phrase, of course — ‘Sin makes the theologian’; but it is a false reading which is nevertheless saying something true. Christian theology presupposes and begins with sin, and man's immemorial predicament. Hence the opening words of Milton's P. L. … I can't plead guilty myself to having misquoted pectus as peccatum in any lecture I've ever given; but I remember how Wheeler Robinson used to remark with a chuckle about the inspired character of certain false readings in scripture” (in a letter dated 3 February 1967). The horror expressed at the idea that “Sin makes the theologian” by some of the Jewish participants was typical as the silent acceptance of it by the Christian was significant. In any case the idea is not alien to the history of Christian thought, however infelicitously I expressed it. As J. S. Whale also writes: “Luther's pecca fortiter, like Thomas's ‘O felix culpa! …’ is a monstrously provocative statement of the truth that CHRISTIAN Theology begins with peccatum!”
20 Much of this formulation I owe to Professor David Daube.
21 Religious Authority and Mysticism, Commentary (November, 1964), 31ff. Contrast with Scholem's view that of a Christian Scholar, Gerhard von Rad: “The question should be put the other way around: how was it possible for the Old Testament traditions, and all the narratives, prayers, and predictions, to be taken over by the New Testament? This could not have happened if the Old Testament writings had not themselves contained pointers to Christ and been hermeneutically adapted to such a merger.” Old Testament Theology, vol. 2 (1965), 333.
22 Jean Daniélou, Théologie du Judéo-Christianisme: Histoire des doctrines Chrétiennes avant Nicée, vol. I (1957). On the first page he writes: “La théologie chrétienne utilisera à partir des Apologistes les instruments intellectuels de la philosophie grecque. Mais auparavant il y a eu une première théologie de structure sémitique.”
23 Professor Miskotte's paper did so interpret Barth with references to Kirchliche Dogmatik III:3, 247; IV:i, 749; IV:3b, 1005f.
24 Theologie und Geschichte des Judenchristentums (Tübingen, 1949)Google Scholar.
25 I used this symbolic interpretation in my popular work Invitation to the New Testament (1966), 492. The symbolism is suggested by A. Loisy, who is referred to, without specific annotation, by E. C. Hoskyns and F. N. Davey, The Fourth Gospel (1947), 530.
26 On this, see R. E. Brown, Does the New Testament call Jesus God?, Theological Studies 26 (1965), 545–73.
27 Rudolf Bultmann (John Knox Press, Richmond, Va., 1966)Google Scholar, ad rem.