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Can Christian Faith Survive Auschwitz?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Abstract
This paper argues that, for both Jews and Christians, the Holocaust represents a hermeneutic rupture. After Auschwitz, Jews find their belief in the God of history called into question. And Christians find their past interpretations of the Gospel as good news called into question, when forced by the Holocaust to see that it has been used to justify 2000 years of persecution, expulsion, and pogrom against the Jewish people. For Christians to acknowledge the Holocaust as hermeneutic rupture is to give it the authority of a new hermeneutic criterion for interpreting the Gospel, in which nothing is the word of God which denies the covenantal integrity of the Jewish People. The Holocaust forces a redefinition of the “canon within the canon” in which Paul's letter to the Romans and the Book of Job become central texts. Romans becomes the cornerstone of post-Holocaust theology because it predates the fall of the temple and the emergence of the anti-Judaic myth of Christian supercession and affirms the ongoing election of the Jewish people. And after the Holocaust, the Book of Job takes on new meaning as an allegory, only a desacralized Christianity which demythologizes some of its most sacred traditions in order to affirm human dignity and Jewish integrity can survive Auschwitz with any authenticity.
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References
1 Rosemary Ruether has argued that anti-Judaism is in fact the “left hand of Christology” from the New Testament onward. See her Faith and Fratricide (New York: Seabury, 1974).Google Scholar For a critical appraisal of her thesis see Davies, Alan T., ed., AntiSemitism and the Foundations of Christianity (New York: Paulist, 1979).Google Scholar
2 Cohen, Arthur, The Tremendum:A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York: Crossroad, 1981), p. 21.Google Scholar
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4 Fackenheim, Emil, God's Presence in History (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), p. 73.Google Scholar
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7 In Croner, Helga, ed., Stepping Stones to Further Jewish-Christian Relations (New York: Paulist, 1977), p. 152.Google Scholar This work is a valuable collection of official Protestant and Catholic statements on Christian responsibility for the anti-Judaic tradition that led to the Holocaust and the various attempts to overcome that tradition and redefine the relationship of Christians to Jews. The Vatican II document which pioneered these efforts was an ambivalent political document, but it led the way to much stronger later directives as some of the documents in this collection indicate. In this essay I am especially concerned to explore a 1975 statement of the U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops who suggest that we find “in the Epistle to the Romans (9-11) long-neglected passages which help us to construct a new and positive attitude toward the Jewish People” (Stepping Stones, p. 33).
8 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science in The Portable Nietzsche (ed. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Viking, 1968 [1954]), pp. 95–96.Google Scholar The context is not unrelated, as Nietzsche was speaking of the death of God.
9 Pawlikowski, John T., Christ in the Light of the Christian-Jewish Dialogue (New York: Paulist, 1982), p. 19.Google Scholar
10 Eckardt, A. Roy, “The Resurrection and the Holocaust” (paper presented to the Israel Study Group, New York, March 4, 1978), p. 13Google Scholar, as quoted by Pawlikowski, p. 17.
11 van Buren, Paul, Discerning the Way: A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality (New York: Seabury, 1980);Google Scholar and Thoma, Clemens, A Christian Theology of Judaism (New York: Paulist, 1980).Google Scholar
12 My emphasis. All scriptural quotes are from The New American Bible (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 1971)Google Scholar with the exception of the book of Job for which I used Marvin Pope's translation from The Anchor Bible 15 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965).Google Scholar
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14 Stendahl, Krister, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), pp. 2–3.Google Scholar
15 I introduce these comments on Romans with a certain awareness of my vulnerability. My area of specialization is theology of culture and not New Testament studies. Nevertheless I believe that scholarship often advances most productively through interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. In that spirit I offer the following as a contribution to the dialogue.
16 See Sanders, E. P., Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), ch. 6.Google Scholar Both Sanders and Stendahl claim that the goal of their respective interpretations is to recover the meaning of Paul in his own historical context irrespective of contemporary concerns. Yet their interpretations remain at odds with each other. Sanders seems to accuse Stendahl of injecting contemporary Jewish-Christian concerns into his interpretation. Sanders interprets Paul as a christological exclusivist who cannot envision salvation apart from Christ. Stendahl responds by noting that Sanders reads Paul as if he were a systematic theologian (hence he is the one injecting contemporary attitudes into Paul) whereas he reads Paul as being a pastoral theologian, less concerned with consistency than Sanders seems to think. Sanders describes the difference between himself and Stendahl by saying that election has soteriological significance in his understanding whereas it does not in Stendahl's. I have tried to establish that election does have soteriological significance, but not an exclusivist significance as Sanders suggests since the remnant saves not itself but the whole. I do agree with Sanders that, in Romans, Paul is more systematic than he is anywhere else in his writings, but I do not find Paul's position suffers the inconsistency that Sanders would find in it and that Stendahl might be willing to excuse by alluding to his pastoral orientation. See the dialogue between Sanders and Stendahl in the Union Seminary Quarterly Review, Vol. 33, Nos. 3 and 4, Spring and Summer, 1978, pp. 175-91.
17 Ibid., pp. 197-99.
18 Ibid., p. 193.
19 Stendahl, p. 4.
20 In the interpretation of Job which follows, I owe an intellectual debt to James Williams of Syracuse University, who first taught me to appreciate the dialectical complexity of the Book of Job.
21 For a helpful and fair minded treatment of the ambivalent history of Christian treatment of the Jews see Three Popes and the Jews (New York: Hawthorn, 1967)Google Scholar by the Israeli scholar and journalist, Pinchas Lapide. The paradox is that, certainly since Gregory the Great, the popes have often been the chief protectors of the Jews against popular hostility while at the same time often promoting this same hostility through their preaching and teaching; see esp. p. 51.
22 Greenberg, Irving, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Fleischner, Eva, ed., Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? (New York: KTAV, 1977), p. 23.Google Scholar
23 Rubenstein, Richard, The Cunning of History (New York: Harper & Row, Colophon Books, 1975), p. 6.Google Scholar
24 Ibid., pp. 27-31.
25 Rubenstein, , After Auschwitz, p. 69.Google Scholar
26 Greenberg, p. 50.
27 Ibid.
28 Wiesel, p. 147.
29 Greenberg, p. 55.
30 Ibid., p. 38.
31 The distinction between “the holy” and “the sacred” which I am implying here, is taken from the work of Jacques Ellul. He argues that the sacred is a sociological and psychological phenomenon inherent in the structure of human experience and is the opposite of God's holiness. As such it is a demonic perversion of the holy, but one which can be dialectically reversed through prophetic criticism in word and deed. See my The Thought of Jacques Ellul (New York: Mellen, 1981), pp. 104ff. and 162ff.Google Scholar
32 Greenberg, pp. 28ff. and 40ff.
33 For a moving example of this, see the autobiographical introduction to Flannery, Edward, The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-three Centuries of Anti-Semitism (New York: Macmillan, 1965), pp. xi–xv.Google Scholar Flannery indicates that the motivation for writing his book on anti-Semitism was the shock of discovering that the cross was, for a young Jewish woman he knew, “an evil presence” which made her “shudder.”
34 Although they are not the words of Paul, the Pauline tradition embodied in 1 Timothy lends support to what I interpret as a strong tendency toward a vision of universal salvation in Romans: For “our hopes are fixed on the living God who is savior of all men, but especially of those who believe. Such are the things that you must urge and teach” (1 Tim 4:10-11).