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Jesus Christ and Auschwitz

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Nicholas de Lange
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The 27th Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture 15th May 1997

Nineteen years ago, when I delivered the 8th Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture, I said this:

History obliges Jews to take account of the figure of Jesus, because Jewish life is lived in the midst of the gentiles, and for the majority of Jews that means in the midst of Christians. We are compelled to respond to Jesus—not Jesus the ancient Jew but Jesus the Christian Lord.

And I concluded with the positive judgment of Franz Rosenzweig:

Before God, Jew and Christian both labour at the same task. He cannot dispense with either.

I fully share Franz Rosenzweig’s optimistic vision, and it is in the light of this belief, and in the spirit of my earlier talk, that I accepted the invitation to come back and give a second lecture in memory of the man we are gathered to honour. We owe it to Cardinal Bea and to other predecessors who, like him, laboured to clear away the bitterness and hatred of centuries, to continue this work, each one of us in whatever way we can.

I would like to take this opportunity to push my own thinking further than I was willing or able to do nineteen years ago. In the intervening years my thoughts have moved on, and so has the climate of Christian-Jewish dialogue. I think we are ready now for some tougher talking. I hope I am not wrong about this.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 78 , Issue 917-918 , July 1997 , pp. 308 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 ‘Who Is Jesus?’, The Month, April 1978, p. 121. The quotation from Rosenzweig is from The Star of Redemption, tr. Hallo, W.W., London 1971, p. 415.Google Scholar

2 No Rusty Swords. Letters, Lectures and Notes 1928–1936 from the collected works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, vol. 1, edited and introduced by Edwin H. Robertson, translated by Edwin H. Robertson and John Bowden, London/New York 1965, p. 226. See Saperstein, Marc, Moments of Crisis in Jewish‐Christian Relations, London/Philadelphia 1989, pp. 41fGoogle Scholar. Saperstein quotes this statement, and also an analogous remark by Martin Niemoller.

3 Moltmann, J., The Crucified God, tr. Wilson, R.A. and Bowden, John, London 1974, p. 175Google Scholar. Many other examples could be given of Moltmann's attitude. See the discussion in Eckardt, A. Roy, Long Night's Journey Into Day. Life and Faith After the Holocaust, Detroit 1982, pp. 87–110.Google Scholar

4 Quoted by Saperstein, op.cit. p. 42, from Here Stand I, tr. Lymburn, Jane, Chicago & New York 1937, p. 195.Google Scholar

5 English translation from The Authorised Daily Prayer Book of the United Hebrew Congregations… New edition, London 1962, p. 319.Google Scholar

6 Tos. Menahot 13:22, quoted from Montefiore, C.G. and Loewe, H., A Rabbinic Anthology, reprint, New York 1974, p. 463.Google Scholar

7 John 2:19–21.Google Scholar

8 My late colleague Geoffrey Lampe, in his article ‘A.D. 70 in Christian reflection’, in Jesus and the Politics of His Day, ed. Bammel, E. and Moule, C.F.D. (Cambridge 1984), pp. 153–171CrossRefGoogle Scholar, minimises the impact of the destruction in the Gospels and other early Christian writings, and concentrates on the polemic against Judaism. While justified so far as it goes, this approach neglects the purely Jewish dimension of the Gospels.

9 TheFaceofGod, p. 35.