Engaging the Doctrine of Israel: A Christian Israelology in Dialogue with Ongoing Judaism

By Matthew Levering

This book is the dogmatic sequel to Levering's Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage, in which he argued that God's purpose in creating the cosmos is the eschatological marriage of God and his people.. God sets this marriage into motion through his covenantal election of a particular people, the people of Israel. Central to this people's relationship with the Creator God are their Scriptures, exodus, Torah, Temple, land, and Davidic kingship. As a Christian Israelology, this book devotes a chapter to each of these topics, investigating their theological significance both in light of ongoing Judaism and in light of Christian Scripture (Old and New Testaments) and Christian theology. The book makes a significant contribution to charting a path forward for Jewish-Christian dialogue from the perspective of post-Vatican II Catholicism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Sep 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781725291119

Matthew Levering

Matthew Levering (PhD, Boston College) is Perry Family Foundation Professor of Theology at Mundelein Seminary, University of Saint Mary of the Lake, in Mundelein, Illinois. He previously taught at the University of Dayton. Levering is the author of numerous books, including Engaging the Doctrine of Revelation, The Proofs of God, The Theology of Augustine, and Ezra & Nehemiah in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible, and is the coauthor of Holy People, Holy Land. He serves as coeditor of the journals Nova et Vetera and the International Journal of Systematic Theology and has served as Chair of the Board of the Academy of Catholic Theology since 2007.

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Introduction

This book is the dogmatic sequel to my Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage , in which I argued that God’s purpose in creating the cosmos is the eschatological marriage of God and his people—the unfathomably glorious consummation that we await. God sets this marriage into motion through his covenantal election of a particular people, the people of Israel. As the Jewish theologian David Novak puts it, this election unto marriage "means that our desire for God has been awakened by God’s desire for us." ¹ Novak perceives that even the most exalted interhuman relationship, which is the marriage of a woman and a man, is only so exalted because it reflects the more perfect marriage of God and His people. ²

It makes sense, then, to turn from the doctrine of marriage to the doctrine of Israel. I engage the Christian doctrine of Israel, what Ellen Charry has called the question of Christian Israelology.³ The Christian doctrine of Israel differs, of course, from reflection upon the State of Israel. But although Charry holds that Christian Israelology does not involve the State of Israel in any way, the importance of the State for the Jewish people means that I will need to give the State of Israel a significant place in my chapter on the land.

In offering a Christian Israelology, the chapters that follow provide extensive meditations on biblical texts drawn from the entirety of Christian Scripture. Yet, the book is not a biblical theology. Readers will not find here a dogmatic theologian’s version of Brevard Childs’s Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament, or John Goldingay’s three-volume Old Testament Theology.⁴ Instead, my chapters will engage theologically with a few central topics: Jewish-Christian dialogue, creation and Scripture, the exodus, the Torah, the temple, the promised land, and the Davidic kingship.⁵

Many of these topics do not normally have a distinct place in classical Christian dogmatics, with the exception being the Torah (or law) and, of course, creation. I have already covered the doctrine of creation in volume 3 of my dogmatics, so what is it doing here? In answer, here is the place to reflect upon why divine revelation and scriptural composition took place as they did within God’s people Israel. Creation is utterly central to the doctrine of Israel, and yet God allowed ambiguities in Genesis 1 regarding the reality of creatio ex nihilo.

The primary goal of the present volume is to undertake, within Catholic dogmatics, a full-fledged treatment of the central realities of God’s biblical people Israel. Absent contemplation of the main elements of Israel’s covenantal life with God, Catholic dogmatics suffers a twofold deprivation: of the dogmatic place of Israel in its own right, and of the deep and inextricable relationship of Israel to the Christ and, indeed, to all the loci of Christian dogmatics. Thus, my purpose does not entail examining the main elements of Israel’s covenantal life with God as though there were no Jesus of Nazareth, fulfilling and transforming Israel’s covenants and promises and pouring out his Spirit. Even so, these central elements of God’s history with his people deserve full Christian attention in their own right even if not independently.

As befits a Christian Israelology, I actively seek to learn from Jewish scholars.⁶ Each chapter mounts a theological dialogue with one or more Jewish thinkers. David Novak, from whom I have already learned much in previous works, is my central interlocutor in two chapters, on the land and the Davidic kingship, respectively.⁷ Franz Rosenzweig and Abraham Joshua Heschel contribute to the chapter on Scripture and creation ex nihilo, Jonathan Sacks to the chapter on the exodus, Joseph B. Soloveitchik to the chapter on the Torah, and Jonathan Klawans to the chapter on the temple. Along the way, I discuss the viewpoints of many other Jewish theologians, philosophers, and exegetes. In setting forth their perspectives for the purposes of my Christian Israelology, I seek to see things as Judaism sees them as a result of its particular experiences and to do so appreciatively, without feeling called to sit in judgment on the way of life of the Jewish people in our own day.⁸

I. The Plan of the Work

Let me briefly introduce the contents of the seven chapters. Chapter 1 examines issues pertaining to Jewish-Christian dialogue itself. I reflect upon the figure of Abraham as understood by Jews and Christians. I pay particular attention to the New Testament texts that have caused pain for the Jewish people, whether due to the rhetorical invective found in the texts or to the polemical criticisms they aim at particular Jewish groups or at ongoing Judaism. I examine these passages in light of my belief that the New Testament was inspired by the Holy Spirit for the salvation of the world but was written in a fully human manner. My goal consists in distinguishing truths that Christians must affirm—for example that Jesus was and is the Messiah of Israel and that the rejection of Jesus by the Jewish leaders and by the people to whom Paul and the apostles preached was a serious mistake—from timebound elements that pertain to the intra-Jewish polemics of the period in which the texts of the New Testament were written. This task of evaluating and sifting controversial passages constitutes a necessary prolegomenon to Christian Israelology.

Chapter 2 asks why God has revealed important truths in a sometimes ambiguous way, with the result that even such a crucial doctrine as creation ex nihilo is not made crystal clear in Genesis 1.⁹ I suggest that the answer has to do with the theo-dramatic mode, uniting mystical and metaphysical patterns of thought, through which believers come to know and share in the God who reveals himself in history and in Scripture. Central to Israel’s patterns of belief and worship is the truth that all things—from angels to worms to stars—are creatures, meaning that all things depend radically upon Israel’s God, the Creator, for their finite existence. Learning how to recognize this God in Israel’s Scriptures, despite sometimes ambiguous and anthropomorphic language, should be the first step of a Christian Israelology. In this task, Franz Rosenzweig’s understanding of divine creative language, and especially Abraham Joshua Heschel’s comparison of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael on scriptural anthropomorphism, prove helpful.¹⁰

Christian Israelology relies upon the fact that the Creator God, in Christ, is accomplishing for believers what the biblical scholar Michael Bird terms a new exodus and a new redemption by entering into the imperishable inheritance of God.¹¹ In chapter 3, I explore the exodus and the new exodus in Christ. I begin by asking why God, having heard the cries of his suffering people, redeemed them from Egyptian slavery only to immerse them in the terrible sufferings of the exodus journey. God hears his people’s cry, redeems his people from suffering, and leads his people toward perfect communal dwelling with him. But why does God allow so much suffering and death to remain? Assisted by Jonathan Sacks’s political reading of the exodus, I investigate the question of suffering on the exodus and on the new exodus in light of the way in which the exodus constitutes a specific people or nation. By placing the constitution of a nation front and center, Jewish thinkers can help Christians better understand the new exodus in Christ.

For ongoing Judaism, It is the Torah that makes Judaism stand out from anything in the human background.¹² In this light, chapter 4 engages the Torah that God gives to Israel.¹³ I turn to Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man in order to gain insight into what Rabbinic Jews mean when they say, The Torah is the link between God and man. The ladder, seen by Jacob in his dream (Gen. 28.12), connecting heaven and earth is said to be Sinai on which the Torah was given. The Torah was created before the creation of the world.¹⁴ Christians may suppose that we have left behind obedience to the Torah, but in fact this cannot be so.¹⁵ Comparing the New Testament’s worldview with that of Soloveitchik, I argue that Christ is Torah in person and that believers fulfill the whole Torah by sharing in his paschal mystery and embodying his love by the Spirit’s power.¹⁶ No doubt, Christ for Christians does not simply parallel Torah for Jews, because Christ is the divine Son. Even so, Christ as the embodiment or fulfillment of Torah stands as the Christian path of life along lines that resonate with Jewish understandings.¹⁷

Just as the Torah is central for Christian Israelology, so is the temple. Richard Ounsworth rightly observes that Christians cannot understand their salvation without entering into the imaginative world of that cult.¹⁸ In chapter 5, I explore the temple and its animal sacrifices in light of the cessation of temple sacrifices and concerns about Christian supersessionism, as recently put forward by Jonathan Klawans. God intended the temple in Jerusalem to be the place where the entire people of Israel would offer worship to God. Jesus enacted a symbolic cleansing of the temple by driving out money-changers; and Jesus and his first followers preached often in the temple precincts rather than dissociating themselves sharply from the temple. As Gerd Theissen notes, in Christianity the traditional ritual actions (bloody animal sacrifices) were replaced by new (bloodless) rites organized around the atoning sacrifice of Jesus.¹⁹

I argue that the temple’s sacrifices are indeed superseded in Christian worship. But this supersession is preeminently a fulfillment, because worship in Christ—who is the eschatological temple—is temple-shaped and sacrificial, in a mode opened up by Christ’s self-offering in love on the cross and his gift of the Eucharist.²⁰ Katherine Sonderegger aptly remarks, The sacrifice of the altar, and the sacrificial meal, are not left behind when the Old Testament turns toward the New, but are rather underscored, heightened and consummated in the life and death of the Incarnate Son.²¹

Chapter 6 turns to the significance of the land for Christian Israelology, which inevitably means coming to terms with the Christian understanding of Jewish Zionism (the return of the Jewish people to dwell in and govern the promised land) and the State of Israel. Gavin D’Costa has recently put the question: if the land was part of the covenant that God makes with his people, the Jews, and the covenant is irrevocable, then does that promise still stand? . . . If it does stand, does it apply to post-biblical Israel (of 1948)?²² Indeed, the very same question was raised by the Catholic scholar Edward Flannery in 1986, and the question needs an answer.²³

Jewish thinkers have advanced various reasons why Christians should support Zionism, including the fact that the destruction of the Jewish State would be experienced by the Jewish people as a disaster comparable to the Holocaust. In my view, David Novak and his co-authors of Dabru Emet are correct that Christians should appreciate that Israel was promised—and given—to Jews as the physical center of the covenant between them and God and that this means that the State of Israel is not solely a political matter.²⁴ From a Christian perspective, however, the land promise also requires accounting for the fact that Jesus, as the Messiah of Israel, has fulfilled the covenants, so that all peoples are called to union with him in the inaugurated kingdom. The fulfilled covenantal land includes the whole world, in accord with Paul’s understanding that the promise to Abraham and his descendants meant that they should inherit the whole world (Rom 4:13). Christ’s fulfillment of the covenant of land entails a transformation, given that believers, awaiting the fullness of the cosmic new creation, have already come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem (Heb 12:22; cf. Heb 11:16).²⁵ At the same time, Christians must take into consideration the impact of Christian persecution of the ongoing Jewish people over the centuries, which has produced invincible ignorance (which I will describe below) about Jesus’ identity as the Messiah. In this light, I make a Christian case for holding that the Jewish people as a whole still possess a covenantal obligation to dwell in and govern the land and should be supported in obeying this obligation, although Christians recognize that the land promise has been eschatologically fulfilled in Christ.²⁶

As a last step in my Christian Israelology, chapter 7 addresses the Davidic kingship, in light of Catholic ecclesiology and, specifically, papal abuse of temporal power. My main question is why God ties himself so tightly to institutions in which power is wielded by fallen humans. According to 2 Samuel 7, God bound himself to the Davidic royal line. Through the prophet Nathan, God tells David, When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever (2 Sam 7:12–13). God committed himself in this manner even though David had liquidated Saul’s family and would soon fall into an independence of the law, a personal lust . . . that results in adultery and murder.²⁷ Indebted again to David Novak, and in light of Pope Pius IX’s forcible removal in 1858 of a Jewish boy from his loving parents on the grounds that he had been secretly baptized as an infant by his nanny, I argue that the Davidic kings’ failures in the exercise of divinely granted power can assist in understanding the failures of divinely authorized Catholic leaders.²⁸ The success of God’s covenantal plan through the Davidic kingship, like the success of God’s working through the successors of Peter, does not depend upon human sinlessness but rather depends upon the sinless Davidic Messiah whose reign, Christians believe, has been inaugurated in a form that invites our participation but can be obscured by our sins.

In these seven chapters, I do not directly engage the Rabbinic Sages but instead allow that tradition to be mediated to me by numerous Jewish thinkers from the past one hundred years who themselves, in various ways, have been engaged in Jewish-Christian dialogue.²⁹ Although I give ample space to describing their views, I should reiterate that I am not trying to provide a theological account of the doctrine of Israel that both Jews and Christians could accept. On the contrary, as indicated above, my engagement with the doctrine of Israel is thoroughly Christian, while at the same time affirming (in the words of Walter Moberly) that the negative attitudes toward Jewishness and Judaism that have generally characterized Christianity are . . . perversions and distortions of [Christianity].³⁰

Fortunately, an explicitly Christian perspective is what thinkers such as Novak, Soloveitchik, and Jon D. Levenson would hope for from a Christian theological work. Soloveitchik famously warned against attempts to produce a fusion of Judaism and Christianity, something that arguably would be neither Judaism nor Christianity. He feared that dialogue could be a screen for people seeking to unburden themselves of the revelation that God has given. He urged his fellow Jews not to trade favors pertaining to fundamental matters of faith, and he insisted upon the necessity and goodness of believing with great passion in the ultimate truthfulness of our views.³¹ I very much agree with him. There are truth-claims that Jews cannot relinquish without ceasing to be Jews, and there are truth-claims that Christians cannot relinquish without ceasing to be Christians. If these truth-claims are controversial, this cannot be helped.³² As Hans Küng puts it, That the Jews should surrender their unbelief in regard to Jesus seems just as unlikely as that the Christians should abandon their belief in him. For if they did so, the Jews would no longer be Jews, or the Christians Christians.³³

Although this book is a work of Catholic theology, I also make frequent use of Protestant theology and biblical scholarship, in grateful recognition of the many notable contributions that Protestant scholars have made to contemporary Christian Israelology. By and large, Eastern Orthodox theologians have not been as active in Christian-Jewish dialogue as have Protestants. Over the centuries, Orthodox Christians were generally as responsible for anti-Jewish oppression, pogroms, and blood libels as were Catholics and Protestants; but the Holocaust was largely enacted by Catholics and Protestants.³⁴ Eastern Orthodoxy has not been entirely absent from Jewish-Christian dialogue, as can be seen for instance in the volume Orthodox Christians and Jews on Continuity and Renewal.³⁵ Even so, John Pawlikowski is correct when he states that [Eastern] Orthodox Christians in the main have not bought into the new template on Christian-Jewish relations.³⁶ Orthodox scholars are present in my book, but not nearly as present as they were in earlier volumes of this dogmatic series.

Let me mention, however, a notable exception to this rule: the Russian Orthodox (and perhaps, at the end of his life, Roman Catholic) thinker Vladimir Solovyov. In the late nineteenth century, Solovyov praised the Jewish people for their adherence to Torah, while he bemoaned Christian lack of adherence to the new commandment of charity. He states, The Jews have always treated us in the Jewish way [in accord with Torah]; we Christians, on the contrary, have not learned to this day to adopt a Christian attitude to the Jews. They have never transgressed their religious law in relation to us; we, on the other hand, have always broken the commandments of the Christian religion in relation to them.³⁷ He points out that Christians make all sorts of excuses for the lack of charity shown by Christians toward the Jewish people over the course of history. Some Christians, he observes, consider the Jewish people to be under the self-inflicted curse of Matthew 27:25 (His blood be on us and on our children) and therefore insist that Christians must subjugate Jews. He responds: "That blood is the blood of redemption. And surely the clamour of human malice is not strong enough to drown the words of divine forgiveness: ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.’³⁸ Besides, if the Jewish people as a whole were cursed, then the apostles (as Jews) would have been under that very curse. Solovyov concludes with pointed implications: Does it not seem striking that in the name of Christ we should condemn all Jewry to which Christ Himself indisputably belongs?"³⁹

II. Christian Inaugurated Eschatology and Ongoing Judaism

It is necessary at the outset to outline my view of the relationship between Christian inaugurated eschatology and ongoing Judaism. This relationship has a large bearing upon my approach in the chapters that follow.

As a Christian, I believe that Jesus Christ has inaugurated the kingdom of God and fulfilled and reconfigured Israel’s covenants around himself by his cross and resurrection and by pouring out his Spirit.⁴⁰ The fact that Israel’s covenants have been fulfilled and transformed means that these covenants are no longer meant to be observed in their original form. Thus, Christ incorporates Gentiles into the messianically transformed people of Abraham, but he does not command his Church to dwell in the land of Canaan.⁴¹ Christ fulfills the Torah (Matt 5:17), but he does not command his Church to observe the Torah’s commandments about the Jubilee or about the animal sacrifices in the temple. Instead, Jewish and Gentile believers in Christ live out the covenantal promises and commandments in their new messianic form, that is, as fulfilled and transformed in the inaugurated kingdom of the Messiah, as for instance through the sacraments of the Church.

Yet, such an understanding of inaugurated eschatology seems utterly to devalue the ongoing people of Israel, the Jewish people who do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. For if the Jewish Messiah has come and has transformed the Jewish people’s covenantal promises and commandments, there seems to be no place for an ongoing Jewish people that does not recognize that its Messiah has come and that therefore continues on with the covenantal promises and commandments in their original form. If so, then Christian Israelology would entail that there is no theological space, from a Christian perspective, for ongoing Judaism.

Clearly, that cannot be right. Even in light of Jesus’ inauguration of the messianic kingdom, Paul insists that the Jewish people according to the flesh remain God’s beloved, elect people (Rom 11:11–12, 28–29). God could never forget or abandon his chosen people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.⁴² What else, then, does Christian inaugurated eschatology allow Christians to say theologically about the ongoing Jewish people?

From a Christian perspective, a decisive point is that the covenantal fulfillment and transformation in the Messiah is not a negation of the covenants God made with the Jews. Let me explain what I mean by negation. Theoretically, Christ could have come and, exercising his messianic authority, simply cancelled the Abrahamic and Sinai covenants. In fact, however, in accord with God’s promises that his covenants would endure forever, Jesus proclaims his followers to be true children of Abraham (Matt 8:11) and he maintains that not even an iota of the law will pass away until the final judgment (Matt 5:18). Christ does not dissolve or negate the covenantal promises and commandments; rather, he fulfills them by inaugurating their eschatological mode of observance. It follows that when reflecting upon the ongoing Jewish people’s obedience to the covenants with Abraham and Moses, Christians must begin by acknowledging that such covenants still exist. They are fulfilled and transformed, but not negated or cast aside.⁴³ This is what I mean by a Christian inaugurated eschatology that relies upon fulfillment and transformation. The question, then, is not whether the original covenantal promises and commandments still exist, but rather how (in what mode or modes) they are in force today.

The answer to this question is complicated by the fact that the eschatological kingdom has been inaugurated by Christ, but not consummated. In the consummated kingdom, all will be clear; the perfected eschatological mode of the covenants will be apparent to all. But the inaugurated kingdom is more complex, due to God’s providential will to allow it to be still marked by sin and death. On the one hand, the outpouring of the Spirit in the inaugurated kingdom is powerful and fruitful in building up the Church (and all who are interiorly united to the Church through implicit faith) throughout the world. But on the other hand, the Church as the inaugurated kingdom is wounded by continuing sin and division on the part of Christians, who far too often continue to behave in a worldly manner, despite the power of Christ’s grace. The inaugurated kingdom, therefore, can be misperceived by others due to the sins of Christians. In God’s plan—which never implicates him in sin, but nevertheless permits human sin within the compass of his providential purposes—God permits not only the failure of most Jews to recognize Jesus as the Messiah, but also the failure of most Gentile Christians who boast[ed] over the branches (Rom 11:18), that is, over the ongoing Jewish people. The latter failure, bemoaned by Paul, almost immediately scandalized the ongoing Jewish people by standing as a counter-witness of hate-filled abuse rather than Christlike love. God is not to blame for Christians’ sins against the ongoing Jewish people, but God has permitted such sins to occur, for reasons that we cannot know but that we can trust are not finally opposed to God’s salvific purposes.

As noted above, my view is that Christ’s inauguration of his kingdom means that for people who accept Jesus as the Messiah, the Abrahamic covenant of people and land remains in force now solely in its messianic mode, not its original mode.⁴⁴ Thus, if there were no legitimate reason today for not recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, then all people would be bound in conscience, on pain of sinning against the Messiah, to observe the Abrahamic covenant in its messianic mode (i.e., in the Church). But as indicated above, and as I will further explain later in this Introduction and in chapters 1 and 6, there are indeed legitimate reasons—from a Christian theological perspective—for why the Jewish people, as a whole (despite the fact of individual conversions), do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah.⁴⁵

These reasons are at least twofold. First, there is the overarching positive mystery of God’s plan as described in Romans 11, in which God is presented as having a plan and a purpose that serve to explain why "Israel [the Jewish people as a whole] failed to obtain what it sought (Rom 11:7). Christians do not know the inner details of this plan, but we know that if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?" (Rom 11:15). I interpret this verse as indicating that God’s plan involves, for positive reasons, the existence of ongoing Judaism until the coming of Christ in glory, that is, until the end of time.⁴⁶

This first reason (God’s plan) of itself suffices for why, even after the coming of the Messiah, Christians cannot expect Jesus’ messianic status to be recognizable to the Jewish people as a whole prior to the eschaton, with the crucial correlative point that Christians should therefore assume that the covenants in their original mode remain legitimately in force for the Jewish people as a whole despite the fact that the Messiah has indeed come and has fulfilled and transformed the covenants. But there is also a second reason, one to which I will appeal relatively often in this book. To use technical theological language, due to Christian boasting (cf. Rom 11:18) or persecution of the Jewish people, the ignorance of Jesus’ true identity manifested by the ongoing Jewish people (with exceptions of course) is invincible because the name of Jesus has been associated indelibly with acts of hatred toward the Jewish people rather than with love.⁴⁷

In sum: the Messiah has come and inaugurated his kingdom in which the covenants are transformed, but because the ongoing Jewish people for legitimate reasons do not recognize Jesus as the Christ, Christians should affirm that the ongoing Jewish people rightly continue to observe their still existing covenants in their original mode. As the Catholic theologian Guy Mansini points out, ongoing Judaism is (from a Christian perspective) not so much a non-Christian religion as it is the religion of God’s ongoing Jewish people who believe that the Messiah has not come and who obey God’s Torah in accordance with this belief. Since this is so, then as Mansini concludes, Insofar as there is no culpable rejection of the gospel, therefore, we may suppose that God remains faithful to the covenants with Abraham and Moses, and that practicing the Jewish religion is pleasing in his sight and rewarded with grace and blessings.⁴⁸

The above viewpoint can be misunderstood, and so let me say a little more in response to potential misunderstandings. First, it may seem that I am saying that, although subjectively speaking the Jewish people believe the covenants still to be in force, objectively speaking these covenants have in fact been negated and discarded. In other words, the Jewish people may subjectively believe that they have a covenantal obligation to dwell in the land (for example), but in objective fact their covenantal obligation has been cancelled, so that what once was the promise of the land is now the promise of no land. But what such a position misses is that, as I have noted, the covenants have not been cancelled by Christ. They are fulfilled and transformed, but they are not cancelled. Objectively speaking, the covenantal promise about the land has been messianically fulfilled and transformed, but, at the same time, the covenantal promise remains—objectively speaking—perfectly intact.

Second, it may seem that I am saying that, since the ongoing Jewish people are mistaken about Jesus, Christian triumphalism over the ongoing Jewish people is in fact warranted. In other words, ongoing Judaism is a mere mistake, and when Christ comes in glory, Jews will become Christians. But in fact, the mystery of God’s plan for Jews and Gentiles reaches to a much deeper level. Proper Christian understanding of the eschatological consummation involves a reality so glorious that it is presently unfathomable, even if known in part. As 1 John 3:2 puts it, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.⁴⁹ Equally, Paul says that our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect. . . . For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood (1 Cor 13:9, 12). The point for my purposes is that it is not adequate to say that in the consummated kingdom Jews will become Christians. This way of putting it suggests that Christians will be unchanged, while Jews will simply convert. But both Christians and Jews will be radically changed at the consummation of all things, so that neither Christianity nor Judaism will remain as we know them. Although it is true that Jesus will be recognized by all persons as the Messiah (a significant point indeed!), this does not mean what it would mean if we were dealing simply with an earthly conversion.

Third, it may seem that I am saying that because Christianity embraces the inaugurated kingdom, Christianity is spiritual and Judaism is carnal. But in fact, I hold that Catholic Christianity is an embodied (carnal) religion no less than Judaism is. In Christ, such realities as the exodus, Torah, temple, and land are not simply spiritualized or interiorized, although there is some spiritualization as befits Christ’s drawing all peoples into the divine life itself. For example, to say that Christ is the eschatological temple does not mean that Christ is simply a spiritualized temple. After all, his body and his mystical Body are nothing if not bodily, both now and everlastingly! Eucharistic worship is profoundly carnal in the sense of being an embodied participation in Christ’s embodied sacrifice.

Of course, interior holiness—belief in the divine redeemer, hope in his plan of salvation, and love for God and neighbor—is needed for both Jews and Christians. Christians believe that the promised outpouring of the Spirit has occurred through Jesus Christ. But this does not mean that Jews, awaiting the Messiah in faith (and thus legitimately not recognizing Jesus as the Messiah), lack union with the Spirit. Only a culpable rejection of Jesus would render Jewish life carnal in the negative sense. Paul often accuses Christians of being carnal in this negative sense, as when he warns the Corinthians: For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, indeed it cannot; and those who are in the flesh cannot please God (1 Cor 8:7–8).

Fourth, it may seem that I am saying that since God’s plan includes ongoing Judaism—and since Christians should affirm the goodness of ongoing Judaism’s efforts to obey its covenantal obligations—it follows that the conversion of Jews to Christianity should be discouraged by Christians.⁵⁰ But in fact, I hold that Jesus really is the Messiah. Embracing Jesus as the Messiah is always salutary, for Jewish people as well as for all people. Why would it not be, since it is true? I believe that Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, is the mediator of all salvation and the source of the Holy Spirit who transforms our fallen hearts; and I believe in the salvific power of union with Jesus Christ in his Church, with its holy teaching and holy sacraments. These facts do not, however, negate the truth that God intends there to be both ongoing Judaism and Christianity until the eschatological consummation, that is, until life from the dead (Rom 11:15). While I will discuss the significance of implicit faith further on in this Introduction—and while I will also later take up the highly charged topic of Christian mission and proselytizing—the point here is that I am not discouraging the explicit embrace of Jesus by Jewish persons.

Fifth, it may seem that I am saying that eschatological fulfillment in Christ renders worthless Torah (or temple or land) in its form prior to Christ.⁵¹ I do not think that the eschatological consummation will involve the Messiah literally reigning on the Temple Mount in the city of Jerusalem or teaching Torah observance such as the food laws or the sacrificial cult. How then does this not render Torah, temple, and land everlastingly worthless? Let me offer an example from Christian faith. In the resurrection accounts in the New Testament, Jesus is shown to possess a glorified body. His body is in continuity with his earthly body, but it exists in a radically different, glorified mode. His glorified body is unlike his earthly body in notable ways. Yet, his glorified body does not negate the body that he had in his earthly life, because it truly is that body, now glorified. In other words, again, negation is not the proper way of understanding eschatological fulfillment. Just because Christ has fulfilled Torah and temple (and land), this does not mean that God has negated these elements of the life of his chosen people.

III. Invincible Ignorance and Implicit Faith

All the above will need further explication in the chapters that follow, but let me now discuss in more detail what it means to say that Christians over the centuries have scandalized the Jewish people through repeated acts of hatred.⁵² Scandal can have powerful consequences, including giving scandalized people the standing that theologians term invincible ignorance—with its correlative lack of culpability.

As Gavin D’Costa has noted, the doctrine of invincible ignorance is scripturally grounded. Relevant passages in this regard include Luke 12:47–48, James 4:17, 1 Timothy 1:13, Acts 3:17, Acts 17:30, and Romans 10:14. In Luke 12:47–48, for example, Jesus compares a servant who knew his master’s will with a servant who did not know his master’s will. The latter’s acting against the will of the master does not result in severe punishment, because he is excused by not knowing the master’s will. The notion of invincible ignorance adds the element that the servant who did not know was not at fault for not knowing—since if he were at fault then he would deserve just as much punishment as the servant who did know. If it is possible to inquire and to find out the truth easily, then one has vincible ignorance, for which one is culpable. For example, if I neglect to look at speed limit signs and do not know that the speed limit in a particular residential area is thirty miles per hour, my ignorance does not prevent me from deserving a speeding ticket for going sixty miles per hour.

From a Catholic perspective, there are a wide range of cases of invincible ignorance. Catholics believe, for instance, that Jesus founded one Church (the inaugurated kingdom) and this Church subsists in the Catholic Church, even if other churches and ecclesiastical communities enjoy an intensive participation in ecclesiality through such things as baptism and Scripture (in the case of Protestants) or are fully Churches though not with the needed element of communion with Rome (in the case of the Orthodox).⁵³ There are reasons why Protestants are often invincibly ignorant of the Catholic Church’s identity. The phrase denotes the fact that they legitimately do not know, which bears upon the standing of such persons in God’s eyes. James 4:17 states, Whoever knows what is right and fails to do it, for him it is a sin. It is not a sin for a person not to do what is right when he or she, for legitimate reasons, does not know that it is right. On non-culpable (because it is invincible) ignorance, Thomas Aquinas states: "it is not imputed as a sin to man, if he fails to know what he is unable to know. Consequently ignorance of such like things is called invincible, because it cannot be overcome by study.⁵⁴ Not surprisingly given its presence in Scripture and Aquinas, D’Costa finds that this doctrine also was applied by many of the early Fathers.⁵⁵ Invincible (or non-culpable) ignorance is explicitly applied to the Jewish people in Acts 3:17 (I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers) and to the Gentiles in Acts 17:30 (The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all men everywhere to repent").

Some Christians, however, worry that the doctrine of invincible ignorance, when applied to knowledge about Jesus Christ, will undermine Christ’s identity as the universal Savior. In response to this concern, it is necessary to appreciate the possibility of implicit faith in Christ. Instructed by Romans 10:9–10 and many other such passages, Catholics affirm that all who are saved come to salvation through faith in Christ.⁵⁶ Yet, this faith may be explicit or implicit. In Hebrews 11, many people prior to Christ are depicted as having saving faith without explicitly knowing Christ. Hebrews 11:6 suggests that the faith that pleases God, in other words that draws people into right relationship with God, is possible (or at least has been possible) even for those who solely believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him, so long as they do not (for whatever legitimate reason) have a real opportunity to know Christ explicitly. From the Church Fathers onward, the Church has always held that Christ is the sole Savior but that people can be saved without explicit knowledge of him.

Given that for the Jewish people the identity of Jesus has been obscured by Gentile boasting and by polemics and persecutions (which began almost immediately), there is no sense in holding the Jewish people as a whole culpable for rejecting Christian preaching about Jesus’ identity. It follows that, although only God knows hearts, Jews certainly can be united to Christ in the same way that they could prior to his coming, namely by faith in the coming Messiah. As noted above, some people take this claim to imply that Christians should now discourage Jews from becoming Christian, but that is not the point that I am making—no more than my Jewish friends would discourage Christians from renouncing the Trinity and converting to Judaism. Nor am I saying that all individual Jewish people are united to Christ by implicit faith; this of course depends upon whether they sincerely practice Jewish faith. Individual Jewish persons embrace Jesus Christ every year, and I affirm the goodness of such conversions.⁵⁷ Coming to know Jesus as Lord and Christ is a wondrous thing, just as Simeon proclaims to God in Luke 2:29–30 when he meets the infant Jesus and recognizes him as Israel’s Messiah.

As do I, D’Costa connects the condition of invincible ignorance with the mystery of hardening described by Paul in Romans 11:25.⁵⁸ God permits this mystery while also ensuring that his Jewish people have not stumbled so as to fall (Rom 11:11). Positing a condition of invincible ignorance helps Christians to perceive how God has continued to care for his beloved Jewish people over the past two millennia. As D’Costa points out, paragraph 840 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church is clearly undergirded by the notion of invincible ignorance in the case of the Jewish people.⁵⁹ Recall that Paul grants that his fellow Jews who deny Jesus’ messianic identity have a zeal for God, even if it is not enlightened due to their belief that observance of Torah will be the path by which God will bring salvation (Rom 10:2). Paul understands the hardening to be God’s permission of Jewish rejection of the Messiah of Israel, and so it is; but Paul also connects the hardening with God’s plan for the Gentiles (until the full number of the Gentiles come in [Rom 11:25]). With the benefit of hindsight, I think we can also connect it with the boasting of the Gentiles over the Jewish people that, despite Paul’s urgent warning, sealed the Jewish people’s invincible ignorance of Jesus’ identity.

Of course this does not mean that Jews are unable to reject Jesus (and reject God) by the sins against charity and by the other mortally sinful vices that also often characterize Christians.⁶⁰ Nor, again, does it mean that recognizing Jesus Christ and receiving his sacramental grace is not a great boon for every believer, a boon that Christians would wish for Jewish people as for all peoples. However, it does mean that Christians went terribly astray, even if for reasons that were understandable, in assuming that the ongoing Jewish people lost contact with the God who loves them and who elected them for himself.⁶¹ In fact, God has his ways of drawing his beloved people close even during the time of the Pauline mystery, and this closeness can be seen not least in Jewish commitment to the true God over the centuries despite such horrific suffering.

Classically, Thomas Aquinas argued that implicit faith can efficaciously unite people to Christ even if they do not consciously confess Jesus of Nazareth as Lord and Savior.⁶² With regard to the Jewish people after the coming of Christ, however, Aquinas supposed that the preaching of the gospel made matters perfectly clear. Indeed he thinks the gospel truth [is] known universally, other than in rare exceptions such as a boy raised by wolves!⁶³ On this view, no Jew could have an excuse for not believing the gospel. Like the later Council of Florence, then, Aquinas assumed that all Jews are in a sinful condition of unbelief. He was mistaken on this point, in part because he was blind to the profound damage done by Christian boasting over the Jewish people and therefore failed to realize that they could be in a condition of invincible ignorance regarding Christ.⁶⁴

D’Costa recounts the history of Catholic development of doctrine on this matter. Especially once the New World and its countless unevangelized peoples had been discovered, theologians recognized the exception for Aquinas might be more of a rule.⁶⁵ The most important breakthrough came when sixteenth-century Dominican theologians, including Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de Las Casas, argued that persons (specifically, in this case, Native Americans) "may be invincibly ignorant even after hearing the gospel, given the scandalous behaviour of those ‘preaching’ the gospel. . . . Invincible ignorance was not limited to the wolf-child but could operate even during ‘missionary activity’ to entire peoples."⁶⁶ The Conquistadores opened theologians’ eyes to the ability of evangelizers to obscure the gospel by their persecution of the intended recipients of the gospel. Closer to the present, the Second Vatican Council, while affirming clearly that Christ is the universal Savior from whom comes the grace of the Holy Spirit, speaks about the salvation of non-Christians and makes clear that such salvation is possible.⁶⁷ Without overlooking Christ’s command that Christians proclaim the gospel to the whole world, the Council’s Ad Gentes teaches that God, through ways known to himself, can lead people who through no fault of their own are ignorant of the gospel, to that [non-explicit] faith without which it is impossible to please him.⁶⁸ The Council and more recent Catholic magisterial documents make clear that the ongoing Jewish people are not cut off from salvation, even though all salvation comes through Christ.⁶⁹

As indicated above, when Christ is proclaimed to the Jewish people, what they often hear is not Jesus Christ—who is self-sacrificial love—but rather is the slander, hatred, threats, and violence that are well documented over the centuries (examples of which I offer below, especially in chapter 6). It is evident that Catholic proclamation of Christ to the Jewish people has regularly been the site of oppressive behaviors on the part of Catholics, as for instance through non-wanted preaching in the Jewish ghettoes, through a requirement that Jewish men attend six or more Catholic sermons per year, and through the persecution of Jews who refused to convert.⁷⁰ As noted above, the devastating result is often that, as Ellen Charry says, [f]or Jews, theological discussion is freighted with the assumption that the Christian interlocutor is convinced that the Jew has no right to exist at all as a Jew.⁷¹ Christians produced this assumption by their willingness to vilify and oppress Jews who had the temerity not to believe in Jesus as proclaimed by Christians.⁷²

The Catholic theologian Philip Cunningham is rightly sensitive to this tragic context, and he concludes that Christians should not seek to baptize Jews in pre-eschatological historical time. Rather, the Church has a mission alongside Jews, not to Jews.⁷³ As is well known, Karl Barth took essentially the same position, on the grounds that the Jewish people already know the true God, even though paradoxically he also deemed the Jews to be abandoned by God.⁷⁴ A strict rejection of every kind of mission to the Jewish people, however, does not make exegetical or theological sense to me. Mission is about proclaiming the Messiah, and Christians have an undeniable mission to proclaim Jesus Christ, with due sensitivity to context. I hold with D’Costa both that targeted mission toward the Jewish people is wrong and that Christians necessarily possess a mission to proclaim the gospel to all people, including the Jewish people, and to welcome converts joyfully in the name of Christ.⁷⁵

If Cunningham simply has in view the delegitimizing, threatening, and insensitive evangelization that Christians have often imposed upon the Jewish people, then he and I would agree that such actions are wrong. In the context of dialogue, moreover, the goal is to hear and appreciate where the other person is coming from, not to set a manipulative trap. Due in part to its history, the word mission may sound like trap-setting, but when undertaken with appropriate sensitivity in light of the Christian history of persecuting Jews, it will primarily mean allowing one’s deeds to shine with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God (2 Cor 1:4) or proclaiming Jesus’ name within a personal friendship in an appropriate way. The Jewish scholar David Berger aptly points out that the history of Christian treatment of Jews is genuinely relevant to this moral calculus. The Jewish community reacts to missionary efforts by Christians through the prism of crusades, Inquisition, blood libels, accusations of host destruction and well poisoning, depictions of Jews as instruments of the devil, and assorted massacres.⁷⁶ Christians must exercise the utmost care not to bear witness in a manner that merely confirms this Jewish experience of so-called missionary efforts.

Given the distinction between bearing witness—which I consider to be mission in a broad sense⁷⁷—and targeted missionary efforts, the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews is correct that with regard to targeting the Jewish people, it is appropriate that the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews.⁷⁸ The meaning of this statement, however, should be carefully delimited. As D’Costa observes, Sharing the good news about Jesus, his life, death and resurrection, is central to the meaning of the church and entails a personal relationship with Jesus the Saviour.⁷⁹ The Church is intrinsically missional and continually proclaims the gospel to all peoples, including the Jewish people, in a wide variety of ways—as for instance in the Pope’s Urbi et Orbi messages and many other lesser known examples. The Pontifical Commission itself observes that individual Catholics necessarily bear witness to their faith in Jesus Christ also to Jews.⁸⁰ The Commission counsels that individual Catholics should do so in a humble and sensitive manner, acknowledging that Jews are bearers of God’s Word, and particularly in view of the great tragedy of the Shoah.⁸¹

I support appropriate forms of personal and ecclesial witness—or mission in a broad sense—to the Jewish people.⁸² In God’s plan, some Jewish persons, such as Edith Stein or my friend Lawrence Feingold, embrace Jesus as the Messiah and become Christians. As a convert myself (though not a Jewish convert), I welcome all converts to Jesus, just as my Jewish friends welcome converts to the covenantal community of Israel. For the Christian community, converts are generally a cause of much joy due to their charity-filled witness to Jesus Christ.⁸³ At the same time, I disagree with Douglas Farrow’s eschatologically supercharged proposal that Christian mission should be focused anew on the Jews, in faith and hope that their ‘hardening in part’ is about to be lifted.⁸⁴

IV. Religious Truth and Religious Persecution

In the chapters that follow, I return more than once to grave sins committed by Christians against the Jewish people and to the notion of invincible ignorance. Examples of acts of persecution and slanderous attacks could be multiplied and countless pages would be needed to tell this sad tale, which did not prevent the Jewish community from many notable achievements, but which obviously caused tremendous grief and destruction. Even a relatively brief book such as Robert Michael’s A History of Catholic Antisemitism confronts a reader with more shameful episodes of Christian persecution of the Jewish people than one knows how to deal with.⁸⁵

That said, a solution that rejects tout courts the possibility of discord about whether or not the Messiah has come—by rejecting the possibility of religious truth itself—and cannot be a suitable solution for either Christians or Jews. Nor should Christian guilt carry over into a quest to redefine core Christian doctrines in order to make Jewish-Christian dialogue easier, as for example in the well-intentioned but unacceptable redefinitions of Christianity proposed respectively by the Catholic scholar John Pawlikowski and the Jewish scholar Irving Greenberg.⁸⁶ Ellen Charry is correct in this regard that Christians must . . . insist on their right to self-definition, rather than renouncing central Christian truth-claims.⁸⁷ In his otherwise instructive book about some of the most shameful Christian slanders of the Jewish people, the Jewish scholar Kenneth Stow argues that the key to Christian apprehension about Jews has been, from the very outset of Christianity, the fear of being compromised and of losing pride of place; and on this basis Stow proposes that the solution is to accept the idea perhaps first put forth by the Italian Jew David de Pomis, who wrote, as early as the late sixteenth century, that ‘nothing is more a matter of individual will than belief.’ By definition, there are no hierarchies, no preferences, no belief that is better than another. . . . God . . . has no preference, but desires only mutual human respect.⁸⁸ Stow’s position would mean that henceforth, Jews (rejecting hierarchies and preferences) must believe against Judaism itself that God has not uniquely elected the Jewish people and that Jewish belief in the God of Israel is not better than belief in the Canaanite god Baal.

Somewhat similarly—although unintentionally so, and without the clear consequences of Stow’s viewpoint—the Jewish scholar Peter Ochs proposes that the key to unlocking real dialogue between scriptural traditions (including Judaism and Christianity) is a weakened sense of reason, along lines that firmly reject dyadic logic. Such logic, Ochs thinks, necessarily excludes those who do not accept the propositions that one accepts. Instead, he embraces the particularity of traditioned reason, as distinct from a supposed universal reason. He goes far toward excluding propositional judgments of truth from religious knowledge, or at least toward significantly undermining their importance. For example, he states: Since this being [God] is relational, our perception is irreducible to the form of discrete propositions and articulated only through the relational processes we have associated with reparative reasoning or with more concrete displays of reparative work.⁸⁹ He resists truth-claims insofar as they attempt to impose strictly monovalent and therefore binarist readings upon texts.⁹⁰ But surely truth-claims—even when they adopt a binarist viewpoint (for example, the claim that Israel was elected in a way that the Amalekites were not) and even when they describe something that is universally the case—are necessary for both Judaism and Christianity.⁹¹

Insofar as Stow and Ochs are simply advocating an end to religious pride—an end to the haughty assumption that Christians are ipso facto better than Jews or vice versa—their points are understandable. Even if the Messiah has in fact come, as of course I believe he has, pride is the very opposite of the theocentric humility that both Christianity and Judaism require. As Paul says in Romans: Therefore you have no excuse, O man, whoever you are, when you judge another; for in passing judgment upon him you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things (Rom 2:1). David Novak praises divine humility from a contemporary Jewish perspective. He remarks instructively, God chooses to practice humility to show humans he is with us when we are most alone in the world. . . . God comes down from his pedestal and involves himself intimately with the most vulnerable, the most lowly, of his people.⁹²

As Novak has insisted, it need not be an act of pride to believe, as a Jew or as a Christian, that God has uniquely elected the Jewish people from among all nations to be his beloved people. Nor need it be an act of pride to believe that God gave the Torah to Israel and that the Torah is true and so are God’s covenants with Israel. It need not be an act of pride for a Christian to believe that the Messiah has come in Jesus Christ the incarnate Son of God. Likewise the devout Jew who believes that Christians have been misled into worshipping a man—worse, a man who was a false Messiah—has not fallen into pride when he or she argues that the consequences of worshipping Jesus as the Messiah are religiously negative. Nevertheless, believers can deploy truth-claims as a weapon, and this is what has happened in Christian persecution of the Jewish people over the centuries.⁹³ It is clear that Ochs’s scriptural-reasoning groups provide an important bulwark against such abuse.

Here we might consider the renewal of Christian faith in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. While Christians prefer to think of saints such as Anselm of Canterbury (himself persecuted by his fellow Christians, who repeatedly forced him into exile), the Jewish scholar Ruth Langer has pointed out that in the same time period, peasant crusaders decided that they needed to kill off the infidel in their own midst. They massacred the Jewish communities in the Rhineland, even denying the prerogatives of local bishops, as in Mainz, to shelter them in his castle.⁹⁴ Langer adds that, liturgically, even today on the Ninth of Av, while mourning the destruction of the temples, Jews also recite laments for these Rhineland communities.⁹⁵ Many more episodes can be recounted of anti-Jewish violence in the midst of epochs that also exhibit sincere Christian piety. This is the case even though from the patristic period onward a theology developed that granted Jews special, even unique toleration both because they were seen as witnesses to the truth of Christianity and because Romans 11, however one reads it, speaks of their continued separate existence when the fullness of the nations arrives.⁹⁶

At issue, of course, was the meaning of this separate existence. Because of its ground in the first century in a widespread Jewish rejection of Jesus as the Messiah, Christians long presumed that the separate existence entails that the Jewish people are mired in religious darkness and distortion. Yet, as we have seen, Paul emphasizes that the separation involves a mystery that cannot be understood in any simple terms. As noted above, Paul insists that the Jewish people have not stumbled so as to fall (Rom 11:11).⁹⁷ He asks rhetorically, has God rejected his people?, and he responds: By no means! . . . For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable (Rom 11:1, 29).⁹⁸ At the same time, as we saw, the mystery involves a hardening—as part of God’s plan of salvation—that has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in (Rom 11:25). According to Paul the purpose of this mystery of separation is not condemnation but mercy: Just as you were once disobedient to God but now have received mercy because of their disobedience, so they have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also may receive mercy (Rom 11:18, 28–31).

God’s mercy to his Jewish people and to Christians is the heart of the matter, therefore.⁹⁹ The plan of God is a plan of mercy for both Jews and Christians; of this we can be sure. Thus Catholics need to ask for mercy from our Jewish brethren, and Catholics should sympathetically interpret ongoing Judaism. In the past, Catholics tended to interpret ongoing Judaism in the harshest way available. Irrationally and blindly, Catholics blamed the Jewish people for everything bad that happened, scapegoating the Jewish people rather than facing up to Catholic culpability. For example, saddened by the secularization of Europe, even Hans Urs von Balthasar fell somewhat into this embarrassing blame game.¹⁰⁰ Today, one can only hope that the rising surge of Catholics who are (unfortunately) embracing secularism will put an end to Catholic scapegoating of the Jewish people. On both coasts of the United States, baptized Catholics often lead the way in secularizing American society; the blame cannot be put upon ongoing Judaism. Moreover, when Catholics come to know the actual religious life of the Jewish people, Catholics discover the spiritual richness of ongoing Judaism, embodied in our time by many great Jewish scholars whose piety and wisdom are clear to all attentive minds.

Undoubtedly, Catholics can see doctrinal deficiencies in ongoing Judaism, most notably the lack of Jesus Christ—which is no small lack. If Jesus were a small matter, then Catholics would convert to Judaism or at least would not reasonably remain Christian. Adam Gregerman says in his study of Walter Kasper’s theological writings on Judaism and of the 2015 document ‘The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable’ (Rom 11:29): Even though they present the Old Covenant in strongly positive terms, they nonetheless compare it unfavorably to the New Covenant. They assess the former as in fundamental ways inferior to the latter.¹⁰¹ This Christian perspective, in my view, makes sense. How could Christians, believing in Jesus as Messiah and Lord, conclude otherwise? I hasten to add, however, that the comparison between Catholicism and Judaism on the doctrinal level cannot be allowed to become, on either side, a claim to moral superiority in the world. The Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews underscores that the permanence of Israel is accompanied by a continuous spiritual fecundity, in the rabbinical period, in the Middle Ages, and in modern times.¹⁰² Let all say amen to this. Of course there are a number of Catholics and Jews who cause embarrassment to their co-religionists and cause problems in the world, but such disobedience cannot overcome the gifts and the call of God (Rom 11:29–30).

I note that this affirmation does not compel Christians to affirm the divine inspiration of the Talmud or to make the greatest Jewish scholars into sainted doctors of the Church. Rather it simply speaks the truth about the spiritual gifts that God has given to his ongoing Jewish people. Christians do not have to measure this spiritual fecundity against that of Christianity as though there were a zero-sum competition or as though Christians were the judge. With Karl Barth, we can appreciate the supremacy of His free grace towards this people [the Jewish people] as it was revealed and actualised in that One.¹⁰³ We do so not as evidence that God runs roughshod over every human no—even if in the end God’s merciful plan will not be defeated, and even if the eschatological judgment of sin has already taken place in the merciful Christ—but rather with an eye to the truth that God continues to act on behalf of his people Israel, ensuring that his beloved people have never stumbled so as to fall (Rom 11:1).¹⁰⁴

Paul deeply mourns the fact that his brethren, his kinsmen according to the flesh, the people of Israel, have