51 - The Mystery Of the Jews' Rejection Of Christ

The Mystery Of the Jews' Rejection Of Christ
By A. Roy Eckardt

IN approaching the question of the Jewish non-acceptance of Christ, we remember that from the point of view of the New Testament a mystery such as this is not a human secret or a tromper l'oeil known only to the mystery story writer or the magician. A mystery is a divine secret, a complement of revelation, and hence something that is not "solved' after the fashions of men.¹ Revelation never ceases to partake of mystery, since it is the disclosure of the God who at the same time remains transcendent and hidden. We cannot speak of the divine mystery, and especially of the mystery of the Gospel, Without taking off our shoes because of the fact that the place on which we stand is holy ground. To "think God's thoughts after him" carries many spiritual risks.

I

It is evident, however, that there have been extra-theological reasons for the rejection of the Christian faith by the Jews. That is to say, it is at once inaccurate and unfair to assert that the only thing that has kept Jews from becoming Christians is the stumbling block of the Gospel-a refusal to acknowledge their transgressions as sinful men and to open their hearts to salvation through the redeeming grace of Christ.² Both in deference to these extra-theological reasons and in order to make clear the difference between a "secular" understanding and our own specifically theological understanding, we refer at the outset to two approaches within the former type of

¹ G. S. Hendry, in A Theological Word Book of the Bible, edited by Alan Richardson (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952), p. 156.
² The implicitly universal proposition, "the rejection of Christ by the Jews," is actually misleading. We can hardly assert that the entire Jewish nation of Jesus' day denied him as the Messiah. Many and perhaps most Jews probably never heard of him, and even among those who did many did not really face the spiritual and existential alternative in their own lives of accepting or rejecting him in his messianic role. Furthermore, at its inception the Christian ekklesia was entirely Jewish in character, while the Church through the centuries has never been without its Hebrew Christians. The oversimplification in our wording is a literary concession describing the fact that across the years most Jews have not acknowledged Jesus as the Christ and have seen fit instead to remain outside the Christian Church.

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understanding. These approaches are the religio-historical and the social psychological.

From a purely religio-historical point of view the element of "mystery" becomes somewhat transparent. Jews find justification within their own tradition for not receiving Jesus as Lord. If Jesus in fact claimed to be divine-a point of recurring debate among New Testament scholars-he was from the Jewish perspective guilty of blasphemy. For the Jews it is true, of course, that when Messiah appears he will come as a highly exalted figure. But he is not divine. If, at the other extreme, Jesus made no unique religious claims for himself, he remains for the Jews at most a prophet or teacher or compelling personality. If as a third alternative Jesus claimed the messianic office without making the claim of divinity, the way in which he finally interpreted the role for himself was to stand in conflict with the dominant view among first century and later Jews. When Messiah comes he is to vindicate the people of God by throwing off the yoke of their oppressors. He is to come in glory. But Jesus of Nazareth failed to fulfill this expectation. On the contrary, he suffered death at the hands of the Romans in a miserable way reserved for especially reprehensible criminals. Thus, the Jews who did come to accept Jesus as the Christ stood in opposition to the religious tradition in which they had been reared. Theirs was the gift of resurrection faith-a point where religio-historical interpretation is driven into a theological dimension.

From a social psychological point of view, we may refer to the normal reaction of the Jews as human beings to the prejudice and discrimination of a more or less hostile majority. In modern times the Jews have been invited to become part of a "Christian" society and perhaps even part of the Christian Church. At the same time they feel that they are not fully welcome. However felicitous the experiences of many contemporary Jews within the wider culture in which they move, Jews possess indelible collective memories of a role as pariah. As a contemporary political scientist has written, "no matter how high they are placed on socio-economic scales, Jews are considered by non-Jews to be an out-group, and more often than not an undesirable one. There are few Jews who do not feel this in their bones."³

This dual situation has been conducive to serious psychological

³ Lawrence H. Fuchs, "American Jews and the Presidential Vote," The American Political Science Review, XLIX, 2 (June 1955), p. 399.

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conflict. The Jew finds it very difficult to know which way to turn. Any potential disposition to assume the religion of the majority is countered by the Jew's natural reaction against prejudice and a consequent tendency to cling to his own group for whatever safety it may afford. Any one of us would do the same.

Just as religio-historical interpretation is driven into theological understanding, so too social psychological analysis raises theological questions. Thus, it is doubtful whether the persecution of the Jews across the years can be accounted for ultimately-within the limits of human comprehension, of course-save through such categories as chosen people, suffering servant, sin, and crucifixion.⁴ Nevertheless, it remains possible, analytically speaking, to distinguish extra-theological factors from theological factors. The former have undoubtedly been of significance in the Jewish "rejection" of Christianity. Without underestimating the importance of such factors, we turn now to a theological perspective, i.e., to the Jewish non-acceptance of Christ as a problem for Christian faith.

II

What does it mean to say that the rejection of Christ by the Jews may be considered from the perspective of divine mystery? Two points are in order by way of coming to terms with this question.

1. In the New Testament the word "mystery' is sometimes used derivatively with respect to certain phenomena that "have a significance in the framework of the divine plan which is made known only by revelation."⁵ Examples are the institution of marriage (Eph. 5: 32), the man of sin (II Thess. 2: 7), and the scarlet woman (Rev. 17: 5-7).

The mystery of the Jews' rejection of the Gospel has a much more serious and decisive significance than this. For Paul, the principal user of the word "mystery" in the New Testament, the reaction of the Jews to Christ is intimately related to the whole meaning of the Gospel. The central reference here is Romans 9-11. To the Israelites "belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ" (Rom. 9: 4-5).⁶

⁴ Cf. A, Roy Eckardt, Christianity and the Children of Israel (New York: Kings Crown Press, 1948), ch. IL
⁵ Hendry, in A Theological Word Book, p. 156.
⁶ All New Testament quotations are from the Revised Standard Version.

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Through the transgression of Israel, "salvation has come to the Gentiles . . ." (11: 11). And indeed the special mystery that Paul wants his readers to grasp is that "a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in' and so all Israel will be saved . . ." (11: 25 f). In fact, for Paul-so Professor Hendry reminds us-the greatest mystery of all is that the Gentiles should come to be included with the Jews in the divine salvation.⁷

2. If the mystery of the hardening of Israel bears a decisive relation to the meaning of the Gospel,⁸ it is nevertheless the case that this disposition of the Jews must be construed negatively or from the point of view of the divine sufferance. This permissive state of affairs stands in contrast to the Gospel. According to the New Testament, "election in Jesus Christ is, at the same time, redemption."⁹ Now that the Christ has come, the most we can say for the election of the Israelites is that "they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers." With respect to the Gospel, they are "enemies of God" (Rom. 11: 28).

The concept "enemy" points to the general problem of events and situations which appear to be in certain respects irreconcilable with God's will as it is revealed in Jesus Christ. A great many things fall within this category-indifference to God, unbelief, sickness and death, strife among men and nations, etc. We think of human suffering as in some sense out of accord with the decided will of God. With the possible exception of Jesus Christ, we do not say that men are elected to suffer. As best suffering is used by God in a way that in the end vindicates the divine purpose and love. From a theocentric perspective, suffering is a permissive phenomenon.

In a way not unlike human suffering in general, the Jewish role points to the divine judgement.¹⁰ We recall the words of Nicolas

⁷ A Theological Word Book, p. 156.
⁸ L. W. Halvorson points out that among the factors that have kept the Church largely inactive in the field of the Christian approach to the Jews are false notions of the meaning of the Gospel (American Missions Together, VIII, 3 [December 19541, P. 7).
⁹ Karl H. Rengstorf, "The Jewish Problem and the Church's Understanding of its Own Mission," in Göte Hedenquist, ed., The Church and the Jewish People (London: Edinburgh House Press, 1954), p. 30.
¹⁰ It should not be necessary to add that such reasoning does not at all warrant the pretension that God is seeking to "punish" or "destroy" the Jews for their rejection of Christ in the manner of human retribution. In the Christian view, the divine judgment is not vindictive; it is, in H. Richard Niebuhr's phrase, the "corrective action of a God who is loyal to his creatures." Nor are Christians justified in imagining that they ought to serve as instruments for some alleged divine punishment of the Jews. Any such attitude is quite foreign to Paul's exposition in Romans and to the New Testament as a whole. The attitude is just as immoral and theologically invalid as the allegation that the suffering of men-at least men other than ourselves-embodies a special divine chastisement. In the presence of the Jews, Christians are well advised to reflect upon their own transgressions.

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Berdyaev: "God's chosen people, who at one and the same time gave us the Messiah and rejected him, could not have an historic destiny like that of other peoples."¹¹ If indeed "the wrath of men shall praise" God (Ps. 76: 10), is there not a sense in which the works of all men are ultimately gathered up into the divine purpose? May not the Lord use non-Christian Jews for his sovereign purposes in a peculiar way substantially different from the affirmative election of witnesses to the Gospel? Can we not discern in the phenomenon of the Jewish rejection of Christ, as mysterious as it is, a measure of meaning for the life of faith? The answer is of significance not only for Jewish life of the past but for Jewish-and Christian-life of all succeeding centuries.

It is our faith that Israel was originally chosen in order to exercise a pivotal role in the salvation of the entire human race. Most Jews have not carried forward this task through a witness to the redemption that comes from one of their own number, Jesus Christ. Yet, with Paul, we continue to affirm that the Jews remain God's people. What is the explicit nature of their permissive election?¹²

III

A clue to the answer may be epitomized by the phrase "the Christian temptation." The promises to Israel have been fulfilled in the new people of God, the Church. Just as the temptation of the old Israel has always been to see in its election the assurance of exaltation above other nations, so too the inevitable temptation of the new Israel is to see in Christ a vindication of its own human claims and ideals. Certainly Christians of the past and the present have manifested genuine contriteness before the judgment of Christ and have through him and the Holy Spirit received newness of life, including the fruits of love, kindness, and goodness. To assert otherwise is to mock the power of God's grace. But it is equally clear that the new dispensation of grace does not mean an absolute guarantee of brotherliness or a final remedy for sinful self-righteousness in the relations of Christians with one another and with other men. Fanaticism and intolerance have dogged the Christian community all through its life. The horrible treatment of the Jews at the hands

¹¹ Nicolas Berdyaev, Christianity and Anti-Semitism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), p. 6.
¹² Are the terms "permissive" and "election" contradictory? Our answer is that when men say "no" to God, they are nevertheless responding to him. Their acts can still be used by him.

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of Christians in medieval and modern times is the most relevant exemplification within the present context of the failure of Christians to obey their Lord's command to love enemy and friend. It is a harsh saying that the Christian cannot come before the altar of God with his gifts until he has been reconciled to his brothers (Matt. 5: 23 f).

But we must not become too deeply engaged here in an added mystery, the mystery of iniquity-however closely related it is to the mystery of Israel. Our concern is with what God may do with the works of men. We submit an analogy.¹³ In The Protestant Era Paul Tillich presents the view that Protestantism is a special historical embodiment of an eternal principle which is effective in all periods of history, the principle of the judging and transforming grace of God.

The Protestant protest against itself must become concrete, and it has, in fact, become concrete in its history: it is concrete in the very existence of a secular world. . . . [The] church whose nature it is to be a Gestalt of grace may lose its true nature and a secular group or movement may be called to become a bearer of grace, though latently. . . . Protestantism bears a unique relationship to secularism: Protestantism, by its very nature, demands a secular reality. It demands a concrete protest against the sacred sphere and against ecclesiastical pride…. If Protestantism surrenders to secularism, it ceases to be a Gestalt of grace. If it retires from secularism, it ceases to be Protestant, namely, a Gestalt that includes within it the protest against itself.¹⁴

The above insight can be applied to the problem before us. The perennial evangelical problem is how it is possible to mediate to the world the God of Abraham and of Jesus Christ. We are aware that many Jews have become secularized and are in many respects poor witnesses to the God who has chosen them as his people. "Not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel" (Rom. 9: 6). And yet, "God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew" (11: 2). The apostle goes on to assert that the Jews' rejection of Christ means "the reconciliation of the world" (11: 15). He is speaking of the truth that "through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles . . ." (11: 11). Naturally, we today no longer limit the significance of the Jewish "trespass" to what Paul discerns here;

¹³ The paragraphs that follow rely to some extent upon an article by the present writer entitled "Christian Faith and the Jews," The Journal of Religion, XXX, 4 (October 1950), pp. 235-245.
¹⁴ Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 213 f.

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the wall of partition between Jew and Gentile has long since been broken down. The wild olive shoot has been grafted in. But because, as the apostle insists, "the gifts and the call of God" remain "irrevocable" (11: 29), the Jews as a whole must still occupy a peculiar place in the present purposes of God, if only in a permissive sense.

It is in this vein that we may suggest the concept of "protestant Judaism." Judaism and the Jews, as "strangers and sojourners" in an extra-Jewish world, mediate the living God from a perspective immediately beyond Christianity. Prophetic Judaism is from one point of view part of the "latent Church." To quote again from Paul Tillich, "the acknowledgment of the latent Church undercuts ecclesiastical and hierarchical arrogance without rejecting the claim of the Church to be the community in which the New Being in Christ is actual."¹⁵ The witness of Israel chastens the Church. Judaism serves to protest against the self-idolatries of Christians and the Christian community. (This does not mean, of course, that the Jews have no idolatries of their own.) The Jewish protest is made peculiarly possible by the fact that the Jews are never fully assimilated to a "Christian" civilization. More positively, the Jews often stand-at least in the United States-for forms of social justice which excel the more conservative attitudes of the socially entrenched Christian community. To be sure, such representation may be generated in part by the Jews' own memories and experiences of oppression at the hands of the majority. The fact remains that the Biblical tradition, which has nurtured Christians and Jews alike, directly and forcefully associates social justice and righteousness with the will of God. As H. L. Ellison has stated, "It is a great tribute to Judaism and an evidence of the grace of God at work that the long centuries of persecution and degradation so little influenced the moral fibre of Jewry."¹⁶

Secularism cannot fill the role of the Jews.¹⁷ Any protest that it may be able to make against idolatry and in behalf of justice is external to the sacred sphere.¹⁸ Other religions cannot fill Judaism's role. The permissive function of Judaism is uniquely related to the spe-

¹⁵ From a lecture manuscript by Paul Tillich.
¹⁶ H. L. Ellison, The Christian Approach to the Jew (London: Edinburgh House Press, 1958), pp. 51 f.
¹⁷ The present paragraph is taken almost verbatim from Eckardt, "Christian Faith and the Jews," op. cit., p. 237.
¹⁸ Of course, ultimately speaking no real division is possible between the sacred and the profane.

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cial revelation of God which appears in the Judeo-Christian strand of history (although we freely grant that God's power and grace are in some way at work in all religions and among all men). Applying the last section of the above passage from Tillich's Protestant Era, we say that if Protestant Christianity surrenders to Judaism, it ceases to be a Gestalt of divine grace manifest in Jesus Christ. But if Protestantism turns its back on Judaism, it ceases to be Protestant, namely, a Gestalt that includes the religious protest against itself.

IV

In an essay entitled "The Relations of Christians and Jews in Western Civilization," Reinhold Niebuhr has recently stressed the prophetic contribution that the Jews have made to our civilization and also the great need for humility and self-examination among Christians in the presence of Jews. Niebuhr emphasizes too the moral dilemmas that the Christian conscience has faced in trying to relate its norms to the community beyond the Church. But he then indulges in a non sequitur when he concludes that Christian missionary activities among the Jews are wrong. They are wrong, Niebuhr alleges, not only because they "have little fruit to boast for their exertions. They are wrong because the two faiths despite differences are sufficiently alike for the Jew to find God more easily in terms of his own religious heritage than by subjecting them to the hazards of guilt feeling involved in a conversion to a faith, which whatever its excellencies, must appear to him as a symbol of an oppressive majority culture."¹⁹ Through a reliance upon purely "religious," pragmatic, and, in effect, humanistic criteria Niebuhr fails to face up to the issue of missionary obligation posed by the very nature of the Christian evangel. His point of view is reminiscent of a latitudinarianism that has been influential in the Churches of America.

In contrast to Niebuhr's conclusion, Harold Floreen speaks critically of those who stress "the beneficial role Israel is playing apart from the Church, as though the will of God were thereby being fulfilled…. The churches must not justify themselves in any neglect of their duty toward the Jews by stressing values to be found in Israel's estrangement."²⁰ Further, as Edmund Perry emphasizes,

¹⁹ Niebuhr, Reinhold, Pious and Secular America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), p. 108.
²⁰ In American Missions Together, VIII, 3 (December 1954), pp. 31 f.

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"God has used surviving Judaism gloriously, but that is not the raison d'etre of her survival…. Judaism has survived in spite of her refusal to follow Christ. She has survived because of God's faithfulness to his election of Israel and to his covenant promise … and not because the Church would become irreparably corrupt without the Synagogue. The fact of God's faithfulness to Israel, which alone accounts for the survival of Judaism, does not, therefore, subtract one iota from the Christian claim that Jesus Christ and his Church are the fulfillment, the full consummation of Israel."²¹ Our distinction between Gospel election and permissive election makes it possible to speak of a genuine, if recusant, role for contemporary Israel without falling into Niebuhr's error or into the distortions pointed to by Floreen and Perry.

Christ came to his own and his own did not receive him. But the Lord has not rejected his people. The permissive election of the Jews is manifest in the continuing witness to the living God which they have been enabled to make, almost in spite of themselves. The positive substance of the Gospel and the permissive role of Israel are brought together dialectically by the apostle Paul in his word to the Gentiles: "Just as you were once disobedient to God but now have received mercy because of [the Israelites'] disobedience, so they have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also may receive mercy. For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all" (Rom. 11: 30-32). The Jewish rejection of Christ is not condoned, but, to the eye of faith, the mystery of the hardening that has come upon part of Israel is given a measure of contemporary meaning. In so far as there is validity in our exposition perhaps we too may be permitted to join the apostle in song: "O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! (Rom. 11: 33).

²¹ Perry, Edmund, The Gospel in Dispute (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1958), p. 137. Perry's study is a forceful and scholarly presentation of a Christian missionary witness in the presence of other missionary faiths. See especially ch. 5, "Christianity and Judaism."