Feature
When Gentile Meets Jew
A Christian Reading of Ruth & the Hebrew Scriptures
Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, is widely seen as a breakthrough in Christian relations with Jews. Implicitly chiding centuries of anti-Jewish polemic, Pope Paul VI proclaimed that while “the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ,” yet “what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.” Thus, “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”
The Supersessionist Critique
This was not enough for some. Though acknowledging Nostra Aetate as a “dramatic reversal” in the church’s traditional “supersessionist narrative,” Christopher Leighton, Executive Director of the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, has written that the document continues to express the “ambiguity” and “triumphalism” of past Christian attitudes toward Jews.
In asserting that “the Church believes that by His cross Christ, Our Peace, reconciled Jews and Gentiles, making both one in Himself,” the church left Jews where they always had been, “in a subordinate role within the grand Christian narrative.”
For Leighton, supersessionism triumphed in the early Church because it became embedded in hermeneutical methods. By finding typological correspondences between the old and the new, by seeking Christ as the looming figure beneath the surface of the Old Testament, Christian readers of Scripture nullified the Jews’ interpretations of their own Scriptures.
Jewish readings were replaced by Christian ones, just as Israel was replaced by the Church. Rosemary Reuther was expressing a common sentiment when she called upon the Church to repent of imperialistic Christological readings of the Bible, which necessarily disallow Jewish interpretations.
Worries that the New Testament and its interpretive strategies are inherently anti-Semitic hang over the recent flurry of efforts to recover traditional Christian modes of interpretation.
Ultimately, this is an unavoidable clash between Jews and Christians. Christians condemn medieval pogroms, but few want to give up Paul; Christians agree that the Crusaders often treated Jews horribly, but they are not willing to admit that this is inherent in our canon. Unless all Jews or all Christians convert, the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament will remain a battleground.
Yet, the supersessionist critique has pointed up weaknesses in some traditional typology. Christological interpretations have often been guilty as charged—they do nullify Jewish interpretations because they are inattentive to the specific contours of the Hebrew text and the history it records. When Bede claims that the combination of wood and gold in the tabernacle boards typifies the double nature of Christ, we have reason to be suspicious that he has not thought very carefully about what the tabernacle was and meant to ancient Israel.
No Christian interpreter of Exodus or Leviticus would dare go into print today without absorbing the work of Jacob Milgrom, Menahem Haran, Baruch Levine, and a host of other Jewish experts. Literary interpretation of the Bible has been all the rage for several decades, and many of the best practitioners (Robert Alter, Michael Fishbane, Moshe Garsiel) are Jews.
Peter J. Leithart is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and the president of Trinity House Institute for Biblical, Liturgical & Cultural Studies in Birmingham, Alabama. His many books include Defending Constantine (InterVarsity), Between Babel and Beast (Cascade), and, most recently, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Baylor University Press). His weblog can be found at www.leithart.com. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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