The Jewish Indictment
S. M. Hutchens on the Gospel of Christ & the Law of the Lord
Judaism is a national life, a life which the national religion and human ethical principles (the ultimate object of every religion) embrace without engulfing. Jesus came and thrust aside all the requirements of the national life . . . he ignored them completely; in their stead he set up an ethico-religious system bound up with his conception of the Godhead. . . . Everything which Jesus ever uttered of [universal moral import] is Jewish ethical teaching, too; but his overemphasis was not Judaism, and, in fact, brought about non-Judaism. When these ethical standards are severed from the facts of daily life and taught as religious rules, while, at the same time, everyday life is conducted along completely different lines . . . it is inevitable that such ethical standards can make their appeal only to priests and recluses and the more spiritually minded among individuals. . . . Such has been the case with Christianity from the time of Constantine till the present day. . . .
—Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching, in
Barker and Gregg, Jesus Beyond Christianity (Oxford, 2010), 56–57.The Christian variation is of a new beginning implicit in sacred order that lives in the flesh of the Jew Jesus as himself, in himself, sacred order incarnate. . . . The use of this image of Jesus as the Christ suggested to the ancients of Israel from the beginning a danger to sacred order itself. . . . The emergence of Christ into the self of every faithful Christian became the art of imagining oneself crucified with Christ. This being with Christ was not necessarily a doing of the commanding truths out of Israel. . . . Those commanding truths were best understood as historically superseded by the advent of the Christ . . . the sacred writings, the great cultural achievement of Israel, were concluded under a condition that was itself unredeemed. . . . Sacred order was not only not enough but actually excluded the revelation of that faith which is the fusion of Christ’s self into every believing human self. Here is the origin of the famous pragmatic will to believe in this version: “Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But, after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:24–26).
After that will to believe has come, every man becomes a master of his fused self, as Paul wrote in an entry of tremendous predictive importance for the emergence of the art of being in the third [briefly defined: individualist] culture therapeutically. So Christ had actually replaced sacred order, and the great antinomian implication was, in the second culture itself, an implication that the forerunners of the third culture tried to exploit immediately in Saul/Paul’s own time. “God forbid” if Saul was eliminated, and a certain Christological utopianism became the break that built a new and fictive continuity into the history of man in the second culture. The Christian story became the predicate for the anti-Christian, and first of all anti-Jewish, story of the supremacy of the arts and sciences in the third culture.
—Philip Rieff, My Life Among the Deathworks
(University of Virginia Press, 2006), 202–204.
For a long while I thought the many defects of Christianity were occasioned mostly by its reception of sinners. In reading the work of Jewish critics like Klausner and Rieff, however, I have come to admit it morally defective because one must labor harder than Christians have been willing to make St. Paul into something other than an antinomian, given the impression of the law he conveys against those who would make it equal to the gospel. The Psalms say, “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving [or converting] the soul,” and “Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord,” which Paul must be read very closely to exempt from denying.
The Most Difficult Paradox
The greatest weakness of Christianity as we know it is its ethical inferiority to orthodox Judaism. In general it treats the law as though Christ expunged it, when Christ himself denied he came to do any such thing. But here’s the rub—an absolute scandal to the Jew—Christ himself also seemed to set the law at naught.
It is a terrible leap of faith for the Jew (and for me) to see Christ as the Lord of the law in such a way that he could both annul and confirm it. This, for me, is Christianity’s most difficult paradox, and while I accept it for Christ’s sake through a kind of Kierkegaardian suspension, I have the greatest sympathy for those who cannot overfloat the Rock of Offense. The blindness of the ethically serious Jew often looks to me more like clear-sightedness, and I don’t blame him for keeping his children away from Christians.
So much of what typically seems to eventuate in Christianity follows the pattern of two very religious women who worked at a place I also was employed and had to listen to them talk—sort of the experiential equivalent of kibitzing liberal Jews. Both had spawned large families of bastards through numerous sexual liaisons, and their children were following suit as soon as they became fertile—but they were churchwomen, chock-full of very sincere talk about Jesus. Dieu pardonnera—c’est son metier.
Christianity, which looks to me awfully like those women, will not be healed until believing Jews bring the Torah back into it, and begin to make it clear to Christians how Christ is the telos of the law for all who believe, an end that wholly incorporates the law without destroying a jot or tittle. At present Christianity is a Gentile institution, strongly marked by Gentile uncleanness, where those who attempt to live in accordance with the Word of God in the law (which abides forever) have always been susceptible to the charge of sub-Christianity.
The Jew first. There are very good reasons for that. May the Lord haste the day when the superior branch is grafted back in, when the Jews accept the gospel of Christ which is theirs by prior right, and the Christians accept the law as the Word of God.
From the March/April issue of Touchstone.
My Answer to "Jewish Indictment" Mail
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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