"All Israel shall be saved"
John Hobbins posts eirenically but clearly on the new Roman Catholic collect concerning the Jewish people for use on Good Friday. Slightly earlier in the week Ruth Gledhill reported it in the Times, and quite fairly given her past evidence of Zionist sympathies and friendships, though she did perhaps give undue weight to her friend Irene Lancaster who also blogged it, typically seeing it as yet more evidence of anti-Semitism.
It seems to me that this is and will remain a point where Christians and Jews must essentially disagree. It is a quite essential part of Christian belief to hope that all people of every race will acknowledge Jesus as Messiah, Saviour and Lord. From a strictly theological perspective, it would be anti-semitic to exclude the Jewish people from that universal hope. Practically and conceptually many of the ways Christians have sought to express that hope has indeed been anti-semitic, but it need not be so, and John points some of that out.
The Roman Catholic Church tends to be fairly clear, even where others wish it wasn’t. The Church of England’s collect should probably quoted for the sake of comparison. It still has the horizon of a universal hope for Jews as well as Gentiles, is deeply biblical, but somehow manages (in typical Anglican style) to make the whole thing sound far more open and ambiguous.
Let us pray for God’s ancient people, the Jews,
the first to hear his word –
for greater understanding between Christian and Jew
for the removal of our blindness and bitterness of heart
that God will grant us grace to be faithful to his covenant
and to grow in the love of his name.Silence
Lord, hear us.
Lord, graciously hear us.
Lord God of Abraham,
bless the children of your covenant, both Jew and Christian;
take from us all blindness and bitterness of heart,
and hasten the coming of your kingdom,
when the Gentiles shall be gathered in,
all Israel shall be saved,
and we shall dwell together in mutual love and peace
under the one God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
February 7th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
when the Gentiles shall be gathered in,
This seems to be the critical thing - is it happening, or has it happened, or will it happen? Perhaps the ‘tense’ divide is too cut and dried a sense of time. I have no answer. I have to live with the questions. Jews worship with me as a Christian and I worship as a Christian with Jews if I go to Synagogue. I see the Lord in the praises of his people and I see the praise of the same Lord in our high Anglican Eucharist - is spite of my problems with traditional ecclesial structures. I have to live with my own confusion too since it is impossible to define the Chruch visually as if some denomination had the whole together - when it is obvious none does.
February 8th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
” That our God and Lord may illumine their hearts that they might acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Savior of all”
I believe you are missing the point. Of course you should wish Christianity is adopted by all, because in your system, those who are not Chrisitan are damned. I will grant there is a backhanded degree of compassion here. However, look at the subtext of this quote. Do Christians pray for any _specific_ people’s salvation _aside_ from the Jews? Not so as I recall from when I was Catholic. The key question is why is this prayer necessary? Is not the Holy Spirit sufficient to call to those who are good at heart and who will thus convert when they learn of Christianity? What would make for the Jews to need a _special_ wish? What would be “darkening” our collective hearts (so that “illumination” was required)? What factor isn’t darkening the hearts of any other people?
Clearly, the implicit answer is our Jewishness. What else makes Jews different save for their descent and their way of life? By offering this prayer you are saying this way of life and/or physical heredity puts Jews _farther_ from salvation than _any other people_. Moreover, it is a way of saying this is such a degree of impediment to our savlation that the Jews require a special prayer to address it. Christianity is all about doing good. So only intractible evil in their way of life could make the Jews specially deaf and resistant to the Holy Spirit.
This is particularly galling for Jews because Christians still believe the lies, half truths and distortions about the Jews in the Gospels. Of course, I suppose you have to, or you’d have to question if the Holy Spirit really was with the Evangelists and the early Christians (or how could they slander and defame the Jews and be trusted as exemplars for later generations?) What Jews are responding to is the lack of objective validation for the premise of this prayer: that something special makes the Jews more resistant to being good people or hearing Jesus than say, the Party members and soldiers in North Korea.
You may think my take on things is pessimistic and impugning the motives of the Church. But if you somehow have some hermeneutic argument that satisifies your conscience (that Christian messages of slander and defamation of Jews in the Gospels are good and necessary)…at least acknowledge that such a reconciliation requires trust and respect for the Christian worldview. I hope you can see that it is reasonable for this trust to be absent from the people who endured 18 centuries of energetic persecution by Christians. Our lack of acceptance of your truth has a great deal to do with how that truth made you treat us (though that’s just the tip of the iceberg).
And thus this prayer is inappropriate. Even if it is meant purely in good faith as a friendly thing, we’re telling you that this is not how its being heard. And Jews have good reason to not hear it that way. Just pray for us quietly along with everything else. If you want to address anti semitism, repeat Pope John Paul II’s apology for anti semitism and his repudiation of the charge of deicide instead. That would be more effective. Why not do that?
(As to what slanders and lies? http://tahkhleet.livejournal.com/7898.html#cutid1 for more details)
February 8th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Kendra, I don’t think you’ve responded to anything I said. Instead you’ve had a general rant about the Pope, and ignored entirely the different wording of the prayer I posted. You also claim I hold views I do not, with no evidence. If you want respect, you might start by showing it.