Land as an Issue in Christian‐Jewish Dialogue

Abstract

Land as an Issue in Christian‐Jewish Dialogue John T. Pawlikowski Two tendencies played a prominent role in shaping the Christian outlook on the issue of the Jewish People and the land of Israel over the centuries. These tendencies have their roots in the early centuries of Christianity. The first of these tendencies was the so‐called theology of “perpetual wandering” perspective with respect to the Jewish People. This theology became so imbedded in popular Western culture that even a plant came to bear its name. According to the “perpetual wandering” theology, Christians look upon Jews as forever relegated to the status of “displaced persons” among the nations of the world. A prevailing mindset is evident in many of the patristic writings. When the “veil of the Temple was rent” and the covenant between God and his people broken permanently as a result, Jews received “a bill of divorce,” as it where, and from that time onwards they were doomed to roam restless over the face of the earth. This perpetual wandering theology continued in force throughout Christian history into the modern period. The noted biblical scholar who in fact defended Nazism Gerhard Kittel and served as editor of the very influential Theological Dictionary of the New Testament1 viewed post‐biblical Judaism as largely a community in dispersion. “Authentic Judaism,” he wrote “abides by the symbol of the stranger wandering restless and homeless on the face of the earth.” And even the great Cardinal Augustin Bea, who played such a central role in the development, passage and initial implementation of Vatican II’s historic Nostra Aetate, revealed continued traces of a traditional Catholic mindset regarding Jews, the covenant and the land. In a 1966 work titled The Church and the Jewish People. Bea falls into the use of language quite reminiscent of perpetual wandering theology. “The fate of Jerusalem,” he tells us, “constitutes a sort of final reckoning at the end of a thousand years of infidelities and opposition to God.” From that point onward, Bea insists, Jews and Judaism existed merely as a “witness to their iniquity and to the truth of the Christian faith.”2 It is understandable, therefore, according to Bea, why many Christian bodies reacted to the reestablishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948 with considerable consternation and even outright opposition. And we also need to recall that in 1904 when Pope Pius X received Theodore Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist effort to restore a Jewish state in occupied Palestine, the Pope ultimately offered a theological explanation for his unwillingness to support this effort. In his perspective since Jews did not accept Jesus Christ he could never endorse the notion of a Jewish national homeland—clearly shades of a perpetual wandering theology—even though he indicated to Herzl that he was in no position to stop this effort.3 From the above brief sample of Christian approaches to the question of Jews and the land beginning in the Patristic era, it should be evident that a long tradition exists within Christianity of an explicitly theological approach to the land of Israel. In fact, it is fair to say that rarely, if ever, in Christian history has Israel been merely regarded as a “political” issue for the churches. Any adequate understanding of Judaism’s attachment to the land within a Christian context must begin with a clear acknowledgment that the churches basically rejected this attachment for explicitly Christian theological reasons. While chapter four of Nostra Aetate is a very brief statement in comparison to most other documents from Vatican II, it in fact contains the seeds of a major theological revolution that undercut the validity of the classical “perpetual wandering” theology of Judaism within the churches. For, in asserting that there never existed any basis for a blanket accusation of deicide and in affirming the continuing validity of Jewish covenantal participation after the Christ Event and the bondedness that Christians and Jews now share through the covenant, Nostra Aetate decisively undercut the foundation of the displacement/perpetual wandering theology of the Jewish People that had dominated Christian theological and popular thinking for two millennia. For that reason it is quite accurate to...