Reviewed by: Searching Her Own Mystery: Nostra Aetate, the Jewish People, and the Identity of the Church by Mark S. Kinzer Gavin D’Costa Searching Her Own Mystery: Nostra Aetate, the Jewish People, and the Identity of the Church by Mark S. Kinzer (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 262 pp. MARK S. KINZER HAS a long and intimate experience of Catholicism. He is currently Rabbi of Congregation Zera Avraham in Michigan and President Emeritus of the Messianic Jewish Theological Institute. He authored Postmissionary Messianic Judaism (2005) and Israel’s Messiah and the People of God (2011). Searching Her Own Mystery develops his vision. He boldly challenges Catholics to rethink their ecclesiology and their relationship to the Jewish people. Kinzer’s strength is lucid prose and penetrating biblical exegesis, making his a voice in the wilderness that is as unsettling as it is insightful. His book is strategically aimed at Messianic Jews and Roman Catholics. Kinzer’s excellent autobiographical second chapter makes the book particularly engaging, but without hubris. It also helps to place Kinzer on a very complex map in relation to other Jewish groups who follow Jesus the Messiah, all of whom resist assimilation into gentile groups that follow the same Messiah (i.e, Christian churches). Kinzer’s novelty is in challenging both Catholics and Messianic Jews to take each other more seriously, as each, he argues, is central to the self-identity of the other. Catholics are called into this partnership by the advances of the Second Vatican Council. Kinzer draws on many Christian sources, including three cardinals and a Pope (Lustiger, Cottier, Schönborn, and St John Paul II). Catholics need to listen. Kinzer’s begins with the Second Vatican Council and its two key documents Nostra Aetate (NA) and Lumen Gentium (LG). Kinzer argues that the Council was a turning point for Catholic perception of the Jewish people. After thousands of years of persecution under-written by supersessionist theologies (the covenant with Christ meant [End Page 941] that the Jewish covenant was invalid), theological invalidity led to socio-racial liquidation. The Council fathers lived in the shadow of such supersessionism—the Holocaust. In NA, Catholicism revoked the teaching of deicide and the guilt of the Jewish people for this alleged crime. For Kinzer, it went further: it affirmed the Jewishness of Jesus, his disciples, his mother, and the deep roots of Judaism onto which the gentile Church itself is grafted. The use of Pauline citations in the Council documents are read by Kinzer as: (a) affirming the validity of the Israel’s covenant, which God never goes back on, and (b) affirming the enduring covenant that Israel of the flesh continues to enjoy. This clearly repudiates supersessionism. Kinzer argues that the Council teachings began to push open a door that was boldly walked through by Saint Pope John Paul II. He possibly took the further step of affirming the “validity” of present day Judaism as part of God’s covenant without renouncing the idea that the fulfilment of that covenant lies in Jesus Christ. Fulfilment indicates deep continuity with and affirmation of the validity of Israel, whose telos is its Messiah and his messianic rule. Kinzer argues that LG §16 failed to take the steps that Nostra Aetate managed because it externalised genealogical Israel rather than seeing it as part of the Church’s “own mystery” (NA §4). It did this despite using key terms such as “People of God,” of the Church, and “priest,” “prophet,” and “king” of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, all of which belong to Israel’s history. LG used the terms as if Israel was discontinuous with the new People of God. It thus echoes a super-sessionism revoked in NA. NA, and later John Paul II and the Catechism of the Catholic Church (§§63, 839-40, 528), pushed in another direction: the Jewish role in the salvation of the world. Kinzer argues that God is faithful to his covenanted peoples, both gentile followers of the Messiah (the gentile ecclesia) and Jewish followers of the Messiah (the ecclesia of the circumcision). Both groups existed in harmony in the early Church, but the Jewish ecclesia was slowly written out of the narrative once...