Undoing God’s Mistakes:

A modest proposal

A preliminary paper for a conference convened by Jacob Neusner at Bard College

First Draft

Andrew Greeeley

Spiritually we are all Semites.   Cardinal Richard Cushing

ABSTRACT

I intend to make a modest proposal for a context in which discussions among Protestants, Catholics and Jews might occur. My assumption is that the split between church and synagogue in the first century and between Catholic Christianity and Protestant Christianity in the sixteenth century were contingent events. They happened but they did not have to happen. They are revocable events but not necessary ones. If this assumption can be sustained as a useful model for discussion across religious lines, then much of the rhetoric of past contorversy can be left behind and energy can be concentrated on exploring the implications of our membership in an overarching religious culture.

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Actually they had no trouble in Rome, mostly because the Romans were so much amused by their American Jesuit accents and pronunciations of Latin. Their term papers, as one might imagine, were prime time material. Indeed some of their teachers were astonished by the little known facts of Roman life they described. Finally, the semester was coming to an end; they had to write just one more paper. Two of the four kids thought they should leave well enough alone, since they had sewed up A grades anyway. The two others wanted to go for A plus and insisted tht "just one more" trip to Rome would do it.

So they opted for the trip. Unfortunately they did not the dials on their machine as accurate as they might, especially the Kirk chaos diffusion dial. Instead of landing in Rome, they ended up in Jerusalem on the 14^th Day of the month of Nisan in the year thirty day, just before Jesus was dragged to trial. Being devout Irish Catholic kids from the West Side of Chicago, they were not about to let Jesus be pushed around. Besides the two boys were ace athletes. So, using their mace and their physical skills, they routed the Roman legionnaires, freed Jesus, and went of to the desert with them.

Four pushy West Side Irish kids, armed with mace, turned out to be almost as good as twelve legions of angels.

Out in the desert, they built a little monastery. Jesus preached and healed there and within the year died in a desert sand storm saving their lives. Note that this event presumes that, while like of all of us, Jesus had to die, it was not essential to his mission the way he did, as much as this might offend St. Anselm and many contemporary Christians who, without knowing it, are fervent Anselmites. They returned to Chicago, arriving only a few hours after they had left. But, since they had changed history, they returned to a world which was utterly different from the world they left. Church and synagogue had not separated. Everyone was Jewish.

The fun for the rest of the story would be the speculation over what the Israelite religion would looke like. I didn’t get very far into it, though I had decided that the Chief Rabbi of Chicago would be a Cardinal and the Chief Rabbi of Rome would be called Jacob XXXII.

I gave up the story because I found it impossible to imagine a convincing Jesus. He is too elusive, too complex, too mysterious, too disconcerting to be captured in story, as every novelist, playwright, and filmmaker who has tried to do a Jesus story quickly discovered.

More recently I have wondered if the break between the Jesus movement and the rabbinic movement would not have happened even if Jesus had not died on the cross.

I have been asked whether if Jesus had not been crucified and the thus the resurrection lost, what would be left of Christianity? This question fails to comprehend that the Christian believes not in a phenomenon but only in God, in this case God’s love as revealed in the triumph of Jesus over death, a triumph which is a promise of a similar triumph for everyone. Jesus had to die like all humans and what was required for Christianity – and that is all that is required – would be an experience in his followers of him having triumphed over death, a triumph which would have disclosed God’s overwhelming and validating love. It should also be noted that the term "resurrection" was borrowed, as was all the vocabulary of the early Christians, from contemporary Judaism – in this case from the Pharisees. What the followers of Jesus experienced, however, was more not less than resurrection. The experienced rather a total triumph over death. This they would have experienced that also if He had died in my desert sandstorm

In this paper I want to ask from the perspective of a sociologist whether this break was inevitable and what the consequences for our situation today might be if we conclude that the break was an accident, an unfortunate mistake, something that did happen but did not have to happen, any more than Jesus had to die on the cross.

The Jesus Movement and the Rabbinic Movement.

I suggest, first of all, that in the "blooming, buzzing" pluralism of the Jewish religious culture of the second temple era, such a break was neither necessary nor possible. I use the term "religious culture" advisedly because the religion of Israel was a culture more than religion with a formal structure, creed, and code that the word religion implies today. In "Israel" (and I use the word here and in the rest of the paper, following Rabbi Neusner, only in the religious sense) we now know there were many different movements, all claiming uniqueness and superiority. There was no authority powerful enough to expel them and no boundaries impermeable enough for an expulsion to have any meaning. The Jesus Movement in its Jewish origins could not have imagined itself being anything but Jewish. Moreover the movement itself had many different sub-movements, not all of them in communion with all others by any means. While conflict among these various essentially Jewish groups was constant, few of them, as far as we know, made any claim that they were not Jewish. It was possible for much of the first century of the Common Era to assume that one could be Jewish and Christian at the same time.

Against this model, it might be argued that once the Jesus movement claimed that Jesus was the messiah and rejected the Jewish law, the break was inevitable. But we now know that Jesus himself rarely claimed any title for himself, that the term "messiah," had many different meanings and that there was no overlap between the meanings Jews in the Second Temple era assigned to it and the meanings Christians assigned to it. There was surely much later controversy over the issue, much of it unpleasant, but that controversy apparently reads back into the first century clear and precise meanings to the word messiah which it did not possess at that time.

Moreover a case could be made that St. Paul’s theory of the law ought to be applied to gentiles enjoy support among many of the more "liberal" rabbis of his time. Certainly there were large numbers of proselytes who were attached to the Jewish religious culture who did and indeed were not required to honor the law.

In both these matters, I submit, there was much more diversity in the first century in the first century than later and bitter controversies were willing or even able to acknowledge. The controversies came after codification. The actual split between Church and Synagogue apparently came before codification and were institutionalized in the codification. We know from the epistles and the gospels the details of some of the synagogue controversy but we do not know in how many synagogues these conflicts actually existed. St John was writing to and about only one community.

The split could not have been institutionalized before the fall of Jerusalem in 170 and probably not before he beginning of the second century because until that time an institutionalizing agency did not exist. Since our imaginations tend to picture religions as possessing an effective authority structure it is hard to picture a religious culture which lacked such a structure. Yet in the first century that was precisely the situation which seems to have existed in the religious culture which was Israel.

On the other side of the debate it is argued that the Jewish people rejected Jesus as the messiah and thus precipitated the break. But the question arises which Jewish people actually engaged in this rejection. I submit that given the sociological and cultural situation at the time that such a rejection was impossible. Only a relatively few Jews could have been aware of who Jesus was and what he claimed – and as I have noted above the
"messiah" term was introduced only later into the controversy. Some of the leadership of the Jewish people certainly rejected him but they were hardly elected leaders and spoke in effect only for themselves. Some Jews would later conspire against the Jesus movement and some would join it.

But the split became definitive only when the sociological situation made it possible and in the eyes of some leaders on both sides inevitable. After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 and perhaps even more after the subsequent destruction in the second century, the virtual disappearance of a Jewish population in Palestine, the dispersal of Jews in the Roman Empire, and the codification of rabbinic Judaism and of Greek Christianity did the split become definitive. It would be hard to disprove a thesis which suggested that the process was one of social and political drift in response to (perceived) pressures from the larger society rather than deliberate policy decisions or clear and dispassionate which hardened the boundaries between the two emerging religions.

We need, I think, an objective social-historical investigation of the dynamics of this process. Unless I am completely mistaken, such an investigation will not discover that the split was definitive in the first century or even possible at that time. Was it necessary and inevitable? We know that there were Jewish Christians who migrated south from Palestine into Arabia after the various falls of Jerusalem and were still functioning in the time of Mohammed. It is said that their version of Christianity had a considerable impact on him. I am unaware of a substantial literature on these communities, but we might learn from them what an other option out of the pluralistic matrix of Israel might have been possible. This other option might prove embarassing to both the other sister or cousin religions which emerged in the west.

If one backs off from the controversies and the conflicts and examines the images and the stories of the two religions which emerged from the same matrix, let us say from the point of view of a sociologist from another galaxy, one is struck by how similar are the underlying images of a loving and faithful God who relentlessly pursues his people because he has fallen in love with them. The "Father" of Jesus is obviously the Holy One. Who else could he be, given Jesus’s Jewish background. One might say that he is the Holy One only more so. Moreover the early Christians did not realize that they were writing the New Testament and might have been profoundly offended to be told that they were. For them the "scriptures" were the same scriptures that their Jewish neighbors who often went to the same synagogue used. The Christian scriptures were Israelite books. All the images which the Christian writers used to describe their experience of Jesus were taken from the Israelite heritage, reinterpreted perhaps, but one suspects not reinterpreted in such a way that in their own minds they were rejecting that heritage.

The visitor from Alpha Centauri might wonder as he studies the emergence of these two religions of the Holy One whether it could have been possible to finesse a Christology at that time out of the use of traditional Jewish symbols? Apparently the Jewish Christians were able to do so. Could it be done today? Obviously the obstacles are enormous and one would not begin the dialogue I am suggesting on that subject. Yet one could perhaps successfully examine the original metaphors of those who were not intending to write a new scripture and be impressed by the Israelite origin of all the metaphors – and come to understand maybe that while they would later be encoded in Greek philosophy this development did not destroy the Israelite origins of the metaphors. Neither then nor now.

I suspect that our ET sociologist would think that this observation was elementary

What follows from this brief outline? That we should pursue a reunion of Church and synagogue? Hardly. I will postpone my answer to that question until I address the second issue, the split at the time of the reformation and the counterreformation.

Reformation and Counter Reformation

Ecumencial dialogue between Catholic scholars and main stream Protestant scholars has pretty well established that the major theological issues of the sixteenth century – justification and Sola Scriptura can now be dealt with in terms which both sides find satisfactory (though Evangelical and Fundamentalist Protestants would hardly agree). No responsible Catholic scholar would defend the sale of indulgences or the corruption of the papacy. Many of the reforms advocated by the Reformation – vernacular liturgy and bible, communion under both species – have already become part of the Catholic tradition Again.

Does this mean that the issues of the Reformation were a lis de verbis? I would rather suggest that Catholicism had been able to contain, one way or another, previous reform movements. Some like the Albigenses or the Waldenses or the Utraquists were crushed, though perhaps not as completely extirpated as simple versions of history might suggest. Others, like the reform of the Friars (Dominican, Franciscan, Caremlites) and the Cistercians before them were absorbed by the Church and had a profound effect on it. Why was it not able to repeat one or other of the formulae in the sixteenth century?

I would suggest again that the reasons were more political and social rather than theological. Without the emergence of the renaissance princes, the improvement in transportation and communication, the invention of the printing press, the relative prosperity caused by loot from the new world and improvement in agricultural productivity, the appearance of nationalism, the intellectual ferment which was at the heart of the renaissance, and the unspeakable corruption of the Vatican, Luther, Calvin, and Knox and the reform impulses they led might have been as readily absorbed as had the movements headed by Francis and Dominic three centuries earlier. Debate over who was to blame is as fruitless as is debate about who is to blame for the separation of Church and Synagogue. Better that it be acknowledged that terrible and unnecessary mistakes were made on both sides and then reinforced by ambitious and greedy political leadership. The Dialectical Imagination (of Northern Europe) and the Analogical Imagination (of Southern Europe) parted company with, as David Tracy who has developed this pardigm, observes with notable loss to both sides.

Would there have been a Reformation if the Papacy was not as corrupt -- and as unresponsive -- as it was in the sixteenth century? What if Leo X had embraced Luther and his reform the way one of his predecessors embraced Frances of Assisi and his reform? It seems rather unlikely. Certainly many Protestant denominations today would be willing to accept a more open and democratic papacy.

Was the Reformation a necessary development? Did it have to happen? On the basis

A historian who is more on the Protestant (Stephen Ozment)side than the Catholic has this to say about the results of the reformation and the counter-reformation:

(It was a) "conservative campaign on the part of the elite Christian clergy to subdue a surrounding native culture that had always been and preferred to remain semi-pagan. What distinguished Protestant from Catholic clergy in the undertaking was only greater discipline and zeal … an attempt to impose on uneducated and reluctant men and women a Christian way of life utterly foreign to their own cultural experiences and very much against their own desires." He adds that the reformation, having undermined for many people traditional Catholic ritual and practice, unloosed far worse superstitions, especially concerning witchcraft, unleashing the horrors of oral European culture.

I don’t ask you to accept as valid my thesis that the two splits I am describing (in highly schematic forms) resulted more from sociological than theological energies. I merely ask you to pause to consider the possibility that such a model might have interesting heuristic possibilities. To the extent that the model seems to fit the data, then one might conclude, again heuristically that to the same extent both separations among the followers of the Holy One of Israel were monumental mistakes, accidents which did not have to happen, but which in fact did happen. They were mistakes made by humans indeed but mistakes Holy one tolerated for reasons of her own So perhaps they could legitimately be called God’s mistakes, mistakes He expects us in some fashion to undo.

To summarize my model: one should always be reluctant to invoke a theological explanation for the breakdown of religious unity unless one has exhausted the explanatory power of sociological and political explanations.

Undoing the Mistakes?

Ronald Knox in his essay "Reunion All Round" in his wonderful book Essays in Satire proposes a universal religion from which I will quote to prove what I think is an absurd picture of undoing the mistakes.

It would be folly to suggest that there are no important and substantial differences among the three religions of the Holy One I have been discussing. Nor does a strategy of trying to finesse all of these differences make any sense any more. Corporate reunion of the traditional ecumenical variety is not likely to happen and would not be a good idea anyway. The various religions of Israel’s Holy One – Catholics, Rabbinic Jews, Orthodox, the wide variety of Reformation Churches, even the Nestorians and the Melkites and the Monophsytes – each have developed heritages of their own which ought not to be lost and in any event will never be sacrificed.

Perhaps there is a hint here of why the Holy One of Israel permitted the tragic separations which have marked the last two millennia. Perhaps no single religion could have developed such rich heritages.

This observation leads me to speculate about a paradigm for futher reflection and discussion, another model or perhaps the same model expanded.

I have written as if the pluralism of the First Century of the Common Era dissipated with the fall of Jerusalem and the resultant codification. The variegated religious culture we could call Israel disappeared when the religions which emerged out of its rich matrix appeared.

But is that really what happened?

Or is not more accurate to say that it never went away and is still very much with us in all its institutionalized offspring? Is not the cultural matrix of Israel now richer than ever? Are we not all spiritual Israeliites? How can we possibly deny that?

At one level such a model may seem trite. At another level, I submit, we have not really begun to explore the implications of the model that Israel lives!

Some suggestions for those of us who think the model merits further exploration:

• We must have done with arguments, accusations, blame, guilt, controversy, even those hasty and often over simplified comparsions which say, "Jews on the one hand . . . while Christians on the other hand . . ." I don’t mean that everyone should suspend such dialectic, only those of us who are willing to explore further this model.
  

• We must be sympathetic, admiring, and generous to our fellow Israelites. We must seek to understand from the inside where they stand when they are at their very best. We must forbid ourselves the luxury of being threatened by them.
  

• We must explore as fully as we can all those experiences, images, pictures, stories and rituals we hold in common. Knowing that our various heritages will (probably) never agree on everything but that, since we are all ultimately from Israel we don’t have to agree on everything, we must strive to expand the area in which we find ourselves in the same league if not the same ball park.

As I write these words I realize how elementary and simple they are. Is not my model perfectly obvious?

If it is, why aren’t we doing what it prescribes.

I’ll illustrate with a story about light. All religious use light imagery. But light imagery has, I submit, special power and special (i.e. deeper and richer) implications for the religions of Israel

So I light Hanukah candles every year. One year I wrote an op-ed page peace for the New York Times. A rabbi wrote an angry letter forbidding me to engage in that candle lighting. The feast was not a Christian feast. I had no right to appropriate a Jewish feast. I implied a religious unity which did not exist. I was breaking down religious borders that were essential. I was trying to cross the border between Judaism and Christianity.

To which I replied that Abraham was my patriarch too and Moses was my Rabbi too and that the triumph of the Machabees was my triumph too. While I might not be Jewish, I was certainly and inevitably and incorrigibly an Israelite.

There are many reasons why one cannot or should not celebrate both Christmas and Hanukah and one reason why one might: both are Israelite feasts of the triumph of light over darkness

So Rabbi Neusner tells me that if his neighbor puts up Christmas tree lights, he will display Hanukah lights.

So why not?

Funny thing, to someone driving along the bay in St. Petersburg, the lights will seem to be the same light. For light after all is light. And the light of the Holy One, His named be praised, leads all of us – gently and lovingly as her beloved children whom She has brought into the world and nursed with the most tender affection --on our long pilgrimage home.

Darkness cannot put it out.