A Word for Continuity: A Response to Joann Spillman (1998)

I do not write sharp disagreement with Joann Spillman. I find her argument of the inadequacy of a one-covenant model to convey the discontinuities between and distinctiveness of Judaism and Christianity to be convincing, as well as graciously presented. Pushing the issue, I also agree, is very helpful to our Christian attempts to articulate a positive theological appreciation of Judaism. I would add, however, that I am not yet convinced that her alternative model is any more adequate to the complex reality we are trying to capture words. In order to make her case, she needs, understandably, to downplay the biblical, liturgical, and historical continuities and interplay between the two traditions whose relationship we are trying to re-image today. A few examples may suffice. Nostra aetate, which established what she aptly calls the of recognition as official Catholic Church teaching (a status significantly advanced by the theological reflections of Pope John Paul II on the subject, I might add), relied heavily its fifteen Latin sentences on Rom. 9-11. There Paul uses the plural to describe what Israel already and does not lose with the coming of Christ. So, a model, I would suggest, is already inadequate to the multiple layerings of theologically pregnant historical realities that make up what Paul understood to be sacred (which for him was the history of the Jewish people and how the gentiles fit into it, given the fact that that history had been broken open to the gentiles by the overwhelming newness of the Christ event). Paul then offered a new image, the root and branches. It is a bit difficult to use since it (Rom. 11:16-24) can be read as a replacement theology which the new (Christianity) replace the old (Judaism) on the root that is clearly biblical Israel for Paul. In this interpretation only the natural branches that accept Jesus are not severed from the root or can be regrafted unto it. However, Vatican II directed our attention rather pointedly to 11:28b-29 as guiding our contemporary theological usage of the metaphor: in respect to election, they are beloved because of the patriarchs. For the gifts and call of are irrevocable. This is the line of interpretation strengthened by John Paul II Mainz 1980 when he spoke of the Jewish Covenant never revoked by God as being dialogue with the New Covenant, the church. Such a phrase and image, of course, can be used to bolster a two-covenant image, as Spillman I think would have it. However, I would seek to take the image a step further. First, to speak simply of two covenants ignores something that for Paul was crucial, the fact that both branches, Judaism and Christianity, are sustained on the same root, biblical Israel. Hence, even if as religious traditions (as Spillman rightly points out) they have grown out and away from each other, at their root they are forever linked, united at the source, namely, faith the one God, the of Israel. To my mind, then, Jewish-Christian dialogue is definitely interreligious, since, as Spillman notes, Christianity and rabbinic Judaism are two distinct religious traditions, but it is not interfaith dialogue, at least from the Christian point of view. Contrary to the patristic teaching of contempt (and its current remnants), Christianity has no argument with the validity of what Jewish faith espouses, though the situation is asymmetrical since Judaism clearly does not accept central Christian affirmations, beginning with the incarnation and the logic of describing God's Oneness by way of the Trinity. However, the obvious differences and discontinuities must not (as a two-covenant model will inevitably tempt us to do) obscure what is shared and what forms the unbreakable spiritual bond between the church and the Jewish people (again, from the Christian point of view): for example, the large chunk of scripture that we do share. …