Heschel was once asked to comment on the challenges facing Protestant religious life. He then wrote a thought provoking piece, from which this is an excerpt:
A deliberate cultivation of differences from Judaism, a tendency to understand itself in the light not of its vast indebtedness to but rather of its divergencies from Judaism. With the emergence and expansion of Christianity in the Greco-Roman world, Gentile Christians overwhelmed the movement, and a continuous process of accommodation to the spirit of that world was set in motion. The result was a conscious or unconscious dejudaization of Christianity, affecting the church's way of thinking and its inner life as well as its relationship to the past and present reality of Israel – the father and mother of the very being of Christianity. The children did not arise and call the mother blessed; instead, they called the mother blind. Some theologians continue to act as if they did not know the meaning of "honour your father and your mother"; others, anxious to prove the superiority of the church, speak as if they suffer from a spiritual Oedipus complex.
The Christian message, which in its origin is intended to be an affirmation and culmination of Judaism, became very early diverted into a repudiation and negation of Judaism; obsolescence and abrogation of Jewish faith became conviction and doctrine, the new covenant was conceived not as a new phase or disclosure but as abolition and replacement of the ancient one; theological thinking – and its terms in the spirit of antithesis to Judaism. Contrast and contradiction rather than acknowledgement of roots, relatedness and indebtedness, became the perspective. Judaea is a religion of law, Christianity a religion of grace; Judaism teaches a God of wrath, Christianity a God of love; Judaea is a religion of slavish obedience, Christianity the conviction of free men; Judaism is particularism, Christianity is universal; Judaism seeks work-righteousness, Christianity preaches faith-righteousness. The teaching of the old covenant a religion of fear, the Gospel of the new covenant a religion of love; a Lohnordnung over against a Gnadenordnung.
The Hebrew Bible is preparation; the gospel fulfilment. In the first is maturity, and the second perfection; in the one you find narrow tribalism, and the other all-embracing charity.
The process of dejudaization within the church paved the way for abandonment of origins and alienation from the core of its message.
The vital issue for the churches is to decide whether to look for roots in Judaism and consider itself an extension of Judaism to look for roots in pagan Hellenism and consider itself as an antithesis to Judaism.
The spiritual alienation from Israel is most forcefully expressed in the teaching of Marcion, who affirmed the contrariety and abruptness discontinuity between the God of the Hebrew Bible and the God whom Jesus had come to reveal. Marcion wanted a Christianity free from any vestige of Judaism. He saw his task as that of showing the complete opposition between the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels. Although in the year 144 of the Christian Era the church expelled the apostle of discontinuity and anathematized his doctrines, Marcion remains a formidable menace, a satanic challenge. In the modern Christian community Marcionism is much more alive and widespread than is generally realised.
Notwithstanding the work of generations of dedicated scholars who have opened up new vistas in the understanding of the history and literature of ancient Israel and their relation to Christianity, the is an abiding tendency to stress the discontinuity between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
According to Rudolph Bultman (as summarised by Bernhard Anderson), "for the Christian the Old Testament is not revelation, but is essentially related to God's revelation in Christ as hunger is to food and despair is to hope… The God who spoke to Israel no longer speaks to us in the time of the new covenant." [1] (here is the spiritual resurrection of Marcion. Was not the God of Israel the God of Jesus? How dare a Christian substitute his own conception of God for Jesus' understanding of God and still call himself a Christian?
What is the pedigree of the Christian gospel? These are the words with which the New Testament begins: "the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of a Abraham" (Matthew 1:1; see also 1 Corinthians 10:1-3; 1 Peter 1:10ff). Yet the powerful fascination with the world of Hellenism has led many minds to look for origins of the Christian message in the world derived from Hellas. How odd of God not to have placed the cradle of Jesus in Delphi, or at least in Athens!
Despite its acceptance of sola scriptura which ought to have protected it from dejudaization, Protestantism has often succumbed to an individualistic Hellenised conception of the Christian tradition, to a romantic oversimplification of the problem of faith and inwardness, to pantheism and sentimentality. Only a conscious commitment to the roots of Christianity and Judaism could have saved it from such distortions. To the early Christians the premise of the belief that the word became flesh was in the certainty that spirit had become the word. They were alive and open to the law and the prophets.
In modern times there was a tendency to look for the spirit everywhere except in the words of the Hebrew Bible. There is no religio ex nihilo, no ultimate beginning. There is no science without presumption and no religion without ultimate decisions. An ultimate decision for Jew or Christian is whether to be involved in the Hebrew Bible or to live away from it. The future of the Western world will depend on the way in which we relate ourselves to the Hebrew Bible. The extent of Christianity's identification with the Hebrew Bible is a test of its authenticity – as well as of Jewish authenticity. Lack of such identification lies at the heart of the malaise of Protestantism today.
Reconnection between Christians and Jews is critical to both traditions. Without each other, neither will see the full potential of religious life envisaged by both Jesus, his disciples and Paul. The "dividing wall" remains. Heschel's view is a little harsh. I think he underestimates how deep a culture can etch itself in the minds of a society. It is not easy to understand how deeply the Hebrew worldview is different from a Hellenistic one. It is even more difficult to adopt a new worldview and operate within it. It's like trying to lose a foreign accent when learning English. Hard work.
Source: Heschel, A J. Insecurity of Freedom. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
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