The Jewish God Is Also the Christian God

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Professor Neusner and I share the position that rabbinic Judaism (the Judaism of the oral and written Torah) and Christianity are two distinct religious traditions, which emerged in the early centuries of the Common Era out of the matrix of the pluralistic religious culture that was Second Temple Israel. Rather than mother and daughter, they are sister traditions with a common mother. They are, to use Neusner’s terminology in a sense which I take it would approve, two different “Judaisms.”

As I worked with Professor Neusner on our book,¹ I came to exactly the opposite answer from his to a question that I believe underlies the issue of ecumenism between the two traditions. That question is this: In addition to being distinct traditions, are rabbinic Judaism and Christianity also, because of their common ancestry, in some sense one tradition? It seems to me they are. He disagrees.

This difference between us may be the result not so much of different theologies as of different academic backgrounds. Neusner is a humanist engaged in the study of texts. I am a sociologist of the religious imagination concerned with experiences, images and stories (from which, I hold, religion takes its origins and its raw, primordial power). Thus he and I mean somewhat different things when we ask questions that sound the same.

I note that the passionately committed Holy One of the Exodus is the Christian God as well as the Jewish God. I note that the story of the pathos of God, told by the prophets,² is a Christian story, too. I note that our common spring festivals—Passover and Easter—are festivals of the same Promise and the same new birth of freedom. I note that both Jews and Christians can and do claim Moses as “our rabbi” and that we both read some of the same sacred books. I suggest that a sociologist of religion from Mars would have a hard time thinking of the two traditions as totally different religions.

Compared to these commonalities, the incident of the money changers (on which Neusner focuses in his article and which I am not competent to analyze) is not all that significant.

Moreover, I believe that Neusner’s characterization of Christianity as a religion of salvation and of rabbinic Judaism as a religion of sanctification, while a useful distinction, oversimplifies the matter, in part because the two words (salvation and sanctification) don’t mean quite the same thing in the two traditions. Catholic Christianity (like Judaism) is very much a religion of sanctification. Protestant Christianity also demands a response to grace, a response that can perhaps be called a form of sanctification. In both forms of Christianity, the response to God’s loving salvation revealed in Jesus is not, in principle, much different from the response demanded by the Holy One at Sinai, or in Hosea or Amos.

Thus, contrary to Neusner, I conclude that dialogue between the two traditions is not only possible but necessary. This dialogue is of two kinds:

First, we must converse about those things we already share, as Neusner gracefully does in his comparison between Rachel and Mary. In this dialogue, we—Christian and Jew—must seek to discover the unity we already have because of our common mother, Israel.

Second, we must also discuss the unity we do not have. For the fracture line between us cannot be the will of the Holy One.

The issue in this second dialogue is obviously Christology: Is it possible to formulate—or even begin to formulate— a theory of the role of Jesus that both traditions can live with?

The problem here is not, I submit, the Messiah question. In a book that Neusner edited,³ the Jewish and Christian authors agree that there were many different Jewish and many different Christian meanings of the term “messiah” in the Second Temple period and immediately after, but none of the meanings overlapped. Jesus was the Messiah in some Christian meanings of the term, but not in any Jewish meaning. Hence the traditions mean different things by the same word.

In a brilliant essay (in a collection of essays in my honor⁴), Neusner has pointed the way to a tentative first step in a dialogue that may lead to a Christology that Judaism and Christianity could share, a dialogue that presumably could go on for centuries, if not millennia.

Many will say that Christianity and Judaism can never achieve a mutually satisfactory Christology.

To which I respond with Harry Truman, never say never because never is a hell of a long time!