ANTHROPOLOGY AND ANTAGONISM: REFLECTIONS ON INTERRELIGIOUS TOLERANCE IN FOR THE LIFE OF THE WORLD

 

 Ecumenical Trends Vol 49 No 5,  Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute  September/October 2020, pp.24-27.

 Dr. Alon Segev is the author of three books and numerous essays and articles on great variety of themes in religious studies, Holocaust studies, intellectual history, and philosophy, from antiquity to modernity. He earned his PhD from Haifa University with a dissertation on Heidegger. He was a Max-Planck “Minerva” fellow at Heidelberg University and had the DFG grant in Cologne University. His current research deals with the debate over the canonical status of the Old Testament, from Marcion to the present. He teaches philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. This year he is a visiting professor of theology at Philipps University Marburg.

For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church (FLW) addresses topics in contemporary society such as poverty, racism, human rights, suicide, abortion, euthanasia, reproductive technology, gender equality, and the environment in ways which may be startling to those familiar with the traditional views of the Orthodox Church. In particular, Section VI of the document, “Ecumenical Relations and Relations with Other Faiths” (§50-60) addresses questions concerning re-ligious tolerance that bear close investigation, in light of the history of the Orthodox Church. My task is to discuss this topic from a Jewish perspective, proceeding from (1) some autobiographical notes that clarify my personal views on faith and ethics, through (2) a general discussion of the document’s anthropological underpinnings, shared in some respects with Judaism, to conclude with (3) a closer look at the challenge of interreligious tolerance that is at stake in Section VI, on ecumenical and interreligious relations.II find it difficult to organize my own reflections on FLW without sharing some portion of my personal life. 

This has everything to do with the relationship between faith and ethics, which has been central in my life since I was young. Intuitively, and emotionally, ethics has always seemed to me to be inferior to faith. I have never thought that ethics alone could be the foundation of just action; I worry that it becomes a cold, rational calculation of gains and losses, by contrast with the deep feeling, illumination, and revelation occurring in faith. In my eyes, it was Abraham’s absolute faith in God rather than an ethical obligation which saved Isaac. 

My natural attitude boils down to the realization that, as Kierkegaard puts it, “either there is an absolute duty toward God, and if so it is the paradox here described, that the individual as the individual is higher than the universal [i.e. moral principles] and as the individual stands in an ab-solute relation to the absolute, or else faith never existed.”1However, conventionally speaking, the traditional Jewish attitude is the opposite. 

Leo Baeck, a prominent scholar and rabbi, argues that the imperative to “love your neighbor as yourself,” unless determined in concrete cir-cumstances by the Law (i.e. the Jewish code of conduct, the Torah), is meaningless. “Every kind of philanthropy, if it is not supposed to be a sterile sentimentality, must have its root in the moral, social will, in the inner respect of humanity, in the living respect of his right, in what the word Zedakah means.”2 Justice, Baeck argues, necessitates a spontaneous activity and responsibility of humans. Being finite, humans need the Law to direct them in life. Otherwise, they are lost. The Hebrew word “Torah” (הָרוֹתּ) means instruction, teaching. Justice loses its meaning, Baeck concludes, once spontaneity is taken from humans or defined as sin. “Justice becomes nothing but the consciousness of absolute depen-dence on the grace of God in Christ; all spontaneity is again identified with sin.”3 Many years have passed before I could confront and deal seriously with the challenging claims made by Leo Baeck concerning the lack of ethics (in the sense he describes) in Christian interpretations of biblical tradition.

 Having been born and raised in a secular, socialist kibbutz in Israel – where kids were taken from our mothers when we were only a few weeks old and put in a collec-tive children’s home, with only a few hours a day to spend with our parents and siblings – I confronted daily the in-compatibility between my own yearning for individuality  and the kibbutz’s expectation of social homogeneity, be-ing governed by strict regulations and lacking in parental love and attention. I always found myself to be an outsider, out of sync with the mainstream. After departing, I spent a long time in foster families, at boarding schools, and on the streets of Jerusalem. Living with an overwhelming sense of abandonment, it was God who became a constant pres-ence in my life as my comfort and protector, indeed as my Father. Moreover, through a series of decisive encounters as a youth with Christians living in Israel, determined to follow in the path of Jesus, I came to appreciate in a deep and soulful way the power of Jesus’ own faith and the faith of those who followed him – sharply contrasting yet stand-ing in continuity with all I had known to that point. I have maintained this appreciation throughout all the personal and professional development that followed.This is, in a nutshell, the personal background in rela-tion to which I approach and will discuss some points in FLWthat offer important, but ambivalent, indications for Jewish-Christian relations. II

 Humanity is created in the image of God, as is stated in Genesis 1:26-27: “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them” ( םָדאָָה תֶא םיִהֹלֱא אָרְבִּיַוםיִהֹלֱא םֶלֶצְּב וֹמְלַצְּב). FLW takes up this fundamental affirma-tion by describing all humanity as “icons of God” (§12). In the words of St. Athanasius, “The Son of God became human so that we might become divine” (§3). Our condition humaine is, however, a fallen existence in a world in which our godly image is deformed by sin. This sinful existence does not exempt us from moral decision and conduct: “We are called, therefore, not to accommodate ourselves to the practical exigencies of the world as we find it, but instead ever and again to strive against evil, however invincible it may at times appear, and to work for the love and justice that God requires of his creatures, however impractical that may at times prove” (§4). Agapē, overflowing love, must be the foundation of any worldly conduct we undertake in a world permeated with sin, if there is any hope of our godly image coming actually to resemble the God it is meant to reflect (that is, theōsis) (§3). 

 Maintaining our godly image in the twenty-first century is a priority of FLW, a priority which Christians and Jews of all denominations may approve. Technological progress, social media, huge numbers of migrants and refugees wan-dering all over the earth, unrestrained capitalism and mate-rialism along with poverty, and new views on sex and the nuclear family comprise the situation in which we live and to which the document articulates an Orthodox Christian re-sponse. The recommendations given in the document are of two kinds. Some recommendations concern the institutional principles of the Orthodox Church and the need to adapt them to our time. Other recommendations concern the faith-ful themselves, calling them to return to the Church and its principles as the way to maintain our godly image. The first recommendation is directed to the Church as a whole: the Church should be independent of any political order, since “The Kingdom of God alone is the Christian’s first and last loyalty, and all other allegiances are at most provisional, transient, partial, and incidental” (§9). This recommenda-tion applies also to individual Orthodox Christians, who can be tempted to mistake the glorious Byzantine empire for the essence of Christianity (§10). Likewise, race and nation should be irrelevant considerations in the Church: “There is only one human race, to which all persons belong, and all are called as one to become a single people in God the creator. There is no humanity apart from the one universal humanity that the Son of God assumed in becoming human, and it embraces all persons without distinction or discrimi-nation” (§11).Such recommendations of and to the Orthodox Church, of course, do not exist as the sole alternative to irreligious disinterest in restoring the image of God. The different Abrahamic religions, and the various denominations of each, have many different notions of how the image of God in our being is to be maintained. Each variation, however, is inclined to conceive of itself as the only right way to God while excluding the others as false ways to Him. As the Gospel of John phrases this sentiment: “So [Jesus] said to them again, ‘Truly, truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before Me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them’” (John 10:8). The root of the word “holy” (k-d-s, ש-ד-ק) in Hebrew means setting apart. In this sense, Mary Douglas translates Leviticus 11:46 as follows: “I am the Lord your God, who rescued you from the land of Egypt; I am set apart [=holy] and you must be set apart [be holy] like me.”4 Thus, one of the most diffi-cult moral-theological questions concerns the possibility of religious plurality and tolerance: is there enough room for more than one variation of monotheism? We must address this question head-on.IIISince the Reformation in western Europe, religion has regularly been assigned to the private sphere. In Hobbes’s Leviathan, for instance, religion is relegated to the status of opinion, which is a private matter. Jürgen Habermas explains: One’s religion was a private matter, a private conviction; it was of no consequence for the state from whose per-spective one was worth as much as the other; conscience became opinion. Accordingly, Hobbes defined a “chain of opinions” that extended from faith to judgment. In the sphere of “opinion” he reduced all acts of believ-ing, judging, and opining to the same level. Even “con-science” was “nothing else but man’s settled judgment and opinion.”5FLW sharply dissents from this assertion of a sharp divide between public and private: “Characteristic of many of our contemporary societies, and curiously common to their oth-erwise often incompatible political systems in both East and West, is the novel teaching that there is such a thing as a purely public sphere that, in order to be at once both neutral and universal, must exclude religious expression” (§80). The document criticizes this view as coercive and inconsistent, since secularity is itself a kind of religion, and since no clear line can ultimately be drawn between private and public. Moreover, once you forbid wearing turbans, habits, or yarmulkes in the public sphere, you can in prin-ciple also outlaw using specific perfumes, speaking foreign languages in public, wearing specific costumes. And yet: on whose terms is religious tolerance to be extended? If a sec-ular state’s principles of what is and is not appropriate in public cannot be presupposed to be objective or coherent, can religious institutions or religio-political establishments be trusted to provide such principles? Religious tolerance is a core issue that comes to the fore in Section VI of FLW, “Ecumenical Relations and Relations with Other Faiths” (§50-60), but its optimistic stance is in tension with much of the history that precedes it. We have quoted earlier from John 10:8: “All who came before Me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them” Such a tradition, and the framing of salvation as a “gate” in 10:9, would seem to leave little room for any other religion as a path to God. It refers to all the prophets acting prior to Jesus; and there can likewise be no prophets coming after Jesus, if he is the Truth as well as the Way. So too for Jews, Yahweh is the only God, known definitively in terms of the history and law of Israel, as contained in the Torah; he is the “God of gods, and Lord of lords” (Psalm 136:6). For Jews, the Torah is conclusive; there is no other way to God. There can be no more revelation, no more prophets communicating to us the word of God. And if authors from St. Paul to Tertullian to Martin Luther (in the west), and from John Chrysostom to John of Damascus and others (in the east), made no shortage of effort to insist that the exclu-sivity (and eventually, the legitimacy) of Judaism has been abolished, so too there is a long Jewish tradition of under-standing the Torah as a universal code, valid for all human-ity. As Eichrodt and Mendenhalls demonstrate, the original essence of Judaism is the covenant (תיִרְּב) between different people of different faiths, ethnic background, and social classes with God.6 It means a complete liberation from all political oppression and powers through submission to the divine Law. But the covenant lost its initial meaning in the sixth and fifth centuries BC. In that time, Ezra compiled the texts making up the Torah and at the same time, along with Nehemiah, defined Judaism by means of ethnicity, excom-municating those who were not of a pure Jewish descent (such as the Samaritans). In the resulting paradigm, Judaism is no longer a matter of free choice, i.e. covenant, but rather it is one of ethnicity, and the Torah has been given to the Jews as a particular ethnic group ruled by political force rather than by divine Law. About six hundred years later, Jesus reclaimed the initial, ecclesiastical, meaning of the covenant as the foundation of his faith. Alas, shortly after Jesus, Christianity too became institutionalized and suc-cumbed to political forces. In his book Two Types of Faith ̧ published in 1951, theJewish theologian Martin Buber discusses two different types of faith, the Jewish faith (Emunah) and the Christian faith (πίστις).7 Buber suggests that what Jews on the one hand and Christians on the other hand understand by “faith” Buber suggests that what Jews on the one hand and Christians on the other hand understand by “faith” is quite different, and that, in spite of their shared origins, there is no path leading from one form of faith to the other.is quite different, and that, in spite of their shared origins, there is no path leading from one form of faith to the other. They are, in this reading, mutually exclusive rather than sequential (as much of early Christian polemics would have it). 

 Emunah implies belonging in the historical tradition of the Jews, as narrated in the Hebrew Bible and its record of the covenant of the Hebrew people with their God. Πίστις, on the contrary, implies conversion and a rupture from death-bound history and law. Emunah is historical, whereas πίστιςis ahistorical. Emunah refers to the entire people of Israel, whereas πίστιςconcerns only the individual. Buber is, of course, not alone in assessing the apparent continuities of Judaism and Christianity as merely apparent. 

The Jewish scholar Joseph Klausner argues in his biography of Jesus that Jesus, who remained Jewish throughout his entire life, challenged the Jewish culture as such and not just particular manifestations thereof:Judaism... is not only religion and it is not only ethics: it is the sum total of all the needs of the nation, placed on a religious basis... Judaism is a national life, a life which the national religion and human ethical principles embrace without engulfing. Jesus came and thrust aside all the requirements of the national life... In their stead he set up nothing but an ethico-religious system bound up with his conception of the Godhead.8not reason enough to avoid joining in dialogue, whose fruits are yet unknown. An awareness of history and an openness to the changing condition humaine in which we find our-selves are the preconditions for any fruitful interfaith dia-logue, an infinite and winding dialogue, since there is no obvious solution to the tension between religions that define themselves in opposition to one another. We can and should, however, continue this dialogue in faith and hope, in order to heal wrongs, avoid conflicts, maintain peace, and imag-ine new possibilities to come.

 Notes: 

1. Søren Kierkegaard, “Fear and Trembling,” in Fear and Trembling and The Book on Adler, translated by Walter Lowrie (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1994), 70.

 2. Leo Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums, edited by Albert H. Friedlander and Bertold Klappert (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998), 221. The Hebrew word “zedakah” is trans-lated into English as “alms.” It refers back to the Greek word ἐλεημοσύνη: pity, mercy, donation – all are implied by the Hebrew word zedakah. Yet, zedakah (הָקָדְצ) derives its meaning from zedek (קֶדֶצ) – “justice.” Thus, you can genuinely love your neigh-bor as yourself only if you are acting justly; a morally good per-son is one who abides by the Law.  

3. Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums, 243-44

4. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Anaclasis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2001), 8.  

5. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translat-ed by Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 90. 

6. See George E. Mendenhall, “The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine,” The Biblical Archaeologist 25.3 (1962), 65-87; and Walther Eichrodt, Theologie des Testaments, Band 1: Got und Volk (Stuttgart: Ehrenfried Klotz Verlag, 1957), 14-15. 

 7. Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith, translated by Norman P. Goldhawk (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1951).

 8. Quoted in H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 3.

 9. See Martin Luther, Werke, vol. 24 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1900), 7. 

10. Rudolf Bultmann, “Die Bedeutung des Alten Testaments für den christlichen Glauben,” in Glauben und Verstehen, vol. 1(Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1966), 333.