Doing Justice to Judaism: The Challenge to Christianity

The invitation from the editors to contribute my perceptions about the changes in ecumenical and interreligious relations on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies in 2014 evokes a personal response. Thus, in the initial section of this essay, I will situate my own journey in the broader theological and ecclesial context. In the second part, I will reflect on challenges in the U.S. Catholic Church in its relationship with the Jewish people. My family life and Seattle, Washington, upbringing were the genesis of my involvement across religious borders. From my early childhood I was skeptical of the teachings of my elementary school religion classes and the formulations of the Baltimore Catechism about who could be saved. Child of a lifelong practicing Catholic--my mother--and of a religiously nonaffiliated father, I rejected the notion that my father would be excluded from heaven simply because of his lack of religious belonging. At some level, I also rejected the notion of a God who consigned people to hell because they belonged to the wrong religion or none at all. My secondary education overlapped with Vatican 11. While I do not recall learning much in detail about the council, I have a distinct memory of reading Pope John XXIII's encyclical addressed to all persons of good will, Pacem in terris, and of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Those formative texts had a profound influence; they stand out more than anything else I read in those years (except the dreadful monograph, Modern Youth and Chastity, foisted upon us in our junior year). Although I know now how fiercely the conciliar participants debated the issues about relations with Jews, I was less aware of the deliberations in St. Peter's Basilica than I was of what was happening on the local front. (1) The priest who was chaplain at the high school I attended, the Rev. William Treacy, had become friends with Rabbi Raphael Levine; joined by a Protestant minister, they had a weekly television show, Challenge, which first aired in 1960 and continued for fifteen seasons. And, when Treacy was named pastor of a parish--my grandmother's parish, as it happened--that was in the process of building a new church, he commissioned Levine's wife, Reeva Miller, an artist, to design the altar. Levine and Treacy founded an interfaith camp together, Camp Brotherhood, and in 1974 wrote a book together, Wild Branch on the Olive Tree. (2) Only in recent years have I realized how much their work, in tandem with the growing sense of aggiornamento in the church, influenced me. In the spring of 1965, for example, I organized an afternoon of exchange with the youth group of Levine's synagogue, Temple de Hirsch, and students at the high school I attended. That was six months before the promulgation of Nostra aetate, on October 28, 1965. A church coming at long last to acknowledge the rays of truth in other religious traditions and the modeling of persons who collaborated across religious borders exerted a powerful pull on me, but it was not until I began graduate study in New York City in the fall of 1974 that I began to grapple with the ways in which supersessionist theology had denigrated Judaism and distorted Christian origins. Writing a dissertation that traced the evolution of salvation history and analyzed its theological foundations was the beginning of my interest in what I now identify as Christian theologies of Judaism--that is, doing Christian theology in conversation with Jewish thought and in light of the history of the Jewish-Christian encounter. (3) It is the latter conversation that particularly shapes my theological thinking. Christians have an ethical obligation to confront our tradition's disparagement of Judaism and its consequent contribution to the rise of Antisemitism. In retrospect, that sense of ethical obligation has been a major influence in my writing and teaching. …