Creating an Unknown Future: The Challenges of Partnership for Christians in Dialogue with Judaism

Abstract

The next generation of Jewish-Christian dialogue presents an array of conceptual challenges for Christians who seek to embrace a partnership relationship with Judaism. This essay describes three of those challenges. First, partnership with Judaism confronts Christians with the challenge of Scripture. Instead of adopting “biblicist” understandings of Scripture, which ignore the critical role of the Holy Spirit in directing the community of faith, Christians must cultivate the hermeneutical habit of reading the Holy Spirit alongside their reading of Holy Scripture. Second, partnership with Judaism requires the reassertion of theology to its rightful place of prominence in Christian thought. The effect and status of Christ are, ultimately, works of God. Thus, Christology serves theology—expressing the community's experience of God—and must not be distorted into Christocentrism. Third, partnership with Judaism compels Christians to reexamine the history of the Jewish-Christian separation, though not from the traditional (“mythic”) starting point that justifies why the schism was inevitable but from the alternative (“anti-mythic”) starting point that proposes, in John Howard Yoder's words, that the schism “did not have to be.”