The long schism.(The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited)(Book review)

The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, by John Howard Yoder; William B. Eerdmans and SCM Press, 2003, US$35.

THAT CHRISTIANITY BEGAN as a sect, which gradually separated from Judaism during the second or even third century of the Common Era, isn't as widely known as it should be. The subsequent closing of both canons and evolution of two distinct theological and ecclesiological and cultural identities --Rabbinic Judaism and Christian Church--still frames the way the subject is approached at the academic level, and religious and secular prejudices still flourish at the popular level. The suggestion that Jews and Christians once shared the synagogues of Palestine and the Diaspora (Galut), and the Temple in Jerusalem, had no insurmountable theological barriers between them, and co-existed within some form of pluralistic unity, challenges over 1600 years of deeply ingrained thinking. But the evidence is as compelling as it's controversial.

The central thesis of John Howard Yoder's The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited is that, while "dialogical respect" between Jews and Christians began in the twentieth century, and has continued in the shadows of the destructive 1940s (Shoah), much more needs to be achieved. Jews who first participated in the dialogue had to travel more than halfway before they could listen and speak. Christians who participated in the dialogue still belonged to churches that were intrinsically antiSemitic. Also, as Yoder points out, no one engaged in the dialogue represented the mainstream believers or hierarchies of either religion, or an increasing secular majority. If Western societies as a whole have developed better civil defences for all minorities, that's quite different from actively promoting the reality that what we now call Judaism and Christianity grew from the same cultural soil.

Yoder argues that the Jewish--Christian schism didn't have to be; indeed, he suggests there was no single event that could be called a schism. Instead, there was a space of at least fifty to one hundred years, or even two hundred years, during which a schism hadn't happened and was neither inevitable nor predictable. Why isn't this better known and understood? Part of the reason, according to Yoder, is that we "do violence to the lived reality of history as it really was" if, in our concern to make sense of it after the fact, we "let our explanatory schemes rob its actors of the integrity of their indecision as well as of their decision-making".

The subject is neither radical nor new. The Jewishness of Christianity has been a subject of academic study, and a focus of clerical training, for generations now. Yoder's intention, then, isn't to produce "unsuspected information" but to reflect on why "much of what we do know" hasn't been "thought through and profoundly remembered", He suspects that "most of the redefinition going on in the vast scholarly literature still is engaged in making adjustments within the framework of the received schema" but these adjustments simply "weaken that schema without replacing it". His solution is to propose a synthesis that's academically acceptable and still reaches beyond the confines of academe, perhaps to inspire and galvanise his readers into replacing the received schema.

If his position is contended it's because the subject is contentious, for wide-ranging reasons, and anyone who broaches it must expect wide-ranging opposition. The opposition revolves around supersessionism, a term that refers to traditional claims, no longer universally made, that the Church has superseded Israel as God's people. Yoder doesn't make or support such claims and tries to counter them by associating supersessionism with the Constantinian polity that consciously dominated Christendom from the fourth century until relatively recently--which he believes still dominates the post-Christendom churches in many unconscious ways--and by drawing close parallels between Mennonite polity and Jewish polity, both of which he sees as "free church" polities. But his understanding of the term "free church" is different from ours. To him it means a religion that's both disestablished and able to witness prophetically from the margins of mainstream culture.

It's not that simple, though, since so many people regard supersessionism as intrinsic to the Christian narrative and ascribe it to all Christians, consciously or unconsciously, past or present, established or disestablished, liberal or conservative, regardless of their theology or ecclesiology or cultural practice. Also, no matter how irenic Yoder wishes to appear, he's obviously forced to carry everyone else's baggage as well as his own. That's probably inevitable in a subject where inspired fools rush in to witness where angels fear to tread. Yoder must accept that a significant proportion of Jewish and Christian readers, academic and non-academic, will be suspicious of everything he says, interpret what he doesn't say, and project upon him a range of attitudes he's tried hard to avoid.