ad Justin

The second Polly Interfaith Study at Congregation B'nai Jeshurun was even more interesting than the first. Some in the audience found Peter Bouteneff's presentation last week patronizing and preachy, so he started with an account of his experiences with interfaith dialogue. He worked for five years with the World Council of Churches in Geneva, and referred us to Leonard Swidler's "Dialogue Decalogue":

Dialogue Decalogue: Ground Rules for Interreligious Dialogue
1st Commandment: The primary purpose of dialogue is to change and grow
in the perception and understanding of reality and then to act accordingly.
2: Interreligious dialogue must be a two-sided project—
within each religious community and between religious communities.
3: Each participant must come to the dialogue with complete honesty and sincerity.
4: Each participant must assume a similar complete
honesty and sincerity in the other partners.
5: Each participant must define him/herself. Conversely—the one
interpreted must be able to recognize him/herself in the interpretation.
6: Each participant must come to the dialogue with no hard-and-fast
assumptions as to where the points of disagreement are.
7: Dialogue can take place only between equals, or par cum pari.
8: Dialogue can take place only on the basis of mutual trust.
9: Persons entering into interreligious dialogue must be at least minimally self-critical of both themselves and their own religious traditions.
10: Each participant eventually must attempt to experience
the partner’s religion “from within.”

Bouteneff has found that people appreciate candor. Only that way you can have "dialogue instead of denial." Especially if you're looking at the first centuries of the Christian church, the selective appropriation and rejection of Judaism is inescapable.

That's well and good, but other forms of denial crept in, most irritatingly a denial that he was doing theology. Even as he stressed that everyone knows "there's scripture, and there's the interpretation of scripture," when questioned he kept saying he was merely "letting the texts speak for themselves." Were he a naive Protestant, this might have been understandable (if still naive), and I can understand as a pedagogue that you don't want to have to say that an outsider can't understand even a single line of your tradition. But still. Especially when you're speaking to Jews, who understand the inescapability of interpretation and the indispensability of commentary, pu-leese.

To be fair (or at least honest), part of my response comes from denial of my own. The early theologians Bouteneff discussed - Justin Martyr, Melitto and Irenaeus - aren't important to me, their variously Platonizing views in fact nearly unintelligible. The post-Holocaust western Christian theology I'm exposed to is philosemitic in a way very few earlier forms of Christian theology were. Judaism is now thought of as the friendly older brother of Christianity, not as the Cain who killed Abel. But there seems no way around the fact that Christians read the scriptures they share with Jews differently than Jews do. For Christians, Second Isaiah is about Jesus - and so is most of the rest of what we call the Old Testament. Does this make Jewish readings wrong? Not necessarily. But incomplete, necessarily. (Some newer Christian theologies assert that Jews have no need of what the New Testament and Christian theology reveal about the Jewish scriptures, but that's still a Christian inclusivist reading.)

It's harder to say this (or think this) in a synagogue than in a classroom, which is why I'm very glad I'm attending this lecture series, for all its frustration. In a synagogue, every sentence about Christianity sounds different. Not just unfamiliar but potentially foolish, self-important and dangerous. I'm not sure what the mostly Jewish audience gets out of this experience, but for me as a Christian this is surely a good exercise.