"A World of Variant Views"
As a mapping exercise, Mapping Messianic Jewish Theology introduces me to a whole world of variant views around the central topics of how the MJM conceives of God, Torah and Israel. I was surprised at first, though I should not have been, by the diversity of viewpoints. But of course, from my own various traditions (currently Anglican, though at other times free-church evangelical), diversity has always been a fact of theological life, and working now in a church which consciously sees itself as part of a Church which is ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic’, I am aware of how the desire to incorporate as wide a body of believers as possible leads to a certain fuzziness over doctrinal distinctives and theological formulations. So in turn it seems to me inevitable that any gathered body of Messianic Jewish believers will exhibit diversity. The texts of the Torah, the former and latter Prophets, and the Writings are, after all, not a collection of texts which naturally lead one to think that there is only one way of putting matters with the God of Israel. Laws and narratives are repeated, and rarely, if ever, to say the same thing twice. Variant perspectives are enshrined in the canonical text, so that readers are promised that swords will become ploughshares while ploughshares will become swords, rendering complexity into any attempt to discern the ways of God amidst subsequent events. There is little basis, within this canonical collection of inspired texts, to suppose that theological articulation in the centuries which followed should be univocal. One might also point out that, on the evidence of both Jewish and Christian traditions, it has not been so in practice either.
So my first observation is that it suggests perhaps an over-optimistic view of potential theological ‘progress’ to make a statement such as ‘at present there is no normative view of Torah’ (p.144) whether that be true of the MJM as a whole or even, as Harvey’s subsequent survey makes clear, just within either the Torah-positive or Torah-negative streams of it. Such a way of putting the matter suggests that what is needed is ‘further work’ in order to arrive at some kind of normative view. My observation from the wilds of Gentile post-Christendom is that such a thing will not happen this side of the eschaton. Over here the Lutheran tradition wrote off the Torah as an anti-type of the gospel while the Calvinist tradition saw it as the root and foundation of Christian ethics, and both traditions brought forth glorious fruit in season (though not, of course, exclusively glorious), and they presumably cannot both be right, yet God somehow seems to pour out grace in both. It would be surprising to me if the MJM ever resolved this issue univocally. Indeed I find pretty much this point made by David Stern under the ‘Torah positive’ label (p.152), but I don’t think there are any logical reasons why it could not have been made in a Torah-negative framework too. Moreover, as with Torah, so with many of the topics reviewed and mapped herein, until the very last page of the very last map, appropriately on eschatology, where Richard Harvey says more or less exactly this: ‘It remains to be seen whether Messianic thought will cohere around one main view, or continue to develop into separate streams reflecting, as one would expect from the variation and diversity within both Judaism and Christianity on the topic, a confusion of voices which will only be finally resolved at the return of the Messiah himself.’ (p.258) I would place more emphasis on the ‘as one would expect’ than on the ‘it remains to be seen’. In practice it remains to be seen, but all the evidence points one way.
Perhaps this acceptance of diversity is to be understood as a MJM equivalent of what I would call catholic ecclesiology, as I hinted above. From my Anglican perspective, there is great merit in understanding the gathering of God’s people to worship and learn together as disciples in as broad and inclusive a way as possible. Obviously, not all self-consciously evangelical ecclesiologies agree. A resurgent conservatism even within Anglicanism is currently campaigning loudly to return to something more like a ‘pure’ church, and there have been non-conformist branches of the Protestant church for centuries whose avowed goal is to ‘return to the New Testament church’ (a goal which has always struck me as odd in the light of, for example, Jesus’ parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), but that is a point for another day). Such approaches often value doctrinal purity and correctness of theological confession, but whereas more theologically catholic church traditions value this too but manage to hold it together with as inclusive as possible a vision of who should be welcomed into the fellowship of God’s believers, non-conformist ecclesiologies often pursue a visible purity of the body. This is evidenced, for example, in having confessional standards as criteria for ‘membership’, or in the de facto result of the pursuit of doctrinal purity: repeated splitting and new denominations. The history of the Church over twenty centuries suggests that theological thinking is always both determinative of and determined in part by the ecclesiological structures in which it occurs. This give and take of what we might call theological idealism and pragmatism requires a constant interplay of allowing the structure to give voice to those who want to speak truthfully of God and God’s creation at the same time as allowing the structure to be shaped by those who give such voice. This is one of those tensions which it is always easier to collapse one way or the other, as countless examples demonstrate, but when it works it offers the church as a ‘plausibility structure’ for the Christian faith. In the light of this it is interesting to note that there is very little discussion of ‘structure’ in MMJT. I don’t know what the right word would be for a Messianic Jewish equivalent of ‘ecclesiology’, and in this regard it is interesting that the organising rubric of ‘God, Torah and Israel’, (p.36) when it arrives at discussion of Israel, turns out to be a chapter on eschatology and the land. I think what I am looking for is some middle term between Israel and the Messianic Jewish theologian, which relates to the theologian’s socio-theological location. Harvey’s discussion pursues, overall, the ‘sources, norms, methods, contents and results’ of Messianic Jewish theology (p.2), but in spite of the close chronicling of specific views held by specific people, I end up wondering whether something has been missed by not attempting to articulate these sources, norms, methods, contents and results in dialogue with their various social and structural locations. Conscious that I could simply be asking for a different work from the one presented, I want to ask how much of the ‘further work’ which is advertised as desirable at many points throughout is in fact going to have to be the work of showing how particular conceptions and instances of Messianic Jewish congregations serve as plausibility structures for particular ways of construing Messianic Jewish theology (MJT). There is evidence of this concern in the discussion of ‘Torah in practice’, of Passover, for instance, as the ‘locus classicus for the practical outworking of MJT’ (p.213), and in the wise conclusion of this part of the survey, where Harvey writes ‘the dynamics of demographic, generational and geographical changes in the constitution of the Messianic Jewish movement worldwide may influence the movement in the directions of either greater “orthopraxy”, or less concern with observance, or continue the flexibility and diversity of practice that characterise it at present.’ (p.221) This, it seems to me, is not only exactly right, but is also likely to be hugely significant for every other topic discussed herein, and makes me question the claim made a few lines earlier that conformity of practice will only be possible subsequent to progress being made on ‘the theological debates on the nature and authority of Torah’. I would rather suggest that different sorts of claims on that issue will count as progress depending on the demographic, generational and geographical constitution of various streams of the MJM.
To be continued:
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