Saturday 22 August 2009

Richard Briggs Review - Part 3

The Nature of Messianic Jewish Theology

In this context, a word is appropriate about the evident close relationship between the MJM and conservative evangelicalism, and in particular its specifically American manifestations in various forms of dispensationalist belief or hermeneutics. If it is true, as Harvey says at various points, that much of the MJM grew out of the same milieu which produced works such as Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and other end-times speculation, then the MJM has a real issue to face in terms of how it sees its own future(s) vis-à-vis the various trajectories currently being mapped out by such Christian movements. Summarising his discussion of Baruch Maoz, Harvey writes ‘If Messianic Judaism disassociates itself from Dispensationalism it would render less dogmatic some of the assertions of the movement, and would open it to a broader range of theological influences within Judaism and Christianity’. (p.257) To which this reader, situated a long way from such dispensational movements, might say: Yes, and a hundred times yes. The disastrous reduction of the books of Daniel and Revelation to end-time charts and maps is just one of the pieces of theological baggage which could be jettisoned in such a move. The patient inclusion in MMJT of diagrams explaining the differences between variant forms of premillennialism, amillennialism and postmillennialism is a tribute to the author’s even-handedness in being faithful to his source material, but it indicates significant problems in the ability of MJT to offer its own engagement with the relevant biblical texts (or indeed most mainstream Christian eschatological traditions and interpretations). Both Daniel and Revelation are profound analyses of the theological shaping of identity under pressure, both drawing upon vivid characterisations of the conflict between good and evil as experienced now and in heaven, and both are profoundly implicated in their originating contexts – the Maccabean crisis on the one hand and the dominance of the Roman Imperial cult on the other. There is plenty of material here for MJT practitioners to ask questions about the nature of God and God’s people, but none if it, frankly, has anything to do with the timing of the millennium. There is even, to give one example, considerable pause for thought in the way that Daniel reads the Maccabean crisis in startlingly different terms from 1 Maccabees’ account, which is deeply characterised by its zeal for Torah observance to the point of violent resistance (e.g. 1 Maccabees 2:15-28). The book of Daniel, instead, offers a resolutely theocentric perspective, even to the point of characterising the Maccabean uprising as ‘a little help’ (11:34). Are there implications here for understanding how to evaluate Torah observance in exile, and indeed what counts as faithfulness in any form in exile? A wide range of scholarship on Daniel suggests that the marginalised position of faith in the God of Israel in today’s world can draw profoundly on this book for its self-understanding, and prevalent trends in the current study of Revelation point the same way. Of course all these readings are contested, as I would be keen to admit, but for what it is worth I suggest that if MJT interacts with this kind of careful and critically respectful scholarship for its eschatological intuitions then it will find itself in a much better place.

This turn to the specifics of the biblical text brings me at the last to the major point which anyone in my position is bound to want to engage in a discussion of MJT: the nature and the status of the Christian New Testament with respect to the ‘sources, norms, methods, content and results’ of MJT, along with the hermeneutics appropriate to reading Jewish scripture itself. As a Gentile coming to a reading of the two testament Bible, I find myself confronted with questions of the extent to which there is continuity and discontinuity between the two testaments, testaments which, in the theological structuring of the Christian Bible, are inter-related as ‘old’ and ‘new’. (In passing I note my continued bemusement at the bizarre argument, mainly put forward by young people I suppose, that ‘old’ connotes ‘out of date’ or ‘disrespectful’ in some way - I always wonder what it says about some cultures that they think of ‘old’ in this way rather than in terms of due respect and wisdom, and find it odd that some Christians have thought this was a sufficient argument to overturn the theological point at issue in this terminology, where the ‘Old Testament’ is indeed very much one source of wisdom necessary to understand the New, and is thus to be treated with all – and very considerable – due respect.)
This matter of continuity and discontinuity between old and new is of course very much the subject-matter of both Romans and Galatians, and in a certain sense of perhaps all the New Testament writings. The context in both the main Pauline discussions makes it clear that the question of how to understand the on-going roles of Jew and Gentile are chief presenting questions. I tend to think that Galatians sees Paul arguing against Gentile conversion into Torah observance, an argument he pursues with an almost scornful zeal (wishing those who get circumcised would go all the way and ‘castrate themselves’, 5:12), while Romans sees him looking the other way and wondering what becomes, then, of the Jewish people if his earlier argument is right. But the logic is the same in both cases, and it is an argument conducted in a very tight logical space: what God did in the past was good (and hence the Torah is good, and holy, and just (Romans 7:12)), but what God has done in Jesus is also good, indeed even better, except that this by no means implies that there was anything wrong with what was done before. The resulting tangle which is Romans 7 is answered with ‘Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord’, and the pursuant discussion of Romans 9-11 surely is intended to settle the matter, if only, as one of my own theological teachers put it so clearly, one had the faintest idea what it is Paul actually argues in Romans 9-11. But whatever it is, it ends, notoriously, with his only non-Christological doxology (Romans 11:33-36), one which emphasises the inscrutable mystery of God’s glorious ways. Good and very good: the very good is better, but not in a way which renders the good any less good. Is Romans, I wonder, a putative Messianic Jewish theology? It is, after all, a systematic treatment of the very subject which two thousand years later runs right through the concerns of MJT.

Surprisingly, to me, Romans is not much discussed in MMJT. Galatians gets a brief mention with Tzvi Sadan’s reading of 3:24 where Paul describes the law as a disciplinarian (paidagogos; schoolmaster) who brought us to the Messiah, though Sadan’s point is reported as being that the relationship of believer to Torah is transformed and not terminated (p.164), rather as Romans 10:4 presents Christ as the telos of the nomos, and thus the ‘purpose’ or ‘final destination’ of Torah, with either way of looking at it possible in the text. In fact, in general, the New Testament, the berit chadashah, is not particularly in view in this survey, and the question of hermeneutics does not often manage to escape the gravitational pull of some form of dispensationalist evangelicalism on the rare occasions it does surface. As an outsider, I confess to a sense of unease that the discussions so ably mapped by MMJT appear to proceed with so little dialogue with the New Testament. Let me offer just one or two pointers to theological reasons which underlie my unease.
In my own teaching I organise a course on ‘Biblical Theology’ around the discussion of continuity and discontinuity between the testaments. I have been deeply influenced by Gerhard von Rad’s presentation of the classical prophets:

What engrossed the prophets’ attention was God’s new saving action, whose dawn they had discerned. The reason why they made any use at all of these old traditions in their preaching is that they ascribed to them something like a predictive character. They looked for a new David, a new Exodus, a new covenant, a new city of God: the old had thus become a type of the new and important as pointing forward to it.


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