Narrative Theology After Auschwitz

""Amidst the tumult and confusion of the times, John W. Aldridge has kept a singular purity of vision," said the New York Times Book Review. While the changing editorial policies of the major book reviews and magazines threaten to make serious literary criticism a thing of the past, Aldridge still believes that books and their ideas have a living relation to daily life. Taken together, these essays offer not only a survey of John Aldridge's distinguished career as a critic, but also an intriguing picture of the evolution of contemporary literature."--BOOK JACKET.

This book takes up the challenge of providing a way to do Christian theology that is both sensitive to the questions arising in the Shoah and incorporates the advances of Jewish-Christian dialogue. Moore's approach also offers new thinking on the difficult texts of the Christian passion narratives as an example of the post-Shoah Christian theology. He expresses a hopeful outlook, that we are on the threshold of a new stage in theology and dialogue; a new generation of thinkers, both Jewish and Christian, are asking how we can move forward and apply the lessons learned from the events of the Shoah.

How is it possible, after the Shoah, to declare one's faith in the God of Israel? Breaking the Tablets is David Weiss Halivni's eloquent and insightful response to this question. Halivni, Auschwitz survivor and one of the greatest Talmudic scholars of the past century, declares that at this time of God's near absence, Jews can still observe the words of the Torah and pray for God to come near again. Jews must continue to study the classic texts of rabbinic Judaism but now with greater humility, recognizing that even the greatest religious leaders and thinkers interpret these texts only as mere people, prone to human error. Breaking the Tablets is important reading for anyone who feels burdened by the question of how it is possible to believe in God and practice their religion.

This book addresses the problem of religion, ethics, and public policy in a global technological civilization. It attempts to do what narrative ethicists have said cannot be done—to construct a cross-cultural ethic of human dignity, human rights, and human liberation which respects the diversity of narrative traditions. It seeks to do this without succumbing to either ethical relativism or ethical absolutism. The author confronts directly the dominant narrative of our technological civilization: the Janus-faced myths of "Apocalypse or Utopia." Through this myth, we view technology ambivalently, as both the object of our dread and the source of our hope. The myth thus renders us ethically impotent: the very strength of our literal utopian euphoria sends us careening toward some literal apocalyptic "final solution." The demonic narrative that dominated Auschwitz ("killing in order to heal") is part of this Janus-faced technological mythos that emerged out of Hiroshima. And it is this mythic narrative which underlies and structures much of public policy in our nuclear age. This book proposes a coalition of members of holy communities and secular groups, organized to prevent any future eruptions of the demonic. Its goal is to construct a bridge not only over the abyss between religions, East and West, but also between religious and secular ethics.

The impact of technology-enhanced mass death in the twentieth century, argues Zachary Braiterman, has profoundly affected the future shape of religious thought. In his provocative book, the author shows how key Jewish theologians faced the memory of Auschwitz by rejecting traditional theodicy, abandoning any attempt to justify and vindicate the relationship between God and catastrophic suffering. The author terms this rejection "Antitheodicy," the refusal to accept that relationship. It finds voice in the writings of three particular theologians: Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits, and Emil Fackenheim. This book is the first to bring postmodern philosophical and literary approaches into conversation with post-Holocaust Jewish thought. Drawing on the work of Mieke Bal, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, and others, Braiterman assesses how Jewish intellectuals reinterpret Bible and Midrash to re-create religious thought for the age after Auschwitz. In this process, he provides a model for reconstructing Jewish life and philosophy in the wake of the Holocaust. His work contributes to the postmodern turn in contemporary Jewish studies and today's creative theology.

Many argue that Christians must address their own culpability in the destruction of Europe's Jewry. If post-Holocaust Christians only lament Christianity's sin the tradition will be ultimately left with little to say and no credibility. Post-Holocaust Christians must emphasize positive differences that Christianity can make, including: -- Repentant honesty about Christianity's anti-Jewish history -- New appreciation for the Jewish origins of Christianity, the Jewish identity of Jesus, and the continuing vitality of the Jewish people and their traditions -- Welcome liberation from liturgies and biblical interpretations that promote harmful Christian exclusivism

The postmodern human condition and relationship to God were forged in response to Auschwitz. Christian theology must now address the challenge posed by the Shoah. Grace in Auschwitz offers a constructive theology of grace that enables twenty-first-century Westerners to relate meaningfully to the Christian tradition in the wake of the Holocaust and unprecedented evil. Through narrative theological testimonial history, the first part articulates the human condition and relationship to God experienced by concentration camp inmates. The second part draws from the lives and works of Simone Weil, Dorothee Solle, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Alfred Delp, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Sergei Bulgakov to propose and apply a coherent kenotic model enabling the transposition of the Christian doctrine of grace into categories strongly correlating with the experience of Auschwitz survivors. This model centers on the vulnerable Jesus Christ, a God who takes on the burden of the human condition and freely suffers alongside and for human beings. In and through the person of Jesus, God is made present and active in the midst of spiritual desolation and destitution, providing humanity and solace to others.

There is an old Jewish adage that pretty much sums up Israel’s experience among the nations for the last 2,000 years. “Scratch a gentile,” the saying goes, “and you’re sure to find an anti-Semite.” That notion is given credence by the fact that the first two millennia of the Jewish-Christian encounter culminated in the systematic slaughter of six-million Jews in the heart of Christendom. But Dr. Paul R. Carlson, author of Christianity After Auschwitz, is cautiously optimistic that the dawn of this new millennium may lead to Jewish-Christian amity as the Church faces up to its past sins and seeks to work with the Synagogue against those demonic forces which threaten civilization itself. However, as Carlson illustrates, the genocidal germ that gave birth to Hitler’s criminal regime still flourishes among countless Christians, many of whom would passionately deny they harbor any anti-Semitic notions or sentiments. While the book is addressed primarily to Carlson’s fellow evangelicals, both Jews and Christians will discover that it provides the general reader with an overview of those critical issues which scholars alone have in the past wrestled with in the post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian encounter. At the outset, Carlson is quick to concede that the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, a scion of the great Chechnowa Rebbe, was certainly correct when he insisted that “Christians have never tried to penetrate the soul of the Jews. “They have read the Bible but neglected the oral tradition by which we interpret it,” he noted. “This makes a different Bible altogether. For example, says Rav Soloveitchik: “To equate Judaism with legalism the way Christian theologians are prone to do is like equating mathematics with a compilation of mathematical equations.” By the same token, old stereotypes die hard. “The Jew has been pictured as the arch-capitalist and the arch-Bolshevik and chastised for being both, whipsawed by contending forces,” says Nathan C. Belth. “The Soviet authorities [saw] Jews as a threat to the state, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who castigate[d] Soviet terror, sees Jews as libertarians who brought on socialism, after, of course, rejecting Christ.” Since time-immemorial, anti-Semites have also portrayed the Jew as the greedy, shady businessman or banker. But they conveniently forget stories such as that of Haym Salomon [1740-1785], the Jewish broker whose financial aid staved off starvation and desertion among American troops during our War for Independence. At one critical point, Robert Morris, the American financier and statesman, sent a messenger to alert Haym Salomon of the plight of the cash-strapped Colonial forces. The man brought the news to Salomon while he was attending Yom Kippur services at Mikveh Israel Synagogue in Philadelphia. The congregation was shocked at the intrusion on the holiest day of the Jewish year; but Haym Salomon quietly informed the messenger: “Tell Mr. Morris our country’s appeal will not be in vain.” But that old canard about Jews and their money remains grist for the anti-Semite’s mill. By the same token, Jews have not been entirely blameless when it comes to their own stereotypes of Christians, particularly evangelicals. Nathan Perlmutter confessed as much during his tenure as national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith. “Our image of the fundamentalist and the evangelical is a kind of collage assembled out of bits and pieces from Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and Erskine Caldwell . . . ,” he admitted. “Even after all this time memories of the great swarm of sex-ridden, Bible-thumping caricatures continue to exert a pervasive power.” But evangelicals would be among the first to admit that Jews have come a long way since the days of the infamous Toledot Yeshu, or Life of Jesus, which depicted the Galilean in scandalous terms. Indeed, the Israeli author Shalom Ben-Chorin is representative of those Jewish intellectuals who now believe that “it is time for Jesus to come home again.” Meanwhile, few Christians realize just how vulnerable many Jews feel in what they perceive to be “Christian America.” That perception is heightened by the 1992 American Jewish Year Book finding that “roughly 12 percent of Americans of Jewish heritage are now Christians.” “There is another way of looking at what I have called a disaster in the making,” says former US Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, author of Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America “Of the 6.8 million people who are Jews or of Jewish descent, 1.1 million say they have no religion and 1.3 million have joined another religion, adding up to 2.4 million,” Abrams observes. “This means that one-third of the people in America of Jewish ethnic origin no longer report Judaism as their current religion (Abrams italics). Such statistics illustrate why Jewish leaders unanimously condemn those Christian missionary agencies which specifically target Jews for conversion. They have been particularly incensed by one recent evangelical effort, known as Peace 2000, which aimed to convert every Jew in Israel to Christianity by the dawn of the new millennium. “Centuries of martyrdom are the price which the Jewish people has paid for survival,” says Brandeis scholar Marshall Sklare. “And the apostate, at one stroke, makes a mockery of Jewish history. “But if the convert is contemptible in Jewish eyes,” Sklare adds, “the missionary — all the more, the missionary of Jewish descent -- is seen as pernicious, for he forces the Jew to relive the history of his martyrdom, all the while pressing the claim that in approaching the Jew he does so out of love. “What kind of love is it, Jews wonder, that would deprive a man of his heritage,” Sklare asks. “Furthermore, given the history of Christian treatment of the Jews, would it not seem time at last to recognize that the Jew has paid his dues and earned the right to be protected from obliteration by Christian love as well as destruction by Christian hate?” The distinguished Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was even more pointed about the matter. “I had rather enter Auschwitz,” he once remarked, “than be an object of conversion.” All of this leads to the opening chapter of Christianity After Auschwitz, which introduces Christians to Emil Fackenheim’s “Eleventh Commandment” — or 614th Mitzvoth — which decrees that Jews are not permitted to grant Hitler any posthumous victories through intermarriage, assimilation, or conversion to a faith not their own. In a word, they are commanded to remain Jews. By the same token, Jewish scholars are quick to recognize that any “open and honest” dialogue will at some point involve a frank discussion of the similarities and differences between the Jewish and Christian perception[s] of the Messianic hope. With that understanding, the second chapter deals with the remarkable career of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh and last Grand Rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidim. Many of his talmidim, or disciples, believe he will ultimately be revealed as King-Messiah. His life and work are considered within the context of that of Jesus of Nazareth, as well as those of several pseudo-messiahs who have troubled Israel down through the centuries The author then makes it clear that Jesus himsel

Focusing on the metanarrative of exile and restoration Timo Eskola claims that a post-liberal, narrative New Testament theology is both consistent and explanative. Combining a post-New Quest perspective on Jesus with an eschatological reading of Paul, the author states that Jesus' temple criticism aims at restoration eschatology. Jesus starts a priestly community that expects God's jubilee to begin with Jesus' work, and proceed with the preaching of the new gospel. The reception of this message in the post-Easter church results in resurrection Christology that proclaims Jesus' Davidic kingship on God's throne of glory. Both Paul and Jewish Christian teachers later present Christ's community as a new temple where believers serve the Lord as priests of the new covenant. Furthermore, restoration eschatology provides a new basis for understanding Paul's contrast with the words of the law, and his teaching of justification.

This popular textbook has been thoroughly revised and updated to reflect recent global developments, whilst retaining its unique and compelling narrative-style approach. Using ancient stories from diverse religions, it explores a broad range of important and complex moral issues, resulting in a truly reader-friendly and comparative introduction to religious ethics. A thoroughly revised and expanded new edition of this popular textbook, yet retains the unique narrative-style approach which has proved so successful with students Considers the ways in which ancient stories from diverse religions, such as the Bhagavad Gita and the lives of Jesus and Buddha, have provided ethical orientation in the modern world Updated to reflect recent discussions on globalization and its influence on cross-cultural and comparative ethics, economic dimensions to ethics, Gandhian traditions, and global ethics in an age of terrorism Expands coverage of Asian religions, quest narratives, the religious and philosophical approach to ethics in the West, and considers Chinese influences on Thich Nhat Hanh’s Zen Buddhism, and Augustine’s Confessions Accompanied by an instructor’s manual (coming soon, see www.wiley.com/go/fasching) which shows how to use the book in conjunction with contemporary films