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BOOK REVIEW
Abraham's promise and American power
Abraham's Promise by Michael Wyschogrod, edited by R
Kendall Soulen
Reviewed by Spengler
American Christianity is personal rather than political, in contrast to the
Protestant Separatism that founded the United States. The evangelicals who now
comprise nearly half of the US electorate entered the political arena with
reluctance. Except for the institutions it built, nothing remains of the New
England Puritanism that brought to a New Promised Land a New Chosen People.
Only the words etched into the marble of Abraham  Lincoln's
memorial remain of the biblical politics that guided the Union side of
America's Civil War. For that reason, I have
maintained, it is misguided to think of
Americanism as a religion.
Not until I read Michael Wyschogrod's new book Abraham's Promise did it
occur to me the long-departed spirit of American Puritanism might once again
become flesh. US evangelicals might awaken one morning as a New Israel not
merely in metaphor, but self-aware as a New Chosen People in a New Promised
Land. The most paranoid imagining about the Christian Right pales beside this
prospect. We are talking about the real thing, not a Straussian imitation: a
politicized Protestantism in the mold of the 17th-century Separatists. A
"Judaizing heresy" made the United States of America possible to begin with, I
have argued on other occasions, and Professor Wyschogrod argues a strong case
for the evangelicals to Judaize yet again. I do not know whether Wyschogrod
anticipates the strategic consequences of his theology, and rather doubt that
this is the case, but it is no less radical for absence of intent.
On the surface, his innovation is a way for Christians to think of themselves
as a special case of Judaism. That is only the conning tower of his submarine,
however. The intellectual resources of US evangelicals have not grown in step
with their membership, and the movement is ripe for a re-examination.
Wyschogrod provides them with a biblical (as opposed to a philosophical)
framework to "understand itself ... [by] coming to terms with the Judaism
within it". To a movement founded on the premise of Scripture alone, this may
constitute an offer the evangelicals cannot refuse.
Wyschogrod has drawn some jeers from co-religionists (including the
neo-conservatives at Commentary magazine), but sympathetic interest from
Protestant theologians. To one of them, R Kendall Soulen, a professor at
Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, we owe the present
volume and a helpful introduction.
An uninvited thought crosses my mind that this might be one of the most
important books of the 21st century. Not since the 17th century could anyone
make such a statement in earnest about a work of theology. But in the presence
of a single superpower, the chief strategic issue of the 21st century is
whether the West has the will to continue living. Islam will have assimilated
childless Western Europe by the end of the century. If America follows Europe
into nihilism, the 21st century will go out in fair imitation of the 5th. That
is why the evangelical mind will be the great issue of the next decade or two.
If millions of people over thousands of years say "Amen" to a religious
doctrine, it must be that this doctrine is woven into the fabric of their lives
such that they cannot live without it in peace. Alone among the peoples west of
the Indus, the Jews believe themselves to be eternal by virtue of Abraham's
covenant with God, such that Jewish life itself is a remedy against death. Jews
express this by speaking of God's presence, or indwelling, in Israel - not an
abstract Jewish soul, Wyschogrod observes, but the real Israel of flesh as well
as spirit.
Christians derive from innumerable peoples most of whom now are extinct, and
all of whom one day will be extinct - as Gentiles, that is, as individuals
defined by the nation of their birth, Gentiles are subject to death, that is,
to mortal sin; that is why no Christian has difficulty with the doctrine of
original sin while no Jew can make sense of it. Christians cannot transcend the
death of their kind except by the resurrection of their flesh, for which the
resurrection of Jesus stands surety. No one can come to the Father - the god of
the Jews - except through the Son, for it is the resurrection of the Son that
persuades the Christian that his life will persist beyond the extinction of his
gentium. No one except the Jews themselves, Franz Rosenzweig added, because
they do not need to come to the Father, as they already are with Him.
Wyschogrod argues that if God is present in Jewish flesh as well as spirit,
then He is incarnate in the Jewish people, which, in its own view, constitutes
God's dwelling-place on Earth. Christianity, he continues, merely condenses the
Indwelling of the Divine Presence among the Jewish people into God's
incarnation in a single Jew, namely Jesus of Nazareth.
Nor could the God of Israel penetrate the Gentile world in any other fashion,
Wyschogrod adds. The Jews churlishly reject the idea that God might choose
anyone else. "The Church's claim of being the new people of God ... is, from
the Jewish point of view, another example of the nations' protest against the
election of the stock of Abraham." But just what god do the Jews believe they
are dealing with? "The Christian is addressed by the God of Jesus who is the
God of Abraham."
This god is a god of covenants; he relates himself to a people through
a covenant that makes that people his people and him their god. Access to this
god is only through a covenant by means of which a people becomes the people of
God; once this is perceived, the Church arises as the people of a new covenant.
Christianity, therefore, expresses the longing of those not included in the
Covenant with Israel for election by the God of Israel.
A subtle premise underlies this argument. Christianity in the past argued that
"its election superseded that of the old Israel". Wyschogrod explains: Israel
must, of course, reject this view. All attempts to transform its election into
a universal election of all people in faith can be interpreted by Israel only
as the beginning of that movement towards the universal which, fully developed,
culminates to the universal truth of a philosophy antithetical to the
concreteness of the God of Abraham. Readers might wish to
compare an essay on the subject of Jewish vs Christian concept of divine love
by Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik of New York City, currently posted in the current
issue of Azure magazine (www.azure.org.il). The philosophical view of love one
finds in St Thomas Aquinas recasts the biblical god into a sort of Aristotelian
prime mover, who loves spontaneously and universally, without cause or
provocation. This is quite different from the god who loves Abraham first among
all men, and extends that love to Abraham's descendants. The Thomist view is
universal and philosophical, the biblical view concrete and historical.
American Christianity hangs in the balance between the philosophical, or
European, view and the biblical, that is, the American view. I believe that
Wyschogrod has fanned a gentle wind in the direction of the scales, which
ultimately will tilt the balance, by offering to American evangelicals a common
biblical framework in which Christian and Jew can understand themselves as
adherents of a common scripture. In that respect he stands in the tradition of
Soren Kierkegaard (the subject of his doctoral dissertation) and Karl Barth, of
whom he is perhaps the only admirer among Orthodox Jewry.
The sacrifice that Wyschogrod offers upon the altar of Judeo-Christian harmony
is none other than Maimonides, the towering Medieval philosopher of Judaism. To
make way for a mystical notion of God's indwelling among Israel, Wyschogrod
must do battle with the Greek philosophical outlook that caused Maimonides to
insist that God cannot be corporeal. Professor Soulen, the volume's editor,
places at the front a ruthless critique of Maimonides, titled "The One God of
Abraham". I have posted some extracts of Wyschogrod's article on the
Asia Times Online Forum under the thread
"Spengler's Free Will Mistake", in case readers wish to pursue the matter
further. It is worth nothing that for Leo Strauss, the intellectual leader of
the neo-conservatives, Maimonides represented the peak of Jewish thinking, that
is, a form of thinking so philosophical as to cease to be Jewish. Wyschogrod's
rejection of Maimonides represents something radically different, and a matter
of extreme controversy among Jewish scholars.
An attack on Maimonides, by the way, also threatens St Thomas Aquinas, the
mainstay of Catholic philosophy. Although Wyschogrod addresses much of his
thinking to the Catholic Church, it seems unlikely that the Vatican would view
him as anything but a threat. I hasten to say that I do not agree with (or
perhaps do not fully understand) all that Wyschogrod has to say about
philosophy, but will leave that for another occasion. The thrust of his
argument strengthens my often-stated view that the United States represents a
radical discontinuity with Western civilization - that is, with the blend of
Greek philosophy and Hebrew ethics created by the Catholic Church - but rather
represents a Hebraic throwback.
What does this imply for US politics? It is a commonplace that theology now
plays a central role in strategic affairs. Washington's hopes in Iraq come down
to a wager that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani will mosque-and-state
differently from his Iranian co-religionists. But the religious dimension of
Iraq's elections on January 30 was no less decisive than in America's elections
on November 2. Theology is a more important variable in US politics than in the
Middle East, precisely because it is more of a variable. Theological responses
in the Muslim world are preconditioned. In the United States they are in
upheaval.
Even the casual reader of US newspapers notes that the cutting edge of
political punditry takes into account theological influences upon the White
House. In The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol claimed President George W Bush's
second Inaugural Address as a victory for Leo Strauss, while Joseph Bottum
claimed the president got it all from St Thomas Aquinas. Catholic conservative
Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for president Ronald Reagan, worried that
Bush had put too much religion into the speech, while the non-conservative
Norman Podhoretz averred that the speech contained just the right amount of
religion. A few years ago this debate barely would have passed for parody.
No one is more astonished at the mass of political analysis devoted to them
than US evangelicals themselves, who busy themselves with school board
elections, recovery from substance abuse, supporting troubled families, and
other worthy ventures. Evangelical Christianity is not a political movement,
quite unlike the 17th-century Protestant Separatism that set out to found a New
Israel. The present "Great Awakening" cares about pornographic fare on cable
television, not elections in Afghanistan.
Not since Abraham Lincoln has the United States felt itself to be a "nearly
chosen" people, with a religious mission like that of ancient Israel. The US
may stand at the threshold of a religious self-awareness in Lincoln's mold. I
have read Wyschogrod's new book with astonishment, and espy a chance that the
US might return to the world view of its founders: that of a Chosen People in a
Promised Land. If that occurs, the world will be a different place.
Abraham's Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations by Michael
Wyschogrod, edited by R Kendall Soulen. SCM Press; London 2004. ISBN
0-8028-1355-0. Price: US$24.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on
sales, syndication and
republishing.) |
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