‘Real Estate’ Theology
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Abstract
Reinhold Niebuhr and the Jewish people There was one Protestant teacher in America who, during the German Church Struggle and the Holocaust, wrote and lectured with remarkable understanding of what was happening. And he understood something that has yet to penetrate most of North American Protestantism: that the Holocaust is as great a tragedy for Christendom as for the Jewish people. For the Holocaust occurred right in the heart of Christendom, and it was carried out by baptized Roman Catholics, Protestants and Eastern Orthodox who were never rebuked let alone excommunicated. And it was planned, supervised and rationalized not by ignorant, illiterate, superstitious savages on the margins of civilization but by professors and Ph.Ds and M.D.s from some of the greatest universities in the world. Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) came to the conclusion, watching the insensitivity and indifference of the socalled Christian nations to the Jewish plight, that the key Jewish tragedy was powerlessness lack of a state. His articles of Februay 21 and 28,1942 in The Nation were classics of political realism informed by an active Christian cons~ience .~ But his most dramatic claim lay not in political pragmatism: it lay in his affirmation of the Jewish right of self-definition. He became the first prominent American theologian to come out against Christian missions that targetted Jews. He publicly called for a moratorium on Hebrew Christian missions.1° He also criticized the provisional tolerance of liberals who were willing to 'grant' rights to 'the Jews' if they would assimilate to the dominant culturel1 a favourite theme of cultural anti-Semites of the Enlightenment from Napoleon to The Christian Centuy of Niebuhr's time. At the critical point he moved beyond the triumphalism of traditional Christianity, the abstractions of much liberal Protestantism, and the hard propositionalism of much conservative Protestantism: he rejected the definitions of the outsider, who had consigned 'the Jew' to role-playing in someone else's passion play. Here is the critical point, for the cardinal issue in centuries of Christian antisemitism has been the determination of the Heidenkirche (Church of the Gentiles) to define 'the Jews'. And Israel is precisely the stone of stumbling to triumphalist Christianity because the new Jewish state is the tangible pledge of Jewish survival and, from the outsider's perspective, self-definition.