Just to refresh what is the background of Aftonbladet’s article: my article about the age-old conspirational theories of blood-thirsty Jews slaugthering children, Bakgrunden till myten om den blodtörstige juden at Newsmill. Unfortunately only in Swedish… sorry.

Alcalà rightly challenges the sources of Boström and points out the consequences of his article, in spite of its dubitable grounds. In the wake of the article, tThere already are several examples of grand anti-Semitic lies about Israeli thefts of organs. since the 1960’s leftist journalists in Sweden have thought that journalism is not there to describe but to change society. To a certain extent all of us have a duty to try changing what is unrighteous. But only when we are in line with truth we can accomplish anything. And up till now Boström and Aftonbladet have not been able to show that there are grounds for the insinuations in the article.

When evaluating the work of a scholarly discipline, understanding the symbolic world—the though world—of the scholars it is necessary to understand the time in which they live. Since my work over the last 8–9 years have been to understand of German exegetes construct Jews and Judaism, I also need to explore their views of ethnicity, nation, and how they look at other ethnic groups.

The picture above is of a fascinating painting by Caspar David Friedrich  (1774–1840), who more than any other painter represents the German Romanticism. The two men, seen from the back, are standing in awe before a nature which is animated by the presence od something higher, which to Friedrich was the Creator God. In his pictures, Friedrich not only confesses a fascination to the nature, but also a Christian faith. Therefore it is not correct to make him a pantheist, nor to make Nazi interpretations of him. But nevertheless, it come from a Germany, right after the Napoleon wars, where the establishing and strengthening of a national identity is of key importance. One main movement for this goal was the Burschenschaften, student organisations, who were forerunners for German nationalism. The hats on the heads of the two men were by the time of the painting prohibited in Germany. It represented the longing for a unified Germany, an idea which was among the most urgent and dominant in German history during the 19th century. To wear the costume was a confession indeed (see http://hss.ulb.uni-bonn.de:90/ulb_bonn/diss_online/phil_fak/2002/schneider_eva_maria/0083_1.pdf).

What has this with exegesis to do? Nothing with the New Testament text, but definitely with the symbolic world of the interpreters. In this nationalistic wave, Jews and Judaism also became more and more of a foreign element. As Herder had put it, describing the Jews:

For thousands of years, yes, almost since its inception, God’s people [. . .] has been a parasitic plant on the trunks of
other nations—a race of shrewd negotiators, almost all over the world,
which despite all oppression never longs for its own honour and abode,
never for a homeland.

For example, de Wette was deeply inspired by the nationalistic movement emanating from the national revival after the Napoleonic wars. And this affects his exegetical positions. More about this in my chapter on de Wette and Herder in my book Roots of theological anti-Semitism.

No shadow over Caspar David Friedrich for this—but it is interesting how the early nationalistic movement of Germany expresses itself in art. Including the costume. For me, looking at a great exhibition of Friedrich’s art was part of my on-going search for keys to the symbolic worlds of the German exegetes who formed modern exegesis and its views of Jews and Judaism.

Photo: © The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, 2009

With Jesus there is both a continuity and a discontinuity to present-day Judaisms. Acting as an endtime prophet, he proclaim that the time has come, the Kingdom of God is present, and the conditions for entering it. Pursuing the law without compromise, he seems to have streched it as much as possible to fit the Kingdom of God ethics which he had come to proclaim in Israel, and out of Israel. But in no way Jesus tries to starta ‘new’ thing, but to fulfil the old, to realise the covenant through his sacrifice, to release the Spirit of the covenant, and to make the calling of Israel as the teacher of the nations a reality.

History made gentile Christianity the dominating in terms of number, philosophical and theological culture etc. This belongs to the greatest problems in the history of the Church; due to this, it is difficult for us today what Christianity was meant to be.

Understanding that Jesus was and is a circumcised Jewish God-man, who took his Jewishness seriously is a fundamental truth, which challenges us to search for what Christian identity is meant to be. Our Saviour is a Jew. This also necessitates that Christians (i.e. people of the Jewish Messiah, since the word  ‘Christ’ only is a translation of ha-Mashiach) understand that they have a fundamental association with his own people, the Jews.

The Dresden symposium was held at Hannah-Arendt-Institut-für-Totalitarismusforschung at the TU Dresden. Around fifteen scholars, all but myself from Germany, read papers over the theme. ‘Voelkisch’ religion is difficult to delimit. Here the focus was ideological movements and people who in different ways connected a craze for the Germanic-Nordic with racist ideas of the supremacy of such peoples.

My interest is the obvious examples of Protestants, who increasingly adapted their Protestantism to voelkish ideas. In the symposium, Professor Manfred Gailus, Berlin, spoke about a ‘Doppelglaube’ in National Socialist theological circles, which contained of Protestantism and voelkish ideas. In my study Roots of theological anti-Semitism I have clearly evidenced this by Walter Grundmann, who increasingly integrated a once quite pietist Protestantism with motives from Norse and Germanic ideology, and from ‘modern’ racial ideas. Grundmann says:

When the Germans today stand in defence against Bolshevism [. . .], when
they stand in the struggle for hereditary soundness and uprightness of life,
the Reich has really come among them, and its ruler is the Führer.
He continues: The fight against Bolshevism and for “hereditary soundness and uprightness
of life” is a sign that “the Reich has really come among them”. This choice of words, linked to gospel sayings with
the same wording, lends divine authorisation to the National Socialist rule, to Hitler, and to the racist project of attaining “hereditary soundness”, purifying the blood of the German people, according to the Nuremberg Laws. (1)

This syncretism is frightening and interesting. How can a Protestantism theologian synthesise these things, without totally losing his identity? I think Grundmann did lose it, but the process is interesting. No doubt he had ‘developed’ theologically to a more liberal stance, saying things in 1940 that he had never said 1930, is spite of his early membership in the NSDAP.

My own contribution to the work in Dresden was a paper with the title “Germanentum als Überideologie. Cooperation between Swedish and German theologians during National Socialism”. There I discussed cooperations between theologians in Stockholm-Uppsala-Lund on the one hand and the very brown university environment in Jena-Eisenach. This is an area which by far is not dealt with enough. And were fellow exegetes were deeply invoved. God willing, and time and purse permitting, I will publish a book on this theme. But first I need to make the paper I read in Dresden into a printable chapter in the volume frm the symposium.

The Moscow trip is another story. 150 pastors and leaders whom I was teaching during four intensive days. And in the evenings the fabulous Rublev icons and Repins art in the Tretjakov Gallery—and a few numbers of my favourite Chagall, plus the great names of 19th century European art in the Pusjkin Museum. And—not to forget—the beautiful rebuilt Dresden, which I definitely wish to visit again.

(1) Gerdmar, Anders. 2009. Roots of Theological Antisemitism. German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann. Ed Hava  Tirosh-Samuelson and Giuseppe Veltri. Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Leiden, Boston: Brill, page 552.

However, his question is a difficult one. David writes about supersessionism, and adds:

I’m also not very convinced by its most powerful alternatives (e.g. two-covenant theology and dispensationalism).

As David suggests, I am not only skeptic against supersessionism, but I am convinced that it is impossible to support supersessionism from the Bible. God will not fail to stand by his promises (of which the Hebrew Bible is full); as Paul says:

They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ. (Rom 9:4–5 RSV)

The new covenant is no covenant with the gentiles—we have no covenant of our own—but with Israel. The only way to relate to the Messiah is through Israel (Eph 2:12–14). Therefore gentile Christians must learn that without Israel, no salvation. This must make us humble.

As Paul shows in Rom 9–11, the Messiah belongs to Israel, and salvation is first for the Jews, salvation through a Messiah who has come and will come back, Yeshua Hammashiach. However, we must be careful not to try figure out with our minds how their way to salvation works.

Christianity has culturally become a gentile thing because of history, and we have so many patterns which are form in an environment where Jewishness has been regarded enmity to the Messiah and the church. It is not. Europeanised Christianity has distorted Jesus into a person, which Jesus only with great difficulty can identify as their brother—compare Josef.

Misguided human solutions include a ‘messianism’, where non-Jews try to live in a Jewish way to come closer to the roots. But there are Noahidic laws, which are there for us gentiles,  and we neither should or would benefit from ‘playing Jews’. Another misguided human solutionis of course where Jesus no longer us the Cornerstone or Stumbling block. He is, to the Jews first, then to the Greek. As already indicated, supersessionism is out of question, since it is incompatible with the Biblical teaching.

Remains perhaps to share Paul’s heart, (the same cry as Josef’s as he met his brothers): a deep love and burden for the brethren, no bullying ‘Here am I, and I have taken over your inheritance’, but a burden for his people, and faith in God’s sovereign solution. This will hardly come through a gentilised Christianity, but from within the Jewish Body itself.

The circumcised body of Israel is the […] carnal presence through which the redemption makes its way in history. Salvation is of the Jews because the flesh of Israel is the abode of the divine presence in the world. It is the carnal anchor that God has sunk into the soil of creation.[1]

I believe that Wyschogrod here is basically in line with a much earlier Jewish sage, Paul of Tarsus, and I will argue that this perspective is essential for the Pauline understanding of the relationship between the church and Israel, but also for the Jews in the world. Christian theology having departed from its Jewish roots has not only excluded Israel from its symbolic universe, but also excluded itself from the symbolic universe of Israel. Illustrated by a simple duality, the church as organism is part of Israel, otherwise it is excluded from the covenants of God (a point which I will clarify below), but as organisation Church history tells us that it has alienated itself from Israel, and thus to a certain extent from the God who in the gospels is presented as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Matt 11:22; Luk 13:28). This estrangement is originally a hermeneutical one, when the church began interpreting itself as something fundamentally other than Israel, but was soon manifested in praxis.[2] The acknowledging of Israel as God’s chosen people ceased, and Christians as well as Jews began defining themselves as entirely different, if not opposing bodies. Not to reiterate my earlier argument, this perspective dominates Christian theology from perhaps the 140’s to the 1940’s. But with what can be called a ‘repentance under the gallows’, that is, a repentance forced upon the repentent, things took on a new note after the Shoah. The World Council of the Churches 1948 and 1961 began to acknowledge the guilt of anti-Semitism in church history and the need to reject the deicide charge. The Second Vatican Council with its Nostra Aetate 1965 took further step in declaring that Jews cannot be regarded as rejected by God, forming the strongest stand against supersessionism till then,[3] and an important one.

To be continued…

[2] Perhaps already in the Didache, probably dating from 70?–100 C.E., where e.g., the days of fasting stipulated diverge from those of contemporary Judaism and Shabbat. This is true even if the teaching of the two ways seems to have deep roots in Jewish tradition, Brock, Sebastian. 1990. The Two Ways and the Palestinian Targum. In A Tribute to Geza Vermes. Essays on Jewish and Christian Literature and History, ed. Philip R. Davies and Richard T. White, 100:139–152. Sheffield: JSOT Press.

[3] Leighton, Christopher M. 2000. Christian Theology after the Shoah. In Christianity in Jewish Terms, ed. Tikvah Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel and Michael A. Signer: 36–48. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 40–41.

Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

These were the words of Adolf Hitler as he motivated his plans for a genocide on a far larger scale, that on the Jews:

Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness — for the present only in the East — with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

(Kevork B. Bardakjian, Hitler and the Armenian Genocide. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Zoryan Institute, 1985.

Today’s big news in Sweden is that the congress of the Social Democrats in Sweden has decided to work for an EU acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide 1915–1923. The decision was taken by the congress against the governing board, and this is a victory for truth and righteousness.

The ‘big politicians’ do not like a decision like this, since it disturbs the dreams of an integration of Turkey into the EU. But the people ran down the top guys. This shows a backbone of righteousness in a movement with which I seldom sympathise. But its former leader Göran Persson made a similar positive historical statement, as he invited to the big Holocaust Congress in Stockholm.

The genocide, started in April 1915, was a systematic attempt to diminish the Armenian population. At least one million, up to one million and a half, people were killed, and hundreds of thousands became homeless, impoverished, and persecuted. Other Christian groups were also greatly diminished by the genocide: Assyrians, Syrians, and Caldeans. In fact, Armenia is the oldest Christian nation with a rich, old Christian literary culture.

It is upon time that EU politicians have the courage to state that this was not only a few single massacres (as if such could be trifled), but that it was a full-scale genocide. And genocides cannot be compared, other than in magnitude. He who rescues a child, rescued a whole world (Jewish saying). And he who kills a child, kills a whole world.

Today’s decision does Swedish grassroot Social democracy great credit.

But, an exegete and biblical theologian, one feels like moving to another world when passing from exegetical theology into Systematic Theology. If the Bible is our source and with the background we have delineated, this is problematic. Systematic Theology which does not feed on Biblical Theology is less than useful to apostolic Christianity.

Earliest Christianity had the Hebrew Bible as its only scriptural Revelation, understanding themselves as those Jews who had got the privilege of knowing the Messiah whom God sent to Israel, Jesus, and being the ones to spread the good news “to the Jews first, then to the Greek.” These Christians operated entirely within the biblical world-view and saw the Scriptures fulfilled before their eyes.

How did the Christian church lose this connection? And what ‘chemistry’ does it change that it has been lost?

Super-sessionism

Kendall Soulen writes

Supersessionism [that the covenant with Israel is superseded, AG] is a specifically systematic theological problem since it threatens to render the existence of the Jewish people a matter of indifference to the God of Israel.”[1]

The architects of Christian theology were the Anti-Gnostic fathers, e.g., Justin Martyr and Irenæus. They create what one could call the standard model:

creation

sin

redemption

fulfilment

Building on dispensationalism

Here physical Israe  becomes obsolete. “The people of Israel was precious before the church arose… the people was made void when the church arose” (Melito of Sardes, 2^nd century). This thinking has to do with dispensationalism, i.e., that God acts with the world in different dispensations or economies (normally between two and seven, sometimes even up till twelve). However, such dispensations are not, or only very weakly, founded on biblical evidence. The existence of an old and a new covenant is evident, but how fixed is the border? A more developed dispensationalism builds on Darby’s very speculative foundation, now about 110 years old, and can scarcely be regarded a serious biblical theological foundation. Therefore it is dangerous to build large systems on weak foundations as different dispensational theories, even if they contain some truth.

However, the model above is not entirely incorrect, but it skips over the own narrative of the Bible, God working through a family (Abraham’s), which becomes Israel. By skipping over the covenant, this supersessionist model can deal with all that are created without seeing the Pauline imperative “To the Jew first, then to the Greek.”

In Paul, Jesus is presented as Abraham’s seed in singular form (Gal 3:16 sperma) and by faith in him (Rom 9:30–32) Jews and Gentiles are blessed. Fundamental to this thinking is the covenant, which cannot become void. Through Jesus Christ the ones who believe in him are brought into the Covenant.

Supersessionism (or replacement theology) is incorrect since God according to Romans 9–11 still reckons with his people, and actually sees the Gentiles as dependant on the Olive Tree Israel.

A model which better reckons upon the role of the family of Abraham-Isak-Jacob/Israel is this:

The God of Israel

> creation

> the fall

> the covenant with blessing to Abraham and through him to all nations

> redemption – the life in the Kingdom – though Abraham’s Seed, a Davidic Messiah, Jesus Christ

> fulfilment of God’s promises: the eternal Kingdom of God, which is new heavens and a new earth where righteousness lives (2 Peter 1:11; 3:13)

This sketch may provide for the need of both seeing the continuity with Israel and the uniqueness of the redemption through Jesus the Messiah. It tries to deal with two problems:

• supersessionism
• its opposite, which does not see Jesus the Messiah as the one way into the Kingdom for Jews and Gentile.

The solution seems to be to consider the covenant with Israel, yet seeing the uniqueness of Jesus.

We will not be able to draw all consequences of this for the biblical Systematic Theology we are dealing with now. But this perspective needs to be included as a corner stone in al theology: the God of Israel saves humanity because of the sacrifice of Jesus, necessarily a seed of Abraham, and opens the way back to God through faith in him.