From a BBC news flash yesterday:
Pope Benedict has rejected the idea of collective Jewish guilt for Jesus Christ’s death, in a new book to be published next week.
Tackling an issue that has led to centuries of persecution, the Pope argues there is no basis in scripture for the Jewish people to be blamed.
It’s a good thing for the Pope to say this, of course. But the BBC article (read it here) is misleading in that it repeatedly gives the casual reader the impression that this idea is the result of groundbreaking exegetical research. That’s of course always going to be the bias of a “news” organization (News Flash! Stunning pronouncement changes 2000 years of Christian teaching!). To say “Pope reaffirms again what many Christians from many communions have said for many centuries” — that’s not quite as sexy of a headline.
More importantly, however, beneath the BBC article lies a worldview: which is that human nature is not in itself a huge mess of evil passions (“If you, being evil…”), but instead tries to explain human evil on bad “ideas.” Centuries of terrible anti-Semitism must be traceable, the BBC and most people think, to some bad idea early in Christian thought. If only we had had Pope Benedict around in the first few centuries, he could have given us the right “idea” and then we could have been saved all those years of pogroms, and Inquisitions, and death camps! A more accurate reading of human history, however, is the Christian aphorism from the late 1500s: What the heart desires, the will chooses and the mind justifies. People would have always have found some reason to commit terrible acts against a vulnerable people; anyone who remembers bullies in the schoolyard knows this intuitively. The BBC thinks that an idea comes first, the free human reason chooses it, and then one’s heart is based on the idea. Thomas Cranmer and others knew better.
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4 responses to “Ideas or the Human Heart?”
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Instead of just absolving the Jews, I hope the Pope also makes the larger point that we might as well all have been the guilty Jews at the Crucifixion, which is a vital point of the object lesson in the story. Some Jews turned against him and crucified him literally. But since we've all turned against him, we've all crucified him metaphorically. Understood this way, even if the nation of Israel as a whole had been guilty, we'd have no grounds to point fingers.
Perhaps after centuries of antisemitism, too many people just can't hear this, and the Pope's point needs to be first made alone.
You are totally right, Ken. The proper way to understand the Passion is to see oneself as the one who has crucified Christ.
This idea is very old — it's been held by many great Christians over many centuries. Here is a lovely discussion of it by Forde, as an extension of Luther's view that Crux sola est nostra theologia — the Cross alone is our theology.
I certainly hope the Pope agrees with that, but the emphasis that people seem to be taking away from his work is that almost nobody was to blame in the Passion (just a tiny number of senior officials in the temple hiearchy) — rather than the idea that we are ALL implicated.
If so, it's unfortunate — and also untrue to the text, because it fails to explain the unaninimous demand of the crowd for Christ's death. The classic understanding says that we ALL voted for Barabbas on Good Friday. What I hear people saying is that the Pope is showing that almost nobody said "Crucify him!"
The Romans crucified Christ; as I understand it, Jews did not have the authority to do this.
Hey BLS! You are certainly right about that.
Here's how I see the issue of this news story about the pope writing this book, etc. It's not happening in a theological or historical vacuum. The Pope didn't wake up one day and think this was an interesting abstract question and decide to write about it.
Rather it flows from the specific horrific and (in the larger scheme of things) very recent event of the Holocaust — and in particular the Church of Rome's complicity in it. Here in the US we have some distance from it — we can shake our heads with some comfort say it was a terrible thing, etc. — but we weren't a few hundred miles from Germany in a Fascist occupied country, and faced with the terrible moral choices of speaking out or not.
Rome has never recovered from her guilt over the discovery of Auschwitz and all those reeking bodies.
Part of the theological history of the Church of Rome post WW2 is attempt after attempt to have its guilt assuaged.
(This particular pope is also doing damage control for other choices he's made that haven't sat well with Jews in the last few years.)
Now, one way to deal with the terrible accusation that "The Jews killed Christ" is to argue that actually almost NOBODY killed Christ. I.e. to reduce the body of people who are guilty. It was really just a few people involved. Pilate's the only real bad guy; and if there are any bad Jews it was maybe half a dozen guys at the top egging Pilate on.
Ken observes (at the top of this thread) that it seems like that's the route the pope is taking.
But a different route, and one that is more faithful to the truth of the Cross (as well as the text of Scripture) is to EXPAND the pool of guilty people — to include every one of us, including Peter the rock on whom Christ built his church. ALL of us vote for Barabbas on Good Friday. The thing that is wrong with filthy anti-Semites claiming that the Jews killed Christ is their implication that they did NOT.