Mountain Minyan המנין בהרים

In this post in July 2008, I asked if “dual covenant” theology was the doctrine of the Catholic church. Pope John Paul II had made a number of statements inching in that direction, and the U.S. Bishops catechism stated that the Mosaic covenant remained “eternally valid.”

At least until recently. They have revoked that change.

From a doctrinal point of view, of course, this idea is mostly nonsense in the first place. Christian scripture provides only a very few vague statements to hang the dual covenant hat on. Plus, from a Catholic point of view, it’s the Church’s interpretation that matters. (Just as within Judaism, it is is the interpretation of the Rabbis that matters—unless you count Karaites.) The Vatican affirmed this change, which probably only conforms it with their real canons anyway. From the Jewish point of view, it’s self defeating. If you admit there are two covenants, then you essentially make Judaism just a Christian sect.

Doctrine aside, this has a political significance. I have always seen “dual covenant” theology as a sort of cognitive tactic to foster tolerance. Since at all points for the last 1700 years, Christian tolerance of Jews has been a more impactful question than the reverse, there is some sense in putting this out there. It probably has created some tolerance among some people.

It’s more problematic for Catholics who are told how to interpret the Bible. Other Christians may choose to read the words, in particular, in Deuteronomy quite literally and agree that God’s deal with the Jews is permanent, messiah or no messiah.

Again, I’m digressing into doctrine. This, along with the restoration antisemitic Easter prayers and other statements mentioned in the article I linked to above, show that Catholic-Jewish relations have peaked. Is it too cynical to me to suggest that this corresponds with the waning of influence of the Holocaust generation?

I think there is. A bevy of post-holocaust scholars like Rosemary Radford Reuther argued that there was nothing intrinsic about the early Christian movement that made it anti-Judaic or anti-Semitic, and place the blame not on the theology, but on the practitioners. As one of my graduate professors put it, this is part of the Christian exercise of trying to deal with the Holocaust and the fact of Christian culpability for it. (Much like the assertion that Nazism was a pagan faith, which, while arguably true, is misleading because just about all Nazis were Christians.)

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is a temporary setback. Maybe other Christian groups will lead the charge towards a massive detente between the faiths. After all, I think the Catholic church is erroneously taken to be the only authentic face of Christianity among many Jewish scholars. But somehow I doubt that.

Popular Christianities today exude images more like Sarah Palin than the Rev. Martin Luther King. They are becoming more fundamentalist, not less. Fortunately, that fundamentalism is more in reaction to secularism than it is to other faiths. Secularism is the major boogeyman for the fundamentalists of all faiths today. As a result, while the doctrines harden, the priorities shift from the incorrect believers to the non-believers.

In practicality, this change in the Catechism probably won’t have many results. But if it signals a post-post-Holocaust era in Christian thinking on a broader level, then, especially coupled with the generally antsy mood of our country, it could mean more nutjobs doing nutty things.