The conversion of the Jewish people to Christ is a controversial subject. Last year we saw the debacle of the document “Reflections on Covenant and Mission,” which was prepared by an inter-religious dialogue group involving individuals representing the U. S. bishops. The Catholic participants seemed to insinuate that Jews can be saved on the basis of the Old Covenant and have no need of embracing faith in Christ, an idea flatly contradicted by the New Testament.
The document was so flawed that clarifications were immediately forthcoming that it did not represent Catholic teaching or the position of the U. S. bishops (though its release was intended to create the impression that it did). The document was quickly and quietly yanked from the U. S. bishops’ web site.
This was just one manifestation of what might be charitably regarded as a loss of evangelistic nerve on the part of some Christians, both Catholic and non-Catholic. Less charitably, it may be regarded as a manifestation of a growing tendency toward religious indifferentism, which is a heresy.
The Jewish people have been particularly the subject of these tendencies on the part of Christians. One reason for this is that we share a common spiritual patrimony. God really has worked in Jewish history: electing the Jewish people, making promises to them, forming covenants, giving Scriptures, showing them grace and mercy. This makes it easier to rationalize the idea that Jewish individuals, because of their unique history and relationship with God, might be able to attain salvation without any need to accept Christ as God’s Son.
Another reason they have been a special subject of indifferentist or anti-evangelistic tendencies is that many Christians feel a sense of shame at what Christians in the past have done to the Jewish people. Anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism have been realities in Christian history (as have anti-Gentilism and anti-Christianism in Jewish history). A sharp edge is put on the matter by the German Holocaust during World War II. In the wake of this unimaginable abomination, many Christians feel ashamed to announce the Good News of Jesus Christ to Jewish people, knowing that many Christians were complicit in the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe.
Many articles have been written on these subjects and on why Jewish evangelization must go forward. Most of these have focused on evangelization in the here and now. Less attention has been paid to how the question of Jewish evangelization relates to what Catholics traditionally have regarded as one of the signs of the end times: the corporate conversion of Israel to Christ.
This future reality is something that is itself controversial. There are some in Protestant circles who deny that there will be any such conversion. One strand of Protestant thought, which at times has been called “replacement theology,” holds that since the Church is the New Israel and the inheritor and fulfillment of many Old Testament prophetic.aspirations, it has replaced the Jewish people as the chosen of God in such a way that they now hold no special place in God’s plans. Since they are just like any other people in every respect, they will play no special role in the end times and will experience no corporate conversion to Christ.
Reacting against replacement theology is the Protestant school of thought known as dispensationalism, which began in the first half of the nineteenth century under the impetus of John Nelson Darby. According to dispensationalism, the Church is in no respect (or virtually no respect) a New Israel.
The Church age is, in the classic dispensationalist way of putting it, a “parenthesis” in God’s plan of the ages, which concerns the Jewish people. At the beginning of the Church age, dispensationalists hold, God turned aside from dealing with the Jewish people in order that a (primarily) Gentile Church might be built up. After the Church is taken out of the picture by the Rapture, God will turn back to dealing with the Jewish people.
They will therefore play a key role in the end times. There are many, detailed prophecies yet to be fulfilled concerning them. And one of these is most definitely a corporate conversion of the Jewish nation to Christ, either involving every single Jewish individual alive at the end or at least a sufficient number that the nation as a body can be regarded as Christian.
The two extremes of replacement theology and dispensationalism within Protestantism (and there are middle, moderate positions) sometimes cause problems for Catholics. Dispensationalists often regard everybody but themselves as advocates of replacement theology and, consequently, as “spiritualizers” of God’s promises to the Jews who do not take these promises—or God’s word in general—seriously. Since Catholics are not dispensationalists, they frequently assume that we hold the views of replacement theologians.
That is not the case. The Church regards both Jews and Christians as complimentary and overlapping peoples of God. We are both elect. Those Jewish individuals who are also Christians might be regarded as doubly elect, or elect on two grounds. While the Church is the New Israel, this does not obliterate the identity of the Old Israel, nor deprive it from playing any role in God’s plan of the ages. In particular, it does not remove the prophesied conversion of the Jewish people in the last days.
This in turn causes problems for replacement theologians. When they encounter Catholic recognition of the special status of the Jewish people, they may be inclined to regard Catholics as proto-, crypto-, or pseudo-dispensationalists.
These problems are exacerbated when Catholic converts are involved. Like everyone else, converts draw upon their background in interpreting things they encounter, and, until they acquire a familiarity with the shape of Catholic teaching regarding the Jewish people, they are prone to reading matters in terms of their background. This includes those with backgrounds in dispensationalism or replacement theology.
I have encountered converts who seek to import dispensationalist ideas into Catholicism, whether these are the ideas of a future, millennial reign of Christ on earth, a “pretribulation rapture,” or a detailed chronology of the role that the Jewish people will play in the end times. Conversely, I have encountered converts who have responded with incredulity to the idea of a future conversion of the Jewish people, sometimes accusing those who make this claim of repeating dispensationalist teaching.
In the worst cases, I have seen converts from both these perspectives try to rationalize away binding declarations of Catholic teaching—like the Catechism’s rejection of millennialism (CCC 676) or its affirmation of the future conversion of the Jewish people (CCC 674).
The advent of Catholics opposing the evangelization of the Jewish people introduces a new complication in the discussion. Most have not thought through the question of how their ideas impact the Church’s teaching that there will be a future conversion of Israel.
It is possible that, even in the absence of Christian evangelization, God could bring about the conversion of the Jewish people. God certainly brought about Saul’s conversion in a direct and miraculous manner that was not the result of ordinary Christian preaching. But we know that God tends to work through historical trends rather than direct interventions. We know in particular his tendency to use the preaching of the gospel as a vehicle of conversion (Rom. 10:12-17). This knowledge creates tension between the idea of the future conversion of Israel and the idea that one should not evangelize Jews.
Recently I received a query from an individual wondering how the two ideas could be squared. In particular, he wondered how the prophesied conversion could be squared with a particular text that has become a darling of those opposed to Jewish evangelization.
The text is found in a document produced by the Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC), which is a subset of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). Released in 2001, the document is titled “The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible,” and it can be found on the Vatican’s web site (www.vatican.va). It’s actually quite good, though it contains a number of passages that are easy to misunderstand if one doesn’t attend to the language or the context in which the document appears.
My correspondent was focused on a particular statement made in section 21 of the document: “Jewish messianic expectation is not in vain.” He took this as sounding as if Jews do not need to convert to Christianity, either now or in the future.
There are two questions to ask when one encounters a situation like this. The first is: What authority does the document have? Catholics have a natural, pious tendency to regard any apparently official statement as a binding teaching. The Church does not wish its documents to be read in this manner. Ecclesiastical pronouncements exist on a spectrum of authority, and it is important to examine the kind of authority that the Church has invested in a particular statement.
For example, in the case of documents issued under the auspices of a national conference of bishops, they must (among other things) have been voted on by the conference and approved in order to be authoritative. That was one of the problems with “Reflection on Covenant in Mission”: It had not been voted on and thus had no authority.
An analogous case pertains to documents from pontifical congregations and commissions. In order for them to be binding, the authority of the pope has to be engaged somehow. Typically this is done by a statement at the end of the document indicating that it was approved by the pope. The CDF’s document Dominus Iesus (2000), on the universal need for Christ and the Church for salvation, carries such a note of approval and thus is authoritative.
“The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible” lacks such a note of papal approval. This and the language it uses reveal that it is being advanced not as a document binding the views of Catholic theologians and Scripture exegetes. It is an advisory document meant to summarize contemporary views and point in the direction that Catholic scholars should look when examining certain questions.
Thus, if one were to maintain that the document changes Church teaching—which always has been that Jewish people are to be evangelized just like every other people—one would fail to meet the “threshold question” of whether the document has the authority to mandate Catholic doctrine.
That still leaves the second question one should ask: What does the document mean by what it says?
The statement “Jewish messianic expectation is not in vain,” like many statements taken in isolation, is ambiguous. It can mean any number of things, depending on how its elements are taken. For example, what Jewish messianic expectation are we talking about? The expectation they had before the time of Christ, which was fulfilled in Christ? Or the expectation of subsequent Jews for a Messiah that is still to come?
Context reveals that it is the latter. The document goes on to state that this expectation “can become for us Christians a powerful stimulant to keep alive the eschatological dimension of our faith. Like them, we too live in expectation. The difference is that for us the One who is to come will have the traits of the Jesus who has already come and is already present and active among us.”
So we are talking about contemporary Jews who, like Christians, await a coming Messiah. The difference is that Christians recognize this future coming of Messiah as the Second Coming of Christ. Jewish messianic expectation is not in vain in the sense that Christ is indeed coming back. What is incomplete in Jewish understanding is the failure to recognize that the Messiah already has come once, that he is present and active in Christians, and that when he returns he will be the same Jesus who appeared in the first century.
I will admit that the passage could be phrased more felicitously. To English speakers, the phrase “for us” carries a connotation of subjectivity that is unfortunate. “In the Christian view” would be better. Likewise, “have the traits of” could be confusing to English-speakers. Some taking this statement in isolation might take the PBC as saying that at the Second Coming Christians will experience the Messiah as Jesus whereas Jews will not.
All of this may be a translation problem. Unfortunately, the Vatican’s web site doesn’t contain a Latin original to check the translation against; indeed, the original language of the document may not have been Latin. It is difficult to say what connotations those phrases may have in its original language.
Nevertheless, the nonsensical idea that Christians will experience the Messiah as Jesus while Jews won’t is not what the PBC is saying. It is simply affirming that in the here and now Christians and Jews both live with the valid expectation of a future coming of the Messiah. The difference is that Christians already know this Messiah to be Jesus.
Note that in none of this is there any discussion of the question of how Jewish people can be saved, either in the present or in the future. And there is certainly no declaration that Jews have no need of accepting Christ for salvation, that there is no need to share the Good News with them, or that they will not corporately convert just prior to the Second Coming.
The teaching of the Church on these questions thus remains what it always has: All men are in need of Christ for salvation (even if through innocent ignorance they may be able to be saved without explicit recognition of Christ in this life), the gospel is to be preached to all men (including Jews), and that before the Second Coming there will be a corporate conversion of the Jewish people.
As the Catechism says, “The glorious Messiah’s coming is suspended at every moment of history until his recognition by ‘all Israel,’ for ‘a hardening has come upon part of Israel’ in their ‘unbelief’ toward Jesus [Rom. 11:20-26]. . . . ‘For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?’ [Rom. 11:15]. The ‘full inclusion’ of the Jews in the Messiah’s salvation, in the wake of ‘the full number of the Gentiles’ will enable the People of God to achieve ‘the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,’ in which ‘God may be all in all’ [Eph. 4:13; 1 Cor. 15:28]” (CCC 674).