THOSE WHO DON'T AFFIRM LIFE HAVE NOTHING BUT THE SELF:

Indispensable handbook for global theopolitics: a review of The Star of Redemption by Franz Rosenzweig (Spengler, 11/22/05, Asia Times)

A tragedy of 20th century history is that Leo Strauss, who began as Rosenzweig's student, transferred his intellectual loyalty to the odious Martin Heidegger. Strauss' follower, Irving Kristol, the "godfather of neo-conservatism", once confessed that he tried to learn German in order to read Rosenzweig. It is a pity he failed. But one still can hope that Rosenzweig's star will ascend.

We live not merely in an age of faith, but in an age of religious wars. Today's intellectual elite feels something like the mad Englishman in a lunatic asylum whom Karl Marx sketched in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. He imagines that his warders are barbarian mercenaries who speak in a welter of unintelligible tongues, and mutters to himself, "And all this is happening to me - a freeborn Englishman!"

So felt France on the return of the Napoleonic dynasty, and so feels the intelligentsia on the return of religion to world politics. To such perplexed secularists, I strongly recommend Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption, available in a new English translation, but with a caveat: it might cure them of secularism. That the translation is miserably inadequate is another matter; it is probably no worse than its prospective readers. [...]

[T]here is no idea in The Star of Redemption that one cannot find close to hand in the mainstream of Christian and Jewish teaching. Rosenzweig's act of genius was to show that Christianity and Judaism are not ideas, not mere religions (his dismissive characterization of Islam), but rather lives.

From death - from the fear of death - arises the perception of the transcendent, his book begins, and in the face of the fear of death, one proceeds - to life, as he avers in the book's last sentence. But the path to life requires a life outside of time, that is, the hope of immortality. Man cannot abide his mortal existence, cannot tolerate the fear of death, without the prospect of life eternal.

Faith cannot be proven or defended, but only lived, Rosenzweig taught. It is not a system of beliefs but an existential choice, not a proof but an affirmation.

It's no coincidence that those nations that have given up on Judeo-Christianityy have likewise opted against continued existence.

FROM THE ARCHIVES:
QUARRELSOME CHILDREN OF ABRAHAM (July 13, 2003)
THE PASSIVE COVENANT AND THE ACTIVE (2005-02-07):
In the end shall Christians become Jews and Jews, Christians?: On Franz Rosenzweig's apocalyptic eschatology (Gregory Kaplan, Winter 2004, Cross Currents)

Gershom Scholem's peerless 1959 essay "Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism" distinguishes "two major currents" of thought. On the one hand with redemption "the restorative forces are directed to the return and recreation of a past condition which comes to be felt as ideal." On the other hand with redemption a "catastrophe" marks "the upsetting of all moral order to the point of dissolving the laws of nature." He goes on to assert that existentialist thinkers, among whom he includes his contemporary Franz Rosenzweig, one-sidedly stress "consolation and hope" and neglect the "abyss" which sunders reality. Given the ubiquitous ambiguity of redemption, however, I think Scholem fails to appreciate the nuance of Rosenzweig's thought.

What Scholem articulates and, I aim to show, Rosenzweig illustrates, is a tension within the messianic idea of Judaism between this-worldly and other-worldly, temporal and eternal focii of redemption. As Steven Schwarzchild has put it, Jewish eschatology reckons "the mixture of grace and morality ... of divine, incalculable action and ... human, rationally moral efforts." But is this mixture benign or volatile, restorative or catastrophic? Rosenzweig's answer offers at once stimulating and disconcerting prospects. Specifically, I will argue that "two currents" (following Scholem) animate Rosenzweig's thought on redemption and, furthermore, the tension between them organizes Rosenzweig's thought on Jewish-Christian-pagan relations. Related questions arise as to whether a coincidence or a contest between Judaism and Christianity redresses the assumed pagan denial of death and whether, in the end, the Christians shall become Jewish or the Jews, Christian. To address these questions this essay considers, in turn, Rosenzweig's dual covenant eschatology, apocalyptic imagination, and messianic hermeneutics.

Eschatology and Dual Covenant Theology

In a recent New York Review of Books essay on Rosenzweig Mark Lilla neatly formulates the dilemma of redemption. "If redemption is wholly God's work, we are tempted to leave him to his work and ignore our own; if, however, we participate in this redemptive labor, the temptation is equally great to think we can redeem ourselves through temporal activity." Does redemption come from outside or is it initiated from inside human life? According to Lilla, Rosenzweig gives an "ingenious explanation": the Jewish covenant is unconditional and passive whereas the Christians covenant is conditional and active. Yet this alleged solution does not, in my view, adequately account for Rosenzweig's complicated, ambivalent position.

As befits a dual covenant theology, on Lilla's (and others') interpretation, Christianity and Judaism each play a complimentary if not a cooperative role with the other. Typically this program maintains that Judaism assures redemption by a covenant once made between God and His chosen People, Israel, while Christian salvation is secured with a new dispensation granted by God to those who declare their faith in the savior, Jesus Christ. And, indeed, just such companionship between Christianity and Judaism evidently provides Rosenzweig with justification for retracting a plan which he had previously conceived to undertake baptism by passing through the gates of Judaism and "not through the intermediate stage of paganism."

However, Rosenzweig would twist the dual covenant formulation to suggest a distinctive eschatology. Specifically, he comes to invert the dual covenant's historical succession and theological priority. Thus a 1913 letter justifies his momentous decision--"Ich bleibe also Jude"--on grounds that the first covenant with Jews is nearer to God than the second covenant with Christians. In other words, Rosenzweig proposes that Judaism is not the superceded premise of Christianity, but rather its surpassing pinnacle. Whereas Christianity "reaches the Father" only by means of the Son, Judaism makes no such approach to God. Because Israel "is already with" God. In short, the People Israel is always already--and the Christian individuals are not yet--redeemed.

Still, Rosenzweig approved of Christianity's "Judaizing the pagans," that is, bringing pagans, through conversion, nearer to Judaism (and thus God). For Rosenzweig, theological priority goes to Judaism and historical success to Christianity: as Christianity aims toward Judaism as its target, Judaism summons Christianity to spread the word throughout the world. This implies that Judaism has no relation to the world save through Christianity, an implication I probe in the next section.

Of course, Rosenzweig's formulation undermines both a standard Christian repudiation of Judaism and its Jewish rejoinder. Even liberal Christians who espouse a dual covenant condemn Jews for refusing to admit that "[a] development ... leads through Jesus, in whom alone Jewish religion 'consummates itself,'" in Rosenzweig's words. This condemnation assumes the Jews are "still waiting" for what presently comes by salvation through faith in Christ. Once again inverting priority and success, Rosenzweig avers "that [the] 'connection of the innermost heart with God' which the heathen can only reach through Jesus is something the Jew already possesses." So, on this view, the condemnation is misplaced: not superiority but rather inferiority motivates Christian animosity towards Judaism. By the same token, this inversion undercuts a liberal Jewish response to Christian condemnation. Liberal Jews often claim that an 'ethical monotheism' calling for universal justice proves the durability of a Jewish covenant; Jews, "a light unto the nations," undertake a mission to reorient Christianity. But to Rosenzweig this claim betrays an atheistic "transformation of Judaism into something this-worldly [Verdiesseitigung]"; it mistakenly denies the "offensive thought" of a Jew who accepts God as "the plunging of a higher content into an unworthy vessel." Turning Judaism into a historical success story perverts rather than exhibits its theological priority. That this dualism runs the risk of identifying Christianity with Constantinianism and Judaism with a perfectly realized utopia would find repeated consideration from Rosenzweig.

Rosenzweig's 1921 opus The Star of Redemption elaborates the inversion of historical succession and theological priority. On the one hand the covenant of Christian faith partakes in or, better, generates human history; its path to redemption is expressed through social-political institutions, Church and State. On the other hand the covenant of Jewish practice circumvents temporal change, as expressed liturgically by the cyclical re-enactment of its redeemed status. Put otherwise, the Christian covenant promulgates a mission to conquer the pagan universe and the Jewish covenant issues its mandate by adumbrating the mission's objective. In Rosenzweig's concise formulation, Christianity is always "on the way" to redemption while Judaism has already arrived "at the goal."

While utterly distinct, in this view, Christianity and Judaism are mutually reinforcing. But the distinction virtually suppresses the mutuality. Thus Rosenzweig baldly states Judaism and Christianity supply "two distinct historical manifestations of revelation ... [and] two eternally irreconcilable hopes for the Messiah." Insofar as the Jewish People stand in the present as the actuality (or, from a historical viewpoint, prospective fulfillment) of redemption, their ritual practice stands apart from the ordinary history which Christianity not only inhabits but, even more, conducts. Embodying the telos, Judaism is not so much unhistorical as it is transhistorical: it simultaneously encompasses (as anticipatory) and surpasses (as ulterior) the vicissitudes of temporal change. Rosenzweig's somewhat priestly account segregates Jewish redemption--"ausserhalb einer kriegerischen Zeitlichkeit"--from the historical alterations and the political vagaries which mark the Christian way to redemption. The Christian approach to and the Jewish accomplishment of living with God are coeval, structurally equivalent positions. The end of time (merely) "restores" their coincidence following a provisional separation.

Rosenzweig's apparent dual covenant program therefore reduces Christianity and Judaism to opposing essences while it nevertheless fails to reck-on the incipient antagonism between them. Neither the radical opposition nor the irenic symbiosis is satisfactory. Another current in Rosenzweig's thinking seems to concede this point. Before getting to that, it bears mentioning that a dually covenanted eschatology attained by the Jewish People and promised to the Christian individual has recently won a stunning endorsement. "Reflections on Covenant and Mission" issued by The Consultation of the National Council of Synagogues and the Bishops Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, USCCB, reads in part as follows. "While the Catholic Church regards the saving act of Christ as central to the process of human salvation for all, it also acknowledges that Jews already dwell in a saving covenant with God." While this dovetails with Rosenzweig's dual covenant program, the statement continues: "The Catholic Church must always evangelize and will always witness to its faith in the presence of God's kingdom in Jesus Christ to Jews and to all other people." Would Rosenzweig approve the Christian Church seeking to evangelize the Jews? Perhaps he would, although this approval would seem to contravene a dual covenant eschatology.

Why would it? If Christians accept that the Jews are uniquely Chosen by God why wouldn't Jews be able to accept, or willing to, that God offers Gentiles salvation through Christ?

MORE:
-ESSAY: Salvation Is from the Jews (Richard John Neuhaus, November 2001, First Things)
-ESSAY: On the significance of the messianic idea in Rosenzweig (Dana Hollander, Winter 2004, Cross Currents)

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 21, 2005 8:31 AM