Dissident Dispatches

by Andrew Fraser

  The problem with making the scriptural story end at the cross is twofold. First of all, this hermeneutic move turns everything in the New Testament after the four gospels into little more than an anti-climax or a set of explanatory footnotes.748 The Pauline letters themselves are denied their rightful place in the history of both ethnic Israel and the re-born Israel of God. Similarly, the book of Revelation is simply ignored and denied recognition as a prophecy of the end to which Paul’s mission had been directed all along, the goal towards which “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Rom 8:22). The New Testament ends with the creation of “a new heaven and a new earth” “in the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (Rev 21:1–2). Significantly, the New Israel of God becomes the bride of Christ only after the destruction of the Old Jerusalem, “the great city, which is figuratively called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified” (Rev 11:8).

  According to John of Patmos, the author of Revelation, this vision came to him from Jesus Christ. This leads us to the second difficulty with the notion that the scriptural story of Israel ends at the cross. Clearly, Jesus himself did not regard his death and resurrection as the end of the story. Nor did the Messiah’s vision of God in the Gospels “concern the universal fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of humanity; rather it had Israel at its very center”. According to Scot McKnight, “Jesus’s God is the national God of Israel, not some abstract, universal deity”. Both Jesus and Paul knew that God had called upon Israel, over and over again, “to repentance and restoration. Now he was calling one more time before disaster struck the nation”.749 In the words of GD Caird, Jesus and “the disciples were not evangelistic preachers sent out to save individual souls for some unearthly paradise. They were couriers proclaiming a national emergency and conducting a referendum on national survival”.750

  Wright uses the entire bag of scholarly tricks to obscure the fact that both Jesus and Paul expected — within a generation of no more than forty years — “a final judgement by which true Israelites would be effectively separated from false Israelites eternally”. He repeatedly asserts that Paul expected neither an imminent parousia nor an imminent judgement on the false Israelites.751 Indeed, if, as Wright suggests, Paul did not believe that Israel stood alone in the dock awaiting judgement, there would be no reason for Israel alone to fear the wrath of God. In the eyes of God, all human beings were equally guilty. Wright contends, and Boyarin no doubt agrees, that Paul’s most significant theological innovation was “the idea of a primal sin infecting all people, Jews included”. Accordingly, “[i]f the Messiah has been crucified, Paul reasoned, it can only be because Israel as a whole shared in the plight of all human beings”.752

  A better view would be that Paul and Jesus remained on the same page. Like Jesus, therefore, Paul’s hope was not for “a universal Church but [for] the restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel through the fulfilment of God’s promises” (Acts 26:7). Certainly, again like Jesus, Paul’s “vision was indeed for the world — but only because it was first for Israel”. His vision, too, “was universalistic because it was particularistic”. Paul sought nothing more than that which had been promised by the law and the prophets (Acts 26:22–23). There is no evidence to suggest that he saw further ahead than the end of the Old Covenant age in AD 70. No differently than Jesus, Paul expected that in his near future “the final salvation, the final judgement, and the consummation of the kingdom of God in all its glory” would bring the scriptural story of Israel to its promised end.753

  Conclusion: The Metamorphosis of Israel

  Both Paul and Peter believed that in its last days ethnic Israel was to undergo a three-stage metamorphosis that we might see as analogous to the life-cycle of a butterfly. For centuries the larval-stage Judaean caterpillar had fed on manna from heaven and then, following the advent of Jesus, on the living bread and water offered by Israel’s Messiah. At the cross, the body of Christ was hung on a tree much like the chrysalis into which the caterpillar changes during the pupa stage. Inside its own bio-cultural chrysalis, the body of Christ grew and developed “until the full number of the Gentiles [had] come in” (Rom 11:25). During the forty-year period following the advent, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ the gospel was proclaimed to the ends of the earth in the manner chronicled in Acts. Meanwhile, the unbelieving Ioudaioi filled up the measure of their sins (Matt 23:32), thereby setting the stage for the end of the Old Covenant age, the final stage in the metamorphosis of Israel.

  In the third stage of its development, an adult butterfly eventually breaks out into the light of day, leaving the dead husk of both the caterpillar and the chrysalis behind. Similarly, in AD 70 the New Jerusalem emerged from the shadow world of the Temple cult to inhabit a new heaven and a new earth. From that moment, Christians began to understand themselves as the nucleus of a third race; neither Jewish nor Greek but rather a spiritual confederation open to all the nations.

  This story remains untold in the work of either Daniel Boyarin, the radical postmodern Jew, or NT Wright, the nominally Christian Judaizer. As a result, neither of these eminent scholars can help us to plumb the bio-cultural depths of Paul’s mission to the Gentiles, the mysterious process of theosis which utterly transfigured and divinized the embryonic people of God. Unfortunately, however, both writers have been far more successful in giving credence to the neo-pagan canard that Christianity came into being as a congenitally Jewish franchise operation. Ethno-patriotic Christian scholars will have much work to do if they are to repair the damage.

  Postscript

  In his comments on this paper, the lecturer (Dr Jeff Aernie, a young American evangelical) noted that he disagrees with my argument “but that does not detract from the fact that it is well written and clearly meets the brief of the assignment” (which was to examine the concept of “Jewish Christianity” in the light of Wright’s latest book on Paul. He suggested that “there are three areas in which [my] argument could be strengthened”:

  1. It would be constructive to engage with Wright’s material in PFG on Romans 9–11. This would allow you to be more nuanced in your discussion of the judgment of Israel. For example your assertion…that “Christian scholars prefer not to dwell on the biblical and historical truth that God rejected historic, ethnic Israel, once and for all” seems to me to be in the first instance an over-statement, and second an assertion without argument. I think it may be more accurate to say that most scholars simply have a different reading of Romans 9–11 and its significance for the future of Israel.

  2. While I think you did a good job reading Wright (and Boyarin) fairly throughout the material, I am not sure you have kept the same care in your discussion of Wright’s understanding of what we might call eschatology. Yes, Wright thinks the cross is the climax of history, but not its conclusion. Here again, I think Romans 9–11 would be helpful. And perhaps even engagement with other places where Wright engages these ideas, such as The Resurrection of the Son of God and Surprised by Hope.

  3. I think you are running the risk at certain points of your paper of an ad hominem argument, especially referring to Wright as a “nominally Christian Judaizer”. Even if that was an accurate description, based on the way you have used the terminology, it is not clear to me what it adds to your academic argument.

  In response to such criticism, I ask readers: Did the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 come as the final, divine judgment against Old Covenant Israel? If so, are those who today call themselves Jews in a continuing state of rebellion against God? Have ostensibly Christian churches and divinity schools — Catholic and Protestant alike — failed to resist the subversive influence of the Jewish revolutionary spirit? The answer to the latter question in particular is hardly in doubt.

  My experience as a nominally Anglican occasional church-goer and superannuated divinity school student te
lls me that few Christians recognize that a cultural war is being waged against them by those who must be regarded, theologically speaking, as “Judaizers”. Clearly, the most visible front in that war is occupied by the mass media of popular culture. E Michael Jones cites the generally positive reaction among his fellow Catholics to the recent Hollywood movie Noah, directed by Darren Aronofsky, as a useful illustration of our increasing Judaized culture. He notes that at one point this film conflates the biblical account of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac with the story of Noah. Jones asks a rhetorical question: “Why didn’t Aronofsky conflate the story of Sodom and Noah”? The answer, he suggests, is that Jews “preach homosexuality even if they don’t practice it because it weakens the goyim both demographically and morally”. Unfortunately, he adds, Catholics are too stupid to understand Aronofsky’s Noah.

  The reason for that “is quite simple” according to Jones. Catholics “have been rendered stupid by adopting the commands of their oppressors. Catholics [and Protestants] live in a totally Jewish culture. They are confronted with Jewish artefacts like Aronofsky’s Noah on a daily basis and yet they would consider it a sin to talk about Jews in any manner even remotely critical because any criticism of Jews or Jewish cultural artefacts is off limits for Catholics [and Protestants]”. Any such criticism “is a sign of anti-Semitism” and anti-Semitism “is a sin”. In fact, it is not much of an exaggeration to suggest that “with sodomy now gone the sin of anti-Semitism may be the only sin left”.754 Needless to say, few mainstream Christians share E Michael Jones’ willingness to combat the Jewish cultural hegemony which has penetrated, virtually unchallenged, into the theological academy.

  As a consequence, organized religion has become morally vacuous and theologically incoherent. NT Wright and other New Testament scholars have done little to cure that spiritual malady. In these circumstances, all of us should consider whether the day of vengeance inflicted upon historic, ethnic Israel still stands as a warning to the apostate peoples and post-Christian states of the modern Western world.

  6: Primary Source Study

  Martin Luther: On the Freedom of a Christian Man [Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen]

  1. Definitions and Dramatis Personae in the Early German Reformation755

  a. Augustinian: A religious order living under the Rule of St Augustine to which Martin Luther (1483–1546) belonged after entering the monastery of the Erfurt Augustinian Hermits in July 1505.

  b. Pope Leo X (1475–1521): Leo X became Pope in 1513 and in 1520 he excommunicated Martin Luther in a papal bull entitled Exsurge Domine.

  c. Curia: In his Open Letter to Leo X Martin Luther declared that he was attacking not the Pope personally but the “godless flatterers” in his Curia, that is the Papal court and its functionaries in Rome charged with the administration and government of the Western or Latin Church.

  d. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153): In his Open Letter to Leo X, Martin Luther cites a work, On Consideration, written by this twelfth century Abbot in the monastery of Clairvaux, which “discussed the duties of the pope and the dangers connected with his office”.756

  e. See/Apostolic See: A see is simply the seat of a bishopric. The see presided over by the Bishop of Rome is called the Apostolic See “because of its traditional association with the Apostles St Peter and St Paul”.

  f. Johann Eck (1486–1543): Eck was a German theologian. He opposed Martin Luther and Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (Luther’s colleague at Wittenberg) in a debate in Leipzig. The debate was occasioned by Luther’s public attack on the Pope’s authority to issue indulgences. This rebellious act led to Luther’s subsequent excommunication by Leo X.

  g. Cardinal: This title was “first applied to any priest permanently attached to a church, but is now restricted to the clergy of Rome who act as heads of curial offices and who possess the exclusive right of electing a pope when the Holy See falls vacant”.

  h. Nuncio: A papal nuncio is a “permanent diplomatic representative of the Holy See accredited to a civil government, who also acts as a link between Rome and the Church in the State to which he is accredited”.

  i. Elector Frederick (1463–1525): Friedrich der Weise was the Elector of Saxony who founded the University of Wittenberg in which Martin Luther taught; he also provided Luther with a safe haven after he was charged with heresy.

  j. Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (1480–1541): Karlstadt was a German Reformer who supported his Wittenberg colleague, Martin Luther, in the disputation with Eck at Leipzig but later his radical, reforming zeal brought him into conflict with Luther, leading to his resignation from the University.

  k. Karl Miltitz (1480–1529): Miltitz was the papal nuncio who took it upon himself to attempt a compromise between Luther and the Pope by suggesting that Luther write his Open Letter to Leo X along with a devotional treatise designed to show his good faith and Christian fidelity.

  l. Cajetan, Thomas de Vio (1469–1534): Cajetan was a Cardinal and member of the Dominican Order who unsuccessfully sought to compel Luther to recant from his claim that the “pope was in error and that he abused scripture by promulgating the idea of indulgences”.

  2. What Kind of Document is Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen?

  In his introductory “Open Letter to Pope Leo X” Luther describes “The Freedom of a Christian” as a “little treatise” which, despite its brevity, contains nothing less than “the whole of Christian life” provided, however, that “you grasp the meaning”.757 The editor of Three Treatises by Martin Luther describes the work more modestly as a “devotional booklet,”758 a label befitting the advice given to Luther by Cardinal Miltitz as to how the road to reconciliation with the Papacy might be paved. Similarly, Michael A Mullett praises Luther’s “eirenic treatise” as a “devotional classic”.759

  From the anti-Christian perspective of early twentieth century cultural Marxism, however, the importance of Luther’s treatise on Christian liberty lies in its contribution to the secular, world-historical process in which modern “bourgeois” society emerged from the medieval world of European feudalism. Herbert Marcuse, for example, viewed the work as a “pamphlet…which became the ideological basis for the specifically bourgeois articulation of authority”.760 Luther’s pamphlet was the sinister Hegelian thesis which called forth its saving antithesis centuries later in the revolutionary pamphlet penned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto.

  3. Who was Luther’s intended or imagined audience?

  When read together with the open letter to Leo X, Luther’s “devotional booklet” appears to be addressed, in the first instance to the Pope. But the seemingly conciliatory tone of both the open letter and the treatise on Christian liberty was deceptive. According to Mullett, by portraying Leo X as an innocently virtuous “lamb in the midst of wolves,” Luther disguised his “strategy of highlighting the iniquities of the papacy as an institution by involving the person of the pope in a dramatic contrast between good and evil”.761 Similarly, Richard Marius describes the treatise as “in fact a declaration that the differences between Luther and the papacy were irreconcilable”. Luther’s pamphlet was in the tradition of “medieval rebellions” in which “the rebels seldom attacked the king himself” but instead fought “to free him from his wicked advisors”.762

  In reality, Luther’s primary audience was not in Rome but in Germany. If Luther had intended to address the Pope in person a Latin version of the treatise would have sufficed. But the publication of both the open letter and treatise “in German, a language Leo did not know, underlines the fact that it was a further public statement of severance from Rome”. As a public statement, it was clearly aimed not just at the clerical and noble elites who understood Latin but at the widest possible German-speaking audience made available to him through the recently-available technology of the printing press.763

  In identifying Luther’s intended and imagined audiences, it is important to read his treatise on Christian l
iberty together with two other works which he produced earlier in 1520 in defence of his allegedly heretical views. Taken either singly or together these works were conceived as contributions to a movement of “national reform and renewal”. The “Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation”764 made an explicitly “nationalist appeal” to the noble class “to avert ‘the hurt and shame of the whole German people’” inflicted by the papacy.765 This work was the first instalment in a trilogy laying the foundation for a trinitarian, German, and Christian ethno-theology.

  Luther’s ethno-theology appealed not just to the noble estate of “those who fight”; he also wrote a pamphlet on “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church”766 addressed to “those who pray” in the traditional ecclesiastical Latin language. Finally, in the treatise on Christian liberty addressed the third estate of “those who worked” to sustain the life of the German people as a whole.767

  4. What circumstances, both in the church and politically, prompted Luther to write this pamphlet?

  The proximate cause driving the composition of his pamphlet on Christian liberty was the controversy unleashed by his unrelenting attack on the sale of indulgences which began in 1517. The logic of that campaign drove him to penetrate to the heart of the corruption entailed by that well-entrenched ecclesiastical rort. Even if the nobility and the clergy set out to eliminate such abuses, the problem of the relationship between faith and the works enjoined by the canon law of the church would continue to bedevil the life of the German people-at-large.