Home : The Voice : December 2002  

A Thousand People Participate in
Organized Study of Anti-Jewish
Feelings Among Christians

by Ray Waddle

The topic is not a happy one — the persistence of anti-Jewish feeling in Christian history. But about 1,000 Nashvillians, including members of six Presbyterian churches, are refusing to shy away from it. Their effort might eventually become a national model for future relations between Christians and non-Christians.

For six weeks this fall, congregational groups met all around Nashville to discuss 2,000 troubling years of anti-semitism — anti-Jewish sentiments in the New Testament, violence against Jews during the Crusades, the Nazi annihilation of Jews in the Holocaust during World War II.

They grappled with a massive 756-page book, Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll, a Catholic writer who is sharply critical of church history and urges Christian repentance for the blood on its hands and a new attitude of acceptance toward Judaism. The book was published in 2001 by Houghton Mifflin.

“The subject offers an invitation to real repentance, which is what Christianity is about at its core,” said Joel Dark, a Presbyterian layman and a historian at Tennessee State University who helped lead a discussion at Downtown Presbyterian Church.

“In that sense, that makes Carroll’s book a profoundly Christian work.” The mood of the study meetings was at times pensive and self-questioning — Is the New Testament anti-semitic? Is it immoral for post-Holocaust Christians to evangelize Jews? — but participants were also engaged and committed.

Two Presbyterian ministers were instrumental in organizing the study sessions — the Rev. Janet Hilley, executive director of the Covenant Association, and the Rev. Trace Haythorn, associate minister at Westminster Presbyterian Church. Participating congregations included First Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Second Presbyterian Church, Trinity Presbyterian Church, Downtown church and Westminster church. Some Jewish congregations in town held discussions too, often involving participation of guest Christians along with Jewish members.

“We’re in such a volatile time,” Hilley said. “The world is uncertain. So much talk of war, divisions. In such a climate, people are hungering to explore differences and how to handle them. They want to explore old hurts and find points of contacts and form new relationships that are warm and mutual.”

Discussions centered around how to interpret New Testament passages that appear anti-Jewish (an example from John 8:44: “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires.”), and what should the Christian theological attitude be toward Jews.

Many participants affirmed Carroll’s point that Christians should respect Judaism on its own terms and acknowledge that Jews remain the chosen people of God. To claim that Christianity supersedes Judaism will only continue the grim history of disrespect and violence toward Jews.

As Haythorn explains it, Jesus the Jewish rabbi came not to replace the Old Covenant but to renew it.

“We get invited into the Old Covenant as gentiles,” he said. “What had been an ethnically centered religion became an invitation to the whole world to experience Yahweh.”

Sponsored by the Covenant Association, a local interfaith organization of about 70 congregations, the study’s success has inspired leaders to plan two more events next year. In February, planners hope to hold a series of gatherings where people can ask questions of Christian clergy and Jewish rabbis, a kind of “everything you always wanted to know about Christianity and Judaism but were afraid to ask” session, planners said.

“Most people in our study are deeply troubled by how unreflective we’ve been as Presbyterians about our relations with the Jews,” Haythorn said. “I hope this is just the beginning of deeper conversation about what it means to be a community and understand why we believe what we do. . . . I think all of us need to work at articulating to others why we believe what we believe, which means we are all called on to share the Good News as we know it . . . ”

The other event, still taking shape, would be an annual lecture series featuring an internationally known speaker on the subject of interfaith relations and mutual respect.

Carroll himself, an award winning novelist and memoirist, appeared here in September to kick off the local study initiative with two lectures. During one of his talks, he pinpointed the Crusades as a fatal turning point in relations between Christians and Jews and between Christians and Muslims. The Crusades, the series of military campaigns between 1096-1291 to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim control, unleashed lethal forms of anti-semitism among the Christian crusaders along the way. It was also the first time that violence was defined by the Christian church as a sacred act, a time when Jesus’ death on the cross replaced the resurrection as the central image of Christian identity, he said.

“Jews had lived unmolested in Europe for 1,000 years,” he said. “When the death of Jesus was put in the center of the (Western) Christian imagination, Jews were at risk as never before.”

It set in motion a deadly chain of consequences, he said — new emphasis on converting Jews, new coercion of Jews in the ghettos, new fanatical legends about Jewish responsibility for Christ’s death, mutant new hatreds of Jews that led to the Nazis’ murderous policies in 20th century Europe.

“After 1096, Jews would never be safe again,” he said.

Carroll said the Crusades had disastrous consequences for Western Christianity’s relations with Islam too, consequences festering even now at the heart of the current war on terrorism.

For centuries, Christians in the West have done little to admit to their own hatred of Islam and its achievements, a hatred that goes back to the Crusades, Carroll said.

“As this war continues we must understand that God’s heart is broken . . . by the long trail of misbegotten choices. We Christians must confess we have contributed to this (climate).”

Haythorn, with assistance from Covenant Association leaders, created a study guide — mostly quotes culled from Carroll’s book — for local use. Reportedly Carroll is eager to see the study guide adopted by other cities to generate similar discussions elsewhere.

(Ray Waddle, former religion editor at The Tennessean, is a Nashville writer.)