Chapter 9: Aquinas as Resource for Jewish-Christian Relations
9
Aquinas as Resource for Jewish-Christian Relations
There exist rival versions of Christ’s fulfillment of the ceremonial law in Aquinas’s thought. This study shows that this tension is most pronounced when comparing, on the one hand, the teaching from the commentaries on Galatians and Hebrews, and the Summa theologiae, which states that the ceremonial law is dead and deadly after the passion of Christ, and, on the other hand, the teaching from Romans commentary, which states that the ceremonial law is a present spiritual benefit that retains a theological value as a prerogative of the Jewish people that cannot be declared superfluous without compromising the faithfulness of God.
In Hebrews and Galatians, Aquinas emphasizes the former view of fulfillment: the Law is described as fulfilled, destroyed, and deadly after Christ’s passion. In the lectures on Romans and Ephesians, Law and covenant are melded together as prerogatives of the Jewish people. In Romans and Ephesians, Paul’s emphasis on the goodness of God’s plural covenants and promises to Israel. In the Ephesians commentary, Jewish Christians are even given a foundational place in Christ’s Church as one of two “walls of the Temple.”687 Here, “Jewish Christians” are spoken of as part of the increase and growth of the Church with no mention of the Law becoming deadly after the Augustinian middle period, or that the Church of the Jews was “not destined to endure.”688
Moreover, in the Romans commentary, Aquinas defends the perpetuity of the prerogatives with an argument based on the theological claim that God is faithful to God’s promises. Aquinas argues that to take away or remove the prerogatives of Israel, which includes Israel’s covenant and Law, would actually nullify the faithfulness of God and call into question the theological claim that God does not lie. In the commentary on Romans, this theological defense of the prerogatives can be considered an argument against the double sens of fulfillment that causes the Law to expire and become dead since Aquinas affirms that the Law is a spiritual benefit for Jews.
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Aquinas’s thought is a significant resource for the new era of Jewish-Christian relations. First, the “fulfilled and upheld” view of the ceremonial law after Christ can serve as a resource for building mutual respect among Jews and Christians in the era after Nostra Aetate. Aquinas’s view of circumcision in the Romans commentary affords a positive status to postbiblical Israel after the passion of Christ that can assist the Church in overcoming economic supersessionism. His affirmation and defense of the ceremonial law as “fulfilled and upheld” reinforces the teaching of Nostra Aetate, and strengthens the Vatican’s teaching that the Jewish people remain dear to God and are a permanent reality.689
Indeed, Karl Thieme’s affirmation and defense of the value of postbiblical Judaism share similarities with Aquinas’s positive view of Jewish Law and election in the Romans commentary.690 Both theologians share the belief that the Jewish people remain God’s elect; that the Jewish people can be pleasing before God as Jews, despite unbelief in Christ. Therefore, Thieme’s struggle with Nazism, which required overcoming the traditional Christian view that carnal Israel is a degenerate people, finds support in Aquinas’s premodern attempt to make sense of difficulties in Paul on the theological status of the Jewish Law after Christ.
Second, Aquinas provides a model of reading of Scripture that is open to the possibility of locating and repairing inconsistencies on the value of the ceremonial law after the passion of Christ.691 Aquinas’ attention to what Steven Fowl has called the “multifaceted literal sense” (the idea that the literal sense can refer to a number of realities) allows one to identify tensions in authoritative traditional readings of Scripture. An example is his concern in the Summa theologiae and the Pauline commentaries to take seriously texts that witness to the ceremonial law as perpetual and texts that seem to say the Law is obsolete after the passion.
Moreover, Aquinas is open not only to identifying tensions but challenging traditional authorities in order to find solutions to conflicting interpretations of Scripture.692
The cessatio legalium tradition has created a deep incoherence in the Christian tradition. It implies that God is now indifferent to Jews and was lying when God said that the covenant with the Jewish people would be forever. Additionally, the cessatio legalium tradition seems plagued by contradictory views of Paul’s teaching on circumcision. Is circumcision advantageous (Rom 3:1–2) or superfluous (Gal 5:2) for the Jewish people in the era of grace? Aquinas attempts to resolve this difficulty in the Romans commentary in a rather remarkable way, by discovering a literal ratio for the continuing significance of Jews and Judaism in Paul’s present tense affirmations of Israel.
Perhaps Aquinas’s move represents a challenge to the traditional interpretation of Jewish Law that is not unlike his challenge to Aristotle’s conception of happiness.693 In the same way that Aquinas invoked “Aristotle against Aristotle,”694 Aquinas seems to invoke a positive Pauline statement on the value of circumcision to overturn the negative Pauline statement that Jewish Law has no value after Christ. It seems Aquinas may have set Paul’s Romans 3:1–2 against Paul’s Galatians 5:2 in order to resolve what he saw as a tension between an Augustinian interpretation of the status of Jewish practice of circumcision and the status attributed to that practice in the letter to the Romans.695 In this way, Aquinas seems to reopen questions on the apostles’ observance of the Law and whether the apostles assumed that the Law would continue for Jews and Jewish believers in Christ. It should be noted that the fact the Holy Spirit allowed the apostles to observe the Law in the apostolic period was, for Aquinas, the strongest argument against the cessatio legalium (Ia-IIae q. 103.4 ob. 1).
Isaac was probably not aware of the cessatio legalium tradition in medieval theology when he challenged the “fulfilled and expired” view of Christ’s fulfillment of the Law. Nevertheless, his neglected “Proposition 9” is concerned with the same the basic concept.
“Proposition 9: Jesus was born and lived ‘under the Law,’ did he intend or announce its abrogation? Many writers hold that he did, but their statements exaggerate, distort, or contradict the most important passages in the gospels.”696 Isaac’s attempt to challenge this concept was, at the end of the day, a challenge to the cessatio legalium tradition. Aquinas’s reply to the objection that circumcision is of no value in the era after grace represents a rejection of a key premise in the logic of traditional fulfillment theologies that assume the cessatio legalium as normative after the passion of Christ. Therefore, aspects of Aquinas’s theology not only support Thieme’s positive vision of the Jews. Aquinas’s Romans commentary seems to call into question the same idea that Isaac challenged: the claim that the Jewish law has expired after Christ.
Based on Aquinas’s “fulfilled and upheld” view of the ceremonial law, I would argue that it is possible to answer “yes” to Wyschogrod’s 1987 challenge to Thomistic studies as to whether or not the teaching on the mortifera character of the ceremonial law can be interpreted more benevolently.
Indeed, Wyschogrod and Aquinas seem to me to share more common ground than has yet been realized. They both express a profound awareness and concern with a theological claim deeply significant for post-supersessionist theology: the claim that God keeps God’s promises. Commenting upon what is now an oft-quoted Pauline phrase, “The gifts and call of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29), Aquinas says that: “it should be noted that ‘gift’ is taken here for a promise made according to God’s foreknowledge or predestination, and ‘call’ is taken for election.” “Because both are so certain,” explains Aquinas, “whatever God promises is as good as given and whomever He elects is somehow already called.”697
Here, Aquinas’s rejection of the idea that God’s promise of the election of the Jewish people might be nullified is similar to Wyschogrod’s reply to Karl Barth in a conversation concerning the transcendent nature of God’s promises:
On a sunny morning in August 1966 I visited theologian Karl Barth in his modest home on the Bruderholzallee in Basel. He had been told that I was a “Jewish Barthian,” and this amused him to no end. We spoke about various things and at one point he said: “You Jews have the promise but not the fulfillment; we Christians have both the promise and fulfillment.” Influenced by the banking atmosphere of Basel, I replied: “With human promises, one can have the promise but not the fulfillment. The one who promises can die, or change his mind, or not fulfill his promise for any number of reasons. But a promise of God is like money in the bank. If we have his promise, we have its fulfillment and if we do not have the fulfillment we do not have the promise.” There was a period of silence and then he said, “You know, I never thought of it that way.” I will never forget that meeting.698
In Aquinas’s Romans commentary, God’s promise to Israel is described as transcending human notions of promise. As Aquinas states in Ad Romanos 11.4.926, God’s promise to the Jewish people is “as good as given.”
In November of 2013 I had the opportunity to spend the afternoon with Michael Wyschogrod at his home in the Bronx. During one of our conversations, I shared with him that I had read his essay on Aquinas, and that it is possible to interpret Aquinas’s view of the ceremonial law “more benevolently.” I told him that in the commentary on Romans, Aquinas argues that if the prerogatives of the Jewish people were to be abrogated on account of Jewish unbelief in Christ it would be unfitting, and would call into question the faithfulness of God. Wyschogrod began to nod and said, “I agree with that.” “But,” he said firmly, “it would not simply be ‘unfitting.’ It would be unacceptable.” After our meeting, I realized that Wyschogrod had better expressed the sense of Aquinas’s words in Ad Rom. 3.1.253 than I. For Wyschogrod and Aquinas, the idea that the prerogatives of Israel have been abolished because of unbelief in Christ would not simply be unfitting; it would be unacceptable because God does not lie.699
687. Ad Ephesios 2.6.129.
688. Ad Galatas 2.3.86.
689. That the Jews “remain dear to God” is a theme in the Church’s teaching that first appeared in Lumen Gentium 16.
690. Connelly, From Enemy to Brother, 187. Thieme no doubt moves beyond Aquinas in many ways, especially in his affirmation of the need to defend the idea of Jewish participation in grace. Connelly, From Enemy to Brother, 230
691. Steven Fowl, “Thomas Aquinas and the Multifaceted Literal Sense of Scripture.”
692. This dialectic is not peculiar to Aquinas.
693. Aquinas claimed that Aristotle’s criteria for happiness actually caused a difficulty for the Aristotelian view that such happiness is actually attainable. As Alasdair MacIntyre explains, Aquinas argued that since only a variety of imperfect happinesses can be had in human life, the happiness Aristotle identified, the ultimate good (of the human soul) must lie “in the relationship of the soul to something outside itself, and that . . . in no state in this created world can the type of good in question be found.” Aquinas is able to overcome the apparent tension between the Augustinian and Aristotelian traditions through a careful and critical reading of Aristotle on Aristotle’s own terms. McIntyre, Three Rival Versions, 137.
694. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, 137.
695. The teaching that Jewish Law is fulfilled and rendered obsolete by Christ, which is often associated with Hebrews and Galatians, remains a challenge for contemporary theological interpretation of Scripture even after the era of Thieme and Isaac. Indeed, Thieme’s debate with Ernst Karl Winter over whether Paul’s positive affirmation of Jewish law and election in Romans trumps Galatians and Hebrews seems to mirror aspects of the discussion over the question of supersessionism in Aquinas’s theology.
696. Isaac, Jesus and Israel, 49.
697. Ad Rom. 11.4.926.
698. Wyschogrod, “Why Was and Is the Theology of Karl Barth of Interest to a Jewish Theologian?” 211–24.
699. Ad Rom. 3.1.253: “For if the Jews’ prerogative were abrogated (praerogativa Iudaeorum tolleretur) on account of the unbelief of some, it would follow that man’s unbelief would nullify God’s faithfulness—which is an unacceptable (inconveniens) conclusion.” Although inconveniens is an adjective that can be translated “unfitting,” Aquinas uses the term to refer to a statement (the theory that the prerogatives might be removed). In this context, it seems the term should carry more force: unreasonable, absurd. Deferrari, A Lexicon of St. Thomas, 533.