Abstract
This book comprises two parts, the first focusing on ‘Scripture’ and the second on ‘Theology’. Cunningham begins both with chapters that set out relevant teaching documents from the Roman Catholic Church. For ‘Scripture’, the foundational text is Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, and for ‘Theology’ its Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate. Cunningham gives a clear rationale for this arrangement: if the Holocaust made a new relationship between Roman Catholics and Jews necessary, it was ‘The Catholic Biblical Renaissance’ (the subtitle of chapter 1) following Dei Verbum that opened up the ground on which it could be established.
The chapters in the first part provide expert summaries of views from biblical scholars as well as official teaching documents on biblical interpretation and their implications for contemporary relationships with Jews. Schneiders provides Cunningham’s hermeneutical matrix (p. 14), and British readers will search in vain for any reference to the writings of e.g. Burridge or N. T. Wright and the debates they have precipitated on Jesus and Paul. Although the perspective is therefore somewhat limited, readers are conducted by a highly experienced guide on a well-marked ‘journey’ within Roman Catholic theology. Something similar could be said of the initial chapters in the second part as well, where Cunningham sets out the epochal changes in the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on Judaism that began to unfold with Nostra Aetate, including discussion of the teaching of the last three popes.
‘If Jews are in a saving, covenantal bonding with God, independently of Christ, then how is Christ universally significant?’ (p. 74) This is the critical question that emerges from Cunningham’s narration of the ‘theological trajectory’ (p. 156), and the chapters on Christology seek to outline an answer. Here, the book becomes markedly more speculative. Reaching for a formulation that will be free of ‘supersessionism’ (the claim that Christianity has replaced or relegated Judaism in the purposes of God since Jesus Christ), he writes: ‘As the personification of divine outreach, and the epitome of perfect human covenanting partnership with God, Jesus Christ, the Crucified and Risen One, opens up the possibility of covenanting life with God to all nations’ (p. 196). It is not clear his approach altogether avoids either a camouflaged claim of continuing Christian superiority, or a diminution of creedal orthodoxy, or possibly both.
This is a valuable account of the journey within Roman Catholicism over 50 years to come to a right relationship with Jews. The way ahead, however, may look rather different. Neither Orthodoxy nor Pentecostalism can easily be fitted into the slipstream of Cunningham’s account of his church’s ‘theological trajectory’, yet as the oscillation between ‘Catholics’ and ‘Christians’ in the one chapter written specifically for a Jewish audience indicates, Jews might prefer to work at relations with Christians more widely. Finally, one might note the absence of Islam: how far can relations between Christians and Jews today be insulated from the relations of each and both together with Muslims?