When Markus Barth, son of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, died in July 1994, he was immediately hailed as one of the great leaders of modern Jewish-Christian reconciliation.Footnote 1 As far back as 1972, the Conservative Jewish rabbi Herman Halperin, from Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Congregation, had spoken of Barth in glowing terms as ‘one of the genuine chaside omit ha-olam of our time, and of all times…’Footnote 2 Anyone who is familiar with the work of Yad Vashem will recognise the term that was employed by Halperin to describe Barth as that which is normally translated as ‘righteous among the nations’. Of course, Yad Vashem did not itself sanction Halperin's description of Barth as one of the righteous, but Halperin's gesture was nonetheless an extraordinary honour to bestow upon him. More recently, Randi Rashkover has been similarly affirming of him, commenting that ‘Markus Barth's work can be appreciated as a tireless effort to exegetically re-order Jewish-Christian relations’.Footnote 3 While Rashkover's words are in isolation ambiguous, her overall reception of his reparative work is broadly appreciative. On both exegetical and moral grounds, she avers, Barth insists upon the need for Christians to ‘foster a deep, familial relationship with Jews’.Footnote 4
Nevertheless, there is an ambiguity, not only in Rashkover's reading of Barth's theology of Jewish–Christian relations, but also in the very enactment of Barth's own theological and hermeneutical convictions. Notwithstanding his genuine love for Israel and the Jewish people, and his equally sincere yearning for a healing of the schism between Christians and Jews – both of which were evidenced in innumerable ways throughout his life – Barth's dialogical approach was fraught with contradiction and, even more tragically, with a latent supersessionary logic of which he remained entirely unaware. As Rashkover correctly notes, there is a tension in Barth between his rhetoric and his action, a ‘problem that plagues [his] writings on Israel…’Footnote 5 Part of the problem is his highly critical response to the repressive actions of successive Israeli governments against the Palestinian peoples – actions that were partially elided by Barth into his broader theology of Christian-Jewish unity, such that he found it difficult to speak of one without reference to the other. This alone caused a good many of his Jewish colleagues and friends to be (I suspect unfairly) suspicious of his sincerity. But more fundamentally, the problem that suffuses Barth's engagement with Jewish–Chistian dialogue lies in his identification of the core of the Christian gospel. Much of Barth's exegetical effort from 1957 to 1984 was expended on the Epistle to the Ephesians. Emerging from that endeavour was a conviction that Ephesians 2 – in particular, the christological act of reconciliation, and the breaking down of the ‘wall of enmity’ – is the fundamental kernel of God's good news. In an ironic consequence, though, this conviction effectively precluded Barth from engaging meaningfully or fruitfully with people – and in particular with any Jews – who kept open the theological reality of opposition and enmity.
It is hardly surprising that in the decades following the Sho'ah, and during the years of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967–1973, a significant measure of Jewish political and theological thought insisted upon the necessity of precisely those two things – opposition and enmity – that Barth believed were so thoroughly repudiated by the gospel. Retaining the right to be in enmity and opposition was, for many Jewish politicians, rabbis, and public intellectuals, necessary in order to safeguard Jewish security within the newly re-formed Israel from the hostility of neighbouring states. But for Barth, to refuse to be reconciled to one's enemy – to keep enmity on the table, that is, as both an objective and a needful posture – was so contrary to what he believed to be the core of the gospel that it erected an unsurpassable barrier to genuine dialogue. To hold such a view was, thus, necessarily to be his enemy. While he may not have explicitly articulated this attitude in his writing, he did express it in his actions and relationships, even to the point of embodying – in spite of his best intentions – a form of rhetorical supersessionism. To put it bluntly, Barth's centring of reconciliation as the sine qua non of the gospel led him to turn away, in sadly supersessionistic fashion, from the very people with whom he believed reconciliation began.
In this article, then, I will do three things. First, I will outline the core of Barth's theology of reconciliation. Second, I will narrate in brief his personal history of encounter with leading members of America's Jewish communities. And third, I will show how their political–theological commitments caused Barth in the end to turn against them, in a way that was not only awkwardly at odds with his prioritisation of christological reconciliation, but also indicative of a supersessionistic logic to which he was at once instinctively allergic, and yet nonetheless susceptible.
Markus Barth's theology of reconciliation
Markus Barth was primarily a New Testament scholar, whose doctoral dissertation, Der Augenzeuge, was supervised by the formidable form critic, Karl Ludwig Schmidt.Footnote 6 Aside from innumerable short articles, Barth's major contributions to New Testament scholarship were his highly popular The Broken Wall – a study guide of sorts written for the American Baptist Convention's Jubilee celebrations in 1959, and based on the Epistle to the Ephesians – as well his three exhaustive commentaries on Ephesians, Colossians and Philemon.Footnote 7 Barth's ‘scientific exegetical’ methodology allowed – indeed, from his perspective, compelled – him to hold views that would, at least in some circles, these days be regarded as somewhat controversial. As he told his one-time student, and later co-author Helmut Blanke, ‘Asking questions is not the problem – it's a problem when there is no self-criticism.’Footnote 8 In Barth's view, for example, there could not be any in principle fixity of the scriptural canon.
[W]hat is canonical still remains open. We have not God's word distilled in a bottle. But when we hear it and when He uses it – then it is – by God's grace, not by a past miracle of inspiration – God's word. The church has to ask again and again: Is this the voice of the good shepherd? She will to her surprise hear in these books the voice of God. If further excavations produced another gospel, or letter of Paul, I see no reason why such books should not be recognized as canonical too. The Canon is still open.Footnote 9
Most importantly for the purposes of this paper, however, it was Barth's unconventional view not only that Ephesians is a genuinely Pauline epistle, but that it – rather than Romans – is the apostle's real ‘testament’.Footnote 10 Whereas Romans must be understood primarily as an occasional piece (ein Gelegenheitschreiben), Ephesians is the locus and summary of Paul's mature gospel proclamation. ‘Ephesians’, says Barth, ‘represents a development of Paul's thought and a summary of his message which are prepared by his undisputed letters and contribute to their proper understanding’.Footnote 11 Indeed, in reflecting critically on Hans Küng's 1967 tome Die Kirche, Barth argued that, while Romans 9–11 continued to be the presumed locus classicus for understanding the relationship between Israel and church, on the contrary ‘above all Ephesians ought to be listened to…’Footnote 12 According to Barth's particular hermeneutic, then, Paul's earlier letters are to be read and interpreted in the light of Ephesians, with the latter as their most mature summative expression.
But this simply begs a further question. If Ephesians represents the paradigmatic Pauline summary of the gospel, what is the kernel of Ephesians itself? Writing in 1984, in what was to be the last of his publications on this epistle, Barth answered the question by arguing that ‘the presumption and basis of [the apostle's] thinking and writing are…the reconciliation and unification of Jews and Gentiles through Jesus Christ…’ Indeed, the ‘unification of Jews and Gentiles is the first, fundamental and paradigmatic event upon which depend and follow the overcoming of sexual, historical, economical divisions’.Footnote 13 Far from the impulse towards harmonious unity being a primary commitment before and outside of Scripture, Barth thus exegetes Scripture – in this case, the letter to the Ephesians – as providing the hermeneutical ground for the church's solidarity with the Jews, and subsequently of all people with all others.
He spelled this conviction out in greater detail in both The Broken Wall and his Anchor Bible commentary. In the former, Barth says that, ‘The church lives in a special relationship with Israel…By “Israel” we understand not only ancient Israel…[nor] do today's Jews in their dispersion over the world (or in the young state of Israel) exhaust what is meant.’Footnote 14 Clearly implying a generously comprehensive definition of the ‘Israel’ that is in solidarity with the church, Barth goes on to insist that, while Paul elsewhere (such as Gal 3:28, Col 3:11 and 1 Cor 12:13) includes Jews and Gentiles ‘as but one among many of the inimical pairs that have been reconciled’, in Ephesians it is primarily and fundamentally the reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles that is the foundation of all other social healings.Footnote 15 ‘According to Ephesians, social peace in any realm and in any form is a consequence of the peace which was made between Jews and Gentiles.’Footnote 16 Or, to put it the other way around, peace in any other realm must be predicated upon first recognising and inhabiting the peace that Christ has made between Jews and Gentiles.
Similarly in his two-volume commentary on the same letter, Barth argues that
The members of the church are not so equalized, leveled down, or straitjacketed in a uniform as to form a genus tertium that would be different from both Jews and Gentiles. Rather the church consists of Jews and Gentiles reconciled to one another by the Messiah who has come and died for both.Footnote 17
The resulting ‘one new man’ is
an organic body consisting of distinct members…a continuous mutual encounter, exchange, bewildering or joyful surprise of free persons…Above all, the joining of ‘the two’ into ‘one new’ whole reveals that neither of the two can possess salvation, peace, life without the other. Jews need Gentiles, Gentiles need Jews…[in order to be] saved at all.’Footnote 18
Precisely, however, because of this Jewish–Gentile solidarity, there is a more universal unity. The church, says Barth, exists in necessary ‘solidarity and association…to those that are still “far”’, for the simple reason that, in Christ, the ‘far off ones’ are the very ones who have been brought near.Footnote 19 Thus, in the breaking down of the wall of enmity between Jew and Gentile, ‘Christ is that reconciliation which is greater and stronger than the hostility of either or of both.’Footnote 20 The ethical consequence of this theological reality is thus that to continue to live as though enmity is still operative is, for Barth, to deny the sum and substance of the gospel.
This determination to foreground the claim of Ephesians 2 (most particularly, verses 11–22) as the most decisive evangelical summary of the New Testament impelled Barth's deeply sincere commitment to Jewish–Christian reconciliation, at a time in which such an endeavour was, after the Sho'ah, still in its academic infancy.Footnote 21 As he wrote to the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches in August 1963, ‘Personally I do not think that we can be Christians unless in very palpable forms we acknowledge and express that Israel is our older brother [sic]; that we are not “the new Israel”; that only in approaching God the Father together (Eph 2:19) we can come to know and to serve him.’Footnote 22 In expressing such sentiments, Barth was speaking way ahead of his time. As we shall see, however, it was also this uncompromising commitment of Barth's to the objective reality of reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles that drove an unintentional wedge between himself and many of his Jewish friends and interlocutors – precisely, that is, with those to whom his theology determined him to be already and primarily reconciled. How and why did this occur?
The rising and shattering of Markus Barth's relationships with his Jewish friends
In 1974, following an address to the Berne chapter of the Christlich-Jüdische Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Schweiz, Barth was described by the local rabbi, Dr. Roland Gradwohl, as ‘an advocate and henchman of…murderous scoundrels’.Footnote 23 One other attendee at the event sent Barth, by the very next day's post, an equally clear message: ‘Shame, shame on you, you little, unworthy son of a great father’ (Pfui über Sie, schämen Sie sich, kleiner, unwürdiger Sohn eines grossen Vaters).Footnote 24 We will return later in the paper to the reasons that occasioned these harsh words. The point here is that Barth had not always been held in such low esteem by his Jewish conversation partners. On the contrary, his relationships with individual Jews, both before his departure from Switzerland in late 1952, and during his 20 years in the United States, were full of promise, friendship, and warm collegiality. And yet, Gradwohl's angry accusation was sadly representative of the fact that many of Barth's Jewish friendships began to sour – and when they did, they soured irretrievably.
So what were Barth's relationships with Jews like? In the first instance, it is worth noting that from 1943 to 1947 Barth and his wife Rose Marie sheltered a German Jewish family, the Eisenstadts, in their vicarage in Bubendorf, after the Eisenstadts had escaped from the Majdanek extermination camp in mid-1942 and had subsequently fled to Switzerland. Housing the Eisenstadts in their own home did not, of course, pose any risk to the Barth's lives, such as would have been the case in the Nazi-occupied territories. It was, though, nevertheless still a violation of Swiss law, and could have resulted in fines, termination of employment, and even imprisonment. Any suggestion that Barth was implicitly anti-Jewish, or that his later hermeneutic of Jewish–Christian relations was grounded in a purely theoretical understanding of ‘Israel’ must therefore contend with this act of bravery.Footnote 25 Later, when living in Chicago, the Barths found themselves close friends with the many Jews who lived in the same part of the city. There was, reported Rose Marie, ‘a warmth and liberal-mindedness’ amongst their Jewish neighbours, and a premium placed on the centrality of the family, ‘that does one good’. Of particular interest is the esteem with which Markus was held by members of the local Jewish community, precisely on account of his father. As one of the local shop-owners once said when Barth's youngest daughter, Rose-Marie, had forgotten her university ID card that was needed for a store discount, but instead mentioned Markus’ name – ‘O, isn't he the son of the great Karl Barth? It's alright then, it's alright.’Footnote 26 Indeed, through the Barth's 20 years in the U.S., Markus cultivated significant relationships with many of the key members of America's Jewish communities. From the early 1960s through to the final years of his life, Barth was in regular contact with such luminaries as Abraham Heschel, Jacob Taubes, Stephen and Henry Schwarzschild, Emil Fackenheim, Michael Wyschogrod, and Zalman Schachter. Similarly, during the early 1970s, he worked assiduously alongside Marc Tanenbaum in advocating for the removal of all antisemitic tropes in Oberammergau's (in)famous Passion Play.Footnote 27 With both Fackenheim and Wyschogrod, at least, contact grew from tentative but cordial correspondence into warm friendship, not only between the men themselves, but indeed between their whole families. But many of these friendships did not last. As hinted above, a good number of Barth's relationships with erstwhile Jewish friends and colleagues deteriorated through the latter half of the 1960s and beyond, with Wyschogrod and Fackenheim being particularly profound losses.
The reasons for this deterioration are instructive and point towards the stridency of Barth's theology of reconciliation that was, in its very centrality for him, ironically divisive. In the case of Michael Wyschogrod, his argument with Barth initially concerned their opposing views on America's involvement in the Vietnam War, before turning heatedly to the rights and wrongs of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Whereas they had at one time been in the habit of sharing family holidays together, by 1975 the breach between them was complete. Angry with Barth, who professed a love for the Jewish people, but was nevertheless deeply critical of the Israeli State, Wyschogrod wrote to him declaring that to ‘sit in judgment over Israel…is a very dangerous enterprise’. There could, he said, be no room for such self-righteousness on the part of anyone who confesses Christ and who purportedly recognises the inextricable bond between Jesus and Israel. ‘[T]he face of the living Jew is the closest you will ever get in this life to seeing the face of your Lord…If you separate yourself from the consensus of this people, you are separated from your Lord…If your morality leads you to the hurting of Jews, it is not the morality of your Lord.’Footnote 28 What was Wyschogrod's point? Simply that if Barth truly loved the Jewish people as he claimed, he would acknowledge Israel's need and right to take the political and military steps necessary to secure its borders from external terrorist aggression and would refrain from censure or rebuke. He would not, that is, naively demand of Israel that it be necessarily reconciled to the Palestinian peoples, as though the reality of enmity between the two could somehow be ignored.
With Emil Fackenheim, the dispute was more strictly theological, but again revolved around the centrality of reconciliation. To put the question most pointedly, was Barth's insistence upon both him and others living into the objective reality of reconciliation – the core of the gospel and thus the foundation of post-resurrection ethics – naïve, to the point of in fact threatening the safety of post-Holocaust Israel? Even before the promulgation of his famous ‘614th Commandment’, Fackenheim had been insisting that ‘Auschwitz’ – as symbol and reality – was such a theologically rupturing event that it had necessarily to be the overriding theological criterion and datum for both Judaism and Christianity.Footnote 29 Barth, on the other hand, while acknowledging the existential trauma of the Holocaust, wanted still to be able to prioritise a Christian belief in resurrection hope.Footnote 30 As he said to the Canadian theologian David Demson, ‘defiance rather than hope is the Leitmotiv of [Fackenheim's] thought…[He] appears to live more from the great enemy, and correspondently [sic]: from negation, than from the source of hope…’.Footnote 31 Whereas Fackenheim was predicating modern Jewish thought and life on the inevitability of enmity towards Jews, and the consequent need to stand firm in its face, Barth was urging him to recognise the christological defeat of enmity as evidenced through the resurrection. This theological–methodological disagreement proved too great an impasse for either of them to cross.
The uncompromising truth of reconciliation as the ground of perpetual enmity
It is entirely reasonable to ask of someone who was such a committed champion of Jewish–Christian solidarity – indeed covenantal, kindred, unity – and of the evangelical imperative of christological reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles, why it was precisely Markus Barth's friendships with Jews that deteriorated so bitterly and intractably. Certainly, he had angry and acrimonious relationships with various of his faculty colleagues, both in Chicago and in Pittsburgh, usually over matters of pedagogy and curricular integrity. But it was the breakdown of his friendships with individual Jews that was especially bitter and irretrievable. The reason, ironically, lies in fact in his commitment to what he saw as the unqualified character of that divine reconciliatory work between Jews and Gentiles, of which mention was made earlier. For Barth, the rejection of the reality of reconciliation – or worse, the proposing of qualifications to that reconciliation – was sufficient cause for him not only to withdraw friendship, but indeed to erect new barriers of disillusioned hostility. In late 1966, Barth voiced the premise of his concern to Fackenheim. Unhappy with what he described as a Jewish ‘triumphalism’ that prioritised Auschwitz as a theological criterion, Barth urged Fackenheim to
try and throw behind you the unbearable guilt and suffering of those endless years and uncounted martyrs…We [need to] look forward, [and] not make sin the basis of our theology…I do still believe that a better witness to resurrection would be the only goal in which both of us, Jews and Christians alike, could meet, in which we would need one another, in which we could catch hope together. Why get fascinated by the abyss of a possible other victory of Hitler, if there is still a victory of God ahead of us?Footnote 32
In Barth's mind, the emphasis on the Sho'ah that he saw in so many of his Jewish friends did two things. First, it precluded the possibility of genuine kinship between Jews and Christians because it replaced, in priority of significance and consequence, the redemptive unificatory event of the cross with the rupturing event of Auschwitz. (That he could even entertain the notion that a Jew might, in his words, share with a Christian ‘a better witness to resurrection’ is itself astounding.) What he was objecting to, that is, was a Jewish diminution of Christianity – a sort of reverse supersessionism, in which Christianity is a mere shadow of all that is right and proper within Judaism – justified by reference to Auschwitz, as though that horror must forever delegitimise the church's existence and proclamation. Barth's impression was, in a way, right. As Fackenheim wrote to him: ‘[F]rom a Jewish standpoint…the very first condition of Jewish-Christian dialogue…is Christian recognition of a still-living bond between God and Israel; and that a Christian who does give this recognition cannot by-pass the scandal of the particularity of Auschwitz.’Footnote 33 That is, only by acknowledging the hermeneutical priority of the Sho'ah to modern Jewish and Christian faith is Jewish–Christian dialogue possible. While utterly convinced of the ‘still-living bond between God and Israel’ of which Fackenheim spoke, and also deeply cognizant of the horror of the Holocaust, and indeed of the churches’ complicity in its possibility, Barth was nevertheless unable and unwilling to take the interpretive step that Fackenheim required. In his view, it made reconciliation conditional upon something other than the cruciform work of Christ.
But second, Barth perceived that a Jewish prioritisation of Auschwitz was being used to justify a militaristic Zionism, with Palestinians in particular the intentional targets. That is to say, instead of viewing the Holocaust as the most obvious recent reason for seeking peace amongst enemies, the enormity of the Sho'ah was being utilised as a way of justifying a perpetual animosity towards Israel's neighbours. Having been a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War through the early 1960s, the latter years of that decade saw Barth change his focus to the Israel–Palestine conflict, with successive Israeli administrations – particularly those of Golda Meir and Menachem Begin – likened by Barth to Hitler and National Socialism. ‘[Al]most all Jews are becoming Sionists [sic] and are doing this not without the great danger of endorsing Nazi-like features of blood and soil, nationalistic and militaristic thinking of infamous memory.’Footnote 34 Rejecting the claim that Israel was in a fight for its survival, Barth declared, during a public forum in February 1970, that ‘That is what I heard Hitler say in the 1930s…’Footnote 35 There was no doubt, said Barth, that Israel had a legitimate claim to the land on which it was situated. Nevertheless, its tenure should be as ‘steward’ not ‘possessor’, with a responsibility of care and protection for all who lived there, and not only Jews.Footnote 36 Eugene Borowitz, with whom Barth was sharing the forum's platform, was appalled at Barth's suggestion. ‘If it wasn't you talking, Dr. Barth’, he is reported to have said, ‘I would walk off this stage right now.’Footnote 37 Nevertheless, Barth was adamant that such criticism of Israel was not only justified, but indeed required by Christianity's kinship with the Jewish people. Christians, he said, ‘shall bear witness to our solidarity with our suffering brother in a helpful manner only when we have the courage to express a critical solidarity’.Footnote 38
It was this determination to manifest a critical solidarity that, as we have seen, got him into such hot water four years later in Berne. There, in front of the Christlich-Jüdische Arbeitsgemeinschaft, Barth sought to argue that, while Jews remained ‘unsafe strangers’ (unsichere Fremde) in the land of their forefathers, Israel was nevertheless guilty of inexcusable criminality against Palestinians.Footnote 39 Questioning whether the Palestinians’ sense of identity had developed sufficiently even to speak of them yet as a people or a nation, he noted that their plight was more desperate than Israel's, simply because Israel had achieved global recognition (da Israel ein weltweit anerkannter Staat sei). Of course, Barth was quick to insist that nothing in the Palestinians’ desperation justified terrorism. But he was even quicker to denounce Israel. Whatever terrorism might be inflicted by Palestinian fighters – he singled out the Munich and Ma'alot attacks of 1972 and 1974, respectively – it paled into comparison against Israel's excessive response. To make maters worse, Barth effectively implied that Israel had brought Palestinian terrorism upon itself. Terrorism, he said, was ‘the last resort to communicate total frustration, when rational communication was no longer possible’.Footnote 40
Naturally, such criticism was strongly rebuffed by Barth's Jewish interlocutors. Ernst Simon took Barth to task for seeking to compare, and weigh up, Jewish and Palestinian tragedies, as something that was ‘really extremely inappropriate’ (wirklich höchst unangebrachten).Footnote 41 Zwi Werblowsky went even further. In his view, Barth's academic and public commentaries on Israeli policies made him one of those friends ‘from whom [may] God protect us’. In the rabbi's opinion, Barth's criticism of Israel disqualified him from being a ‘moral partner in any dialogue, since after such obscenity no communication is possible…’.Footnote 42 Barth was, in this sense, the unwitting, and certainly (from his own perspective) unwilling enemy of the Jewish people, and Israel as such.
But it was Barth himself who, when it came to the question of Israel–Palestine, closed the door on any attempt at reconciliation with his friends. Wyschogrod, for example, was prepared to admit that Barth's accusations against Israeli injustices were legitimate and was adamant that he wished to remain on speaking terms with his Swiss colleague. But he was forced to accept that ‘you are not on speaking terms to me and…no longer consider me your friend’.Footnote 43 Indeed, Barth referred to Wyschogrod, on at least one occasion, as ‘a blood-thirsty warmonger’.Footnote 44 Why? Because Wyschogrod's acceptance of Israel's need to defend itself against external aggression was seen by Barth as a refusal to enact the reconciliation between enemies that had been occasioned by the cross. As he complained to David Demson, Wyschogrod would never himself visit Israel lest ‘his prejudices for the immaculate behavior of the Israelis might be destroyed…At any rate, he insists on telling me that I have to declare wonderful all that the Israelis do and keep quiet about the wrong suffered by the Palestinians – as if I could do that!’Footnote 45 Barth's relationship with Fackenheim was even more decisively and permanently cut off, again from Barth's side. ‘It appears to me,’ he wrote to Demson, ‘that people like Fackenheim who expect from us a blanc [sic] check…are actually working not for the peace of Israel but to its disadvantage…What we and Israel need today, are not fanatics but sober people, friends and brothers of Israel, not bootlickers…’Footnote 46
It is here, I think, that Barth ventures into dangerous territory – indeed territory that the best of Barth would surely have wished to avoid, but in the end could not. That Barth – a Christian – was prepared to identify himself as being in closer proximity to the welfare of Israel than people like Fackenheim, Wyschogrod, and Werblowsky, was a rhetorically provocative move that was, in its own way, peculiarly supersessionistic. The force of his criticism was in effect to claim that he was more truly ‘Israel’ than those Jews who disagreed with him. His former friends were now his enemies, because they either rejected what they perceived as his naïve belief in the political reconciliation between militarised opponents (for example, Israel and Palestine), or because they qualified the conditions in which such reconciliation might be achievable. Thus, their reconciliation with him might, theoretically, be possible – but only by agreeing with him.
Quite obviously, for a Christian to demand Jewish conversion to a different perspective has been the hallmark of Christian hostility to Jewishness as such for nearly 2000 years. From John Chrysostom to John Duns Scotus, Martin Luther to (regrettably) Markus Barth, the Jew must convert to the ways of the Christian, in order for the Christian to look upon the Jew with favour. Whether or not Barth thought it likely, or even realistic, that his former Jewish friends might change their minds on those matters that had driven them apart is unclear and, in the end, not the point. Rather, the point is the supersessionary direction of the expectation that he had.
At the heart of the disagreement – and ultimately, the cause of the bitter deterioration of these friendships into, if not enmity, then at least intransigent hostility – was the identification of theological primacy. What, that is to say, should stand as the fundamental and determinative theological criterion and datum? At least for people such as Wyschogrod, Fackenheim, Irving Greenberg, Arthur Cohen, and Richard Rubenstein, the Sho'ah was and has become the tremendum that cannot be avoided or overcome.Footnote 47 As Jews, they each claimed, and lived – in their own particular ways – the dictum that Dietrich Ritschl would later lay down for Christianity: that theology after Auschwitz can no longer be done ‘to the exclusion of this fundamental wound’.Footnote 48 Again, in their own distinctive ways, this has been repeated by both Catholic and Protestant theologians, from Johann Baptist Metz to Martin Rumscheidt.Footnote 49
But Markus Barth did not and could not, agree. As indicated at the start of the paper, he understood Paul's letter to the Ephesians to be the summary of the gospel message, with Ephesians 2 being the inner kernel of that evangelical core. There is no gospel without reconciliation; and the breaking down of the enmity between Jews and Gentiles is the primary and grounding instantiation of that reconciliation that then proceeds outwards across all other social, economic, sexual and other divisions. Thus, Barth could not tolerate any idea, event or principle that might be posed as a ‘still more central point’ (to quote his father from 1933). As he said in a homiletics lecture in Rüschlikon in December 1974,
Living after Auschwitz, the preacher in the pulpit these days will have a conscience lacerated by his co-responsibility for the past and maybe for a future holocaust…Yet he will not attempt to calm consciences by quoting Bible verses that promise the former Canaan to Israel, or by calling for all-out support of questionable Zionist intentions, attitudes, and deeds. On the other hand, the preacher will not seek to please the new leftist youth in his congregation…by indiscriminate support of all that the Palestinian guerillas do. Rather, he will speak on the ground that Jesus Christ on the cross stretched out his hands over Jews and Gentiles…Footnote 50
This quote perfectly sums up the chasm between Barth and his Jewish colleagues. For them, Auschwitz was necessarily determinative of both faith, theology and consequently of politics. For Barth, on the other hand, it could only ever be a subsequent and non-determinative criterion that was radically relativised by the reconciliatory and unificatory event of the cross, about which Ephesians 2 speaks so eloquently. That he and his Jewish friends might have come to differing perspectives on this is neither surprising nor especially problematic. The awkward irony, though, is that Barth's insistence on the primacy of reconciliation – in particular between Jews and Gentiles – was the very thing that caused him to retreat into angry enmity, when his Jewish friends refused to prioritise it in their own lives and theo-political commitments. What is tragic about it is that Barth – I think unwittingly – reverted to age-old supersessionary logic in his determination that they must change and not him.
There is, of course, much more to say about Markus Barth's theology of Israel, and about his personal friendships with a great many Jews on both sides of the Atlantic. It would be both unfair and untrue to suggest that supersessionist logic characterised the heart of either Barth's theology or his friendships. He was, on the contrary, sincere in his devotion to the wellbeing of Israel and to the removal of anti-Jewish prejudice in the church's teaching and liturgies. Nonetheless, his devotion was, as Rashkover says, ultimately ambiguous. Moreover, it was his insistence that christological reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles lies at the heart of the gospel that was the ironic cause of the fracturing of so many of his Jewish friendships.
