-Julius-Kei Kato, PhD
I participated in a symposium on Christology and its state vis-a-vis Jewish-Christian relations 60 years after Nostra Aetate. It was held in Rome, Feb. 24~26, 2025, at the Rome campus of the Australian Catholic University. Symposium program HERE.
This is a quick 'taking stock' of the wisdom-gems that I received and took away from this very insightful symposium, in fellowship with other scholars and practitioners. Below, I develop one big "wisdom-gem" and briefly mention three other themes. Each deserves a more extended reflection but, for the moment, these are my reflections on matters that struck me with force before they fade away with the passage of time.
[Wisdom-Gem #1] Exegesis will not save us. Ethics will.
In an insightful remark during her talk on the present-day state of Christian-Jewish relationships in the wake of Nostra Aetate, prominent Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine suggested that--in these words (as far as I can remember them)--"Exegesis will not save us. Ethics will."
This struck a chord in me. Many of us in the gathering were biblical scholars with training mainly in exegesis and historical-critical methods. (I moved beyond exegesis in my PhD studies and present work but I still consider myself very much a biblical scholar who engages in exegesis as one of my main tasks up to today!) These words then pertained to us directly, reminding us that we may very well do an excellent job of exegesis with regard to particular problematic passages in the New Testament that seem to be anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic, and supersessionist. At the end of the day, however (as AJ Levine reminded us), there is a limit to what we can do as exegetes. No amount of exegesis will solve the problem of the anti-Semitism and supersessionism of certain parts of the New Testament. To move towards some kind of solution, we will have to enter another area --- the area of ethics.
Ethics
By "ethics," I understand the following: How we interpret texts and their messages (for our purposes here, the New Testament) in a way that clarifies not only what they meant in the past (which is, strictly speaking, the task of exegesis), but also and most importantly, what the ethical repercussions of the text's message has had in history and what consequences they continue to have in our present day.
Hermeneutics
Let me emphasize here then that critical hermeneutics ("interpretation") plays a crucial role in the enterprise of clarifying the meaning and ethical import of texts as they pertain to and impact Christian-Jewish relationships. The full formula should therefore be: "Exegesis will not save us. If there's any chance of detoxifying and redeeming Christian supersessionist and anti-Semitic texts, we should intentionally employ critical hermeneutical-ethical lenses to them."
The next burning question then is: What are the "nuts and bolts" of these so-called "hermeneutical-ethical lenses" that we need (aside from traditional historical-critical exegesis) to detoxify and redeem anti-Semitic and supersessionist passages in the New Testament? This is not the space for me to elaborate on them. Just very briefly then, let me put it in the following way:
A religion is basically a worldview -- it is the "world" in which believers and adherents dwell. This religious world influences in turn how they view the world around them, with consequences for how they act toward others in their locations. It goes without saying that religious texts (like the texts of the New Testament) come from these religious worldviews.
Texts should therefore be subjected to a critical analysis of what kind of worldview they stem from. That analysis should be followed by taking stock of what particular worldview(s) the text produces. The two are often directly related although the world that a religious text gives birth to can be different from the worldview of the text depending on how this text is interpreted; hence, the importance of an ethical and compassionate way of interpretation!
Some Criteria and Tools that May Aid Us
Concretely speaking, in my experience thus far, I have found that some concrete criteria and tools to analyze worldviews behind texts could effectively explain why some religious worldviews are more "tribal" and harmful to the "Other" (outgroups), while some others are more open and compassionate. Some of these criteria and tools I've used through the years include: (1) Various developmental theories and categories (e.g., "stages of faith") applied to religious worldviews; (2) Principles of a Global Ethic; (3) Compassion as the core hermeneutical principle (e.g. historian of religion Karen Armstrong's Charter for Compassion) (4) "Conventional or Transconventional" Religion-Spirituality (e.g. spiritual teacher and psychiatrist Roger Walsh's proposal), among others.
I have written on these categories and tools elsewhere without however explicitly applying them to problematic passages for Jewish-Christian relations in the New Testament. I've resolved to apply them more explicitly in my future work. (Confer my blogpost titled "Worldviews and Religions: The Role of Religions-as-Worldviews in Building a Global Community of Justice & Peace" found in this following LINK in my blog.)
I have also applied some of the categories above to analyze the various problematic aspects of the Gospel of John in the following article titled "Confronting John’s Shadows while Basking in Its Lights: A Theological Attempt to Deal with the Fourth Gospel’s Ambivalence" (Kato 2023). It is an attempt to grapple theologically and ethically with the different problematic aspects of John's gospel. It can be found at this LINK.
In my 2023 monograph Reading the Bible in a Secular Age: The New Testament as Spiritual Ancestry, I have a chapter dedicated to presenting Jesus. I try my best to avoid wrong caricatures of "Judaism" vis-a-vis the life, ministry, and teaching of Christianity's central figure. I hope that I have succeeded to a certain extent in that endeavor. You can read that chapter at this LINK.
