Thoughts on Reformation Day

I've often been puzzled by the odd coincidence of Reformation Day - which commemorates the anniversary of Luther's nailing of the "95 Theses" to the Wittenburg church door - falling on Halloween. Odd timing,  I would normally think.

Then, this year it dawned on me: "95 theses"...protest against indulgences...indulgences for those in purgatory....prayers for the dead...Feast of All Souls....Halloween.

D'oh!

Sometimes it takes a while.

Called to Communion has Stanley Hauerwas' essay on Reformation Day up.  Hauerwas makes a number of points that seem to connect with a book I've recently read by Pamela Eisenbaum entitled "Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle."  Eisenbaum is a Jewish professor of Bible Studies at a Christian seminary.  Her thesis is that Luther severely distorted Paul into an anti-semitic, Torah-hater by ignoring the pro-law statements in Paul's letters and by being ignorant of the world view that Paul was writing from.  Our view of the stark dichotomy of Law v. Grace comes from Luther, not Paul, who would have seen grace in the law, which incidentally St. Thomas Aquinas taught in his Commentary on Romans:

For even in the Old Law faith was necessary, just as it is in the New: “You who fear the Lord believe him” (Sir 2:8); “I believed; therefore I have spoken” (Ps l16:l0). And indeed, works are required in the New Law, namely, the works of certain sacraments, as commanded in Luke 22(:19), “Do this in memory of me” and of moral observances: “Be doers of the word and not hearers only” (Jas 1:22).

According to Hauerwas, Luther's polemical approach had a rhetorical objective of making a caricature of Jews in order to have Catholics take the place of Jews in Luther's reading of the New Testament:

For example, note what the Reformation has done for our reading texts like that which we hear from Luke this morning. We Protestants automatically assume that the Pharisees are the Catholics. They are the self-righteous people who have made Christianity a form of legalistic religion, thereby destroying the free grace of the Gospel. We Protestants are the tax collectors, knowing that we are sinners and that our lives depend upon God’s free grace. And therefore we are better than the Catholics because we know they are sinners. What an odd irony that the Reformation made such readings possible. As Protestants we now take pride in the acknowledgment of our sinfulness in order to distinguish ourselves from Catholics who allegedly believe in works-righteousness.

Later, Hauerwas explains what this has done to Christian-Jewish relations:

You can tell the destructive character of that narrative by what it has done to the Jews. The way we Protestants read history, and in particular our Bible, has been nothing but disastrous for the Jews. For we turned the Jews into Catholics by suggesting that the Jews had sunk into legalistic and sacramental religion after the prophets and had therefore become moribund and dead. In order to make Jesus explicable (in order to make Jesus look like Luther — at least the Luther of our democratic projections), we had to make Judaism look like our characterization of Catholicism. Yet Jesus did not free us from Israel; rather, he engrafted us into the promise of Israel so that we might be a people called to the same holiness of the law.

Hauerwas' observation is that Luther turned Jews into Catholics, but the buried lede is that Luther turned Catholics into Jews by the same caricaturization.  This caricature lives on: within the last several weeks, at a Protestant theology discussion group, I heard one Protestant member casually describe Catholicism in terms no different than those which St. Paul is supposed to have used for the "Jews": legalistic, ritualistic, without grace, etc.

Of course, this rhetorical approach by which one Christian group plays the "they are more Jewish than we are game" has a long provenance.  Another Jewish professor (of history), Paula Fredriksen in her very excellent "Augustine and the Jews" points out that it was a common trope of internecine Jewish "slanging" for one Jewish group to accuse another of being "legalistic", "carnal" and "sinful", which the Christians were more than happy to pick up on in their dispute with the Jews.  On the other hand, when Christian heretical groups used those tropes to undermine the Old Testament in order to argue that the God of Christ was not the God of Moses, then the stakes involved in bad-mouthing the Jews reached a new high because the game was no longer a "zero sum" game of Christian v. Jew, but was one were everyone could lose when it was Christian and Jew v. Manichee. Thus, according to Fredriksen, Augustine had to re-order the game by defusing as best he could the casual anti-semitism that had - and, unfortunately, continued to - plague Christian apologetics.

It is interesting how a Jewish re-assessment of Reformation approaches to Paul and Augustine may further intra-Christian dialogue.