The Holocaust and Christian Theologies of Sin and Forgiveness: Imperative Need for Christians to Listen to Jews

Elizabeth Johnson, The Quest for the Living God (London: Bloomsbury, 2007)

Ruth Krall's recent sounding of various ecclesial responses to the sexual abuse of minors and how they raise profound questions about theologies of sin and forgiveness has made me think about the valuable contribution of Jewish thinkers to Christian theological reflection about these matters. Ruth's essay includes a paragraph surveying some Jewish thinkers on the topic of sin and forgiveness.

More on Remembering: Metz and the Suffering of Ancestors

To complement what I posted earlier today in remembrance of my mother's death, another passage from Elizabeth Johnson's Search for the Living God (NY: Continuum, 2008)--(I warned you I'd probably be quoting this book incessantly in coming days, no?).  Here, Johnson is summarizing a central point of Johann Baptist Metz's theology of dangerous memory: 

Living Beyond the Walls: Church as Sacramental Sign

I recently posted to a discussion of sexual ethics on the National Catholic Reporter’s blog café. My posting develops a small parable to explain the perspective of those of us who are made outsiders today by the church in its pastoral approach to marginal communities (http://ncrcafe.org/node/1968). My parable focuses on the experience of gay Christians. There are others who also stand in the margins with us, and the parable can equally well apply to those other marginal groups.

For those of us who find ourselves called to the table but simultaneously shoved away by those occupying the center of the church, it’s like watching a banquet inside the church, but through a glass wall. We can see the table set. We see the gleaming plates and utensils, the groaning table laden with good food.

We see our brothers and sisters sitting feasting. As they do so, they celebrate the presence of the Lord who is the host of the banquet; they rejoice in the communion of those who sit with the Lord at the shared table. They proclaim the grace of the Lord in their lives, the amazing grace of the Lord’s invitation of all sinners to the table.

And yet, even as they marvel at the amazing grace that sets this lavish table for all sinners, those sitting at the table seem curiously unable to see those of us who are watching through the glass wall, hungry for the bread of life and for communion with our brothers and sisters around the common table. The glass wall that separates us, which our brothers and sisters have constructed (not the Lord: he abolished rather than built walls) seems strangely outside the scope of vision of those at the table. For us, it means everything. It is the decisive fact for us, as we try to respond to the invitation of the Lord to sit at the banquet table set for all sinners.

As my little parable at the NCR café notes, while we stand outside looking in, occasionally a brother from the right will get up and come to talk to us. When he does so, he tells us we are perfectly welcome at the table—as long as we acknowledge and confess our sin and promise to sin no more. We are welcome, that is, as a special category of sinners whose sins create a barrier different from the sins of all other sinners at the table, who are not asked to engage in this extraordinary exercise of self-renunciation and self-denial before coming to the table.

The brother from the right informs us that he’ll remove the glass wall if we will only admit that who we are, in our very nature, is wrong, and that the love we express on the basis of our nature is wrong, warped and twisted. When we reply that we cannot repudiate who we are without repudiating the Lord who made us as we are, that we cannot repudiate the love that flows from the depths of our beings if love is the central virtue for those who walk in the footsteps of Jesus, he shakes his head sadly and returns to the feast, leaving us where he found us, looking through the glass wall at the banqueters who celebrate the all-inclusive, all-merciful love of Jesus for every sinner.

Now and again, a sister from the left also leaves her place at the table and comes to talk to us. She tells us that our inability to pass beyond the glass wall is, after all, not due to any mechanism of exclusion on the part of the community, but is our own fault. It is our own refusal to accept the second-class status accorded us that keeps us from the table. It is our refusal to understand that the normative path for Christians is heterosexual marriage, and that, though we are certainly invited to the table, we are invited as those who cannot meet the norm, which keeps us from feasting with our brothers and sisters.

She, too, the sister from the left, promises to remove the glass wall that separates us from the other banqueters, provided we stop asking the church to reexamine its idolatry of the historically changeable model of the nuclear family, and provided we promise to fit into the way things are. When we respond that the conditions placed on us seem extraordinary—and are not imposed on any other category of sinners— and when we note that it is unjust to blame the victim of structures of marginalization, rather than to examine and abolish those structures, she returns to the table, leaving us to solve our own self-created problems on the outside of the glass wall.

Why re-tell this little parable today? I’m doing so because it has been on my mind as I think through the funeral Steve and I attended last week, his father’s funeral. Everything related to the funeral ceremonies—the wake and the funeral itself, the two lunches following each event—occurred in his family’s parish church. The funeral was a totally church-centered occurrence, as it should have been, given his father’s life of commitment to his parish.

It is an interesting experience to participate temporarily in the life of a parish that is part of a church which teaches that gay and lesbian persons are intrinsically disordered, and that our committed relationships of love deserve no recognition or protection because they are sinful relationships, not to be compared with the church-blessed relationship of marriage. It is interesting to participate in parish life, that is, for those of us who are gay, whose experience of being in church is simultaneously an inside-outside experience.

For me, these experiences are painfully mixed. They are experience of seeing the glass wall taken down by some brothers and sisters, while it is made even higher by others. Following the wake, as we all stood in church meeting and greeting, a cousin of Steve’s who is particularly warm and welcoming to me (she works with gay people and has come to love them, she tells me), came up to hug and talk to me.

As we talked, I looked over her shoulder to see a pew with four men who had lingered following the wake. The four were looking at me, sneering and laughing as they did so. One of these I recognized as another cousin of Steve’s. The others are somehow related, too—when you have 72 first cousins on one side of your family alone, the chances are high that at least half of the 300 or so folks at the funeral will be somehow kin to you.

The experience of taking to a cousin who was hugging and laughing with me, and then to look over her shoulder and see other cousins jeering, was disconcerting, to say the least. And yet it is a typical experience for those of us who are openly gay, insofar as we continue to have anything at all to do with the churches. While some within the churches recognize that exclusion of any kind is antithetical to all that Jesus stands for, but others who have just prayed side by side with us for an increase of charity ridicule and exclude us, we find ourselves both inside and at the same time outside, looking in through the glass wall.

In our relationship to many in the church, we have come to expect that we will be always made to know that we stand on the other side of the glass wall looking in, if we attend any service within the church. In our relationship to some within the church, we also find the wall taken down, the table free and open to us as it is to all other sinners.

It’s a strange place to find oneself. It’s a place many gay people who once had ties to the churches refuse to stand in, and who can blame them? What can be more painful than to live in a place that divides you to the very core of your being? And what can be more painful than to pray alongside other Christians for an increase of charity, and then to look up and see those with whom you have just prayed now acting as if the words you have all prayed mean nothing at all—at least, nothing at all when it comes to how the church receives you as a gay person? For many of us who are gay and feel called to sit at the table of the Lord, it is simply too difficult to live in that place of horrible tension where you truly do not know when the next blow will land, and when the one delivering the blow is a brother and sister who sits at the table hosted by the Lord of Love.

I blogged here recently about the ecclesiology of Metz (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/ecclesiological-options-and-church-of.html). Metz calls on the church to live towards the horizon of hope that forms the horizon of all human history. Metz reminds us that the church does not stand alone in trying to live towards that horizon of hope. Many secular movements also see the horizon of hope and move towards it along with the church. Metz’s ecclesiology opens the church to secular movements of liberation that try to anticipate in history here and now the hope that forms the ultimate horizon of human history.

In Metz’s ecclesiology, one must live within the church itself as if the glass walls no longer exist. One must live around the glass walls, living here and now as if the reign of God has already broken into history: a reign of God in which the least are the greatest, the last are first, and the poor have a privileged place. One must live as if the church is not mired in the structures of division and exclusion that typify society. One must live in a way that prefigures the reign of God by living, within the church, as if social structures of division and exclusion do not exist at all.

This is what it means for the church to be a sacramental sign of God’s salvific presence in the world. It means living in the here and now the vision of human possibility we can imagine when we look at the horizon of hope that norms human history. It means demonstrating to the world at large what is possible when we choose to live together with love and hope, with respect for each other in all our differences, the respect due to all those God has created.

What I have been trying to articulate about Steve’s father—who exemplifies the church at its best today—is precisely this: he lived within the structures of a church that still erects that glass wall for gay believers. And yet he lived in such a way that the wall did not exist. He simply chose to ignore it, to live around and beyond it—even when some of his own children continue to place the wall there for those who are gay or lesbian.

When more and more solid citizens, faithful churchgoers live that way, the wall will come down. Is it any wonder that there is such fierce resistance today to the eradication of the glass wall that keeps gay believers on the outside looking in, when people such as Steve’s father begin to ignore that wall? When solid, faithful members of the church start behaving as if the glass wall simply doesn’t matter, is just not there, then church leaders (and their allies) who have spent so much time and energy constructing and maintaining the wall probably have reason to be perturbed.

Ecclesiological Options and the Church of Postmodernity

In these days of commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Humanae vitae, I’ve been asking myself what-if questions about where the church finds itself now. To be specific: what if Ratzinger had appropriated the Nazi period and its aftermath quite differently than he has done? What if he had approached that period of dark kairos in a way similar to that of his countrymen Rahner and Metz?

The trajectory of Catholicism at the end of the 20th century was decisively set by two men—John Paul II and Ratzinger—who reacted to the horrors of the 20th century in a quite specific way, one that has determined the course of the church into the 21st century. That there were other options for the church—other ways to appropriate what happened in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—is apparent in the theology of both Rahner and Metz. Had the church chosen to follow the path sketched by the theology of Rahner and Metz, it would be in a very different place now—one, I believe, that would far better situate it to be an effective sacramental sign of salvation in the world than the option chosen by John Paul II and that pope’s chief theological advisor, the current pope, Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.

The contrast between Ratzinger and Metz is especially illuminating. When I read Ratzinger on the Nazi period, I’m constantly struck by the dichotomous (and, ultimately, false) way in which he presents the relationship between the Catholic church and the Nazis. To hear Ratzinger tell the story, the church was the sole locus of sanity in a world that went mad with ethnic hatred and blood lust, with total lack of respect for human life, in the Holocaust period.

That sharp dichotomy between church and world that characterizes the ecclesiology of both John Paul II and Ratzinger is apparent already in Ratzinger’s attempt to come to terms with what his countrymen did in the 1930s and 1940s, and with how the church responded. The church held fast to authentic human values and respect for life; the Nazis crossed the line and quickly went to hell, with eugenic experimentation and extermination of the mentally and physically challenged, of “inferior” races, and so on. In the church, light; in the world, darkness. In the church, Christ; in the world, the devil.

To think this way is to disregard the testimony of history. Sadly, the church was simply not the beacon of light in the mid-20th century that Ratzinger would have us remember it as. Its witness against the atrocities of the Nazis was muted, tragically mixed, and compromised. The response of the church was often, at best, one of indifferent silence, at worst, one of complicity.

Certainly, there were courageous Catholics, including many priests and religious, who actively resisted the Nazis. Some of them paid the price of martyrdom for their courageous witness. We should remember them. And we do—primarily because they stand out so sharply from the mass of their co-religionists at the time, in their willingness to speak out.

On the whole, the church stood by in silence as millions of human beings were slaughtered. At its worst (as with the Austrian bishops), it actively welcomed the Nazis as saviors of the church from the scourges of godless communism. The historic legacy of antisemitism in the church, a legacy whose roots go back to the very beginning of Christianity, bore bitter fruit in the 20th century in the church’s timid, unconvincing response to the Nazis.

Ratzinger does not admit this. In refusing to admit it, he falsifies history, and builds on the basis of that falsification an ecclesiology inadequate to meet the challenges of the postmodern period. His fellow countryman, his fellow Bavarian, Metz, has quite different memories of the Nazi period, and out of those memories, fashions a very different ecclesiology—one that, had the institutional church chosen it in the latter part of the 20th century, would place us in a very different place today.

Growing up in a small Bavarian village during World War II (just as Ratzinger did), Metz recalls the silence of his Catholic village about the presence of a death-camp just outside the village. Metz writes about how the people in his village continued praying, singing, going to liturgy, knowing full well that other human beings were being murdered outside the village all the while. And saying nothing. Just as the church itself, in its institutional mode, said nothing.

For Metz, silence was not an adequate response to what happened in the Holocaust. In contrast to Ratzinger, Metz could not defend the silence of the church or try to cast re-read that silence as some kind of noble, prophetic witness against all odds when a savage state was persecuting the church. Metz reads the silence for what it was: complicity. In refusing to stand up against—in refusing even to admit—what they knew was going on right in their midst, Catholics failed to live the gospel at a time of tremendous need for prophetic Christian witness.

Much of Metz’s ecclesiological work following the Nazi period is a meditation on how and why the church is able to turn a deaf ear to the cries of the oppressed for liberation—when the church can very well make a difference. Metz critiques the church that turns in on itself, pretending it can pray and conserve its faith as it ignores the suffering of the world around it.

Metz’s reading of the critical theorists led him to recognize that there are, at all periods of history, many currents at work in the world to imagine and bring about a more humane future for the world. Out of this insight, Metz developed a theology in which the church must always be in active collaborative dialogue with secular currents that are moving along with the church towards the horizon of hope—as the church itself moves, through its proclamation of the gospel and its attempt to be an adequate sacramental representation of the reign of God in history.

Rahner, too, followed a very different ecclesiological path after the Nazi period than did Ratzinger. Rahner’s attempt to re-read Thomist theology in light of the personalist philosophies of the early 20th century—his theology of transcendental Thomism—reflects on the venerable Catholic maxim that grace builds on nature.

In Rahner’s theology, the entire “natural” world is imbued with grace. Nature and grace are not at war with one another; church and world are not enemies. Salvation is not extrinsic to the world; it is the very core, the deepest history, of the world as the world fulfills its destiny.

The dichotomy between church and world that so decisively shapes the theology of John Paul II and Ratzinger—a dichotomy in which the church alone represents salvation—is not present in Rahner’s thought. In a world in which grace is active everywhere and at all times to draw the world to salvation, the church is, of course, a sacramental sign of salvation: but it is a sign of a salvation that is not the exclusive prerogative of the church or of Christians. It is the sign of a salvation that God is effecting everywhere, for all creation, not only for those calling themselves Christian.

Though Rahner speaks at times of the church of the remnant, he has explicitly repudiated the notion of the smaller, purer church that informs the ecclesiology of Ratzinger. Rahner notes that his church of the remnant is a church engaged in active collaborative dialogue with the world, not a cult of true believers turning its back on the world. Rahner’s ecclesiology also grants something that is hardly ever granted in the ecclesiology of Ratzinger and John Paul II—namely, that the church is sinful, even as it is holy and a sacramental sign of grace.

What a different church we would be living in now, had either Rahner or Metz, or both, had the honor, privilege, and power of Ratzinger under the papacy of John Paul II. Ratzinger and John Paul II closed many doors that both Rahner and Metz would have left open: dialogic doors of welcome to Christians of other communions; to the world religions; to secular movements working for a more humane world; to women and laypersons; to theologians. The ecclesiology of both Rahner and Metz opens to all those groups, since God is never the captive of the church and its clerical elite in the theology of Rahner and Metz.

I cannot help suspecting that it is not merely the staunch intent to stand against the godless relativism of secular modernity that forms the very core of the ecclesiology of both John Paul II and Ratzinger. Both maintained that the true face of 20th-century secular relativism was apparent in Nazi ideology and the ideology of state socialism in the Soviet Union. Both saw the church as the only adequate fortress against that godless ideology and its ravages.

But both ended up with an ecclesiology that also implicitly defends the continuation of a system of clerical power and privilege that is equated with the essence of Christianity—of their clerical power and privilege. In the crisis of sexual abuse of children, we are just beginning to see the price the church has been paying for its idolatrous continuation of this changeable, historically developed polity of church governance.

And as we do so, some of the most important voices in the church to help us meet the challenge of this crisis have been silenced. At a moment in history when we need many voices speaking confidently of the experience of grace within many different social contexts, we have a unitary voice—the voice of the church’s clerical elite—seeking to represent itself as the sole possible voice of the church in the postmodern period. At a moment in which thoughtful dialogue with an increasingly complex secular culture is imperative—in which an educated laity could well lead such dialogue on many fronts—we have a church intent on curbing critical thought, a church intent on imposing simplistic litmus tests of orthodoxy, a church intent on hounding out its best and brightest in the name of preserving orthodoxy,

when what is actually being preserved is clerical power and privilege, at a cost we too few of us have even begun to recognize, in this period in which the church's influence in the public square could be so much more cogent, had the project of Vatican II not been deliberately stopped by the previous pope and his theological advisor and successor, Cardinal Ratzinger . . . .