Promising Openings in Theological Encounter on the Trinity
by Alan Brill
While Dabru Emet’s first claim that “Jews and Christians worship the same God” accepts Judaism’s and Christianity’s shared commonality found in the God of Israel, it is noticeably laconic. This brevity creates deep ambiguity about how the authors of Dabru Emet view the Trinity. Before exploring this, however, I must first highlight the clear point in the claim.
Dabru Emet affirms that Jews and Christians worship the same God, a claim with antecedents found in more than a millennium of Jewish thought; indeed, almost all medieval Jewish philosophers affirm a common monotheism. For the tenth-century thinker Saadiah Gaon, Jews, Christians, and Muslims are the three faiths of monotheism. Maimonides’ position is that Christianity—despite its anti-Judaism and foreign worship of the Trinity—has brought knowledge of God and the Bible to the world. Rabbi Yakov Emden reformulates this sentiment in the eighteenth century:
We should consider Christians and [Muslims] as instruments for the fulfillment of the prophecy that the knowledge of God will one day spread throughout the earth…the rise of Christianity and Islam served to spread among the nations…the knowledge that there is One God who rules the world, who rewards and punishes and reveals Himself to man. (Commentary to Pirkey Avot, 4:13)
A variant of this notion was expressed by the Neo-Orthodox Rabbinic leader Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, who stated that Christians “profess their belief in the God of heaven and earth as proclaimed in the Bible and they acknowledge the sovereignty of Divine Providence…” (Principles of Education, “Talmudic Judaism and Society”).
In contrast to the above, Dabru Emet seemingly wanted to go beyond these prior statements to serve as a bold recognition of the changes reflected in Nostra aetate. But what was new?
In Jews and Christians: People of God (2003), Christian theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg wrote that Dabru Emet affirmed that the “Christian trinitarian doctrine of God is no longer a violation of Biblical monotheism…and the Trinitarian doctrine of the church does not ‘associate’ something else to this one God, but claims that the One God is one with his revelation in Jesus” (183). Pannenberg assumed that the innovation was a rejection of all Jewish critiques or caveats on the Trinity. Because both religions can see that the Trinity is an outgrowth of the understanding of the Biblical God, present through His name, glory, and wisdom, for Jews the Trinity is no longer an unnecessary extra association (shituf) but rather a valid formulation of the God of Israel.
Unfortunately for Pannenberg, however, this was not the intention of Dabru Emet, which followed traditional paths of the medieval thinkers. At its core, the declaration on the same God elided the crucial discussion about the Trinity. Going forward for both Jews and Christians requires opening a discussion about the relationship of Jewish conceptions of God to the Trinity. Jews consider God the Father, the God of Israel, as entirely the same as the active God of the Bible; the creator and redeemer are the same. In contrast, Christian thought since Patristics rendered God the Father as an abstract deity of creation. Hence, when Christians speak of the “God of Israel” of the Hebrew Bible, they affirm that the active God of the Bible—who gives prophecy, hears prayers, and redeems Israel—is specifically the second or third person of the Trinity.
In addition, the first claim of Dabru Emet did not incorporate the theological distinction at the core of Nostra aetate. The Church document clearly distinguishes between natural theology—in which humanity can find God as a human expression of transcendence—and Christianity—which knows God through revelation. Where Christianity acknowledges Jews as the first people to receive that gift of revelation, Dabru Emet did not address whether Jews should reciprocate and acknowledge Christianity as a continuity of that revelation.
To return to the topic of the Trinity, the ancillary writings of several authors of Dabru Emet claim that the doctrine of the Trinity appears incomprehensible from the Jewish perspective. For them, the Jewish Biblical record does not speak of God in a way that allows us to characterize His nature as a relation among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. From this perspective, Trinitarian doctrine appears alien even before it appears wrong.
In his book chapter, “The God of Jews and Christians,” in Christianity In Jewish Terms, Peter Ochs acknowledges that there is an overlap of doctrines between Judaism and Christianity, but also points out that Christians add certain claims which cannot be accepted by Jews. Ochs states that although the Trinity of the “New” Testament is unlike the Biblical God of the Hebrew Bible, Jews can still find similar attributes of justice and mercy, logos, and holy spirit. Ochs’s essay points to a gap between the Jewish emphasis on God’s simplicity and lack of composition and the Christian belief in persons within God.
Yet unlike Ochs, current scholarship shows that first-century Judaism and Christianity shared a variety of interdivine structures of bitheism, angelic and mediator figures, hypostatic logos, and theories of Divine glory. The two religions diverged in how they developed this rich material, with the Jews treating these manifestations of the Divine as subordinate to God and keeping the categories fluid, while Christians formulated these manifestations as the doctrine of the Trinity. Although Ochs acknowledged that the Rabbinic literature contains the concepts of ruah hakodesh and shekhinah, offering the possibility of a theological bridge to the Christian concepts, this was not his view nor that of Dabru Emet.
This open possibility of a theological bridge was already proposed by renowned theologian Jürgen Moltmann, who wrote in 1987 that Judaism and Christianity come from “the same spiritual neighborhood,” creating an overlap of conceptions of God. Moltmann uses the Jewish terms shekhinah and tzimzum as found in Midrash, Rosenzweig, and Heschel to explain the Trinity, thusly allowing a new fertile ground for comparison. Jewish theologian Pinchas Lapide responded enthusiastically to the openings of Moltmann.
In sum, we should acknowledge that although the theological encounter about divinity is still embryonic, its ongoing discourse still strongly encourages us to develop these promising openings.
Alan Brill, Ph.D., is the Cooperman/Ross Endowed Chair in Jewish-Christian Studies in honor of Sister Rose Thering at Seton Hall University. Follow his blog, “Book and Beliefs and Opinions,” and on Twitter @kavannah.