Messianic Jews: A Third Way?

At Beth Israel Hospital, on First Avenue and Seventeenth Street, just around the corner from where I live, there was in 1994 a round-the-clock vigil of crowds of Hasidic Jews keeping watch as their rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, slowly died. He was ninety-two years old and left no designated successor to head the Lubavitcher movement, which has enterprises around the world. Some of his followers believe he will rise from the dead and this will inaugurate the final messianic kingdom. The significance of such messianic expectations among Jews has been sharply debated in these pages by David Berger and David Singer (see FT, May 2003).

A different kind of Jewish messianism is today found among the twenty to thirty thousand Jews who have accepted Jesus as the Messiah but who, insisting that they are still Jews, indeed that they are more fully Jews by virtue of following the Jewish Messiah, have formed messianic synagogues. There are over three hundred such congregations, most of them affiliated with the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations (UMJC), the International Association of Messianic Congregations and Synagogues (IAMCS), and the International Messianic Jewish Alliance (IMJA). Jews in the Holy Land who have become Catholic have been given their own bishop, and the renewal movement founded by Kiko Arguello and encouraged by Pope John Paul II, which is known as the Neocatechumenal Way, has established on the top of Mount Korazym, near the Sea of Galilee, “Domus Galilaeae,” where on Saturdays Catholics, messianic Jews, and Orthodox Jews gather to praise the God of Israel.

Admittedly, it can get somewhat confusing. It is a confusion that the Church has from time to time tried to prevent by insisting that one is either a Jew or a Christian. Jesus-believing Jews who continued to practice Judaism were excommunicated at the Second Council of Nicea (787), and there was, for instance, this seventh-century profession of faith for Jewish converts: “I do here and now renounce every right and observance of the Jewish religion, detesting all its most solemn ceremonies and tenets that in former days I kept and held. In future I will practice no rite or celebration connected with it, nor any custom of my past error, promising neither to seek it out nor to perform it.” That was thirteen hundred years ago, and some insist it is still the only course of religious integrity.

Theologian Ellen Charry, a convert from Judaism, writes that “the religion attributed to Jesus by the Gospels overturns nearly every Jewish belief and practice . . . . Christians do not worship a Jewish Messiah—they worship the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God incarnate.” Messianic Jews, she believes, represent a “duplicitous tertium quid that has neither Jewish nor Christian theological integrity, no matter how sincere its adherents may be.” Rabbi David Novak is emphatic that Jews who accept Jesus are still Jews, although very bad Jews, while Michael Wyschogrod (in his book Abraham’s Promise) insists, as we have discussed in these pages, that such Jews—Cardinal Lustiger of Paris, for instance—are still bound to be Torah observant.

A useful overview of these disputes is provided by David J. Rudolph in “Messianic Jews and Christian Theology,” an essay in a recent issue of the ecumenical journal Pro Ecclesia. Rudolph’s contention, directly contrary to that of Charry, is that messianic Jews constitute a kind of “third” community that overlaps both Judaism and Christianity. Presumably they could be completely integrated into the Church while maintaining aspects of Jewish identity and practice but in reality, he says, this has resulted in complete assimilation. Messianic Jews, he contends, need communities of their own. It is difficult, if not impossible, to see how this can be squared with Catholic ecclesiology. And it is very improbable that messianic Jews will be included, as Rudolph says they should be included, in the Jewish-Christian dialogue.

That being said, the community of messianic Jews seems to be growing and is developing theologically sophisticated arguments that, however apparently eccentric, should not be ignored. I confess to being more than a mite uneasy with some of the initiatives of the Neocatechumenal Way in this connection, but it must be admitted that the Church is still probing toward a fuller understanding of what St. Paul, in Romans 9:11, called the “mystery” of God’s purposes in the relationship between the Church and the people of Israel.

That probing goes on, Paul suggests, against an eschatological horizon, and it may be that ours is a time and the growth of messianic Judaism is a catalyst for understanding, just a little more clearly, the mystery of God’s plan.