Renewing Orthodox Christian Faith, Worship, and Life through Jewish Dialogue

In the aftermath of the Shoah, engagement and dialogue between Christians and Jews have naturally focused on elements of anti-Judaism long embedded in church faith and practice. Expressions of Christian contempt for Jews and Judaism, while not necessarily the immediate cause of modern antisemitism, have at the very least fostered the environment in which such hatred and violence was allowed to grow unchecked. Efforts have therefore been made to identify and address negative stereotypes of Judaism — held overtly or latently, expressed deliberately or unconsciously —to ensure that Christians through their teaching and practice do not continue to harm others, least of all those God first called into covenant relationship.

This vital work is ongoing across most expressions of Christianity, including today within the Orthodox Church. Within the last year, the Orthodox Theological Society in America (https://www.otsamerica.net) has established a working group of more than 60 global scholars — called Orthodox Christians in Dialogue with Jews (https://www.ocdj.net) — to identify and address aspects of anti-Judaism within the preaching, teaching, and worship of the Orthodox Church. This project highlights both the need for the careful and challenging work of facing up to nearly 20 centuries of prejudice that fundamentally distorts the gospel and Orthodox theology, as well as the pain that our Jewish sisters and brothers experience when we do not face up to that.

Along this path, however, and accompanying the lament Orthodox Christians need to express for past harms, participants are making joyful discoveries through engagement and deepened relationships with Jews. While much of the discourse within this dialogue necessarily revolves around critiques of negative aspects of Orthodox teaching and hymns, engagement with Judaism also holds up a mirror to beneficial and life-giving elements of Orthodox Christian tradition. This paper thus seeks to explore how Orthodox Christians can benefit from a dialogue with Judaism by rediscovering and appreciating the often-overlooked dimensions of their own theology, liturgy, and faith practice.

This paper will explore these across three broad themes:

(1) the recovery of the full narrative of God and Israel — and a truer christotelic rather than a limited christocentric typology;

(2) the illumination and deeper understanding of existing Orthodox Christian liturgical and faith practices through a Jewish perspective and interpretation; and 

(3) the retrieval of a more vital sense of living patristic tradition reflecting the dynamic “Talmudic” approach to seeking truth through dialogue, debate, and the application of heuristic methods.

The first theme will explore Orthodox Christian understanding of the Scriptures (or Old Testament). The Scriptures permeate Orthodox liturgy and theology, but are often reduced in our interpretation of them to a pattern-book of types and prefigurative images. Engagement with Judaism and with a renewed narrative theological tradition, including reading the Scriptures (or Tanakh) alongside Jews today, enables Orthodox Christians to recover the full story of God and Israel, and to understand more deeply how the early followers of Jesus as Messiah saw him as the encapsulation and fulfilment of that story. Rather than reading the Scriptures merely christocentrically (and focusing our attention on specific stories and univocal dimensions of them), this allows for a more christotelic reading of the Scriptures, in which the whole weight and meaning of the original accounts is brought to bear within the New Testament writings and Orthodox liturgical texts, which consist of commentaries (midrashim) and interpretations (pesharim) of the Scriptures.

The paper’s second theme will delve into ways in which elements of Orthodox Christian liturgy and life are brought to the fore and given greater meaning by shining upon them the light of Jewish perspective and tradition. For example, within the liturgical cycle of the Byzantine rite, the importance of Saturday as a liturgical day (on which the Divine Liturgy is celebrated on all Saturdays of the year except the Great and Holy Sabbath), dedicated to the commemoration of the departed (those at rest), can be enhanced through the lens of Sabbath theology and observance. Likewise, the Jewish perspective of halakhah (literally, “to go” or “to walk”), living faithfully in response to God’s invitation into covenant relationship, can elucidate and complement the Orthodox Christian tradition of embodied faith practice and holiness of life, a tradition which began (as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles) as “the way.”

Under the third theme, the paper will show how an appreciation for the Talmudic tradition of the Rabbinic Judaism can help recover an Orthodox Christian understanding of the writings of the church fathers as a vast and diverse collection, full of theological reflections and counter-reflections, in which constant dialogue and debate unveils a living tradition of the Church based on an understanding of truth as a dialogue, always developing, and ultimately paradoxical. A “Talmudic approach” to reading the church fathers involves engaging in deep analysis, interpretation, and discussion of their writings, similar to the way Jewish scholars interpret the Talmud.

Within these three main themes, this paper will thus suggest that, by engaging in dialogue with the Jewish community, Orthodox Christians can gain fresh insights into their own tradition, deepen their understanding of their own liturgical practices, and retrieve valuable elements of faith and practice that may have gone neglected or unnoticed.