This article will propose how the Christian church, constituted in the Jewish Jesus, might conceptualize relating to the covenanted Jewish people, Israel. It will do this by thinking through two images for the church, that of the Body of Christ and the people of God. I will reconceptualize these images within an anti-supersessionist framework to indicate how they can be applied when thinking of the relationship between the church and the Jewish people. Turning to Anglican sources, I argue that the concept of noncontrastitive transcendence is useful for more fully articulating a relationship between Israel and the church that is grounded in God’s absolute freedom. This divine freedom is expressed in non-dual relations in the divine life that is translated in the relationships of the communities constituted by God.
How is it that the Jewishness of Jesus became so obscure that few Christians recognized its reality and significance? How might the church recover this fundamental component of his life and ministry? Two arguments serve as anchors. 1) Early church writers were unable to imagine or depict a Jewish Christ because they regarded Judaism as the old and obsolete Other and their perspective became embedded in church life. 2) Providing a more adequate account of Christian origins entails comprehending a web of interconnected understandings that have the potential to counter the inadequate and unjust account many Christians have internalized.
Recent scholarship has urged Christians to rediscover the Jewishness of Jesus, yet this recovery has seldom transformed the theological imagination of the church. This article argues that the difficulty is hermeneutical: Christians have too often read the Scriptures christocentrically, seeking isolated prophecies and figures that are fulfilled in Christ, rather than christotelically, perceiving the entire narrative of Israel as gathered into its salvific horizon in him. The term “christotelic” is borrowed from Peter Enns, but it is put to different work here. Where Enns locates the telos in the paschal event, the patristic tradition, particularly as lived out liturgically in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, locates it in a person who assumed not humanity in the abstract but the covenantal flesh of Israel. That difference is decisive: a christotelic hermeneutic whose telos is an event restricts Jesus’s Jewishness to a datum of first-century history, whereas one whose telos is a person cannot, since only someone living Israel’s covenantal life from within could carry it to its messianic end. Drawing on Irenaeus of Lyons, Cyril of Alexandria, Basil of Caesarea, Tyconius, Augustine, and Maximus the Confessor, the article finds a tradition that arrives repeatedly at the christotelic reading and repeatedly fails to hold it, and argues that what the fathers could not hold steadily, Byzantine worship performed: a church that cannot sing without the songs of Moses, that proclaims the genealogy of Christ as gospel, and that keeps the feast of her Lord’s circumcision has confessed in her liturgy what her theology too often forgot. To read Scripture christotelically is to affirm that Israel’s life with God was full from the first, that the Incarnate Word remains irrevocably Jewish, and that the church’s identity is rooted in her grafting among Israel’s natural branches.
