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It's called On the Blooming of America, the wind jumper, you know, I just saw that something. You see that? This is Peter Berger on the Blooming of America. It's really interesting. I've just been reading it. What he interprets, dropouts, so-called youth culture, as just a way to engage in downward social mobility. He figures that the blue collar children are going to come up in the upper rising social mobility. They're waiting to accept the situation. Is

it perfectly possible for the American can company to get all of its, you know, people to run the system in Wichita State if Yale goes the way it's going? What? In the Times. In the Times. Today's time? And next to it there's a column about technology and the necessity of keeping our scientists and technologists to solve our technological problem for us, particularly environmental problems. It complements this article by diverse. That's a good point. It's a great

contribution, that extended page, isn't it? Because there are a lot of opinions here that are not the New York Times anymore. They must have had a lot of glee when they put those two in there. I was talking about it. So many, so many days after the Brimes book came out, everybody's writing unconsciousness. Many people here who have the background for this story, so I'll just give you the background first, have to do with wholeness movements

within the Methodist tradition. Well, let's take a minute just to go around and introduce folks before we call on Ramai Samuelson to lead us in our discussion. I'm going to suggest that maybe we have an hour or so, whatever he needs, hour, less, or what, and then maybe we take a break and go into the other room. There's coffee, and we can sit around the tables and have an equal time, you might say, with you and

give and take. And part of my problem is that this room has one, speaking of the Methodists, we have no, we're asked not to have coffee in here because of the rug which was given to us as a gift, but like the Methodist parson, we have to take care of our gifts. So it does inhibit me to some extent in my hospitality. So that's part of my problem, and part of the answer is, of course, for

us to get up and move around. And the other is that we'll accommodate both of these things by going in the other room if that's okay with you. We have introduced ourselves at length this afternoon, but it would be kind of nice, I think, if we identified ourselves and what we are doing at the present time so that our guests who have come tonight would know you too. And just in case you don't know, and I'm

sure you do, on my left is Dr. Bill Ramsey, who is in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. I made a distinction for them between the university and seminary this afternoon. Purely descriptive, factual, so I'm glad you took me. He's been a good, the way we got into the when people leave bequests, you know, and so forth. Of course, it gets worried about that. So that we have Dr. Ramsey, as I say, in the Department

of Religion, and Dr. George Thomas, who did serve there, is emeritus now, and is serving in Rutgers University in their department of what would it be there? I'm visiting professor this year. Very good. Well now, let's, let's us go around then and say who we are, starting with you, Herschel, tell them who you are. Come on in, Jack. And Milton, let's go. I'm Rabbi in this. Milton Richmond. Milton Richmond. Robert Samuelson, fellow director at Princeton and

visiting lecturer at Rutgers. Morris Tosk, Rabbi, Bayonne, New Jersey. Jack Cooper, director of continuing education here. Saul Bernards, I'm in charge of the religious work for the University of Michigan. And Dr. Migliori is our counterculture over here. He's from the other side there on the, on the duet that's leading us in our seminar. And so he's going to get his equal time tomorrow morning. We're happy to have you with us tonight. Jack Rubenstein, Rabbi in

Rowley, New Jersey. Dana Conda, the minister of West Art in New York. And Robert Flanagan, Westchester Baptist Church pastor in Marksdale, New York. Thank you all. Did we miss anybody? There's a possibility that Mr. and Mrs. Evans may join us. They are in the house. But I think we had better get underway and if they come we'll just let them fit right in as they would like. He is the minister in upstate New York. Well, Norbert,

excuse the familiarity, but we are, you know we're happy to have you here. And we'll give you the floor and let you take us where you want to for an hour or so. Let me explain what I'm going to be doing actually in the three talks. And I think it needs some justification. My field is philosophy and concern really with philosophy of religion. Now, when asked to do a presentation in terms of Jewish-Christian dialogue, I

assume that the only reason that I'm doing it rather than someone else is going to be from what I know best, which suggests that if I'm going to be doing it in terms of interfaith dialogue, it's going to be on philosophical issues because if it's not on philosophical issues, there's no reason for me being the one who's giving the paper. Now, that represents a problem initially that one, philosophy isn't the only thing to talk about in

terms of Jewish-Christian dialogues. And not everyone is all that caught up in philosophy. And that becomes a question of what one's temperament is. One has to recognize temperamental differences. It largely comes down to a question of the kind of games one likes to play and the kind of games that I like to play, which I guess is why I'm in the kind of philosophy I'm in, is like I like to play chess. I enjoy math

problems too, and that for me is fun, so this kind of philosophy ends up being fun for me. My wife hates chess, and she really hates this kind of philosophy. She likes English literature, and she likes Scrabble, and I think those kind of games go hand in hand. So one can kind of find out where one feels. That's one problem, but again, my only justification for doing what I do is this just happens to be what

I do best and enjoy most. Two, I have to recognize it's always a problem planning in this group of what level that you talk at, and you end up compromising both ways so that for some people it's going to be much too superficial, and for other people it's going to be much too complex, and then one hopes that beyond the initial paper one can become more complex for those who want to be more complex and simpler

for those who want to be simpler, and that's sort of dependent on the conversation part of things. Now, so much for self-justification. The paper I have takes approximately 25 minutes to read. I think what I would prefer to do is read it. I talk better when I don't read, but I also talk longer when I don't read, so I think the latter alternative is a preferable alternative. I would say, seeing that the paper takes like

25 minutes, that we can hold polemics, and there should be a lot that's polemical afterward, but at any point you're not following me on anything or want something clarified, then by all means raise that number, and clarification issues can be taken care of, and then you can go into polemical issues. Anyway, the paper is somewhat mixed between doing philosophical issues, and then there are other factors into it, but my main concern are philosophical issues in it.

In the initial Jewish-Christian dialogues of the '40s and '50s, the emphasis was placed on what Jews and Christians have in common. The emphasis came from years of separation and conflict. The participants knew how they differed, but they sought to explore what they had in common. The fact that by the '60s, expressions like Judeo-Christian tradition were commonplace, even outside of the context of interfaith programs, is a sign of the success of these early dialogues. However,

these meetings were perhaps too successful. We saw so much in common that interest in meeting declined. Furthermore, some of us were so convinced of what we shared in common that by the middle '60s, there was a need to reconsider how we differed. Through the late '60s, the emphasis on Jewish-Christian difference had the ring of an academic gain. But a number of political events, not the least of which are the Arab-Israeli wars and the emergence

of Black-Jewish conflicts at home, have given a serious tone to these discussions. Once again, we are becoming aware of what separates us. The bridge built between us no longer appears to be as sturdy as it once seemed, and we are forced again to look at the foundations. When Bertram Russell received his Nobel Prize for Peace, he commented that if you say to an Englishman that the French are his brothers, he will instinctively disbelieve you until

you explain to him that England and France are both being threatened by Germany and that a common defense against the Germans is desirable for both. Then he will understand and assent to what you mean when you say that the English and the French are brothers. We are different, and what it means for us to be together is that we share a common enemy. I propose therefore, in the interest of brotherhood, to talk about common enemies. Who

the enemy is depends on who we are. To be Christians and Jews is not enough. For example, about two years ago I observed a Jewish-Christian dialogue centered around the theme of the law. The Christians wanted to talk to the Jews about why Jews place so much emphasis on the details of the law. The problem was they were asking the wrong group of Jews. The Jews present were primarily Reform Jews, who had the same objections to

an emphasis on the details of the law as did the Christians present. What happened is that the Reform Jews responded to the question as if they were traditional Jews, which they were not. The discussions were interesting role play, but they were nothing more. Liberal Judeo-Christians have issues to discuss with traditional or orthodox Judeo-Christians. Judeo-Christians have issues to discuss with secularists. Liberal Jews have issues to discuss with traditional Jews. Liberal Christians have issues to

discuss with traditional Christians. Liberal Jews have issues to discuss with liberal Christians. And traditional Jews have issues to discuss with traditional Christians. In all these cases, there is a common base out of which the two groups can communicate and common concerns over which they differ. However, even though there is a certain amount of overlap in these cases, the common bases and the common concerns are not the same in the six meetings noted above. I have excluded

a meeting of conservative Christians with liberal Jews as well as liberal Christians with traditional orthodox Jews because there may not be enough in common to deal with what they are concerned about. In the light of the above, I decided that our first discussion should take place from the vantage point of what we have in common, which is to say, I plan to deal with an issue in which we face a common enemy. Then, having this unity

behind us, I want to turn in the next two discussions to issues which divide us as Jews and Christians. If I am not mistaken, what we share in common is that we are moderately liberal Judeo-Christians. I had no basis to make that assumption, but I created the myth that most of you will be like me since I had no other data to go by, and I guess Herschel too, and operated that generally. I guess we'll

find out whether I'm right or not. As moderate liberals, we face two fronts simultaneously, namely secularist and radical liberals on one hand and traditional Christians and Jews on the other hand. The central theoretical issue between us and them, if I am not mistaken, is our respective attitudes towards religious authority and tradition. A friend of mine who teaches at Catholic University of America put the issue this way. If a man makes a seemingly stupid statement, there is

one way that you should respond to it. But if God were to make a seemingly stupid statement, such as sacrifice your son, your only son, a very different response is appropriate. Now what are we to do with a seemingly stupid statement by a pope, such as you may not use contraceptives? Such statements also have an appropriate response, but their logic is distinct from the logic of divine and merely mortal statements. As Jews, we may substitute for

the pope the Shulchan Aruch. And for the statement about contraceptives, we may substitute a statement about the law of the Yaguna or any other appropriate distinction in Jewish law between men and women. I leave the question of an appropriate Protestant substitution to the Protestants. Some of the issues that divided James Pike from his fellow bishops might provide the appropriate substitution instance. In any case, what characterizes us, if I am not mistaken, is that we would distinguish

statements from religious authority from both statements by any man and from Revelation, whereas the radical liberal or secularist would reduce the logic of statements from tradition to ordinary statements. And the orthodox traditionalist would reduce the logic of statements from tradition to statements of Revelation. I have called us moderate liberals rather than moderate traditionalists, because I believe we are more concerned with defense against the claim of the radical liberal than with defense against the claim of the

orthodox traditionalist. For this reason, my concern in this paper will be a defense of the authority of religious tradition as different from, but complementary to, human reason. I will defend the claim that arguments from defined religious authorities are not merely appeals to authority, which are properly judged to be irrelevant in demonstration, and that such an appeal is a logically proper form of religious argument. I will attempt to explain in what way such an appeal is logically

legitimate, and how such appeals are to be judged. For anyone who assimilates statements from religious authority to ordinary statements, there arise a number of dilemmas which, it seems to me, defy solution. The most important of these problems are the following. One, how are moral acts and religious acts related and different? Given two men who are concerned with civil justice, one acting on the basis of his understanding of divine will, and the other acting on the basis

of his moral duty to his fellow man, understood in the light of any given system of ethics which does not appeal to divine will, are the actions of these men in any significant sense different, or are they in fact doing the same thing? Is the behavior of one judged either morally or religiously different from the other? Conversely, given a ritual act such as attendance at public worship, is such an act to be judged morally? If so,

then is a person who does attend public worship better than someone who does not? On the other hand, if ritual acts have no moral value, is there any sense in which one can be said to be obligated to perform that act? Again, when a Jew takes part in a sit-in, does he do so as a Jew or as a man? And when a Jew takes part in a worship service, does he do that as a

man or as a Jew? Do such questions as these make any sense at all? The issue involved here is how religious and moral values are alike and different. Are God's commands good because they are God's commands, or are they God's commands because they are good? If they are good because God commands them, then God's will is arbitrary. Furthermore, there is no way to distinguish what is good from what is bad. For God could just as well

command the murder of six million Jews as command us to love our neighbors. Furthermore, if God is himself unknowable, how can one ever know whether or not the command that one hears is divine or demonic? If, on the other hand, God commands what he commands because it is good, then the command is to be obeyed not because God commands it, but because it is good. And if this is so, what difference does it make whether or

not God commands anything? Three. In medieval terms, the above two problems were expressed as a single problem in the following way. Now, I'm quoting Saadia at this point, and I presuppose that the Saadia passage was read if it's not, you know, with villainy. Quote, Could God not have bestowed upon his creatures complete bliss and permanent happiness without giving them commandments and prohibitions? Nay, it would seem that his kindness would in that case have contributed even more

to their well-being, because they would be relieved of all exertion for the attainment of their bliss. End quote. If Revelation states what God wants of man, then God ought to have made those wants universally accessible to all men, which he did by bestowing upon all men the gift of reason. But for that purpose, no revelation was required. On the other hand, if Revelation presents divine desires for man which cannot be known through reason, then why

did God not make these doctrines accessible through reason, since more men reason than accept the authority of Revelation? Thus, the content of divine revelation must be both rational and beyond reason at the same time, which seems to be impossible. Saadia solved the dilemma in the following way. First, Saadia made a distinction between rational and non-rational laws. He characterized the rational laws as general requirements for how man is to be related to God. The first subcategory

are acts whose purpose is to teach men the proper regard for God. The second subcategory are prohibitions on acts which imply disregard for God. The third subcategory consists of acts interpreted as violence against God. Note that the acts listed as violence against God are all acts of human injustice. They include the four principal vices, bloodshed, fornication, theft, and lying, together with the vice of usury, as well as the virtues of justice, truth, and fairness. Insofar as

we consider only the third subcategory of rational laws, they are identical with general moral demands. They differ from these demands only in that in addition to being obligations to men, which is their moral sense, they are obligations to God. Hence, Saadia justifies Revelation in this respect as follows. Let me then an explanation of this matter, that God's making his creatures diligent compliance to his commandments the means of attaining perfect bliss, that this is the better course.

For according to the judgment of reason, the person who achieves some good by means of the effort that he has expended for its attainment, obtains double the advantage gained by him who achieves this good without any effort, but merely as a result of the kindness shown him by God. The creator preferred to assign to us the ampler portion in order that our reward might yield us a double benefit, not merely in compensation exactly equivalent to the

effort. The moral man performs good to his fellow man alone, but when the moral man is a religious man, by performing a single act, he performs two moral acts, the one to man and an additional act with respect to God. Saadia here agrees with Plato's Euthyphro who said that, piety or holiness appears to be that part of justice which attends to the gods, as there is the other part of justice which attends to man. Religious acts

are moral acts performed in relation with God. In Saadia's terms, while rational laws are laws both moral and religious, there is also a category of laws, his non-rational laws, which do not seem to be rationally justifiable as morally binding. These laws are subdivided into five types. There is the appointment of special days such as Shabbat and the festivals, the appointment of special agents such as prophets and priests, isolation in cases of defilement, and prohibitions of

certain foods and certain women. Saadia gives three distinct justification for these laws as laws. The first argument is the following, quote, what is commanded of this group of acts is good and what is prohibited is reprehensible because the fulfillment of the former and the avoidance of the latter implies submissiveness to God, end quote. These are acts whose value lies in the divine command. They are good because God commands them, but they are not commanded because they

are good. Concerning his first justification, Saadia in no way distinguishes himself from any other religious thinker. Besides, to say that God's will is God's will sheds no light on what there is about the content of divine will that makes it worthy of being divine will. But this is not all that he says. He adds the following, quote, yet I find that most of them, most of the non-rational laws have as their basis partially useful purposes,

end quote. His second justification consists in noting what these utensil purposes are. The appointment of Sabbaths and festivals gives men the leisure to learn and to enter more deeply into human relations. The appointment of prophets and priests frees some men from the daily battle of survival in order to serve all men as teachers and intermediaries between man and God. In this way, some men are also free to teach all men about righteousness and morality. The noted

prohibitions on food and women and the designated periods of isolation, Saadia argues, has the virtue of leading men to dedication to God, to a de-emphasis of bodily pleasures, and in the case of women, some women are prevented from abandonment. He has a very, very strange article that unless certain marriages were prohibited, people would marry their own sisters and then there would be women without people to get married to. No matter how sound or forced these

individual arguments are, the general force of his claim is interesting. He argues that as the rational laws are moral demands which have religious force, the non-rational laws are religious acts which have moral force. The first category consists of man's obligations to his fellow man, which entail obligations to God. The second category consists of man's special obligations to God, which entail special obligations to man. But again, if this were all that Saadia had to say, we

would rightly be dissatisfied with him, as we ought to be with Maimonides and the other rationalists who have argued the reasonableness of revelation. For Saadia's defense against the charge of divine arbitrariness seems to have led to a position where revelation is superfluous. Insofar as Saadia gives what he calls rational arguments for divine commands, he is a hedonist. That is to say, he implies that an act is good, which produces the greatest pleasure for the greatest number

of people. Yet he also says that the good is to be defined as that which God wills. In this sense, we can call Saadia a synthetic rather than an analytic hedonist. In other words, he does not define the good as what gives pleasure. The good is defined as what God wills. Still, given divine justice, what God wills produces the greatest pleasure, and what is contrary to divine will produces the greatest pain. But if this is so,

then pleasure and pain serve as the criteria by which we can determine divine will. And since our observation of pleasure and pain is more certain than our participation in divine revelation, divine will is practically superfluous in all moral situations. It is Saadia's third justification, which is his most original contribution to the discussion. It is this argument that overcomes the objections noted above. Beyond the soundness of his argument, it is of interest to note that this seems

to be the one feature of his argument that everyone has ignored. It is the one feature of his argument that no one, to my knowledge, repeats. Yet it is the crucial statement in his argument. Without it, he has no solution. Saadia states the third justification as follows. There was therefore need for messengers who defined it and designated it as prayer, and assigned to it certain set times, and gave to it a particular formulation, and prescribed a

specific posture and direction. Another illustration hereof is that whereas reason regards fornication as reprehensible, it does not define how a woman is to be acquired by a man in order to be considered as belonging to him. A further example is that although reason considers stealing objectionable, there is nothing in it to inform us how a person comes to acquire property so that it becomes his possession. Another example is the question of the expiation of crime. Reason

considers it proper to be sure that whoever commits a crime should expiate it, but does not define what form this expiation ought to take. Reason is limited in that it can only deal with the general, yet life is lived concretely and not generally. The judgment it is wrong to steal is not a complete statement. To be complete, you must add who is stealing, what he is stealing, and the conditions under which the theft takes place. A

prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp stealing food from his guards does not have the same moral value as a powerful king stealing the wife of one of his soldiers. By analogy with mathematics, not stealing is a function. In itself, it has no value, although it has a value range, until concretized by its terms. The terms involve agent, object, and context. Thus, the relationship R holding between A and B is not the same as the relation R

holding between A and C, even though the general form of the relation R is the same in both instances. Statements of moral obligations apply to relations between persons, and all personal relations are concrete. To murder is wrong, but what constitutes murder? The clarification lies in the specification. That is to say, in the statement of who commits the act against whom under what circumstances. Similarly, to speed in an auto is wrong, but what constitutes speeding depends on

the road, the condition of the auto, the condition of the driver, and the surrounding location. How is a speed limit reasonably decided? It is reasonable that there should be a speed limit on Prospect Street in Kingston. It is also reasonable that the speed limit should be a specific speed, for reasonably it is not sufficient that the signs on Prospect Street read, do not speed. But what reasonably should that specific limit be? At this point, no answer

can be given. Twelve miles per hour is as reasonable as thirteen, which is as reasonable as fourteen, etc. There is a range of reasonable limits, and the range itself does not have clear borders. In other words, there is no specific number that can be cited at which we can definitely say that that is too fast, or that is too slow. At this point, it is reasonable to decide a procedure by which a definite decision can be

made. It would be unreasonable to let everyone determine for himself the speed limit. Since there is no single reasonable alternative, there would be no agreement between individuals. Hence, someone by some method is given the authority of decision. To be sure, his or their decision ought to be within the range of what is reasonable. But within this limitation, his or their decision reasonably has authority over the equally reasonable determinations of others. In this single stroke, Saadia provides

a solution to the numerous related dilemmas cited initially. 1. Religious acts are judged as moral acts. Whereas non-religious moral acts deal with personal relations in general, religious acts are moral acts in which one of the terms of the relation is God. Not all moral acts are religious, but all religious acts are moral. 2. God commands what is good, and his commands are reasonable. Yet commands are always specific, and as such, they go beyond reason. Insofar

as they are specific, they are reasonably arbitrary. Divine commands thus are generally reasonable, and become specifically reasonable in virtue of being a divine command. 3. It is reasonable in baseball that a ballplayer may be safe or out. It is not reasonable to let any ballplayer make this decision, and there are borderline cases between safe and out. But it is reasonable for someone designated as an umpire to make this specific decision. The umpire stating you're out makes

the player out, and that is reasonable. Similarly, the statement by an appropriate religious authority of an obligation within the range of what is reasonable is itself reasonable in a way that an identical judgment by another member of the given religious community is not reasonable. Procedures for concrete decisions are as reasonable as the contents of such decisions. Thus, revelation is or ought to be rational, and yet its states would reason cannot state, and in going beyond reason,

it is reasonable. These dilemmas arose because statements by religious authorities were assimilated to ordinary statements. Once we see that two seemingly identical statements are not identical, given who is uttering them, the dilemmas dissolve. The above arguments have many further consequences for other related religious issues. Issues over civil disobedience in a state, or when change within a historical religious community is or is not justifiable, can be approached from this light. One additional consequence relevant to our meeting

can be stated. Given that the relationship R between A and B differs from the relationship R between A and C as a relation, simply because one term of the relation is different, it is not difficult to say that the obligations purportedly demanded by God in different religious traditions can all be affirmed as divine will, all other factors being equal, simply because of the difference in the communities of persons with whom God is relating. This leads not

to Rosenzweig's double covenant theory, but more radically to a multi-covenant theory. Thank you very much. Very good. What do you say? Are you comfortable or do you want to move? Could we ask questions of information in the light? I was wondering, would it be useful to me after reading the paper to outline the strategy, how the steps connected, because it might have seemed complicated. Would that be a useful thing to go through? I look at

the first part, which was really introductory, to talk about as I interpret philosophical issues in Jewish-Christian dialogue and use the basis to raise an issue from the standpoint of those who I would call moderate liberals, which would seem to me that there are a point of tension with two opposite extremes. One, and I think from a Jewish tradition, people like Alvin Reinus, Sherwin Wine, for example, would really give no legitimacy to a religious tradition at

all. What's reasonable is what they mean by being religious. And you've got comparable kinds of positions in a Unitarian tradition. And I think this is pretty much where Pike himself stood at the time that he got into trouble with the bishops. That's one side of it, and somehow there's a feeling among me, and maybe others too, that somehow that's a mistake, that these statements that come out of a tradition are to be treated differently than other

statements. On the other hand, in opposition to an Orthodox Jew from where I stand, they don't have the authority of divine revelation because they're in the tradition. I don't mean that an Orthodox Jew says that a statement from the tradition is divine revelation. What I'm saying is he treats it logically as if it were divine revelation, i .e. the theoretical means of overcoming it or changing it are too strong to be able to have any effective

way to go against the traditional statement. So it's a justification of a statement out of religious authority as sensible. Now the second part then is to set up a series of dilemmas. Did I hear you at that point in your paper? You choose to, as your term for describing us, moderate liberal, for the stated reason that you judged we were, like at the time, the people who felt that, if I may say so, the dangers were

from the radical liberal side. I should have thought that was a justification for moderate liberal. You might have chosen liberal traditionalist. Yeah, I think that would do just as well. As I was going to say too, if I understood you, to locate what for you was the polemical, the more serious point. Yeah, I agree. Creating this opposition from the other side too, as you were characterizing this position. Yeah, I think that will do just as well.

I suppose I have an implicit assumption, which is not spelled out, which is somewhat about what I judge theology to be, and that tends to be, you tend to do theology or religious philosophy, as the case may be, if the following statements are affirmed. One, you have two different sources of authority or truth. Two, they seem to be in conflict. And three, you want to affirm both. So that, in a sense, the ones that you're seeking

to answer are really people who you're in the camp with, but you're not really completely in their camp. You've got your one foot in that camp. If you didn't have your foot in that camp, you really wouldn't be concerned about it. Russell doesn't do religious philosophy because he's sure religious traditions are nonsense. And what he has to say against religion is largely irrelevant for that reason. Similarly, a party that seeks to defend religion against the authority

of science, if he sees that as a conflict, but argues that on the basis of scripture, i .e. only accepting scriptural authority, is scientifically irrelevant. So I suppose that's part of the reason I chose the label liberal. Okay, the strategy is to set up a series of dilemmas. One dilemma comes out of students, namely the kind of question the students ask all the time. When I go down to Washington, am I doing it as a Jew

or as a man, that sort of question. The second question comes right out of Plato's Euthyphro. And the third question is does God will the good because it's good or is it good because God wills it? And Plato never gets out of it. To me, in a sense, it's classically the most interesting of all the philosophy of religious texts because it raises what I see as the important problems. And Plato, for most purposes, drops the question

after that. When he wrote the Euthyphro, Plato spoke of, when he listed virtues, always listed what's called piety, I think the Greek is osion in that case, as one of the virtues. Then after it, it tends to be dropped. There's a few cases it appears, but basically he drops it from his list of the religious virtues. So the second comes from Plato. The third one comes directly out of Saadia, which is this question then in terms

of Revelation, conflict of reason and Revelation. Now I chose Saadia because I think the Plato question, the first two questions are really the same question. And no one answers Plato's question. No one really deals with Plato's question except Saadia. And in the first two parts of Saadia's explanation, he doesn't. It's only in that third part that I think he really comes to terms with the Platonic problem. The second part of the strategy was just to explain

the different categories that Saadia is dealing with for those who had read the Saadia article. But the crucial point of the argument comes down to the question of non-rational laws. And the problem is if the laws are rational, you don't need Revelation. It would have been better to have men better rational. On the other hand, if you need Revelation, then that's sort of bad too, because if Revelation is telling you the truth, then God certainly

could have found a better way of communicating it to people than something as unreliable as Revelation. In what sense unreliable? Because God gave man the nature that they have, and somehow men don't seem to go too much by Revelation, so isn't there some fault on God's part for picking this strange way of doing things? And the answer, Saadia's answer to it is basically that it's both. You have both sides of the horns. And the answer, I

think, is an interesting answer, that reason is capable of going only so far. Namely, reason is only capable of giving general formula, but life is lived in the concrete, and the general formula must be concretized. Now to concretize it, since it's rationally neutral, calls not for a specific answer, but for a specific method. And that's basically what Revelation and tradition is. Within the range of all reasonably acceptable determinations, there becomes the specific judgment, do this. And

that was the analogy with baseball. So the crucial thing about the Pope making his statement, what makes the Pope's statement different from the other person's statement, is that he's within a system which gives him this authority, which is like the umpire making the statement rather than the manager of the New York Yankees, even though both alternatives are reasonable. Now there's limits on it, and I've set definite limits. The response has to be within the range of

what is reasonable. And that leaves all things open to civil disobedience. As long as the judgment of the legislature is within the range of what's reasonably reasonable, it has the right to make its arbitrary determinations. But there are points of going beyond what's reasonable, and then you're not obligated to it. Now the same thing would apply to a statement of a Pope, and from where I stand religiously, it applies to the laws of the aguna, laws

that deal with a woman whose husband has died, she's not had children yet, and then she's stuck to marry the brother of this person, and there's all sorts of problems there. Okay. That's not how it moves. No, that's how it moves. That's the same problem. Okay, it's a parallel problem. Well, okay, that's the strategy of the paper. Does that make it clearer? I get worried about the clarity of the paper. That's helpful. How do you defend

the statement? How would you go about defending the statement you made along the way that there are more people who believe in tradition? Isn't that true only in the modern situation? Yeah, it is basically true in the modern situation. It was meant as a modern statement, right. I suppose if one was going to re-phase it into Saadia's terms, whose revelation do we want to talk about, the revelation of the Jews? Well, there are probably numerically

more people who reason, even though there aren't very many people who reason, than accept torietic revelation. You know, it's not a claim on the great number of people who reason. It's a number on the very few people who accept revelation. Do you feel that's true even pre-modern? Well, within one specific tradition. Yeah, sure, the masses of Jews accepted it. There's also the problem, let's say that we take a view of mission, where the mission is

to be brought to all men. God gives a message to a few people, but God's intention is that it be spread to all men. That's a terribly awkward way for God to do it. Why ought God to pick such a clumsy way to make his truth known? I think of a parallel midrash that raises a parallel problem. Maybe that's part of the issue, too, at this point. You know the midrash on Am I My Brother's Keeper,

where Cain's defense against God is, look at God, you gave us the capacity to commit murder. Now, if you didn't want us to commit murder, you had no business giving us this capacity. So what right have you to be upset about our committing murder? It's really the same argument at this point. The argument is, if there was something God wanted us to know, which he ought to seem to want us to know because he judges us

morally if we don't obey it, then why didn't God build that knowledge into us, which in Sadia's terms was what reason did? From Sadia's position, reason always turns out right, unless you misuse it. But if you use it properly, it leads you to these truths. So the point is, if it is something good and something that ought to be known, why isn't it built in? Is it not a pernicious God who does these kind of tricks

with us? It makes demands upon us for things we don't know to be good. It would lead beyond your paper, but I'm inclined at the moment to take a little more seriously my quip. You know what, if we did not have in mind, which is our proper business here in your paper, as it were, organized traditions, in which there is a book, or in which there are appointed prophets and teachers, where your analogy with the umpire

or the termination of the speed limit and the range of the reason of the book, that's a very good analogy for organized tradition. You know, I genuinely, apart from how many people read it, I genuinely think that even to the modern period, we all have our longer or shorter traditions. So we don't get de novo with moral reason. We begin with certain sensibilities that have been shaped, certain perceptions, you see, they just aren't organized, as it

were, in terms of tradition to us, you know, over sutras. The problem with the modern period than that, I think, is that we're fragmented in the thing that, in the forming of our consciences, we take to be just the perceived premise of moral reason. But I don't believe any man is bereft of moral reason, you know, and we just sort of make a morality out of reason. Yeah, I don't have any... But that doesn't affect the

thing we're doing. Yeah, it could only be problematic if, once one makes that judgment, which is true, one infers from that a position of moral relativity. So we are so culturally determined by these prejudices, there's no way to make objective moral judgments, and I wouldn't want to go... I wouldn't want to carry that implication. Can we take a question between... Excuse me. You go ahead. I was wondering what it would be useful, in terms of the

analysis of Sasha's new article, to make a distinction between reasons and grounds for belief. Are the following two questions the same? One, can we give reasons for believing what we do? And two, what are the grounds for our believing, which we are able to give reasons for? If one can make a distinction between those two, I'm wondering in which camps Sasha would fall. Because a particular text struck me when I read it this afternoon. It comes

at the beginning of chapter one, where he says he's concerned about displaying the rationality of revelation. It seems to me to be his chief concern. Not the question, if revelation is rational, then what is the use of revelation, or is it not revelation superfluous? Perhaps I missed that, but it does not seem to me that he raised that question as sharply as you did. His concern seems to be to display the rationality of revelation. For example,

in the second paragraph of chapter one, he says, well, in support of the validity of the revealed laws, they have signs and miracles and so forth, then afterwards we discover the rational basis for the necessity of the prescription. It seems to me then what he is doing subsequently in the paper is displaying the rationality of the revelation, which he already accepts on what grounds is something that we might want to explore. One of the things he

said here is the signs and miracles. Is there a use for us to make this? I'm not sure on how you're making the distinction of grounds and reasons, because there are several ways that that distinction can be drawn. I'll pick it up on what I think is the kind of distinction, or one way of drawing the distinction, and say in a way it's not appropriate, but let me bring in one historical point about Saadia. The historical

motive for Saadia writing the Book of Beliefs and Opinions, the Emanovideo, was the Karait movement, which claimed an authority other than rabbinic authority for interpreting Scripture. The book was primarily meant as a polemic against the Karaites. Now, as a polemic against the Karaites, he was concerned with, let's say, justifying the rationality of rabbinic tradition, since the Karaites claimed in their theologians was that the rabbinic tradition had no rational grounds, was at best arbitrary. But I think

in arguing, so that you're right in saying the major force of his argument was to show that the tradition is rational, and that he was, like other Jewish philosophers after him through the Middle Ages, primarily concerned with arguing the rationality of rabbinic tradition. Now, the problem with the distinction of rationality and grounds at that point is, you see, when you said grounds, I had Kantian images at this point, that you start out from the data, and

the question is to determine how the data is possible. So you start from the data and argue backwards towards a possibility. Where Saadia was in fact doing that, and I think that's the proper thing to do, but Saadia wasn't aware that he was doing that. Saadia thought he was proceeding deductively, which he wasn't, but that's what he thought he was doing. Yeah, I think what makes Saadia stand out in this, even though he was trying to

argue the rationality of the law, is in the passage that I gave, he was aware of something that the others weren't aware of, and that was the problem of making the law too rational. In other words, the others seeking to show that the law is rational went all the way over, in a sense it didn't answer the problem of the Euthyphro. But Saadia, either through knowledge of the Euthyphro or otherwise, has a sense of it, which

is unique about that last part of his answer. He withdraws from it being overly rational. Now there's also some rabbinic basis for his judgment and his awareness in this sense, and the signs are that he was pretty well in the rabbinic tradition. Rabbinically, the question is asked, well I'll give you an example of a question that his answer is in the spirit of. Why do you need ten Jews for a menu? Where a minion means how

many Jews you have to have public worship instead of private worship. And the answer given is, if God had said nine, you would have asked the question, why do you have to have nine for me? And in a sense, all of this is an explanation of that answer. How would what you've said, it may fit into the notion of say, does it really make any difference to God whether the proper manner of kosher slaughter would be

at the neck of the animal or some other way? But this is what is commanded, it's not for us to question. In a certain sense, it at least ties in, I'm not sure if it ties in with it, it's almost saying that what God is commanding in the general, is you shall prescribe certain ways, both in the sense of holiness and separation, Jews characteristically to follow, as to which specific ways, leave it to human authority, would

be one way of putting it, or as to which specific ways I'll be arbitrary about. Doesn't that touch on pretty closely? Yeah, I think that fits into the general. You might have in mind too that the Midrash question is asked, if God is God of the world, how big a temple would you have to build to hold God's little toe? Question. If God is God of the world, how many cows would you have to sacrifice to

give God an appetizer? Answer. God says, since I am God of the world, there's really nothing people can do to relate to me, because I really don't need anything. But if I don't give them demands to relate to me, then there's no way for them to relate to me. So what I'll do is, since I'm everywhere, and so they won't find me anywhere, I'll say, go to this temple and find me there. Since there's nothing you

can do for me, which will have the consequence of their doing nothing, I say, bring me cows. And that way, by making it specific, the people are capable of relating to me. Now that's the same spirit of an answer. The other part of it that fits in with the Midrash is the understanding that the authority for regulating the covenant between God and man is given to the rabbis. And therefore, the God can't interfere with the procedure,

unless the rabbis go too far astray. But that basically, God is obligated within the umpire. The two teams get together and designate an umpire system, a method of decision-making, and God himself doesn't interfere with them. And that's the Midrash about the walls of the academy falling in. I don't know if you're all familiar with that Midrash. That's a nice Midrash for another... This is a Midrash that basically has nothing to do with this. It has

this as a consequence. The major point of this Midrash has to deal with a response to anti-nominalism and no more prophecy. The Midrash is a group of rabbis are debating a point of the law, God's law. And I forgot who the two rabbis are. One rabbi, the rabbi who's losing, says, if my interpretation of the law is correct, let the walls of this academy fall in. And the walls begin to fall in. And the other

rabbi says, if the rabbis are debating a point of law, what business is it of the walls? I think it's Mar and Samuel. Mar and Samuel. Mar and Samuel? Okay. Which is which? I forgot. Mar is the loser. So we'll go by that, Mar and Samuel. Mar says, so the wall, out of respect to both rabbis, stands halfway. Then Mar says, if my interpretation of the law is correct, let the river flow backwards. And the river

begins to flow backwards. And then Shmuel says, if the rabbis are debating a point of law, what business is it of the river? So the river stands still out of respect to both rivers. Then Mar says, if my interpretation of the law is correct, let a voice from God, a bat kol, come and say so. And then a voice is heard to say, Rabbi, Mar is correct. Shmuel then says, when God gave the Torah to Israel

at Sinai, the Torah became the possession of Israel. And according to the Torah, the rabbis determine what God said in the Torah. Now, if then, if the rabbis are debating a point of the law, what right has God to mix in? And then the story ends that Mar dies and he goes to heaven and he asks, did God hear the debate? He said, what did God say? And he said, God laughed and said, my children have

won. Now, there's a good article on that midrash by Alexander Guttman in the Hebrew Union College annual, something like 1938, where the major point of the midrash was again to establish that voices from God have no authority in legal matters. That was the main point of the midrash. But it does have this other consequence too, that truth lies as much in the procedure as it lies in the content. And where content is neutral, which turns out

to be in the most significant questions, truth is appropriately determined by following an appropriate procedure, a legitimate procedure. How do you answer the secularists in your game? I can see you answering the traditionalists. The secularists want to kill the umpire altogether. And they often, by the way, fill the umpire out of the game. Well, I think if you stay on the analogy, there's two ways of dealing with it. First on the analogy. If you're playing a

game and there has to be a system of scoring, now in effect the rejection of the umpire at this point is rejection of the scoring system. And therefore what one has done is elected not to enter into the enterprise. He's elected not to be part of the game. Now, one can talk about rule changes in the game. But there's a great deal of difference between changing the rules and not having rules. And then one would have

to point about what kind of authority do we want to talk about. Now, when Saadia is talking to the Karaites, the authority is not the rabbis. So one has to go to another kind of authority. Now, in my introduction, that's the point I meant about common base. One must talk out of a common base because the common base provides the rules by which you score the differences you're dealing with. But between some people there can be

no play because there isn't enough in common to have common rules. Now, that's one thing. If we can't find an acceptable alternate system to talk about, and that depends who it is we're talking to, then there is no way to settle it. But that doesn't mean you're right. That just means you don't want to play. There's a second answer to it, too, which can be made as a general logic point. The issue with him is that

he treats all statements logically as if they were propositions. And the nature of propositions is who utters them makes no difference. Now, the crucial point I want to make to him is that logically, who utters a statement in important context is very crucial logically. And one can give religiously neutral examples. There's a marvelous example by Jaco Hintica in his interpretation of Descartes' Cogito, which is basically this. Hintica has argued that the Cogito was not a proposition.

It's not an argument, I exist, statement one, therefore statement two, I think, therefore I exist. It's not a proposition at all. It's an utterance. An utterance means statements that include who says it. And his example is this. The statement de Gaulle exists is something logically possible that may be true or may be false. One has to give evidence for it. But when de Gaulle says de Gaulle exists, there's no question of it's true. In other words,

de Gaulle saying de Gaulle's exists is a necessary truth. It's not a necessary true proposition because when you translate it into a proposition, it becomes de Gaulle exists, which is questionable. There's a logic to utterances which takes into consideration the speaker that's a very different logic than the logic of propositions. And what I've been really arguing then for is religious statements and religious authorities are to be understood properly not as propositions, but as utterances. Can I

at that point make a suggestion to you? I very much appoint, and I believe it does have, at least something to be addressed in this distinction between what is said and said. I even lack the use of the rules of the game analogy and umpire or the police principle to make the decision about what the reasonable speed until B, you know, the common assumption in our society that there should be a reasonable decision like that. But

for all the fruitfulness of that, in modern philosophy, I think you probably know the book better than I do, but there's a lot of discussion in the book by some of the philosophers about rules, roles, and relations. Does that answer? My point is to suggest that instead of the umpire, I don't know if you get specificity out of this, but that's one of your chief points, you see. You're out in a close decision, and that means

you are out, or 12 miles or 11, 13. But if you wouldn't use the notion of roles, so to say, and this I think goes to something the oriates talk about when he spoke of grounds and reasons for any other. There would be a distinction one would make between the rightfulness of what God commands, and God's right to command. Now you have got that in your announcement with the umpire. His right to say you're out is

one thing. It's different from the rightfulness of what it is he has decreed. My suggestion to you about pressing, in addition to that, your announcement, that we press the analogy of roles. For some of these roles of natural, they grow up, they have a tradition. They're not like fabricated games, you see. You may lose specificity of decreed, which is one of the virtues you want, in particular, sometimes. But we would distinguish between, would we not, between

the rightfulness of what a parent commands, and the parent's right to command. Now that's a role, and many particular things come out of it. The same thing said, it can be so extreme that the child rebelled, in your case of civil disobedience, if somehow the role has gone beyond the spectrum of reasonable parental command. But the rightful, the right of parental authority is a sort of role in relation to those who are derivative from us, another

generation, the family. And you apply that to God. And I think this made me, the grounds for establishing God's right to command are not the same thing as the reasons to be given for the rightfulness of his commands. In the case of the father, I suppose we in our religious tradition would appeal to many ones to support God's right to command. So another thing is about the rightful, is what he says. We'd say, he's the creator

and giver of life. All the celebrations of this role, that in our past, he has been active in exercise, and be gratitude and gift, and creator, and so forth. All of which we appeal to those grounds for believing his right to command his children. That would be quite different in a process from inquiring into the rightfulness of these distinctions among women, and so forth. In other words, my suggestion simply is that, while your analogy is very

helpful, and I've used sorts of things like that myself, in terms of ethics, and in terms of authority, it's very nice to hear you do it, it still is a fabricated game, you see. All you can say is that of it as an analogy is that we bound to need that. You could even think of Roman games where somebody's out because the whole audience puts thumbs down or something, you know what I mean? Instead of one

single man to keep it organized. You could change not only the rules of the game, but you could change somehow how we get these close decisions. You could think of that. It's a fabricated game. It's good, but I think myself, alongside of it, the notion of role, some are natural, some, at least in any case, they have had a history in human communities, military justice or command, a person occupies a certain office in a total human

activity. Again, there are limits. But we do distinguish the rightfulness of anything issuing from those quarters and the general role, which has a certain part. What complicates, I think, is that's helpful, but then when I have to draw the distinction between, for the distinction about God and man, when it comes to any authority less than God, we say there's a crucial distinction between the right to command and the rightfulness of the particular command, which in a

sense, the latter are somewhat arbitrary. But when we're speaking about God, the assumption is not only he has the right to command, because by God's definition he is, but that whatever God commands, since he's truly God, is also right in some sense other than human authority. Now, that, at once, I think, would lead to the question that many of us moderns would have looking upon the scripture as containing God's word, let's say, but not being simply

identical with God's word, because we would, at that point, I think many of us tend to say that God's word is in the Bible, let's say, that God has a right to command and even has in fact commanded certain things is a matter of, you know, affirmed by faith, but that everything that the tradition has claimed is actually God's own word is questioned. And we would say, indeed, may well represent human attempts to formulate or, you

know, to formulate it in further detail what God wants. To the extent that they are human, then, what you said earlier, inside you would apply, to the extent that they are human, in a sense, they have their legitimacy because God has given the, as the Midrash reported, God has given the right, so to say, to certain human authorities to exercise the role of specifying. But if they're beyond a certain range, as you both have said, then

people can come along and say, well, that, that's the human element and it's gone beyond the property. Yeah. Now, this, do you really mean that? I mean, don't we together say, don't we? All these analogies, the human and the divine, you can break out objections. We don't just say God would allow boys, and that therefore gives the authority. We, in our tradition, say, we know the heart of a stranger, and not only that, we know God

brought us up out of Egypt when we were weak and with no merit, and strangers, and aliens, and all of that. In other words, our warrants, not just God and the loud voice, our warrants are, you know, the cause of our testimony, too, it's a religious faith, all right, it's not a human testimony, or a testimony from a human who's making, but one is giving a warrant. And I think the general is an inter-sensional word,

a ground, you see. It's not an explanation of the intelligibility of what God commands, maybe, this, that, or the other aspect, but we, even in this respect, we are saying that the ground for our affirmation as to how we should treat a stranger justly is to be found in the fact that God emphasized, you know, a certain role, a certain action with which we are dead. The problem with stories, you know, the problem with stories, I

mean, because let's say when the Ten Commandments are introduced by that very affirmation, you say, I brought you forth from Egypt, and I think the implication is therefore I have the authority, but also I have the goodness, because look, I've saved your life, so I command you here to do it. But then, if you go on and say, well, therefore, everything in Scripture has the same authority, and we ought to accept them the same way, because

after all, look what God did for us, and He commanded us, and He must know. It's at that point where we were modern enough, so to say, you know, to say, granted in principle that that's so, when it comes to the specifics, some of them representing the human aspect, the human spelling out of what God wants, art can still be questioned. We don't draw the conclusion that fundamentalists would say that since God has established His claim

on the basis of what He's done for us, therefore everything that Scripture says, declares us coming from God, is necessarily to be accepted by us as coming from God. The point that Dr. Ramsey raises, I think is like really important for a whole area of general ethical analysis. The context I'm pretty supposed is one stands in interpersonal relationship, and then one talks about how one makes moral judgments within the relationship. But there's also the moral question

of are there moral judgments that can be applied not only within interpersonal relationships, but between entering a given relationship or not entering a person, are there moral justifications that can be given for that? And that's a whole interesting area, and I think a very difficult area to answer. And the point that Herschel was pushing, I had in a sense an interchange with Arnie Wolfe on something that I sense is very close to this. We were talking

one weekend about God's condemning Saul for not killing Agog. And I took the position that God was wrong, that no matter how questionable Saul's motives were, Saul did the proper thing. And I argued it as really my context of being a liberal Jew, that what made me a liberal, whether an orthodox Jew, was not that I reject the authority of Scripture as a record, as reasonable as any, of Divine Word, but that I have a right

to say no to Divine Word. And Arnie's response to it was, do you really think if God said anything to you that you would be in any way capable of saying no to it? Which gave it authority simply in the fact that God said it. And the only answer to it is, I think his point is quite right, and at that point I was talking propositions rather than utterances, and that was my mistake. But the relationship

between God and Israel is such that that authority of dissent is given to us, and we can cite biblical precedent to dissent. There's people who do it quite well. Norbert, there's a subtle distinction here. In the instance you cite, it wasn't that God talked to Saul, it was God through Samuel to Saul. Now wait, there's a subtle difference here. I don't know about Mr. Samuel. I'm taking it in the context of the tradition that at that

point, given partially what happens to Saul, that Samuel was a true prophet of divine will. I don't think he was right. You're trying to save the situation. When God talked to the prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah, there was no back talk. There was no other way of acting. When God talks to Moses and says to Moses, I'm going to wipe out the children of Israel, Moses gives a very good argument to God why he shouldn't, and God

backs down on it. You'd better take the case to get rid of the intervening prophet and take the case of Abraham. Yeah, well, I think we shouldn't suspend critical judgment because here we are worshiping at the throne of reason in addition to the throne of theology, and I think we have to make some distinctions between what one might call the mythos of our religion and the normative principles. I think we would regard the Abraham stories, I

would, in a sense, arch types of a mythos, and I would not regard the prophetic stories in the same way. I think there's some distinction. Yeah, I'm not happy with that. I resist getting into the whole thing of how one is to understand religiously scripture because that's a whole night in itself, and I'm not prepared to argue it in detail. In the Quest for Past and Future Fakenheim book, there's a very nice article, though, that relates

on this where he takes somebody's account, some rabbi's account, of the sacrifice of Isaac as being a story that tells us about how they used to practice child sacrifice, but now they've gotten to the point of not practicing it, and he objects very strenuously to that kind of interpretation religiously of the story of Abraham because that really reduces that story in scripture in general when that method is followed through scripture as really insignificant. This was a

nice thing that happened in the past, but if that's all the Abraham story has to tell us, then it's religiously insignificant because we all know you shouldn't sacrifice children. You don't need the Abraham story any more for that. The force of his argument is, and I'm really reluctant to get into it in the details now because that's a big topic, is that you really have to come to terms, I think, with scripture in and of itself

as a source of authority without becoming orthodox, in a real way, not simply as a historical document or something embodying mythos. Now, lots of that's depending on what you're building into the word myth. But I take part of the connotation of your use of the word myth as fictional. No. The trappings, which has basic universal truths, but the trapping is related to the truth, but how is the truth that's important? The vehicle, I want you to

think about. Let me come back to something else. May I fix something else? I really don't understand your beginning, and I don't understand your end. You threw me a curve here, and I'm really for it. Not Rosenstein's double covenant, but multiple covenants. I would understand that if you put that in the beginning, if you would say that there are multiple covenants, as there are different religions and different revelations, and what you would call multiple covenants, now

where does the problem of authority or reason handle the multiplicity of truths? Then I would understand it, but you put it at a tail end, like it is a dessert. Yeah, it was thrown in. Let me carry out the implication on that. If God, the A in the case, relates to all people in the same way, still the relationship will be different, because the other party of the relation is different, and so one can have multiple

traditions that are authentically relations with God. Now, that suggests more than one covenantal relationship with God. The only point on the Rosenzweig is to say that that suggests Rosenzweig, but it's not really Rosenzweig, because Rosenzweig did not see multiple possible relationships with God. He saw two, Christianity and Judaism. He really only saw Christianity. There's a good paper that was given by a chair of Judaic studies at Case Western Reserve, Bernard Martin, that he gave at an

AAR meeting two years ago on the historical Rosenzweig. It was extremely interesting. He argued that Rosenzweig really saw that the world was now Christian. The Hegelian unity of the ideal with the actual had come about in his time, and the world was Christian. And so it made sense to him that everyone should be a Christian. It's ridiculous not to be a Christian. And that was Rosenzweig's playing with becoming a Christian at this point. Now, his decision

to remain a Jew, again, quoting Bernard Martin, was not that Judaism made sense independent of Christianity, but that Judaism had a very specific role to play within the Christian community, and really saw the Jewish covenant operating not as something separate and unique from the Christian covenant, but playing a very specific role within the world that is now Christian. And I'm saying something very, very different than that. So it was really to make this point of, you

might have heard this, then made associations with Rosenzweig, and I'm not really talking Rosenzweig's terms at all. Alright, but pick up the word the multiple here. Don't we use the word authority in multiple ways. For example, we kick around the analogy and talk about chess and games. But isn't the crucial thing about religion that it's not a game that you step in and out of? That it's all of life and it's utterly sincere and it's permanently

transforming. Isn't that I'm now playing chess and I'm not now playing chess? I suppose you have to say that don't build into the word game entertainment. No, no. Stepping into a set of rules and roles. A person who plays war games has done just what you've said. He's whole life, you know, Patton played war games and Patton lived his life the warrior. I don't think game analogies are necessary. Even when he's making love to a woman,

what are you talking about? Oh, Patton in particular, I'm sure, always was the soldier. Even when making love. But I don't know that. There are all kinds of games. Well, the point is that there are different forms of authority. And there are different meanings to the word reasonable. As was pointed out, the reason for, the rightful, the ground and so on. If there are these, and this is where I thought the connection between multiplicity would be

made. That you have all of these varieties. So the problem is almost an antimony. It's an impossible solution. Explain why. Well, if you have, if you have different, for example, one might say that the, we could talk of religion in terms not of its reasonableness or its goodness, which was the main thrust of Sajja, which you interpreted, but in terms of its emotive qualities rather than its cognitive qualities. Okay. Yeah, I mean, there's all sorts of

things that one can do with religion. I, I interpret what one does philosophically with religion. Okay. Remember that, that became, I guess that goes back into that first one, the same that I was doing a philosophic enterprise. Is, is in these terms. Oh, okay. So, okay. Let me spell it then. Certain assumptions about philosophy. Because I think that's crucial in this. Philosophy does not really have an ability to discover truth or anything of that sort. The

total capacity of philosophy is to show possibilities and enters into any area where the possibility of something, the logical possibility of something is in question. So you do philosophy of science. What it means to do philosophy of science is from the commitment that science is a justifiable enterprise. You take what seems to be logical barriers to doing science. If this is true, then science is nonsense. And you show it's not nonsense. And either you can show

it's nonsense or you can't show it's not nonsense. You can show it's not nonsense or you cannot show that it is not nonsense. There's really no way to show that it is nonsense. From the rules of the enterprise. Because there's no way of philosophy to get at that. Now, this is what Kant did. It's a method from Kant. And I'm very Kantian at that point of philosophy. I'm really doing that with philosophy of religion at this

point. I'm really taking issues that seem to be unreasonable. And I suppose in this sense unreasonable means... Not subject to formal rules of logic? That doesn't really quite say it. One would have grounds in Western civilization, given the way people think in Western civilization, to reject it. And then the argument becomes to say those reasons aren't really reasons. You may have other reasons for rejecting it, but those aren't reasons. That was the game at that point.

But that's not to say that there aren't other things that one can do. One can talk about the beauty of religion and things like that. I don't think that's a philosophic question, no, that's an artistic question. He's after the stuff between an authoritative and a reasonable. Incidentally, you can put not just a game, you can change it, you can quit playing it sometimes, you can play a specific route on the road where you don't have an

umpire exactly. But the way the British do this has had a long history. They surely did it before on all dealings. You're making me sound like you're in a precedent. No, I'm talking about why there's a whole people sensitized to just unthinkingly pass one another on the different side. They probably did it when they were just tracks. They were on highways, striking a tie in Great Britain. They just striked around the opposite way from ours. I

think it's all related in some way. Now you can change this, but it will take a great change to bring it about. In a certain sense, in the way we behave, the way we're traveling pass one another. It's part of our upbringing. It's not all of our life, the kind of thing you say religion is. But it's the whole people that have a certain way of doing it. In that case, tradition has an authority about our

property. It shapes how we behave and make it proper to that. Of course, any common laws. And there are ways to do things, to have a certain authority. Even though there are, at your point, I think, about certain things in tradition. We ought not, we aren't going to just be radical leaders to think we can always draw out of the wellspring of reason. The hang of my hat is when you keep using the word authority. I

much prefer if you use the word faratees. Or you keep using the word tradition. I wish you'd use the word traditions. Because in the everyday world in which you and I live, it's exactly what we do. Authority was used as a generic abstraction. You presuppose what you're saying. Sure, there are authorities. I can't make out whose authority we've been talking about. Is it the authority of God to make commandments to us, lay down laws to us?

I took it to Paul Ramsey when he talked about God's right to do this. Or a parent's right to do certain, to order certain things. And distinguish that from the rightfulness of the content of the commands, of the demands. He's talking about the authority of God is right. But it seemed to me that most of the time, you're not talking about the authority of God. You're talking about the authority of those who are appointed, who are

set aside to interpret the God's will. And so human authorities, the rabbis, for example. You've used the illustration of the analogy of the umpire. And that is a human authority. And different questions arise about those two authorities with respect to the right of God. I suppose no Jew or Christian would want to deny that God as our creator has a right in some sense over us. But the questions would arise as to whether any particular person

really knew that God was commanding him. Was Abraham right in thinking God commanded him to sacrifice his son, Isaac? Or was he wrong? Or was Samuel right in thinking God was commanding to get the slain, wasn't he? And then now Paul Renzi seems to be talking about the authority of a tradition, a kind of an ethos, such as that of the British, not to be God or a group of those who are appointed to speak for

God and to do the sort of thing you'd rather vividly describe the umpire is doing, specifying within a general principle of what is right and what is wrong. But a whole tradition that each one of us presupposes behind his moral judgments. I think we have to distinguish those three very carefully, or else we don't know quite what we're talking about. Yeah, right. Yeah, I think it's a good point. Saadia does confuse the two, and it's good

to drop, because what he does start out arguing about, what he states his problem about, is a problem of the right of divine authority. But Saadia so naturally thinks that rabbinic statements are divine in that sense, come from God, that no real distinction is made that way. And I used Saadia, not for what he stated his problem to be, but what he really did, which was talk about justification of rabbinic authority. Now, can one then take

at that point a position that would say, look, I accept divine authority to make these judgments. I don't accept anyone else's authority, but divine authority. I think there's several arguments that one can raise against that, at that point. One is, one of the points of that walls caving in business, voice from God with Maron Shmuel, is that where you have only divine authority and no authority other than divine, you really don't have an operating system, you

don't have a way of proceeding. So that you are forced by necessity, natural necessity, necessity of your social condition, not logical necessity, to create authority, and that every community ends up with this form of authority. I think one can raise a second kind of argument. So it's certainly not a pernicious move, it becomes, in a sense, a necessary move. One could raise another argument against having only divine authority without another form of mediating divine authority. And

this is in a novel, you might be familiar with the novel Thaïs by Anatole France, where the argument, what the story says is, here's this monk in the Egyptian desert in the Roman Empire, and he gets his vision from God that says, go out and convert the greatest belly dancer of her age, Thaïs. So he goes to Alexandria and he converts Thaïs, and Thaïs enters a nunnery. Then he goes back to his desert, and he gets

visions of Thaïs again, and then he's almost caught climbing over the wall of the nunnery, barely escapes. Then it occurs to him that the voice that had told him to convert Thaïs was not the voice of God, but was the voice of the devil. So he then begins to drive the devil out of him, and he goes deeper into the desert, climbs up on a big pillar, sits on the pillar in the desert day in and

day out, beating himself. Well, from no food and constant exposure and beating himself, he slowly dies. And people are gathering from all over to see this great religious saint. Just before he dies, he realizes that the voice that had led him to go to the desert and sit on the pillar and beat himself and not eat was the same voice that had got him to go and convert Thaïs. Well, the point of it is that I

think if you can, when it comes to divine voices, there are no bodies by which to define God, to identify him from other forces. One is left, in order to distinguishing whether God is God, with the sole criterion of are God's actions characteristic or not? And one needs rules to do that. Now, the importance of the community in this case is the community provides the rules by which that judgment enters. Now, the question then can be

is, why should God accept those rules to limit his way of acting? Now, Jewishly the response on it is, is God did it freely through contract. Now, I raise a point, you know, this ties in with you, and it's a crucial point I think that Jacob Petikowski raises, which is, you know, at one point, revelation has to be taken terribly seriously. And if we don't take revelation very seriously, the whole thing may not be possible. Now,

you know, what we say about revelation may be very different than what an orthodox Jews says about revelation. But without revelation, do we have a possible religion? And I don't think we do. Except, you know, especially Mendelssohn in Jerusalem. In this context, Judaism was a revealed legislation, not a revealed religion. And unlike Sadia, for him the general principles are universally accepted and appeal to the reason, but so that the function of religion is fulfilled. In other

words, it was religion that made what we call reasonable things acceptable. And what religion is, what is left then is the laws, the customs of the folklore, which are needed for specific communities. Yeah, are you saying like these laws were given through Israel for all mankind universally? Yes, and now it's universal. So Judaism was a nice thing, it did an important thing in the past, and who needs it now? It's general teachings are no longer needed.

The sense that everybody, Christians and Jews and, you know, Muslims, Buddhists, have achieved those large universal principles. What is needed still is for each community to have its observances and customs for the sake of the social cement or for the sake of the personal sense of what is special. Wouldn't it make more sense for us to do the same, all do the same customs at this point? No. Why not? Well, because we're culturally, we're different traditions

and antecedents, and we have different environments. But that has nothing to do with divine word. And at some point, it's been suggested, when all of these conditions become homogenized, it may be what we mean by the one word. At the outset, then, to try to clarify one's own intentions in participating in a Jewish-Christian dialogue. Standard reasons which numbers of Christians might offer for entering into such dialogue are either quite objectionable or religiously secondary. Among the

objectionable reasons, I will mention two. First, the aim of converting Jews. This aim is premised on the assumption that Christians alone are in touch with the truth, and such an assumption hardly prepares one for genuine dialogue. Second, there's the hope of gaining easy relief from guilt feelings connected with the horrors which Christians have inflicted on Jews. I find this motive objectionable because it evades real issues under the camouflage of innocuous conversations. As Professor Falkenhayn says, the

truth is that Christians will find it easiest to drop the ancient charge of deicide, harder to recognize roots of Christian antisemitism in the New Testament, and hardest of all to admit that both Jews and Judaism are alive. The religiously secondary reasons I want to mention are also two in number. First, it is my impression that some, Jews and Christians alike, agree to take part in such a dialogue with the aim of fostering cordial relations between members

of different religious communities in a pluralistic society. I think this is an important and worthy goal, but one which falls short of real theological dialogue where one speaks and listens precisely as Jew and Christian. And second, there may be an interest in learning more about Judaism and Christianity from the standpoint of the scientific study of religions. Although this can be a valuable dimension of a real theological dialogue between Jews and Christians, it is no substitute for

it. A Jewish-Christian dialogue in depth requires a genuine openness to the other party at the level of one's deepest religious commitments. It involves the willingness to be a radical listener. One Jewish critic has rightly noted the anomaly of a series of Judeo-Christian studies entitled The Bridge, with no Jewish contributors. If a dialogue is to be likened to a bridge, surely the bridge should be open to two-way traffic. There must be listening as well

as speaking. I think Richard Rubenstein has put this point very well. When I enter into dialogue with someone from a religious community different from mine, I express my readiness to listen to a voice different from my own, which precisely because it is different, precisely because it is no mere echo of my own voice, can greatly enrich my own religious experience and perception. I want to quote a few more sentences from Rubenstein because they state what is

in my judgment the proper rationale for Jewish-Christian dialogue. Christians, he says, need my opposing vision as I need theirs. I suspect that this has always been unconsciously true of both Christianity and Judaism. Throughout history, Christians have shown great capacity to uproot non-Christians within their homelands. Judaism is the one non-Christian religion which survived in Christendom, in spite of all the horror which so frequently pervaded Jewish-Christian relations. Jews survive because of both Jewish tenacity

and Christian unwillingness finally to exterminate the last Jew. At no time since the rise of Christianity to European supremacy, the Jews have the effective power to guarantee their own survival, in spite of all the horror, Rubenstein concludes, something in Christianity found the Jew as opposing self indispensable. Rubenstein's statement is based on the broad philosophical principle that the self needs the other in order to know itself, that differences enhance rather than diminish life. More specifically, however, his

point is that Christians and Jews need each other in order to enter into the best in their own religious heritage. This is the point that I want to try to develop in my own way in the following remarks. I must speak, of course, from the Christian side of this proposal. I want to say what I continue to hear from the Jewish faith, which I consider indispensable if I am to be a faithful Christian. I must say

that this is not the only word I hear or expect to hear, but it is, for me, an important and indispensable one. My thesis is this, that without Judaism as a strong and living religious witness, Christianity succumbs to the ever-present temptation to identify itself with the dominant culture and thus loses its prophetic power. Judaism is, in fact, the one non-Christian religion which has survived in many Western countries and hence is the one religious community

that is able to provide a countervailing religious vision to an all too comfortable Western Christianity. But my argument does not rest on this sociological fact alone. The Jewish community is, I contend, the bearer of a peculiar experience of transcendence. And without the witness of this community to this experience, I believe that the Christian community would be religiously impoverished. I propose to call this experience the Exodus experience. I must first explain what I have in mind by

the phrase, the Exodus experience. I mean, of course, first and foremost, the liberation of the Jewish people from Egyptian bondage by the mighty acts of Yahweh. But I want to use the phrase Exodus experience to speak not only of something which happened in the days of Moses, but of a continuing and living reality of Jewish faith and history. Christian theologians have in recent days, in any case, often projected an image of the Jews as the suffering

servant. Now it turns out that this way may be simply another example of Christians projecting a theological concept on the Jews. If we have any sense of reality, Christians must recognize that Jews understand themselves as capable of strong resistance as well as suffering endurance. And it is particularly to focus upon this power of resistance, which I want to recognize in speaking of the Exodus experience of the Jewish community. Both Judaism and Christianity are religions of the

covenant. Judaism is based on God's gracious covenant with his chosen people, Israel. The covenant refers to a relationship between God and a particular people. In the biblical view, man is related to God by means of his membership in the people of God, charged with the responsibility of covenantal faithfulness. For both Judaism and Christianity, the covenant is rooted finally in the mysterious, electing love of God. As a number of theologians, both Jewish and Christian have emphasized, it

is misguided to try to contrast Christianity and Judaism as religions respectively of grace and law. For both religions, man's relation to God is essentially a response to the initiative of the divine love. For the Jew, the Torah is the concrete expression of a gracious covenant. For the Christian, the covenant love of God manifested in Jesus of Nazareth issues in thankful obedience to the divine will. How then are these two religions of the covenant to be distinguished?

Will Herberg and Reinold Niebuhr answer this question along the same lines? They say, Christian faith introduces a new covenant between God and his people, new not in the sense of supplanting the old, but in the sense of enlarging and extending it. Judaism and Christianity represent one religious reality, but they represent it in a particularistic and a universalistic mode. Judaism, according to this theory, faces inward to the Jews. Christianity faces outward to the Gentiles. Through Christianity, God's

covenant with Israel was open to all mankind. This idea of Christianity and Judaism as two religions with one center worshipping the same God, but with Christianity as Israel's apostle to the nations, goes back to Franz Rosenzweig. According to Rosenzweig, Israel can bring the world to God only through Christianity. Now, I would, I think, agree with Herberg and Niebuhr that this definition of the relation between the two religions, Judaism and Christianity, is more attractive than most. But

the difficulty I have with it is that it says little about this indispensable witness which Judaism continues to make to Christianity, which I am calling the Exodus experience. If in the Christian community faith is anchored in the Christ event and its revelatory meaning, in Judaism faith is anchored as I listen and hear the witness of Judaism in the Exodus event. Biblically speaking, the Exodus is God's act of deliverance of his people from bondage. Led by God's

call and promise, an enslaved people cast off their chains, defy a powerful state, and choose to venture into the future attended by great risks. The identity of Israel was forged in this process of Exodus, of resistance, of moving out. The Exodus experience is the experience of a transcendent God who singles out a people and summons them to a loyalty above, allegiance to the powers of the state and the concerns of personal and family safety and security.

The Exodus experience is the experience of confrontation with a moral law that transcends the law of the state and singles out a community, distinguishing it from the dominant social milieu. Biblically, the Exodus experience is focused at Horeb and the Red Sea and Sinai. But the Exodus experience is not simply a series of events in the past, but a living reality in the ongoing history of the people of Israel. Historically, the Jews have had to live in

Exodus. By their very Jewishness, they have constituted an anomaly in the non-Jewish world. By its very existence as a Jew, the Jew has been singled out and has borne witness to a reality transcendent of the powers and values of current culture. Here I quote Herberg, The Christian has always aspired to be only a sojourner in this world, a stranger on the way home, man on the move in search for his true identity, homo viator. This,

says Herberg, is the Christian life as it should be, but it is the Jewish actuality. In speaking of the Exodus experience attested by the very existence of the Jews, I do not wish to offer a feel of Gumanon. I speak of flesh and blood Jews who confront me here and now. I speak of a community which has gone through the Holocaust and yet which chooses to raise Jewish children with no guarantee that they will not also

be victims of another Auschwitz. This is, I submit, an awesome witness of faith. Professor Falkenhayn again writes, After Auschwitz we have to ask if we have the right to bring up Jewish children. When four generations from now we might be implicated in their being murdered. But when I ask this question, Falkenhayn continues, when I ask this question of the generation of my great grandfathers in Germany, I cannot help but ask myself the other question, which would

you rather have their great grandchildren be? Jewish victims at Auschwitz or Nazi executioners? Thus, both in terms of its biblical sources and in terms of the Jewish historical experience, the Jewish community bears an indispensable witness to Christians. It witnesses to the Exodus experience, an encounter with the nameless mystery which summons and promises, a confrontation with the divine law which stands above all human laws. And by this witness, Jews give warning to Christians tempted to accommodate their

faith to secular culture and the gods of the modern states. The experience of the Exodus, historically embodied in the faith and history of the Jewish people, gives vital expression to a prophetic and critical faith, which is the source of a religious critique of the idolatrous and oppressive impulses of modern secular states. Christians need the witness of the Jewish community, the witness of this Exodus people, in order to be faithful to what is deepest in their own

religious heritage. The history of Christianity seems, in a negative way, to bear this out. And to this matter, I now turn. The question I want to raise is whether the historical evidence may not suggest that there is a close relationship between Christianity's power to resist the pressures of a dominant culture and the recognition of the living and indispensable Exodus witness of the Jewish community to Christianity. A full and cogent development of this hypothesis would demand far

more time than we have here. But perhaps a few indications can be given of the direction in which such a study might move. If we turn to the New Testament first, it is clear that Christianity first appeared as a movement within first century Judaism. The debate between Jews and Christians had the character of a sharp inter-family conflict. If there were markedly different movements or schools within first century Judaism, there were also different movements within first

century Christianity. From Acts, the Acts of the Apostles, the New Testament, and the Pauline letters, we know that there were significant differences between the Jerusalem church and the Pauline position, having to do with the observance of certain Jewish practices. The letters of Paul contain some rather severe statements of invective against the Jews, as for example 1 Thessalonians 2:15, the Jews killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out and displeased God and

opposed all men by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles. That they may be saved, so as always to fill up the measure of their sins, that God's wrath has come upon them at last. While at the same time, Paul could speak of the Jews as my brothers, could say that the gospel is first for the Jew and only second for the Gentiles, could say that the goal of God was not the destruction but the renewal

of Israel. As Marcus Barth tries to argue in his book, Israel and the Church, Paul is hardly an anti-Semite, though some of his words have been given an anti-Semite interpretation by his disciples, and though perhaps some of Paul's own words carry the seed of such anti-Semitism, rather Paul stands in the tradition of the prophets who, as the Jeremiah, had to say cruel words to his own people in God's name. What I'm trying to

suggest at this point is that with Paul, one sees the inter-family conflict between Christianity and Judaism still very much alive. By the time of the writing of the synoptic gospels, the relations between Jews and Christians had hardened considerably. The fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD had a far-reaching impact on Jewish-Christian relations. It was all too easy for Christians to interpret this event as the sign of God's final rejection of the old Israel. In

the Gospel of John, the Jews have become a symbol of darkness, falsehood, and enmity to God. Jews are said to have the devil as their father. That the readers to whom the writer of this Gospel addresses himself are not any longer well acquainted with Jewish feasts and practices is clear from the many explanations of these activities that the writer feels to be necessary. What I'm suggesting here is that with the widening gulf between Judaism and Christianity,

there is an increase of polemical and unsympathetic words and interpretations of the other member of the original family. So the history of the first century church, it seems to me, begins with close contact and even participation in the Jewish community and ends with incriminations and condemnations. I'm not concerned to try to untangle the various reasons for this development. Many factors were involved. But I am interested in noting a development which seems to parallel the increasingly severe

theological portrayal of the Jews. This is the tendency to relate ever more positively and uncritically to the state powers. The picture of Pilate, for example, undergoes remarkable transformation in early Christian literature. The beginnings of this are already evident in the New Testament. In all of the Gospels, the picture of Pilate at the trial of Jesus is that of a well-intentioned administrator who recognizes the innocence of Jesus but gives in to the pressure of the mob.

But in the Gospel of John, Pilate not only declares the innocence of Jesus but becomes an inquirer after the truth and in turn is told by Jesus that the power of the state he represents has been given by God and therefore the greater sin has been committed by those who delivered Jesus to Pilate. This tendency to exonerate Pilate and the political power which he represents continues in the later literature. In the apocryphal Acts of Pilate, the

Jews tell Pilate that Jesus was indeed the Messiah and Pilate then writes to Emperor Tiberius to say that the crucifixion was a miscarriage of justice. It was a short step from here to make Pilate and Tiberius Christian believers and to have the Emperor propose to the Roman Senate the acceptance of Jesus as a God. All the stages of Christianity's relation to the state up to the time of Constantine are already reflected in the portrayal of Pilate

as first innocent, then as a believer, and finally as party to the official recognition of Christian faith. My point is we see here a process in which Pilate is ennobled precisely as Jews are debased. In Chrysostom's homilies on the fourth Gospel in the fourth century, Pilate scourges Jesus to exhaust and soothe the fury of the Jews. The reductio ad absurdum of this literary trend was achieved in the popular medieval portrayal of Pilate as a Christian saint.

One could scarcely find a more telling symbol of the interconnection between the collapse of Jewish-Christian relations and the alignment of Christianity with the imperial power. The very first law of the Roman Empire passed under Christian influence in 315 enacted that Jews molesting Jewish converts to Christianity shall be consigned to the flames and Christians joining the Jewish community shall suffer the same punishment. The legal restrictions placed on the Jews from Constantine onward led inevitably to the

creation of the medieval Jewish ghettos which persisted up to the Nazi Holocaust. This chasm between Christians and Jews which developed had many consequences. It was, I believe, a contributing factor in the rise of Christian allegorical and spiritualistic interpretation of Scripture. Which is, in its own way, a kind of alienation of Christianity from its own deepest heritage. However rigid and ingenious this exegesis may have been, it lacked prophetic criticism of the structures of state and society which

had characterized the Old Testament tradition at its best. Since we have spoken of the Exodus experience as central to the Jewish witness, it is interesting to see what happens to the interpretation of the Exodus traditions in the patristic and medieval literature. The Exodus from Egypt is unanimously seen as an image of the Christian's Exodus from the world of sin. The passage through the Red Sea and the drowning of Pharaoh is interpreted as a sign of the

mystery of baptism and the destruction of the Christian's spiritual enemies. The Pharaoh pursuing the Israelites up to the Red Sea is an image of the devil's pursuit of the Christian up to the salutary water of baptism. I cannot further document this development here. The point I am trying to make is simply that the de-Judaizing and spiritualizing of biblical traditions, such as the Exodus tradition, amounts to a kind of de-historizing and de-politicizing of biblical

faith. The Exodus experience is no longer a threat to tyrants and despots and unjust laws. It has been spiritualized and rendered politically impotent. It is not surprising, therefore, that the periodic awakening of the Christian political conscience has usually been rooted in a recovery of the spirit of resistance and prophetic judgment of the Old Testament. I think this is true of the impact of Calvinism in Great Britain and the United States. It is true of the awakening

of the Christian social conscience in the social gospel of the early 20th century. It is true, surely, of the prophetic social criticism of Reinhold Niebuhr in the mid-20th century. It appears also to be true of the younger Christian theologians like Jürgen Moltmann, who are attempting to develop what they call a political theology. That is a theology which is fully conscious of the extent to which traditional Christian theology has been functioning as religious support for given

social structures and relations, however unjust and enslaving to some men these structures and relations may be. And a theology which seeks to give fresh expression to the politically dangerous messianic hope of the biblical tradition. Moltmann entitles the last chapter of his book, The Theology of Hope, Exodus Church, Observations on the Eschatological Understanding of Christianity in Modern Society. He says that the title Exodus Church is meant to focus attention on the reality of Christianity as that of

the pilgrim people of God as described in the epistle to the Hebrews. Let us go forth, therefore, to him outside the camp, bearing his reproach, for here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come. And Moltmann tries to ask in this concluding chapter of his book, Theology of Hope, what does this mean, this idea of an Exodus Church for the social shape of Christianity in modern society and for the task it has to

fulfill in the field of social ethics. Moltmann goes on to say that beginning with Constantine, the Christian religion took over the role of the old Roman state religion. It became the new protector and preserver of the state. In modern society, of course, the function of Christianity as the religious cement of the social order has increasingly disintegrated. The social roles of Christian faith today have been reduced to the cultivation of religious subjectivity or the creation of small

clubs or spiritual communities where men find some solace from the social estrangement of the world of work and politics. Moltmann summons the church to break out of these social roles and venture into Exodus. Only when Christians appear in society as a people who are not wholly adaptable and with respect to whom the modern integration of everything with everything else fails to succeed, do they enter into a conflict-laden but fruitful partnership with this society. Only where

their resistance shows them to be a community that is incapable of being assimilated or succumbing to the pressure to make the grade, can they communicate their own hope to the society. They will then be led in the society to a constant unrest which nothing can allay or bring to accommodation and rest. Well, Moltmann's theology is closely related to the work of the maverick Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. Bloch is quite unlike traditional Marxists in his fascination with

the Bible and in his unorthodox interpretation of the biblical traditions as the fountainhead of revolutionary impulses in Western history. Bloch knows, of course, that religion has often served in Marxist terms as the opiate of the people. Yet he finds in the Bible the beginning of the dangerous hope impulse, the eschatological consciousness which has sparked so many freedom movements over the centuries. Religion for Bloch is essentially hope, and hope is a principle of criticism of things as

presently experienced. Bloch, the neo-Marxist and secularized Jew, holds that the idea of God which began with Israel at the time of the Exodus was radically different from all previous understandings of God. What happened with Moses, he writes, was a leap in religious consciousness, and the ground for it was laid by an event that is the greatest antithesis to earlier religions, rebellion and Exodus from Egypt. What Bloch is saying here is that the God of the

Exodus experience is not the God who provides the religious certification of the established powers and the blessing on the dominant culture. Rather, the God of the Exodus experience is a God who sets himself in opposition to injustice and slavery, who singles out an oppressed people and summons them to courageous opposition to an idolatrous culture and its system of values. It is not necessary to follow Bloch in his argument that Marxism is the heir of the prophetic

and transcending impulse of biblical religion minus belief in a transcendent God, to recognize that he has underscored an essential and distinctive understanding of the biblical idea of God and the faithful community. I submit that in Bloch's influence on Jurgen Moltmann, there is a strange and circuitous witness of the Jewish Exodus experience to Christianity, but one that despite the circuitity of the witness is nevertheless having a transforming impact upon contemporary Christian theology. But the question must surely

be raised why the witness of Israel and its Exodus experience needs to be heard in such a circuitous and alloyed fashion as it is in the case of Bloch's atheistic interpretation of Scripture. In all the theology of hope literature of Christian theologians, in all the talk of prophetic and political theology, there has been to this point little discernment of the implications of all this for Jewish-Christian relations, little recognition of the continuing and vital witness of

the living people of Israel. So far Christian theologians of hope and radical politics have allowed the Jewish witness to be present only as the witness of Old Testament Scripture. But the Exodus experience is not present only in what Christians call the Old Testament word of summons and promise. It is present also vitally in the living witness of the Jewish community. It is this witness, I repeat, which is something we Christians will always need to hear. I'm

impressed by the warning which Jewish theologians and spokesmen have given to contemporary secular and death of God theologians in their attempt to embrace the secular world uncompromisingly. Here again I quote Professor Falkenhayn. Time was when even orthodox Jewish believers would ask of Christians a more wholehearted acceptance of those secular liberal ideals that have separated state and church, established the equality of all citizens, and emancipated Jews. Now that some leading Christian thinkers are urging precisely that, they

are warned against abandonment of the biblical God by Jews, not all of whom are self-declared believers. One could not altogether blame Christian thinkers if they felt that so far as Jews are concerned they can never do right. But of course the warning comes from the Jewish community not because of some desire to show Christians to be always in the wrong, but because of the experience of the Nazi holocaust. Nazism was, as Falkenhayn reminds us, a

distinctly modern phenomenon. It used precisely the modern phenomena of anonymity and technological skill to carry out its grisly mathematics of mass murder. An increasingly secularized Christian theology needs to listen to the witness of the exodus experience of the Jews. The Jewish community has perhaps only begun to come to terms theologically with the holocaust. Christians also need to ponder long and deep over the meaning of this event for themselves as Christians and what it means in terms

of Christian responsibility in the modern world. One thing that we have to, I'll have to back up a little bit with you and with the group as we get into discussion, and that is we have indicated to the students that we'd like to have them sit down, any of them would care to have lunch with us at 12:30. So I'd forgotten that when I said to you that we could go to 12:30, I think

we'd better quit at 12:15. That's alright, and I say this because once you get involved, I'll have a hard time stopping you, and I want to do it now, I have to break. We'll go over, the tables are on the left-hand side as you go into the dining room, and there's yellow signs on them saying, dialogue, come and join us. Okay, now we're ready to fire back, and I think I'll just open up a

window for a little bit. It seems warm in here. I think one of the things that I'd like to say in addition to what I've already said, after reflecting on the approach that I took in this paper, and also recalling some remarks that were made last evening, I became a little bit suspicious of the way I went about this. Perhaps I didn't clearly enough explain my aim in the paper. It could be read, or it could,

it seems to me, give the impression of saying that Christians find Judaism and the Jewish witness valuable only insofar as it serves to sustain or deepen Christianity, and I can see a kind of patronization at work there. I'm simply asking the question in this paper, what must the Christian hear from the Jewish community? I'm not, I hope, succumbing to the temptation to completely relate to the Jewish community in terms of its value or its ability to

sustain perhaps a faltering Christian social and political witness in the modern world. Well, I'm afraid I didn't read it that way in the beginning. You know, it made it sound like there's a two-party system in religion, and you need the suffering opposition of the U.S.A., but the price is a little too high to pay. We'd rather, we'd rather you learned it not at our price, but at the price of... So your caveat is, as we'll

tell you, that's my first page. But there's something else I'd like to pick up. Sure, we cannot be objective, but we must be honest, and you, of course, see the Exodus and the Christian polarity, by which I refer to the meaning of here spirituality as opposed to the political life, or as you put it, the transcendent as opposed to the power struggle. But by making this polarity, you're already doing something that some Jewish thinkers reject, namely

the emphasis on a unity rather than a duality condition. In other words, there's no distinction between, in the Jewish image of the Commonwealth, there's no distinction between the priest and the king, both are under the same one law. There is no caesar or papyrism, so to speak. And so, on the one hand, you emphasize the spirituality of the experience, but that's, you know, that's dead without the political. In other words, they were freed from the pharaohs,

that would be the political aspect, but there was a very, you know, interwined is also the spiritual quest. For us exes, or for some of us, we all have to watch ourselves about it, love you, love Christian. For some of us, half of the coin was getting out from under the slave master, but the other half was getting the covenant of Sinai, so there was the spiritual end put into twine. Isn't it that there's many distinctions

between them, and I think you made a distinction. I think the author is distinct as well. Because you have a spiritual truth and political oppression, a political truth and a spiritual oppression. I'd just like to remind you that some of our Geneva ancestors had transcendental spiritualism, and also were politically oppressive. They lost their patience at some point, for various interesting reasons, and so too with the Geneva influence in the American scene. In other words, we must

not make a distinction between the political and the spiritual. The two, the Exodus experience has both, and it's impossible to separate the two. I agree with that. I perhaps entirely misrepresented myself by giving you the impression that I was trying to split apart what you're calling the political and the spiritual. On the contrary, I thought my point was precisely the reverse. That in the history of the Christian church, there has been just that tendency to break

apart, to dichotomize, the political and the spiritual. Is there something in Christian thought that leads there, or is it some foreign element? All the Greeks thought. Okay, so now we've got escape, though. Thanks for our golden burden. See, that's what's serious about it, because at one point the hang-up in Jewish-Christian relations was that it was the Jews' fault. And I'm wondering now if it was anybody's fault. Was it something within the very nature of

Christian dogmatics which made this duality? I'm not acquainted with that particular charge against the Jews. Well, you said in the opening that one of the hang-ups is the question of deicide and so on. Yeah, but how does that relate to this question of the relationship between the political and the spiritual? Well, there was a duality. There was a split between the didache and the kareem. There are two worlds, evidently. There is what you would call

the spiritual and the political, or the transcendental and the inanimate. For the Jew, there is no split. Somehow the two are interwoven. And therefore, on the one hand, you can see the Jew in a transcendental sense. But, you know, he has to also eat every day and sleep. In other words, what I'm suggesting is I'm not satisfied if the Christian sees the Exodus experience in his transcendental message. I'm not so sure that will help the situation.

You see, but I was trying to say that I think what comes across or should come across to the Christian community with respect to what I'm calling the Exodus witness of the Jews is precisely the earthly, the political and the prophetic quality of the liberation from Egypt. It's this worldly character. Rather than interpreting this experience in spiritualistic terms, talking about the liberation of the freedom... Salvation in terms perhaps. Would salvational terms help us? It might, if

salvation here is understood in terms of... Spiritual salvation. Spiritual salvation, yeah. In other words, the picture we should take... The basis of sin, this sort of thing. It's first of all an individualization of the event and secondly a spiritualization of it in both respects. It's ripped out of history, ripped out of the concreteness of the fabric of history. Would you be willing to go the next step if for a Jew the Exodus and the Sinai covenant

means the core idea that the Jewish people had chosen with God. You see, you don't want to go that far. Sure. You're saying... Well, you didn't even mention it. You may have it back in mind. You're saying the Exodus experience has a lesson for us Christians. What's the lesson? The lesson is that life should be politicized and propheticized and so on, right? But could it be that the lesson goes in another direction? Could it be that

the fact that there was an Exodus and its culmination in Sinai means something about the Jewish people as a people? Not for your sake, but for truth's sake or for the people's sake. In other words, aren't you using the Exodus experience to do something for Christians? Yeah, now we're back to the original problem. I'm sure that's a bad thing to do, incidentally. It seems that if the Jew is making a demand, which a sense comes out

of this, is, now look, if we're going to be able to talk to each other, it isn't enough to accept this as... It's nice that you don't accept this as a future conference anymore, but we also don't want to be just accepted as men. We want to be accepted as Jews, too. So you need a basis as Christians to relate to us, which doesn't entail conversion on one hand. And on the other hand, doesn't entail being

a humanist, because if you don't take Christianity seriously, you can also relate to us, too. But you've got to find a way to do it and take Christianity seriously. And that seems to be doing the exact kind of thing you're doing. There must be something about the Jew being a Jew, remaining a Jew, that says something important to a Christian. And that's what I think you were arguing, and that seems to be really the right way

to go about it. Why should you relate to another person? To be very crass, what's in it for me? And I think there has to be something in it. Yeah, well, the only thing is, you know, it makes the Jewish experience a textbook for something else. But it's a quality of truth in itself. I think that that's valid, because the biblical tradition says the experience of others is a textbook for you, that you inherit the land

because of the pollution of others who went before you, and therefore learn from them exactly what can happen to you in your turn. The use of a human experience as a textbook for another one is not totally invalid. What I'm disturbed about is the two-fold consequence of your thesis. That, on the one hand, that accepting the Exodus experience as a rejection of both, as a spiritual, at one and the same time, a spiritual experience and

a political experience, what it seems to me you have extrapolated is that for Christianity today, there must be a vitalization of that experience within its own framework. That is, a willingness to recognize that the state it has supported is not necessarily compatible with Christian virtue. And therefore, it must be willing to accept its own excess. Christianity. A rejection of the political state, per se, along with its spirituality. The other side of that coin is the dilemma

that the Jew finds himself on today when he is hung up with something that hasn't happened to him in 2,000 years, and he has, at one and the same time, a political and spiritual state which is causing all kinds of internal agony. We also have our Exodus hang-up today. What is our religious state in a political institution? I don't know. Can Christianity really cross the bridge? And can Judaism cross the bridge in the world

today? And revitalize what you call the Exodus experience? Yeah, well, whether it can do this is one question, and whether it can remain Christianity if it doesn't is another question. Will Judaism remain Judaism? It's interesting. When Pat and I spoke here, he talked about the Elsho's experience, and he had talked about it in really the terms that you were speaking of. And Paul Ramsey was a discussant. And then Paul Ramsey got up afterward and said, we

are all Jews, in a sense. And we often looked at you and thought, you're a full professor at Princeton University. How could you talk in this way? It was really difficult. Something is bothering me, and it's a rather practical question. And I'm just hoping we can discuss this. We stated, or rather you stated, that the movement urges the Church to go out and venture into politics. In other words, have its Exodus. Now, my question is, what

kind of politics, and what kind of politics would be, let's say, Judeo-Christian politics? I'm using it very broadly. I hope you understand what I mean by that, without defining it too closely. Because I do see a case where people are doing just this, and many people are shocked and horrified. To give an example, to mention a name, which is close to this area, I believe it's the Reverend Carl McIntyre, went out and had a

pro-Vietnam peace march. And this is politics. He's going out of the Church and into actual political activism, and he's going out for, let's say, let's finish the job in Vietnam. Let's bomb the heck out of these people. Let's do something. In other words, he feels that it is the, let's say, the Judeo-Christian thing to do, to destroy communism and win in Vietnam. Now, when we go into politics, what umpires do we have? What guidelines do

we have? What is specifically Christian about politics? Now, I could go and march and bomb the heck out of Vietnam as, let's say, an Air Force officer. Not as a chaplain, not as a Jew, not as a Christian, not as anybody. But as, quote, as an American. What guidelines do we have? I mean, it's good to say, let's go out, but where are the guidelines? Oh, yes. In your work with Dulles, it turned out to be

characteristically, he was responding from an important political position. How is his response to Christian? Dower, I'm not far enough from your comment. You know, really, you're still searching. Well, now, the Exodus event, which is the kind of paradigm of the conversation, is one in which men experience resistance and rebellion to an appropriate power as at one and the same time the demand of God. Well, you see, then, let's take this one step further. You have, on

the one hand, Reverend Carl McIntyre, who has marched as a religious power in resistance against the secular state, which is not doing what he considers to be the will of God. We now have the Brothers Berrigan, who went into an establishment of the state, namely a draft, poured blood on the record. I think it was animal's blood, which I suppose, if I look into it subconsciously, this is a sacrifice of blood on these records. I mean,

we can go on to the Book of Leviticus and have a gay old time. These people are now being accused by, quote, an oppressive, unquote, state of planning to kidnap the Jewish advisor, which is ecumenicism at its highest. Take that as you will and blow up a couple of steam radiators in this cold Washington winter. Now, the question, therefore, is this. Where is God in all of this business? How should a person, a traditional person, whether

the Jewish persuasion or the Christian persuasion, look upon these two extreme examples of religionists going into politics? Where is God in this picture? How do we pick out God? I mean, it's all good and well to say, well, let's go out of our churches and let's do our political bag. But what political bag? And are we sure that this political bag is the voice of God? One of the difficulties, I think, here is our own institutional

bag. The fact that we're all members of churches and synagogues, maybe, as institutions, and institutions can't be wrong. They can't make wrong decisions, and they can't have different opinions. I can see, you know, not in the fact that we have different opinions, but how we differ. And I don't see that in a church. It's pretty common to say, well, what if the church makes a wrong decision? You know, and I think that's kind of, well, you

know, what if the church makes a wrong decision if it stands in one of the leaders? I think there's a lot of institution in that. I was thinking of Dostoevsky's, what was it, Karmazov, the grand position of when Jesus comes back. Right, right. This is what he was talking about. And the priest says, get out of here, you're ruining all business. We don't want Mendo one for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What would probably occur to me,

if the value, the utensil value that you were seeing in his Exodus function, or in his experience, does that then give a vested interest to the Christian to keep the Jew in that position? What do you mean by that position? Jew is radical? Well, I'm thinking about, your reference, I think it was Richard Rubenstein who quoted, that perhaps the reason the Jews are the one non-Christian religious group that survived through the Christian Middle Ages, because

it was important for the church to have Jews, but to have some Jews. There was sort of a theological necessity to keep the Jews in existence, but it was also a theological necessity for the Jews not to do too well, because part of their testimony was also the testimony of not doing terribly well. There might be a problem with it. This is a conflict, I think, within the Jewish community too. As we were talking about how

the suffering servant image of the Jew came from Christians, I began to think of all the current Jewish thinkers, mostly secular ones, I mean the novelists, the Jewish novelists, who characterized the Jew as the suffering servant. And I was beginning to wonder, gee, you know, what are the Jewish sources of thinking of the Jew as the suffering servant? Maybe it isn't really Jewish, maybe this has been imposed on us, and I'm really not sure. The Exodus

image that I've tried to project is not the image of the suffering servant. But isn't Exodus... It is an image of one who affirms his identity, despite pressure to relinquish it. And that's something, I think, quite different from the image of the suffering servant. I sort of built into it that to go into Exodus is to be in exile. I mean, to leave Egypt, they had to be not really integrated into the Egyptian society, or where

you want to leave. And it's to be an outsider to the Exodus. Well, there's confusion on that, because in Jewish tradition, as you all know, the Jews were accused on the one hand of being so close to Egyptian identity, on the one hand, that the first hardship in the desert, they said, take us back to the pickles. On the other hand, Jewish tradition of Egypt, or whatever it is, on the other hand, you have the other

idea that the reason the Jews retained their holy names, that is, their biblical ancestors over the two hundred and ten years or so, and didn't integrate or didn't assimilate, so we have the peculiar tension between the two. Basically, okay, they're in Egypt and they're not in Egypt, one foot in Egypt, but what makes them an exile is the other foot out of Egypt. The kind of tension you get in the contemporary Jewish community, which gets into

the Israel business, is at least for one large group of Jews, what Israel is about is we don't want to be the non-establishment anymore. We're kind of tired of being the non-establishment. When you get to the sort of thing where an American Jew makes a criticism of Israel, and then you get the Israeli response that says, what makes us different than anybody else? You don't get the same criticism. Well, I go back to the

demand for kingship. It's in fact your scripture, but it must be like all the nations. That desire itself is an ancient one, that resistance to the Exodus function in your turn. See, if I just clarify one point, it came up in your comment and also in Norbert, I hope that what I've said here doesn't happen at the seed of demanding that the Jew suffer on the Christian's behalf. It's important to have someone in the world offering

suffering resistance, and that might as well be the Jew, since it kind of relieves the Christian of that responsibility. What I think I'm saying is that I want to recognize the importance from a Christian perspective of the Jews being a Jew. Now, in many ways, I want to listen and I want to hear what that means, but it's really an emphasis from the Christian point of view of the importance of the Jews affirming Jewish identity. Okay,

but you see, the difficulty comes up in using the illustration or what you call a paradigm of Exodus. The Jew as a Jew can probably be better described in relation to halakhah, to law, to Torah, than the Exodus experience, because the Exodus experience has all kinds of problems of its own. There's a Catholic book called The God of Exodus, and he has an interesting comment. He says that the concept, now it's an open argument, but it

has some interesting points, that the content of God changed with the Exodus experience in his view. And I would agree with it, especially in view of Chapter 6 of Exodus, where Moses is now explaining that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob knew God as Shaddai, but not as Jehovah. It's an amazing paragraph as a result of maybe the Exodus experience So if you're talking about the Jew as a Jew and his role, his secondary role for the Christian

world, his first role is sui generis in himself, the second role, probably a better illustration, would be the role of law, the role of halakhah, the role of Torah. Now we may be on something really very important so far as the line that I took in this paper. I guess my assumption here in the paper, and it may just display my own Christian distortions of Jewish faith, my assumption is that in some important sense, the law

and the giving of the law is contained within what I'm calling the Exodus experience, whereas you were suggesting in a way that perhaps the law is independent of what I've called the Exodus experience. Well, it's the climax, but it's greater than the Exodus experience. Amos in Chapter 9 will refer to the fact, haven't they taken the Ethiopians out? What does it mean to say it's greater than the Exodus experience? Can it cancel the Exodus experience? No,

it didn't cancel, but it's the climax. It's the crown of it. Excuse me, which is the real you? You as a child or you as your maturity? Sinai is the maturity, so to speak. We call it the birthday of the Jewish people. The fact that there was an Exodus is the labor pains of being born. It's not the labor pains, it's those grounds we talked about. Why are you obligated under the covenant? It makes no sense

without the Exodus. The Exodus is the reason for it. But the covenant is. But the covenant is the Yatseret. The covenant is an integral of the national existence, but the theological existence depends on the Exodus. What? Yes. What are the two symbols that are constantly echoed in the liturgy of God's revelation? He created a memorial to the going out of Egypt. The experience of God is manifest in the historic life of the people. It's the theological

connection to the people. It is in the Exodus, the Exodus experience. Now, is Sinai a fragment of it or not, I don't know. But the liturgy rings consistently with the recitation of the Shema each day as a three paragraph. The third paragraph is included only because a man must not forget morning and evening that he went out of Egypt and the whole Passover service is the reenactment of the individual of that experience. You cannot recreate the

life of the individual with theophany in Sinai. But you can't ask the question. There is no individual with theophany in Judaism. It is the people. What? It is the community of the people. I don't know if the prophets would accept that. It's a chicken and egg question. It's like asking which is more important, the resurrection or crucifixion? The resurrection doesn't make any sense without crucifixion. All right, but now we have a good comparison because what Calvary

is in Christian, in the system of ideas, Sinai is for the Jew. Now if the first act was Sinai, No, no, no. Sinai is the resurrection. That's right, that's right. All right, let's take the tome. The central, the choric experience. But you must say it seems to me Sinai. Let me just say, you're quite right. There's reference in the daily liturgy and in the festivals to Egypt. You're going out to Egypt. But I think there are

two thrusts there. One is our complete obedience or our sense of obligation to God who is the master. And therefore we are not slaves to anyone but to God. The sense of complete obedience. And the second one is also a very practical one and that is to remind us that we were once slaves and ergo must be sensitive to all modern slavery. I think the two thrusts there have a kind of a horizontal and vertical relation.

One of these is God. I would argue with that. What I do argue with is the centrality of halacha, of law. Even in your statement, the role of law is minimal. By the way, I'm a Jewish legalist. But I understand that in terms of the exodus experience, as I understand it, the role of the legal framework is not central. Well, but here the speaker or the lecturer is giving us is looking for a new opening for

Jewish-Christian relations and he focuses on his paradigmatic one, namely the exodus, which for various interesting reasons is certainly contemporary and relevant in the sense of our political problems that was brought up. But the point I'm trying to suggest is that that is not as rich precisely because it's incomplete, precisely because one must say much more. Whereas on the other hand, a better opening might be, just as a suggestion, a better opening might be the concept

of justice and law and halacha and practice and actions rather than beliefs and dogmas and metaphysics. In that sense, in that sense, and I think men like Bonhoeffer and Cox have seen that, that that would be a better opening, or at least that would be a good opening for appreciating each other's contributions. I think I was assuming that the exodus experience might be used not as a substitute for the law, the importance of law in not

only the Jewish community but also the Christian community, but as something of a principle of interpretation, as a paradigm of orientation in the understanding and application of the law. It's not a question for me of either or, or one rather than the other. I regret very much I had to be awake, but I just wanted to put this into the mix in case somebody didn't mention it, to buttress the position that the exodus is not only

a theological conception, but it's so inextricably linked in with these conceptions that you're talking about, and how I have, because when you have about 130 of the 613 mitzvot that are absolutely the basis for it, is the yeti at the time, the exodus. 130 mitzvot, I mean explicitly stated, explicitly stated that you shall do this because of the remembrance of the exodus region. Now that's a very, very sizable component of justice, compassion, and relationships between men

and men that you have in the exodus. May I add one thought to this 100 to number 130 that we mentioned 613 mitzvot before. Many of the mitzvot which today are inoperative, such as sacrifices, certain laws dealing with land, certain laws dealing with, let's say, marriage of two wives at one and the same time, all of these are not zecheli et sief mitzrayim. And therefore those laws which are operative today, of the laws rather, the 613

which are operative today, the percentage of zecheli et sief mitzrayim, the memory of the exodus of Egypt, is a high percentage, a very high percentage. Right, right, right, sure. If you take out the component of the korbanot, the zecheli rises. And you see how this percentage rises. Now I want to add one thing though to buttress what Rabbi Richmond is saying. I mentioned before the idea of atzeret, that is shavuot, the holiday of the giving of

the laws, called the culmination, the binding up of the exodus. And I think that what we have here is this, that if in the exodus experience the Jewish people came to believe, let's say, in the one God, because the Bible says that then they believed in God, Yahweh, and Moses is served, belief, mere belief to Judaism, is something which hangs in the air. It has to be brought back down to earth to be made concretized, to

be made practical. And it was this Sinai experience through law which made the exodus something practical in the everyday life of the Jew. It's true that a modern Jew cannot, let's say, experience the affinity of Sinai. I want to debate that, but I think it takes too far. We can't experience the exodus. But the question is, how do we experience the exodus? According to our tradition, it is through Sinai, namely through the observance of the law,

that we experience the exodus every day. Which is law. Yah, which is law. The very word Seder means order. In other words, freedom, without order, without law, becomes license and anarchy and chaos. His father had a statement in the Haqqada that was edited by Maurice Samuel, the introduction that Dr. Finkielstein had, liberty without license. He makes a reference to that, kind of the inside of the exodus. As an example, I, as a Christian, don't even believe

I can understand the Jewish people if I understand their birth. I understand their birth being back there when they cried out to God before Moses came down, in a sense. But if there's no Passover and exodus experience in the life of Israel as a people, then I can understand who the people are. Because to me, they're just like any other people who just set up a pact and start to follow, rather than responding to something they

experience. In other words, I feel the experience of that birth is all included from the Passover on, at least, and that this is all considered part of the life. And I think that's why Christian theologians, and I notice Christian theologians almost unanimously go back to exodus as an essential experience for Judaism. Whenever they try to talk about it, they always go back to it. And yet, last night, what I was hearing, when you introduced in your

paper what we were hearing, what I was hearing is the assignment essential. As we were actually talking about, Judaism on a fragile basis. And maybe we have to discuss where the real grounds are, where we start to dive on it. It's interesting that Carl, you mentioned, excuse me. Go ahead. But Carl Kalsky also picked up, in the purpose of exodus, in his argument with Shami, and for him. And then it's interesting that you mentioned Block, who

would be certainly a good follower. But from a political or even a sociological point of view, the people may be set to have begun, from this way of looking at the world, at exodus, at, you know, coming out of Egypt. But we're really writing a history in this materialistic sense. Isn't there more to it? I mean, even in the Jewish tradition fields, for example, in almost a tortured way, it has to attribute many things to Abraham,

Isaac, and Jacob, even before exodus, like the order of the services. I don't think some of it is forced rationalization. But the attempt has always been to make it a, you know, it was there from the revelation, the personal revelation given to Abraham, or the series of covenants of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and Moses. And there's a whole series, but they're all of the same cloth. In other words, this one experience is not a sub

-disruption of history. There is a total package here, although the culmination is Sinai. But it isn't that this one experience... See, what you're doing, I think, is just as you view Jesus in some circles as the intrusion of history, there's a bolt out of the blue that disrupted the natural order of events and changed history. You're making a kind of a Christ-like intrusion out of the exodus thing. It's also a bolt out of the blue.

Whereas other people would argue, no. Other people would argue, there was, you know, God's revelation came in a continuity with a high point, with a mountain top. With Adam on it. Right, right, right. And then to Noah, I don't quite feel that there was that sort of bolt-like, blue intrusion of Jesus. Well, the reference is really a quotation. As being a continuum of a Jewish experience, just as the Sinai represents a continuum of the human

experience with a particular intrusion in Jewish life. But still, on the continuum, I think there's a little bit of this in my presentation. On the continuum, this event has a kind of paradigmatic significance and importance. I don't like the language of bolt out of the blue either with reference to exodus or to Jesus. But that there is a new departure here. And that, as one might put it, there is originating or creating revelation here. That, I

think, is involved in my presentation. I think the Jewish tradition itself, even if it has several different accents, its main voice from within the Benedict itself, makes clear that this exodus event, initiated with exodus, even granting that there's some advanced information and big figurements with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but still that dual event, the twin event of exodus and Sinai, is considered to be an incursion in history and a unique thing. And I mean, after how

Geronimo looks back and then speaks about exodus, did this ever happen before that God would take a foresonation from another, or I spoke from you from heaven, and I came down, and all that. I think there's more in the main line of tradition for that, but I would like to ask you about one other problem. My problem about your exodus paradigm isn't what other men have developed, because I'd probably like to go along with it almost

completely, but my problem is slightly different, but in one sense trivial, in one sense questioning the suitability of the whole term, exodus paradigm, because as you developed it, this was a pattern of resistance, a paradigm of resistance against the power of the state and accepting it and so on. But in terms of the tradition itself, in terms certainly of biblical tradition, isn't the emphasis on what God has done for the people, and it's almost an imposed

exodus in a sense, an imposed defiance of Pharaoh on the part of God with Moses sent to do it, and Moses resists at the beginning, but certainly the people do. They don't listen at first, and when they go, it's almost just momentarily that they can follow Moses the day before the sea and after the sea, and as I mentioned, I want to go back, so that granted, your main thesis as far as that which is supposed

to be a central characteristic of Judaism and its value also from the Christian perspective, I question the suitability of the exodus, the term exodus or that event as best exemplify this notion of resistance to or defying the power of the government or challenging in the name of God any would-be God and so on, because it seems to me that the exodus itself, as far as the people's concern, is much more passive than the rest of

your whole thesis. But the point is not that Israel chooses to be chosen, but that Israel is chosen. There's another thing, if I may interrupt, may I strike a blow for women's liberation? Oh, by all means, you've got to get that in. If you remember in the Bible the first people to actively resist Pharaoh were the two midwives when he ordered a policy of genocide, the Bible says right off, these people fear, these two women fear

God, they did not obey Pharaoh, and because of this God made for them houses, whatever that term happens to mean. And I do feel that there is a resistance here, and I do feel that the very fact that the Bible does speak of the resistance on the part of women, by the way, shows that there must have been far, far more resistance than the Bible sort of speaks about, because remember one thing, the Bible is trying

to demonstrate that this exodus was not a human act at all. Samson Raphael Hirsch, no, no, no, that's the point. Now the point is the Medrish cures this a little bit by stating what was the greatest resistance of the Jews. One resistance was they maintained their family lives in tact, they did not succumb to the sexual immorals of the Egyptians, they maintained their Hebrew names in tact, namely they did not swallow the Egyptian culture hook, because

if we take the idea of name, as it was meant in those days, it meant the essence, they did not follow the Egyptian culture. You said we have an embarrassment for the name Moses. Well, no, you see, again, I'm speaking from the point of view of Christian, I mean, if you want to get killed with Moses, I'll give you a better one. But I think that our organization was in terms of Scripture. Yes, well, again. He

probably knew these interactions, but let's assume for the purpose of the paper they didn't. But you see, still to my way of thinking, the Scripture has an axe to grind here, and this axe was picked up by Samson Raphael Hirsch perfectly in his commentary on it, where he states that this is to demonstrate that Moses couldn't do a thing by himself. His first attempt by himself ends in disaster, the people criticize him, he cries out to

God, what are you sending him for? The moment I came here, things went from bad to worse. And God says, okay, now the fun is going to begin, now I'm going to give the ten plagues. Now, if we stick to Scripture, the ten plagues were given by God, and that's all there's to it. But as people living in the 20th century, and even going back to the rabbinic traditions, we see that the rabbis didn't take it

literally. They said there must have been some rhyme and reason, there must have been some reality here, and it was a war. And they give one explanation, they give many other explanations. And the point is that we can't, let's put it this way, I personally, and I think we made this point last night, we're not literalists, we're not fundamentalists. And if we are literalists and we are fundamentalists, then I think we're torpedoed from the very word

go, because the Jews were backsliding, God did force it on them. But I think we have to look at the Bible here with a, going one step further than the actual text, and that I do believe that there was a basis upon which to build the resistance. The very tradition tells us that because of two mitzvahs, God took the Jews out of Egypt, the mitzvah of the Missusa, smearing the blood on the doorposts and the mitzvah

of the Paschal land. And the very fact that they observed the Paschal land shows a great resistance to the idolatry. They took their lives in their hands. Take a look, for instance, in modern India, the idea of, let's say, a Hindu, not a Hindu, a Muslim trying to kill a cow in Hindu territory. You get killed. This is what the Bible, the rabbis explain as this sacrifice here. So there was this resistance. And we cannot be

literalistic about the Bible. We must use the Bible, whether it's rabbinic commentaries or modern commentaries. But literalism is a term you can use to dispose of a problem. I think the main thrust of scripture, not just the literal detail, certainly puts much more stress on God's act, and really is a very reluctant acceptance. I think Karl Lansky maybe went over and said, Well, I certainly agree with what you're saying, Rabbi Matt, but you sound just a

little bit like a Barthian Christian in emphasizing the transcendence of God in this act to the exclusion of human response. Now, to be sure, I think the emphasis in my paper was on the response dimension of the Exodus experience. And I would have the problem that Norbert was developing for us last evening of trying to show how, as a believer, one is concerned not simply with this response as moral response, but also as religious response. And

that's the genius of the Exodus experience, that as a moral response, as an expression of concern for justice and freedom, it is at the same time a religious response. This is understood to be a response to a divine promise and a divine command. So I don't want to separate these things. There'll be an accent upon it. I don't want to go over by it, and I don't want to separate too much, but somehow to take what

seems to be, in terms of scripture, a much greater emphasis on not only God's initiative in the sense of calling Moses, let's say, from the bush, but continued pressure upon him. And then certainly as far as the people, God's mighty act, which I'll refer to again and celebrate after the fact too, and to make that the vehicle for stressing the main piece of your paper, namely the response, the resistance by people to establishment and status quo

and the power to be, somehow seems inappropriate. Why? I'm not sure why. Unless, well, what I'm afraid of is that when the emphasis upon the mighty act of God and the response of the people expressing themselves in resistance to unjust power are split apart, you have precisely what happened in the Christian tradition, a spiritualization of the event. I'm so excited about your whole thesis, but I don't see how the structure and the emphasis in the biblical

account, leaving aside the later account, can carry all that, because granted there has to be some response on the part of Israel, if they went forth, though the Bible itself and the rabbinic tradition too talk plenty about Israel's reluctance almost at each step of the game, but granted that there had to be a response and therefore you could say, even if under pressure they finally stepped forward and stepped into the sea, et cetera, that's not to

be neglected. And in fact, I could even say it's very significant, but somehow to say that therefore let's turn to the account of Exodus as the paradigm for bombing when we got low and never to the state, seems to me to make it bear too heavy a burden. I won't argue the point further, but that's why I felt it was somewhat inappropriate, but in a sense, though you might say that's a critical critique of your central

thesis, just in terms of appropriateness of that imagery, but not a critique at all of the main point of your paper, the thesis itself, except for the name, so to say. I think it can be definitive. The impression I get in reading that whole Exodus account there is that God has a show he wants to perform, he has this thing he wants to do, and everyone really is against it. And so if Moses tries something on

himself, but that can't work out because it doesn't fit into what God wants to do. And then Moses, when he hasn't succeeded, he's had enough of it, and God makes sure it's him to carry out his role. And Israel doesn't want to play his part. But Pharaoh, too, doesn't really want to play his part. There's this real resistance on Pharaoh's part against being such an S.O.B. And there's even points in the account where he

says, let him go already, let him go, it's not worth keeping him. And then Pharaoh says, okay, I'll let him go. And then in the middle of the sentence he says, no, no, I'm not going to let him go. And that's God saying, you know, I'll make sure he doesn't let him go because I got another miracle I want to do. So he can't let them go. That's my motto. He's in the heart and into the

heart. Yeah, right. Now, it seems to me, though, that the point of it all is if one takes being chosen to be an exile or an Exodus people, you have to be a masochist to choose such a role. No one in his right mind would choose to be in such a role. And maybe that's part of the resistance to that. But the point is not that anyone chooses to be in such a role, but God chooses

them to be in such a role. Right, right. Think of the Mormons. Think of the Mormons. And then there I see a fascinating parallel. So they're good. Right. They actually showed the role. You know, masochist, this is your body judgment. And they have succeeded. Well, I assume their goal, I don't know if they were going to church, but I assume their goal was to eventually find a place where they aren't an exile. And for them to

choose a place not to be an exile. I don't quite see how the thing of masochism comes in here. When one is interested in assessing the moral quality of a particular act, does one allow oneself to get all caught up in the question of how that individual felt as he did what he did? I mean, so that if he had some hesitations and some reluctance in doing what he did, it's not really the kind of moral

act that we hoped it would have been? I think you get into a jungle of problems here when the factors of reluctance or hesitation or fear are somehow allowed to cancel out the moral quality of the acts being done when it needed to be done and how it needed to be done. I want to cancel out the moral qualities of this. I'll get to that in the afternoon. But maybe perhaps the reason you have the impression

from that that it entails the canceling out the moral value of the act is maybe a moral assumption that moral value lies in one's intention rather than the act itself. In other words, if a person does a good deed but does it against his will, he really didn't want to do it, then somehow he didn't do a good deed. I don't think that's really quite so. I think another curtain is the case of a Jeremiah who's

doing the right thing. You know, God says you've got to condemn Israel. He's condemning Israel. God tells him he can't help but do the right thing. But he doesn't want to do that. And boy, anybody who would want to do that would be something wrong with him. I mean, his family hates him. Everybody hates him. Nobody wants anything. People want to be liked by people. People want to be accepted by people. Now, he doesn't anyway. He

can certainly choose to do the right thing, but no one's going to choose to be an outsider. Maybe doing the right thing is more important than being on the inside. That's right. But who wants to choose to be the one everybody doubts on? We have maybe two more, then we've got to quit because it's a time. And I want us to get over to lunch and be there so when the students come, you'll be there. I

hope this isn't a ringer that destroys the conversation. I wanted to ask Dr. Gliore. What I hear you saying in terms of today, and maybe not hearing well, is there is anti-Semitism today, modern anti-Semitism signaled by the Nazi heritage that's still existing. And for me, I wonder why there isn't anti-Gentiles or anti-Christianity. I think this is a question you're asking about the establishment of modern Christianity. What types of, and I think the

Jewish community, I think, as having been much more political, what type of sharing sort of in an exodus with Jews can Christianity do that would produce this break from the establishment? How do we share in a modern exodus experience with them in a real way? Well, the immediate response is to find oneself in collaboration with others in causes of justice, fight against racial discrimination, and so forth. But it doesn't mean you stay in Egypt to find

it out. Pardon me? But it doesn't mean you stay in Egypt to find it out. So you see our ballgame is a new game? I've got a terrible thought if we hadn't left Egypt, just if, and stayed there and organized according to your name and concern. We wouldn't have had the problem today, right? They thought they could leave Egypt. See, what they did now with them, they left Egypt because they wanted another part of Egypt. Well,

we are adjourned, friends, and we'll be back at 3 o'clock. It's been great. Thank you. I'm afraid I can't. I wish I could. I'm glad to see you're involved.