“The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” Theologian R. Kendall Soulen joins Drew Collins to discuss supersessionism, the name of God (tetragrammaton), the irrevocable covenant between God and the Jews, and the enduring significance of Judaism for Christian theology. Together they explore religious and ethnic heritage, cultural identity, community, covenant, interfaith dialogue, and the ongoing implications for Christian theology and practice. They also reflect on how the Holocaust forced Christians to confront theological assumptions, how Vatican II and subsequent church statements reshaped doctrine, and why the gifts and calling of God remain irrevocable. Soulen challenges traditional readings of Scripture that erase Israel, insisting instead on a post-supersessionist framework where Jews and Gentiles bear distinct but inseparable witness to God’s faithfulness. Image Credit Marc Chagall, ”Moses with the Burning Bush”, 1966 Episode Highlights * “The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” * “Supersessionism is the Christian belief that the Jews are no longer God’s people.” * “The Lord is God—those words preserve God’s identity and resist erasure.” * “Israel sinned. They are still Israel. That identity is irrevocable.” * “The gospel doesn’t erase the distinction between Jews and Gentiles; it reconfigures it.” About R. Kendall Soulen R. Kendall Soulen is Professor of Systematic Theology at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. A leading voice in post-supersessionist Christian theology, he has written extensively on the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, including The God of Israel and Christian Theology and Irrevocable: The Name of God and the Christian Bible. Helpful Links and Resources * R. Kendall Soulen, Irrevocable: The Name of God and the Christian Bible — [https://www.amazon.com/Irrevocable-Name-Unity-Christian-Bible/dp/B0DNWGYYK5](https://www.amazon.com/Irrevocable-Name-Unity-Christian-Bible/dp/B0DNWGYYK5) * R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology — [https://www.amazon.com/God-Israel-Christian-Theology/dp/0800628837](https://www.amazon.com/God-Israel-Christian-Theology/dp/0800628837) * Vatican II, Nostra Aetate — [https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html](https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html) * Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel — [https://www.amazon.com/Body-Faith-God-People-Israel/dp/1568219105](https://www.amazon.com/Body-Faith-God-People-Israel/dp/1568219105) * Drew Collins, The Unique and Universal Christ — [https://www.baylorpress.com/9781481315494/the-unique-and-universal-christ/](https://www.baylorpress.com/9781481315494/the-unique-and-universal-christ/) Show Notes * R. Kendall Soulen’s formative encounters with Judaism at Yale and influence of Hans Frei and Michael Wyschogrod * Romans 9–11 as central to understanding Christianity’s relationship with Judaism * Supersessionism defined as denying Israel’s ongoing covenant with God * Impact of the Holocaust and World War II on Christian theology * Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate affirming God’s covenant with Israel remains intact * Over a billion Christians now belong to churches rejecting supersessionism * Soulen’s early work The God of Israel and Christian Theology diagnosing supersessionism in canonical narrative * Discovery of the divine name’s centrality in Scripture and its neglect in Christian interpretation * Jesus’s reverence for God’s name shaping Christian prayer and theology * Proper names as resistance to instrumentalization and fungibility * Jewish and Gentile identities as distinct yet united in Christ * Dialogue with Judaism as essential for Christian self-understanding * Post-supersessionist theology reshaping interfaith relations and Christian identity * Implications for law observance, Christian Seders, and Jewish-Gentile church life * Abrahamic faiths and typology: getting Christianity and Judaism right as foundation for interreligious dialogue Production Notes * This episode was made possible by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation * This podcast featured R. Kendall Soulen * Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa * Hosted by Evan Rosa * Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow and Emily Brookfield * A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School [https://faith.yale.edu/about](https://faith.yale.edu/about) * Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: [https://faith.yale.edu/give](https://faith.yale.edu/give)
“The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” Theologian R. Kendall Soulen joins Drew Collins to discuss supersessionism, the name of God (tetragrammaton), the irrevocable covenant between God and the Jews, and the enduring significance of Judaism for Christian theology.
Together they explore religious and ethnic heritage, cultural identity, community, covenant, interfaith dialogue, and the ongoing implications for Christian theology and practice.
They also reflect on how the Holocaust forced Christians to confront theological assumptions, how Vatican II and subsequent church statements reshaped doctrine, and why the gifts and calling of God remain irrevocable. Soulen challenges traditional readings of Scripture that erase Israel, insisting instead on a post-supersessionist framework where Jews and Gentiles bear distinct but inseparable witness to God’s faithfulness.
Image Credit: Marc Chagall, ”Moses with the Burning Bush”, 1966
Episode Highlights
About R. Kendall Soulen
R. Kendall Soulen is Professor of Systematic Theology at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. A leading voice in post-supersessionist Christian theology, he has written extensively on the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, including The God of Israel and Christian Theology and Irrevocable: The Name of God and the Christian Bible.
Helpful Links and Resources
Show Notes
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: Coming soon to For the Life of the World: Solo, a new podcast series.
Macie Bridge: Are you afraid of being alone? We've been told we are living within an epidemic of loneliness of the era, has seen the age of loneliness approaches rapidly. If you didn't see it coming, you're not alone. This worldwide phenomenon has crept up on us rather silently.
And now it's here. I'm Macie Bridge, and starting October 15th, I'll be hosting a six episode series on solitude, loneliness, isolation, and other dimensions of being alone. It's nearly inevitable that we will all fly solo in some capacity at some point in our lives. And is the problem really the condition of being alone or are solitude and loneliness?
Two very different beasts. In this series, I'm asking the questions, in what ways are loneliness and solitude presenting themselves in our current time? How have Christians historically approached these experiences and what questions should we as contemporary people of faith be asking of our own solitude and loneliness for ourselves and for each other?
I'm joined in these episodes by author and environmentalist, Laura Marris, sociologist Felicia Song, medievallist, Hetta Howes and medical doctor, Lydia Dugdale, and our very own Miroslav Volf. Each bring a rich and nuanced perspective to what is occurring in our world and how we might respond in faith. So whether you're flying solo now or not, these questions are worth asking for the sake of our shared humanity.
And if you're like me, you might even come away with some new convictions and ideas. So I hope you'll join me on October 15th and listen in as we all go solo.
Evan Rosa: This episode was made possible in part by the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit Tyndale Foundation
From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture.
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R. Kendall Soulen: The question I think that we can ask is, do Christians agree or disagree with the Jewish claim that the Jewish people have a special calling before God? And generalizing, you can find exceptions, but the dominant answer for most of Christian history is the Jews did have a special calling. They no longer do have a special calling.
And so the answer to the question is, no. Jews no longer have any special status or calling before God. And that statement, you know when Christians say Jews no longer have a special status before God, they're covenant is a null. They're covenant is revoked, they forfeited it. Whatever verb you want to use.
That's how I would define Supersessionism. It's the Christian belief that the Jews are no longer God's people. Now, some Jews say. We're no longer God's people. You know, atheist, agnostic Jews. Plenty of Jews hold that view. I wouldn't call that supersessionism. But when Christians say it as part of their belief system, then that's a Christian belief.
And the Second World War, the Holocaust occasion of process of reflection. And one of the landmark events in that reflection, second Vatican Council, was the Roman Catholic. Church affirming that the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable and that God has not abandoned the promises he made. Um, that was really a turning point and it addressed that issue of supersessionism and it created the possibility of what I think you can call a post secessionist Christian point of view.
Like a lot of other Christians I'd overlooked the dimension of the New Testament that. I came to think was really, really, really, really important. And that dimension of the New Testament is the deep reverence it has for the personal proper name of God. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Those words in the Lord's Prayer are not window dressing.
It's the theme, the glory of God's name. And so to use a multisyllabic theological word, God, it's name is not just a figure of speech, it's the holy te Raman, which comes from Greek word meaning four letters, but Yod, Hey, Vahe represent in Hebrew the personal proper name of God that in Jewish tradition and in Christian tradition in the New Testament is not.
Pronounced and I began to realize one of the reasons the traditional reading of the Bible skewed in a super secessionist direction was because it was overlooking this way of identifying who God is and how God acts and who Jesus is, and that once that dimension focused in the name of God is brought back into the picture and given the weight that it deserves.
The traditional reading of the Bible pushes against supersessionism because really what's at stake is a question of the identity of God. Is God true to God's self and God's promises? That's the way Paul frames the issue. The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.
The Roman Catholic Thomist tradition has a wonderful saying. Grace does not destroy, but perfects nature. And I would say that the grace of the gospel doesn't destroy but elevates and reconfigures the grace of being Jews and Gentiles.
Evan Rosa: Has the church replaced Israel as God's chosen people? The fancy theological word for this would be supersessionism. The view that the Christian Church has superseded, literally has sat upon the children of Israel as God's covenant people. Now, this is a question of the relationship between Jew and Gentile, which is present very immediately.
In the gospel context of Jesus life and teaching and on into the acts of the apostles and the writings of Paul and Peter, but asking the question, has the church replaced Israel as God's chosen people? It stirs up a deep and chilling awareness of the real world stakes that it has. When he reported on the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue, shooting, my friend a neighbor, Mark Oppenheimer, himself a practicing Jew, noted the heaviness.
Required to confront the ubiquity of low level antisemitism that pervades the United States. That's just one case, of course. Examples number the stars, the Jewish French historian Jules Isaac suggested in a 1964 book The Teaching of Contempt Christian Roots of Antisemitism, that the consistent violence, hatred and antisemitism chronicled for centuries springs from the church's original resentment and blame of the Jews for deicide for killing Christ.
This he says, led to a repeating pattern of contempt and vilification near constant efforts to exterminate and annihilate the Jews, the kind of hereditary pattern that made the holocaust possible. Jules Isaac was responding to the Holocaust and was in fact instrumental in the Second Vatican Council and the 1965 Papal Declaration of Nostra A at Thate Latin for.
In our time, which helped to redefine the church's relationship to the Jewish people, Muslims, and other world religions. And so the question of whether the church has superseded the children of Israel as God's chosen people, I should give every Christian pause to reflect on the theological and moral and emotional and psychological dimensions of antisemitism.
The fact is Supersessionism has been held by numerous Christian theologians for a long time. It's a dominant position, and for centuries it simply went unquestioned. The list of Supersessionism includes Justin Martyr and Augustine from the early church reformer, Martin Luther, who had much worse to say about the Jews and many in the Eastern Orthodox tradition.
So what does it say that Supersessionism is one of the relatively few things that opposing Christian denominations can agree on today? Drew Collins welcomes theologian, Kendall Soulen of Candler School of Theology at Emory University for a discussion of the irrevocable gifts and calling of God. What the divine name, the teragram on sometimes represented as Yahweh or alls Lord, what that has to do with supersessionism and ultimately a hopeful theological perspective on the God who keeps his promises.
Thanks for listening,
Drew Collins: Kendall. Hey, drew, it is so good to be with you. I'm so happy we found the chance to do this. Always a pleasure to see you. Yeah, likewise. I encountered your work as I was trying to answer some questions about my own biography and my faith. I, my mother is Jewish, my father is Christian, and the, the status, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity has been a long and complicated point in my own spiritual and biographical sort of understanding and mercifully, as part of this process of self understanding, I encountered your work and it has been hugely helpful.
So, before we go anywhere else, I just wanna say thank you. Wow. That you can't ask for more than that. So thank you for sharing that. No, I really genuinely, I genuinely mean it. It's been completely important. And, but I was wondering if I could invite you to just share a little bit about how you understand your engagement into this, in this topic.
R. Kendall Soulen: Yeah. Well, let me also start at the personal level. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and I had, apart from one Jewish family. Didn't really know Jews. But that changed when I got to college. And I went to Yale as an undergraduate and one of my dear college roommates was an observant Jew, Sam Fleisch hacker.
And we remain in touch to this day. We email, but we were both a bit of oddballs 'cause we were both theologically interested Christians and Jews. And, and the thing was that Sam had thought a lot more about Christianity than I had thought about Judaism. And the reason is, I think simply that he was a minority in a predominantly Christian world.
So having to think a little bit about it. But for me it was, it was a novelty. And I think the seed got planted at that time. Subsequently too, I just happened to come under the influence of wonderful human being. Hans f Fry, who was born in 1922 in Breslow and his family barely escaped Germany in time. So there's a long, wonderful story.
But Hans was. Became a Christian theologian, but very aware of his own Jewish identity and the issues that touched on the relationship of Christianity and Judaism. So in time, that became a, a topic, and the way I got into that was through reading the Bible and in particular the letter to Romans. And then within the letter to Romans, Romans nine to 11.
And I didn't go saying, Hey, I, I wanna focus on the relationship of Jews and Gentiles, Christ and Judaism. But simply as a result of reading that, and I read it with another wonderful teacher, Wayne Meeks, I began to realize that was just a thorny part of the letter, a fascinating part of the letter. And I kept coming back to it.
And then in graduate school we focused on it again. And so I think you could say that there was just an accumulation of. Nudgings that pointed me in that direction. And eventually I began to realize this is a really important issue, how Christians understand their relationship to Jews. Second World War is just not that far apart.
You know, the two people who influenced me so much barely escaped with their lives and their families. So many people didn't. Um, my dad studied in Germany. I had studied in Germany, I'd been to the camps. So those questions just shaped the theological work. Landscape for me. Yeah.
Drew Collins: Yeah. It's, I, in World War ii, in the aftermath, feel like a real watershed moment in the Christian sort of discussions and imaginations of the relationship to Judaism.
There's this profound change, sort of before the war and afterwards, and I, I take it that your work is inspired by that change and trying to, to understand that change. I wonder if you could talk a little bit, help, invite, help our listeners to understand that paradigm shift. Yeah. So I think you're
R. Kendall Soulen: correct.
I wouldn't say that the Holocaust in World War II themselves were the cause of the changes, but what you can say is they were the cause that made Christian step back and reexamine how they had been thinking and talking. It was the, the crisis, the catastrophe that required dramatic reassessment and. The word that gets used, and I think in, in, in general, circulation, popular culture, the news is antisemitism for many reasons.
That's not exactly frequently the key word from the specifically Christian point of view. For example, uh, antisemitism often identifies a hatred of Jews. Yes. But it's grounded in their ethnicity, their race, some immutable characteristic. Now, that doesn't apply to a figure like Martin Luther. Martin Luther, sadly, towards the end of his life, wrote terribly dreadful things about the Jewish people, but the reason wasn't because of their ethnicity.
The reason because was because they, they wouldn't accept the gospel. So if Jews had accepted the gospel, Luther would've had no more problem with them. Whereas in the 19th and 20th century, the the National Socialists and those who were not national socialists, but were also promoting philosophical, economical, cultural views that targeted Jews as a problem.
The problem is not what they believe, it's who they are. It's their ethnicity. It's their culture. It's inbred. It's in the bone. It's in the blood. So baptism doesn't change any of that. So the issue is not so much antisemitism as what is the teaching that Christians took for granted before the Second World War that led them to be so easily led astray by the Jew hatred that took over Europe.
And I think the way I boil that down is in terms of a simple question. Most people who are have any familiar at all with Judaism would understand that whether you're a liberal Jew, reconstruction, conservative, Orthodox Judaism affirms that the Jewish people have a special calling before God doesn't make them better, but it does give them a special responsibility.
And the question I think that we can ask is, do Christians agree or disagree with the Jewish claim that the Jewish people have a special calling before God? And generalizing, you can find exceptions, but the dominant answer for most of Christian history is the Jews did have a special calling. They no longer do have a special calling.
And so the answer to the question is no. Jews no longer have any special status or calling before God. And that statement. You know, when Christians say Jews no longer have a special status before God, their covenant is a null, their covenant is revoked, they forfeited it. Whatever verb you want to use, that's how I would define Supersessionism.
It's the Christian belief that the Jews are no longer God's people. Now, some Jews say we're no longer God's people. You know, atheist, agnostic Jews, plenty of Jews hold that, but I wouldn't call that supersessionism. But when Christians say it as part of their belief system, then that's a Christian belief.
And the Second World War, the Holocaust, occasioned a process of reflection. And one of the landmark events in that reflection, second Vatican Council, was the Roman Catholic Church affirming that the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable and that God has not abandoned the promises he made. That was really a turning point and it addressed that issue of Supersessionism and it created the possibility of what I think you can call a post supersessionism Christian point of view.
And that's, and we've been building on that. I'm not Roman Catholic, I'm United Methodist. But that, um, statement in no strate from Vatican Council was echoed, in other words. And where did Second Vatican council get that from Romans nine through 11? From Paul, from reading that those chapters and the World Council of Churches as issued a similar statement in the 1970, the Presbyterian Church, USA, so if you, and then a number of other denominations, United Methodist, Lutheran churches in Germany, the Church of the Rhineland.
So that if you'd, if you simply go by the numbers, you know, add those other denominations to the Roman Catholics, over a billion Christians. The world today belong to churches that officially teach. We agree with the Jews, God's covenant with them remains intact. Now, all the consequences that flow from that, that still has to be clarified.
But that core affirmation is where we've changed and our, our self understanding has become more consistent with Jewish self
Drew Collins: understanding. Yeah, and there's something really interesting in the sort of the path you just described, which is in response to these ecclesial declarations and pronouncements, it strikes me very few congregations are either aware of these pronouncements, they don't have very much bearing on their day-to-day lives, but that the, the statements themselves admit more explanation and understanding of the basis on which, however strong the appeal to Romans nine through 11.
There's still a lot more to say about why Supersessionism, why this, this historical, longstanding attitude towards the church needs to be rejected. Yeah.
R. Kendall Soulen: So it is true that statements from above can only accomplish so much. And it's true that a lot of these issues, the life in local churches is a, is always kind of always starting from the beginning again.
But at the same time, when you think about how many hundreds of partnerships there are between synagogues and congregations and relationships between rabbis and ministers, and how many conversations take place, we're in a different place than we were a hundred years ago, and the conversations start from a different place and go to a different place.
And so yes, so I would say that the glass is half full rather than half empty. There's not just the statements, but. One of the key questions, you know what? It seems to me that has to happen? What for any doctrine, doctrines tend to be fairly economical in what they affirm. They don't go on in large detail.
And whether they actually play a role in a person's life or a church's life is gonna depend on how deeply are they integrated in the way you actually read the Bible. So if you have a doctrine of the Trinity on the books, but it doesn't actually inform the way you ever read the Bible, then it's not gonna do much.
And I think that was the question that I tried to answer in my first book on the on Supersessionism was called The God of Israel and Christian Theology. My question was this, I said, okay, church Christians have gone on record saying God's covenant with the Jews is. Not something that God's gone back on.
Even those Jews who don't confess Christ remain part of a relationship that God honors. What consequences does that have for how we traditionally read the Bible? Can we incorporate this in teaching into the way we traditionally read the Bible? And my argument in that book was that as a matter of fact, the super secessionist point of view was so deeply embedded in the way we traditionally read the Bible.
And that was part of what the book tried to show, that when we think about the Bible in terms of creation in Genesis one fall and Genesis three redemption in Christ in the New Testament, new Heaven and new Earth. In the Book of Revelation, part of the way that all gets put together is that we are in a process of reading Israel and the Jewish people out of the picture.
And so I argued that we really needed. This is a little embarrassing to think back on, but I basically said we need to find a whole new, what I called canonical narrative, a new framework for understanding the Bible is unity. And I wanted to propose a framework that was Christian centered in Christ, but that was not super secessionist, that didn't feed the idea of the obsolescence of the Jewish people.
So the book tried to do those two things and um, I think it did the first better than it did the second. In other words, it diagnosed the problem better than it proposed a solution. So I think that my analysis of how the traditional canonical narratives goes wrong with stronger than my proposal for what to take its place, many people reviewed the book and along those lines.
So I was happy, but I myself became dissatisfied with my answer. I realized that there. Were things in my account of the Christian story that I had left out. I'd left out a doctor in the Trinity. I had Christology. Those are bigger missions. But I also realized that like a lot of other Christians I'd overlooked the dimension of the New Testament that I came to think was really, really, really, really important.
And that dimension of the New Testament is the, the deep reverence it has for the personal proper name of God. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Those words in the Lord's Prayer are not window dressing. It's the theme, the glory of God's name. And so to use a multisyllabic theological word, God's name is not just a figure of speech, it's the holy te Raman, which comes from Greek word meaning four letters.
But yo, hey, Vahe represent in Hebrew. The personal proper name of God that in Jewish tradition and in Christian tradition in the New Testament is not pronounced. And I began to read the Bible and reading lots and lots of New Testament scholars and Old Testament scholars, and I began to realize one of the reasons the traditional reading of the Bible skewed in a super secessionist direction was because it was overlooking this way of identifying who God is and how God acts and who Jesus is.
And that once that dimension focused in the name of God is brought back into the picture and given the weight that it deserves. The traditional reading of the Bible pushes against supersessionism because really what's at stake is a question of the identity of God. Is God true to God's self and God's promises?
That's the way Paul frames the issue. The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. That's the way it is framed in the prophets. Ezekiel, I, I won't do it for your sake, but I'll do it for my namesake. And this emphasis on God's identity and, and God's fidelity to God's own integrity as represented by God's name, changed the way I read it and made me think.
The traditional canonical narrative doesn't have to be super secessionist. It can be post supersessionism. And so this more recent book that I wrote called Irrevocable the Name of God in the Christian Bible. Is an attempt to show exactly how paying more attention to a really central feature of the Bible changes the way, I think, makes the reading of the Bible more rich, but also gives us lots of insulation against a tendency towards supersessionism.
Drew Collins: Yeah. Yes. And I'd like to dig in there, there's, there are two really fascinating, but distinct prongs of your argument, but there's an element of your argument that is oriented on the person and practice of Jesus. And then there's the other side of it is Paul's letter to the Romans, especially in chapters nine through 11.
And so I was wondering if you could share a little bit about how you see the reverence for the divine name. Mm-hmm. Um, vis-a-vis Jesus, his identity and the way he, his his enacted the narration of his enactment in ministry in the gospels. And then after that, a little bit more, if you could help us to understand what is going on in in Romans nine through 11.
R. Kendall Soulen: So turning to Jesus, let's actually go back to the burning bush because it can help to clarify what we mean when we're talking about God's name. So many, we remember the story of the burning bush. Moses take off your sandals, and Moses was a little skittish about the idea of going and says, what if they ask me, what's your name?
What shall I tell 'em? And God replies, and I invite people to pick up the Bibles and read that passage and read it really carefully. What's interesting is that God replies like in folk stories where there are actually three replies. First one is, I am who I am. Now, let me just say that's Exodus three 14.
The tetra groan does not appear on Exodus three 14. I am who I am is not the te groan. The next reply is, tell them I am sent you again. No te groan. Next verse, Exodus three 15. Tell them I am the Lord. That's where all of a sudden a word appears in capital letters, LORD, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
That's actually the tetra groan. So when we think about the burning bush, it's this climactic movement towards a, the third name. I am who I am. Well, that's, uh, uh, we could spend, you know, a whole podcast just talking about that. But it's a tautology. Uh, it, it's mysterious. God's identity is defined with respect to who God is.
I am. I will be who it, I will be. When we get to that last name, the Tetra Ramadan, that's an interesting name. Many people think that it's exactly simply a form of I am who I am. Um, grammatically it's similar, but it's not. So it's more like, uh, I am who I am as a bit of a pun on the name. And so. The name itself, I am who I am, doesn't appear in the rest of the Bible very much.
There's echoes of it in the New Testament. On the o on the other hand, Exodus three 15, the Tetra groan, which, and Lord is not the Tero groan, it's what we put in place of it as a kind of a surrogate that appears 7,000 times. And when we get to the New Testament period, probably for a couple of hundred years, that name had become so traded with such reverence in Jewish tradition that it was typically not pronounced.
Now this is true of all the different streams of Second Temple, ju Judaism, Kuran, Josephus, Pharisees in, in fact, when Jesus is before the high priest, he's a, the, the high priest says, are, are you, uh, the son of the blessed? Well, the blessed is simply a surrogate for the tetra groan. The priest is not gonna say, are you the son of Yohe Vahe?
Jesus says, according to Mark, I am, and you will, you will see me seated at the right hand of the power. Well, again, the power is not God's name, it's Jesus's use of a surrogate. You will see me seated at right hand of Yohe Baha. So they're both using surrogates. They disagree about Jesus' identity, but they agree about God's identity.
God has the awesome name that represents God's uniqueness. God's incomparable. And when you begin to look at the New Testament through that lens, that respect for God's uniqueness and God's incomparable appears on page after page, and the signs are there so frequently that we've gotten used to them and we don't notice 'em anymore, or the translators push it out of you.
So to get, I'm gonna get to Jesus here in a second, but let me just mention ways we push it out of you. So everybody knows that the Old Testament, when you see a surrogate for the Terah groan, Lord is capitalized. That tells you that word in the New Testament, it's not capitalized. And that's because behind there in the Greek is a Greek word and not the Hebrew word.
And the Greek word is frequently crio, which means Lord. But there's a clue there in the grief that kios functions exactly the same way as Lord does, namely as a surrogate. And the clue is there's no article. So it's not ho kios the Lord, it's simply kios. And you drop the article and what happens, it's becomes a sign of a proper name.
So that happens in English too. If I say the boss is coming, I'm using a title. But if I say, boss is coming, it sounds like a proper name. And what John the Baptist says at the beginning of Jesus' ministry is. Prepare ye the way of Lord. When the crowds shout out that Jesus is coming into Jerusalem, they don't say blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
They say Blessed is the one who comes in the name of Lord. So there are all these signs that the New Testament honors the name just as much as the old does, but in this very Jewish medium. So let's come to Jesus. When you focus on the way he speaks and the way he communicates his teaching, what do we notice about that?
Those kind of vis signs for the reverence of God. What we notice is they go up, they their, their density and their creativity increases. Jesus is not just conforming to dominant cultural practice. He's literally introducing new forms of piety. For the name he is hyper scrupulous. About the name, which is not all that surprising.
When you think that when the, the disciples ask him to teach him to pray, he says, our father hallow be your name. It's the very first petition out of his mouth. Jesus is hyperfocused in his mission on, you know, the way I would put it is Jesus's announcement of the imminent king coming to the kingdom of God.
We can read that through Ezekiel's anticipation of where the Lord says, I will magnify my great and glorious name, not for your sake of Israel, but for my name's sake. The Lord will take the initiative in manifesting the glory of God's name and because that's something that only God can do. Jesus is basically modeling a kind of.
Aism Reserve before the name. Take the name off your own lips. Make room for God to declare the name. So how our father and heaven hallow be. Your name is a, you hallow your name because we can't,
Drew Collins: along the lines of the ways in which the loss of this awareness of the divine name. In the New Testament especially, maybe sort of contributed to what I would describe as an inclination towards Instrumentalization Yeah. Of the Old Testament. Um, God's revelation in the Old Testament, both God's own self revelation.
Right. Which is quite shocking when you think about it. And that terms is sort of, yeah. God reveals God's name, this majestic, you know, mysterious name instrumentally only for a sort of brief period of time. So that, but with more dire consequences for people, the instrumentalization of, um, Israel and the Jews.
Thanks. That's a great question. Let's think
R. Kendall Soulen: a little bit about what proper names do and, um, as opposed what's not a proper name. A common noun is not a proper name. God is really not a proper name. It's a common noun. Trust in God and God we trust. We're identifying a category of being. We have God, we have goddesses, we have God's proper name.
Identifies a unique individual, and there's a way in which prop, when we identify something by name it, there's a tendency to resist instrumentalization. If something is identified by name, there's always gonna be a little bit of a loss if you substitute something else for it. Lemme give you an example.
Book of Job. Everybody remembers Joda has 10 children. At the beginning of the book, at the end of chapter one, every single one of 'em is dead. But good news, at the end of the book job, his fortunes are restored and Job has 10 children. Okay? Happy ending. Well, yeah. Um, but, but the children who he has at the end are not the same children he had at the beginning.
So what if, would Job have identified those children by name? No, because if you identify them by name, you realize those children are dead and they remain dead at the end of the story. So basically child or son, daughter of job is a rule. It's like, God, it's a, it's a job opportunity that anybody can fill.
And that to some degree is what happens to our understanding of mission and people of God. If we think of God, the subject of the Bible in terms of a proper name, a common noun, only God. And that's one of the losses, to be honest with you, that I think comes about when we become very self-conscious and start editing our God language down to just God.
God, to avoid offending people. Don't use Father, don't use King, don't use Shepherd. All these, because God is really more a job title than it is a proper name. So here's another example. David, like Job has 20 children. King David, I think has 23 children. I forget which number Absalom is, but Absalom is just one of 23 children.
But when Absalom dies and he is not a particularly Winsome character, but David Laments, oh my son, my son Absalom, my son, my son d David laments for his son. So grievously that it causes David political problems because he is got all these other kids but none of them replace Absalom. That's what proper names do.
And, and the Bible story, we didn't know, we don't know Absalom personally, but we sense David's grief by the weight. He gives that proper name. The Bible understands God as having we, we can call that quality that a proper name gives as non fungible and the God the deity of the Bible is just. Awesome with non fungibility in the sense that this God is unique, wholly unsu.
Substitutable awesome. You can't put it into words, but te groan by the way, doesn't mean anything in particular. It's like LBJ or RFK. It identifies, it doesn't defy, but what it does tell us is that God is not prone to substitutes. And the interesting thing about the Bible is that I think the biblical portrait of God in relationship to Israel is much more like David in relationship to Abso and creatures all by themselves.
Are they non fungible? I think that depends on the attitude God takes towards them. We relate to some things in our lives as fungible as something we could interchange. We might like the person who delivers our mail. We're more concerned about getting the mail than we are about who delivers it. We feel differently about a beloved animal, a dog or a cat, and more differently still with relatives and friends.
But what confers non fungibility is in the case of God's relationship to you could say, God allows God's uniqueness to rub off on the creature. And I think that's what happens in the relationship with Israel, the Jewish people. It's a love relationship, and that lies at the core of God's grief when the people don't act.
I mean, Absalom caused David plenty of grief, so it's not any kind of declaration that everything that that is done is great, but it is a declaration that this relationship is. Has an integrity that can't be exchanged. Yes.
Drew Collins: You know, reading your, your work really did drive home for me how these assumptions of the fungibility of Israel, in a sense had sort of knock on effects and rubbed, did sort of opposite dynamic in a way rubbed off onto God, God the father in particular, and sort of presented God in the Old Testament as fungible in a sense, and sort of leading up to the incarnation to the extent that people like Justin Martyr would say that the divine name revealed to Moses was Jesus.
There's lots to say about the relationship between the distinctness of God's identity is revealed in the Tetragrammaton and the distinctness of Jesus's identity as an expression in relation to that, the affirmation of individuality and distinctness and creates some questions today. For us to be the relationship between the church in Israel, um, and the Jewish people.
Right? We have this, these distinct groups. Now, and this gets into Romans nine through 11 a little bit. How do you, how should we understand the relationship between these two groups? Yeah,
R. Kendall Soulen: so I think where I'd wanna start is that I think it's the case, and this is something that I, I learned from my, my, uh, mentor, Michael Gra alt, like Hans Fry.
Michael never became a, uh, Christian, but he engaged with lots of dialogue. And I, for your listeners, an opportunity to read his book, the Body of Faith, or an anthology of his writings, Abraham's Promise. Highly re recommend those. But Michael persuaded me that Christians don't take seriously enough the fact that most of them are Gentile.
Most Christians are Gentiles, and a Gentiles simply means a non-Jew. And if you read the New Testament, the categories are not Jews and Christians, it's Jews and Gentiles. And the difference is that if you think in terms of Jews and Christians, your Venn diagram doesn't include everybody on the planet.
But if you're, if you think in terms of Jews and Gentiles, all of a sudden everybody on the planet is included. And in Acts 15, for example, one of the things that seems to be suggested by that council of the Apostles is that the Jewish followers of Jesus remains significantly Jewish. They're baptized, but they continue to observe the law.
Paul, when he goes to Jerusalem, orders his colleagues to go and to make sacrifices of the temple. But the decision is made that the Gentile followers of Jesus don't have to do that. So the church thinks that baptism is very important. Brings you into a new relationship. But it doesn't simply stop the fact that people are choosing Gentiles, it unites them.
They're one. It's not, uh, it's one is not closer to Jesus than the other is. So it's similar to male and female in that respect, but they don't simply disappear. So how does that relate to this whole business of being non fungible and having a non fungible identity? Drew? The way I currently put these things together in my mind is that I would say that as a Christian, I believe that every individual human being on the planet has a non fungible identity.
That's part of our being in the image of God and coming into relationship to Jesus is a way of discovering and claiming that Id identity more deeply and being given that identity in a healed. But what's true about it as individuals is not true about us, of the natal communities to which we belong. And there it seems to me, the Jewish people are in a unique situation.
The community has a non fungible identity that is rooted in the word of God. Now, in order to think that's true, you have to think the scriptures have some authority, but the word of God is expressed in the Old and New Testaments seems to affirm that God calls this people as a distinct people. Alright, let's turn to Gentiles.
I've already said that Gentiles qua individuals have unique identities, but is that true of the communities, the NATO communities, to which they belong? And there I would say, no, it's not. That's the difference. My own natal community is the typical American me mess after three or four generations, Welsh, Irish, Dutch, et cetera.
There is no natal community. There are certainly have been 20th century examples of natal gentiles who say, our communities chosen in some special way, ORs, perhaps South Africans, perhaps other groups and category. But I think that from the biblical perspective, it's not that gentile communities have no value, it's that it doesn't consistent being particularly chosen.
And so I would say the value is precisely in the way they are become vessels of God's wisdom and can they learn and exchange wisdom and they become kind of laboratories of the praise of God, the languages and the cultures and, but that's constantly changing and it doesn't mean that there's any one community.
Can that persists over time. And that's not any drastic loss. The fact that there isn't going to be this or that ethnic group in 10,000 years, there'll be others and it will have existed and made its contribution. So Jews and Gentiles simply occupy different places. They're different. But I think what makes them special is each testifies to a different aspect of who God is.
Jews can point to that divine name and God's uniqueness in a special way because of their non fungible characters. A community over time, the Lord. But Gentiles can point in a special way to the what comes after that in the Bible. The Lord is God. And that final part of the sentence is very important 'cause God is the part of the word that gets translated.
If the Lord is a surrogate for the Hebrew proper name, that Hebrew proper name doesn't get translated, but Lord gets translated God de they do, uh, theos that and on and on and on and on. And Gentiles are that laboratory where that
Drew Collins: gets expanded. Yeah. And, and an expansion that's already, that's also anticipated in the Old Testament as well, right?
Yes. I mean, there's very much so, and that's visible in the book of Revelation at the end. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. What I love about the way you described this relationship, it affirms the integrity, the distinctness of the Old Testament and the new, in some respects, and does not seek to sort of harmonize them in a way that collapses their distinctions.
But yet it's still, at least from a Christian perspective, holds the real possibility of discerning a sort of. A unity that is developing in time and space. And that is the pro that is not sort of, it's almost retrospective and maybe and prospective in an esco eschatological sense. Yeah. Yeah. Nate, thank you.
And I think that's really helpful. But I, um, I was recently ordained as an Episcopal priest in, in January, and as part of that process I had to do hospital chaplaincy, which was powerful, wonderful experience. We were, one of our classes was co-taught by a, a rabbi actually, who was herself, who was a gentile convert of Judaism as at Hait.
But, and she asked us to go around and talk about our experience of engaging with Jews. This your experience of Jews. Of Jews, yes. To working with Jews, which was for a group of people who were all Christians, right. An important question for them to ask and like, what does it look like for you to minister to come alongside?
Right. It got, I think I was the first person she asked and I said, well, I am wonder, which is a, which was, which, you know, I'll be honest, was an affirmation I've only been able to make in the last few years mm-hmm. As I realized that it was mm-hmm. Not up to me. Right. Um, you know, my cousin is a rabbi. I've got lots of my, half of my family are Jews and I've, and I spent a lot of time asking them, and my cousin once told me, drew, you could eat a ham sandwich on Passover.
There's nothing you could do. It's not up to you. You are a Jew. And that has been a real gift to me, at least in my own self understanding. But. When I offered this to this Jewish chaplain, she was appalled. Honestly, the idea I, when I described myself as a Jewish Christian, she was not pleased. You could tell with the possibility and made space for me as I sort of described mm-hmm.
My own story. Yeah. But it does, it strikes me that one of the, it's important at least to, to say what looks like sort of progress, I think, and, and constitutes like a real insight into understanding and a better understanding and creating space for the diversity in this relationship between Jews and Christians and, and sort of avoiding supersessionism isn't always well received or looks differently from the Jewish side of things sometimes.
Right. Is that something you have encountered, um, Jewish reactions to your work? How do they differ from Christian reactions?
R. Kendall Soulen: Yeah, so that's a really important, and I think it is necessary to say that. A lot of sensitivity and nuance is necessary when, when addressing, 'cause these are really sensitive questions and Jews and Christians are individuals and they approach these issues in different ways.
But let me tell you a little bit about what's been important for how I've thought about these issues. I'm a gentile. I don't claim any Jewish heritage in particular, but I've been very influenced by both Hans Fry, who was born into a Jewish family and baptized, and Michael Wishard, who is Orthodox Jew and never baptized.
But thought conversation with Christians was very important. Michael Wish helped me understand that according to traditional rabbinic teaching. Being a Jew is not something that can be changed. And one of the places this actually crystallized was in a context of a, a persecution in the Middle Ages because during the Middle Ages, uh, many Jewish communities came under huge pressure to convert to Christianity, and some Jews did.
Then when the pressure abated, maybe a different Lord or king or bishop is in place, many Jews regretted what they'd done and wanted to go back and be re received in the Jewish community. And the question was, have these guys forfeited their Judaism? You know, are they no longer Jews? And one of the opinions that became normative in the tradition is the per of 11th century Talmudic commentator Rashi, and he commented on a passage in the Sanhedrin that is, and here's the passage Israel send.
Even though they have sinned, they are still Israel. That became, and if you think about it, that's a lot like what Paul, the way he reason in Romans 11, he thinks of the failure to recognize that Christ is Messiah is an error, nevertheless is real sin. They're still is real. That identity is irrevocable.
It's so that Michael Wishard pushes this point of view. And if push comes to shove, in my experience, at least many well-informed Jews or rabbis will say, yeah, technically that's correct. However, there's another side of the story and that side of the story is represented by David Novak, also a friend and a an important Jewish theologian and philosopher.
And David had vote notes that in addition to the theological issue, there's what you might call the sociological issue. And sociologically you could say that both Christianity and Judaism. Have traditionally made, wanted to make barriers to conversion high. They don't want, namely, Christians don't want Christians to become Jews, and Jews don't want Jews to become Christians.
So how do you go about do doing that? Well, you, you make the personal penalty very high and you basically, you, you shunning in extreme instances, discommunication. So I think that where an individual thinker in the Jewish tradition falls on that spectrum can be towards the sociological, which sounds like your advisor was, or the theological, I think both have to be respected, but at the end of the day, I think it's the theological that that bears the greatest weight.
And I think the sociological by itself is in danger of losing sight of some really key aspects. So to go back to Hans Fry, Hans will. Did not make a show of identifying himself as a Jew. He was very modest about that aspect, but it was quite clear that he thought of that as an an essential part of who he was and his story, and it was not something that to him was incidental or could be lost.
That's my take on Hans. In the case of Michael Wish abroad, why does he think that's such an important issue? I think it's partly Michael's diagnosis was that in the modern world, communities are naturally have a tendency towards fragmentation religious communities, and he wanted to be an advocate for an understanding of Judaism that did not read individuals out of the community quickly.
He wanted to be an advocate for an understanding of Judaism that said Israel sinned. There's still Israel for the sake of creating as broad a platform as possible for our Jewish community.
Michael wish abroad was of the opinion that the more secure a person was in their Jewish identity, the more seriously they took its theological DI dimension, then the easier it was for them to adopt an open understanding towards Christianity. And on the contrary, Jews who didn't have much of a living relationship to Jewish tradition and were insecure in their knowledge or understanding of it, were often the ones who wanted to make a marker of opposition to Christianity.
'cause that was one of the few things they had to hang, hang their hat on. And he did not think that mechanism was very life-giving or promising as a strategy. He wanted to dig deep, deeper into Jewish tradition, and even if that meant discovering, hey, we're not always as far apart as we thought, his attitude towards Jewish Christians, one of the disputed issues was, I think it was Brother Daniel, a Jew who became a Carmelite.
And the question was whether he could immigrate the Israel under the law of return. And that was adjudicated in the Israeli Supreme Court some time ago. And the issue was decided against Brother Daniel. Uh, but Wishard thought that was a mistake. It simply wasn't a very sound ruling on the basis of Jewish tradition.
So that's a case where he was prepared to stick his neck out. It looks like he's sticking his neck out for a Christian, but what he thinks he is doing is sticking his neck out for a really deep understanding of what Judaism is, Israel sin, but he's still Israel.
Drew Collins: You know, when I'm asked how, how I think Christians should relate to the law, I'm not really sure what the answer is, and I'm, I really wanted to ask this to you because as I understand it, a key point of your argument is that we find Jesus and his followers continuing to observe the distinctly Jewish practice of name avoidance, vis-a-vis the Tetragrammaton.
If, if part of our affirmation of the significance of the Tetragrammaton is premised on Jesus and his disciples and his followers, sort of law observance, what does that mean for our own relationship
R. Kendall Soulen: to the law? Yeah, so that's a big question and I think my first instinct is to say that this is a question that we're fortunate that we have some direction on in the New Testament.
And Acts 15 is sometimes called the first Council of Jerusalem or the Council of Jerusalem. And basically the outcome you, the starting point is the apostles who are themselves maintaining a law observance as followers of Jesus are asked, do Gentiles need to observe the law too? And they decide no. But the outcome of that is that then the church consists of two groups, two different ways of following Jesus, let's call it that.
Uh, one way among those who were Jews who are followers of Jesus as those who also are community characterized by tour observance and as Gentiles, those who come from communities that are not and are not expected to. So painting with a big brush, I could say the church has been overwhelmingly gentile down through the ages, not exclusively, but overwhelmingly.
And one of the things that this overwhelmingly Gentile church has thought it was entitled to do is lay down rules for that tiny little portion of the church that's that's identifies as Jewish. And I think part of my instinct is to say, let's stop doing that. As gentile Christians, we have enough to worry about without either pros prescribing or proscribing.
One thing we should, I think cease doing is teaching that J Jews who follow the law as followers of Jesus are offending against Christianity in some fashion. We should stop saying that, but I also am not eager to put myself out there as someone who addresses. Baptized Jews and says, you should be doing this.
Because it seems to me that the model we're given in Acts 15 is of the, that portion, the Jerusalem based church having enough guidance and resources they can, council, happy to enter into council, but at the end of the day that, that those are decisions that they have to be able to make according to their own lights.
Drew Collins: That's really helpful. Yeah. It's, it reminds me of Acts 10 a little bit as well, and Cornelius where, and Peter's dream where the dream is, he involves the angel, the Lord saying there is none of this food is unclean. Right. Let nothing that God has made clean be deemed unclean. But then when Peter.
Articulates that he says something I'll paraphrase. No one is unc unclear, right? So it ends up not
R. Kendall Soulen: turning on the issue of food, right? It doesn't draw a conclusion with respect to food. It just means those who eat those
Drew Collins: food are not clean law observance is not nullified, and yet it's also not a requisite for followers of Jesus.
And
R. Kendall Soulen: in, in a way, it seems to me that it gets back to Paul's statement at the beginning of Romans. The gospel is God's word, power of salvation to the Jew first and also to the Greek. Why doesn't he just say to everybody he thinks something? God has been doing something significant with the distinction between Jews and Gentiles, and it's so easy to think that is some sort of defect in the economy of salvation.
But what if the distinction between Jews and Gentiles is not a defect? What if it's actually the structure of being blessed in a certain way, being blessed by somebody who's different. You go back to the biblical saying, we don't say God is God. We say the Lord is God. And the fact that we're making that identity statement, bringing together two different ways of identifying God is part of the richness of the biblical conception of God.
And it seems to me that part of the richness of the biblical conception of the way God deals with humanity is that it's Israel and the nations, and they don't have to be leveled down to one common denominate. There is a common, common denominator. I mean, I would say being in the image of God, but the particular way in which we look are called to live that out, I think is different and not necessarily posed.
So becoming a follower of Jesus. In a sense, you know, the, the, the Roman Catholic Trumpist tradition has a wonderful saying. Grace does not destroy, but perfects nature. And I would say the grace of the gospel doesn't destroy, but elevates and reconfigures the grace of being Jews and Gentiles and being Jews and Gentiles is already part of a preparation for Pentecost and for Christ and for the kingdom of God.
Um, and, and, and the, and, and the gospel doesn't erase that. Reconfigures, it transforms it. Most people in the world are not Christian, which means they're Jews and they're Gentiles. But when you look inside the church, it seems to me we still have Jews and Gentiles. It's just that now they've entered into a new kind of relationship.
Yeah. And they're praising God together. The Lord is God.
Drew Collins: Kendall, I'm wondering how you see Messianic Jews fitting into the dynamic that you've, that you've, that you're describing here, because it seems like they are in many ways anathema to both Christians and Jews.
R. Kendall Soulen: Adolf von Harnick, great towering liberal theologian in Germany at the turn of the last century, world 1900, uh, wrote a history of Christian dogma in which he wrote, um, no group in history is born the Appium of Christ more than.
Jewish followers of Jesus. And believe me, hark was not a friend of Jewish people. So the fact that he wrote that, it's an, it's a really important question. One thing I'd observe is that if you think about people who I are, who are Jewish, and then who at some point in their life are baptized or become followers of Jesus, that's a really bog ca category.
And my guess is, based on my experience, most of them would not identify as Messianic Jews. So when you talk about Messianic Jews, you're, you're isolating a particular segment of, of pretty, pretty big category people that would include Michael, uh, uh, would include S Fry, my teacher, uh, Cardinal Luer, um, Archbishop of Paris that Michael Gro wrote a letter to.
Really big category. And I, one of the things I would resist is the idea of lumping everybody in of that into the category of Messianic Juice. And, and another is simply to observe that that group of people has all sorts of different viewpoints on what it means to be Jewish and, and to be a follower of Jesus.
Now, shifting specifically to Messianic Jews, as a Gentile Christian, my main concern is to articulate a vision of Christian faith that with respect to this portion, not just facts, I'm gonna go not just Messianic, juice, that whole group of people and say, I'm gonna stop judging you. I am, and above all I'm gonna stop saying I wanna, I wanna speak for a church that does not say you can't be a Jew and a follower of Jesus at the same time, because I don't think that's true.
I don't think I am given the authority from scripture from anywhere else to prescribe how that group of people goes about being a follower of Jesus. Messianic Jews identifies a group of people who want specifically to form communities that typically navigate these issues. And to be very honest, I don't know that world intimately.
I know that it, it itself is, is a fractured world. And Jews for Jesus is one aspect of it that actually doesn't fall within Messianic Judaism. So a lot of people's familiarity with that whole world is tied up with the movement of Jews for Jesus in the, uh, you know, several decades was more prominent a few decades ago than it is now.
That was like a Billy Graham outreach ministry didn't actually have congregations at all, just like Billy Graham's ministry doesn't. And it was about persuading Jews to become followers of Jesus and then connecting them with an evangelical congregation. Messianic Jews don't do. For the most part. So my primary concern as a Christian theologian is not to be an advocate for Messianic Jews, except insofar as I wanna defend their right to be part of the conversation.
And I wanna defend their right to clarify what it means to be a, a Jew and a follower Jesus on their own terms. And I want to, to the degree I can argue for why treating that group with respect is, is a, a Christian obligation, how Jews treat those groups. That's up to Jewish groups. And so, you know, I'm not expecting Jews to who, mainstream Jews to hold my view, but I think Christians are obligated to be very thoughtful and cautious and to avoid the tendency to read them out of the picture.
And that's why our society for post-session is theology from the very beginning. You know, it was a controversial issue. Will this be a society that explicitly makes room for people who identify as not just Jewish and Christian, but specifically as Messianic Jew And I, I think that's very important, Warren, in the last couple of decades.
The other thing I would say is the number of people in the Messianic Jewish tradition. Who have, uh, developed very impressive academic, uh, records and contributions has grown. So it's a maturing tradition. I think it's one that we have a lot to learn to. There's lots of controversy within the movement itself.
You have to get the Jewish, Christian relationship. Right. And, and I, I think for me, what happens when you start with that is that you're starting categories. It shifts from Christians and everybody else to Jews and Gentiles, and I think that it's really for specifically Christian understanding of other religions.
I think you have to understand, have a theology of being a gentile. What are the religious and theological possibilities that go with that? And that becomes the avenue into what we can say about other religions that is positive, it seems to me. And that will also give us certain understanding of the sort of things we don't expect to find.
And part of it will be because of what Judaism Instantiates. We will expect to find other ways of completing the sentence The Lord is blank, but we won't find, expect to find any proper names that can take the place of Lord. Our understanding of what the divine wisdom through which all things are created can be radically transformed.
Drew Collins: The abundance of recognizing God to be in a proper noun and of individual identity. In that sense, however, we wanna understand the relationship that God has to creation more broadly in our encounter of it. It is not at odds with. God's specific, unique identity is revealed in the teragram, but it's precisely in, in light of that, there's always more to know
R. Kendall Soulen: on Juan.
Yeah. And I think that I, I would agree with that. And I think for me, the very nature of proper names has a apo dimension. It ha. And which means, you know, you can't circumscribe or define that. And that's true of all proper names. And I think that's part of the beauty of the Bible is it's so full of proper names, not just for God, but you know, a lot of others.
And the Bible perceives the world as inhabited by things that have proper names. And that proper name, it seems to me is a kind of a window into an infinite depth always because it's, it identifies without circumscribing and that I think is. A way of thinking about identity that opens up into kind of a Gregory of Missa Endless discovery.
Yes.
Drew Collins: Yeah. And has implications I think for our, the way we encounter those of different faiths, the way we understand God's relationship to them. Right. And it is not, mm-hmm. In spite of their uniqueness or it is not something that comes into, wash that out. It builds upon it. Right.
Kendall, thank you again. This is really just such a joy for me to get to do this with you. Well, it's my pleasure. And Tyler Lee
Evan Rosa: for The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Kendall Soulen. Interviewe by Drew Collins, Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow and Emily Brookfield. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
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