At 26, Franz Rosenzweig, a German Jew, decided to become a Christian. Before he could be taken into the Lutheran Church, he dropped in for the 1913 Yom Kippur services at a little Berlin synagogue. Nobody is certain what thoughts and feelings the services gave him, but by the time they were over, Rosenzweig had changed his mind, resolved to live his religious life as a Jew and “return to where I have been elected from birth.”
When he was 35, Franz Rosenzweig fell ill of a creeping paralysis which eventually robbed him even of the power to speak and left him only an uncertain power of movement in his right thumb. Yet, by indicating with his thumb the letters of the alphabet, he was able to complete a body of theological work that has made him one of the most important figures in modern Jewish theology. In 1929, before he was 43, Franz Rosenzweig died.
In the current issue of the Jewish monthly, Commentary, Jewish Scholar Will Herberg describes the growing impact of Rosenzweig’s work on current Jewish thought. Says Herberg: like the Christian philosopher, Kierkegaard, he felt that religious teachings “cannot be appropriated merely by the intellect; they must be made part of one’s existence to be truly understood.”
The function of religion, according to Rosenzweig, is not to erect theological systems or establish universal truths, but to lead to experience of God, starting from one’s own personal existence. He “commends ‘the Pharisees of the Talmud and the saints of the Church’ for knowing that ‘man’s understanding extends only so far as his doing.’ Religious observance is, in effect, the doing of one’s religious convictions; the two cannot be separated.”
Franz Rosenzweig’s concept of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity treated the problem, according to Herberg, “with a depth and originality that will make all future thinking on the subject dependent on his work.” To him the two religions were “essentially of one piece, one religious reality: Judaism facing inward to the Jews, Christianity outward to the Gentiles. The two faiths are organically linked as complementary aspects of God’s revealed truth. Yet they are not the same; they are distinct and different in their being and in their function . . . While Israel stays with God, Christianity goes out to conquer the unredeemed world for Him.”
The religious history of Israel was to Rosenzweig a seed which, “falling on the ground of paganism, produces a tree—Christianity—in the fruit of which it reappears in another form. Christianity is, in fact, ‘Judaism for the Gentiles,’ through which the peoples of the world are brought to the God of Israel.”
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