SCJR 15, no. 1 (2020): 1-3   

 

 

Norbert Reck  

Der Jude Jesus und die Zukunft des  

Christentums: Zum Riss zwischen Dogma  

und Bibel: Ein Lösungsvorschlag 
 

 

 (Stuttgart: Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 2019), 182 pp. 

 

 

KATHARINA VON KELLENBACH 
kvonkellenbach@smcm.edu 

St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St Mary’s City, MD 20686 

 

 

Norbert Reck is well-known in Germany for his writings on post-Holocaust 

Roman Catholic theology and Jewish-Christian relations. Most recently he coordi-

nated the collaborative project of the “Gesprächskreis Juden und Christen beim 

Zentralkomitee der deutschen Katholiken” [Discussion group of Jews and Chris-

tians at the Central Committee of Germans Catholics]. The group produced Von 

Abba bis Zorn Gottes [From Abba to the Wrath of God] (Patmos 2017), which 
moves alphabetically through a variety of topics in order to dislodge anti-Jewish 

tropes. In Der Jude Jesus und die Zukunft des Christentums, he links the failure of 

Christianity to address anti-Judaism more broadly with its loss of credibility in Eu-

rope. He argues that the eradication of theological anti-Judaism is a matter of 

Christian survival rather than mere decency and propriety toward the Jews after the 

Shoah. The vitality and integrity of Christian doctrine and practice is at stake. Ad-

dressing the roots of anti-Judaism can revitalize Christian observance in Germany 

where church membership hovers just around fifty percent and weekly worship 

attendance is in the single digits. How did this happen, he asks, and how is it con-

nected to theological anti-Judaism?  

To understand the seeds of this crisis, Reck turns to the 19th century. The first 

three chapters chronicle the rise of historical consciousness that ruptured the unity 
between dogmatic theology and biblical exegesis, which increasingly embraced the 

historical critical method. The Christ of faith and the historical Jesus were pulled 

apart, as scholars and their audiences critically examined both “what happened” 

and also how the Creation, the Exodus, the Virgin Birth, the miracles, and the Res-

urrection could have occurred in history. In the United States, this tension led to 

the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and the rise of Protestant fundamentalism, with 

its creationism and dogged resistance to natural science and history. In Europe, the 



               

               Von Kellenbach: Norbert Reck’s Der Jude Jesus                                                    2 
 

 

               

    

Bible was “demythologized” and stripped of wonder and enchantment. Many left 

the churches and retreated into skepticism and secularism.  

The historical realization that Jesus was born a Jew, taught as a Jew (within 

the matrix of Second Temple Judaism), and died as a Jew prompted three re-

sponses. First, it could be ignored, as Jesus was appropriated and molded in the 

image and likeness of the particular community that heard his message. Second, 
his Jewishness could be used as foil and antithesis to enhance and clarify conflicts 

and antagonisms important to the Christian interpreter, such as militarism or paci-

fism, modernism or anti-modernism, clericalism or anarchy, or hypocrisy or 

legalism. Against such Jewish backgrounds the Christian message always shines. 

Reck proposes a different path that accepts the Jewishness of Jesus as relevant and 

meaningful rather than random and extraneous to the Christian faith. The Jewish-

ness of Jesus is more than an accidental ethnic identity but constitutive of an 

unfolding covenantal story that began when G-d liberated the slaves from Egypt 

and asked the people of Israel to pledge their children to the observance of cove-

nantal obligations from generation to generation. The centrality and continuous 

retelling of this covenantal story provide the clues for healing the rift between his-
tory and dogma in Christianity. Following Foucault’s discourse analysis, Reck 

reclaims the Exodus as the underlying matrix of stories about the Messiah, about 

the meaning of sacrifice, and of miracles such as Jesus’ walking on water.   

Foucault’s “discourse analysis” is the bridge that Reck uses to traverse the di-

chotomies of “Jewish” and “Christian,” this-worldly and other-worldly, political 

and spiritual, temporal and eternal, and historical and dogmatic truths. Paul Til-

lich’s Dynamics of Faith rather than Foucault’s discourse analysis may have 

offered a better bridge, but the point is well taken: “Faith” is necessarily and always 

expressed in symbolic language and described in myths that are, as Tillich put it, 

“symbols of faith combined in stories about human-divine encounters” (Dynamics 

of Faith 1957, 56). As “discourse,” Reck says, the truth of faith becomes dialogical, 

contextual, embodied, and pluralistic rather than dogmatic and apodictic. Dogmatic 
truth emerged because the Christian church decontextualized, de-historicized, and 

de-temporalized the story of Jesus Christ. This did not happen in the Jewish inter-

pretative tradition, which continued to look to history as the place where G-d is 

revealed, wrestled with, and sought after. The stories of faith come alive in their 

telling and retelling in the Beit Midrash [houses of learning] and in the family 

where stories are transmitted. By contrast, the Church developed an understanding 

of faith as assent and acceptance of stories as truth. For instance, the story of the 

Virgin Birth turned into dogma that must be swallowed whole without questioning 

and understanding. This, Reck points out, no longer works in modern democratic 

societies, where people have the choice to leave rather than be forced to “believe” 

stories whose meanings they no longer understand. The cognitive dissonance cre-
ated by critical thinking and historical consciousness can no longer be ignored by 

clergy and academics, who have indeed learned to decode the symbolic language 

of dogmatic theology back in seminary.  

The recognition of the Jewishness of Jesus compels several shifts. It brings the 

Jewish tradition of story-telling into the church now conceived of as an assembly 



             

              3                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 15, no. 1 (2020) 
 

 
 

of mature, responsible, and thoughtful people who work out the presence and 

meaning of God through the canon of biblical stories. The recovery of Jewish 

his/story reminds the Christian church that the will of God shall not only be done 

in heaven but also on earth, in the form of concrete obligations to do justice and to 

live responsibly in particular places. Miracle stories, such as Jesus’ walking on wa-

ter, are not to be “believed” as improbable historical events but rather seen as 
invitations to trust the power to reach for the extraordinary and to defeat doubt and 

despair. Reck proposes a theocentric Christianity following the Jewish storyteller 

from Nazareth who announced the impending kingdom of G-d with its vision for 

justice and unceasing care for the neighbor, the sick, and the destitute as the un-

changing core of truth in Christianity. Releasing Jesus from anti-Judaism, Reck 

concludes, the church will find his powerful stories to articulate and facilitate new 

conversation among people about their faith and fears and their hopes and desires 

for more justice and meaning in this, concrete, historical moment.