Rethinking a Controversial Prayer
Rethinking a
Controversial Prayer
By Gordon Maitland
A MOTION was brought forward at the last General Synod (in 2016) to remove the prayer “For the Conversion of the Jews” from the Book of Common Prayer. It is found in “Prayers and Thanksgivings upon Several Occasions” and reads:
For the Conversion of the Jews
O GOD, who didst choose Israel to be thine inheritance: Look, we beseech thee, upon thine ancient people; open their hearts that they may see and confess the Lord Jesus to be thy Son and their true Messiah, and, believing, they may have life through his Name. Take away all pride and prejudice in us that may hinder their understanding of the Gospel, and hasten the time when all Israel shall be saved; through the merits of the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP p. 41)
Regardless of the intention behind the prayer and the theology that it expresses, it is widely seen by many in the Church as being (at best) unhelpful in our relationship with the
Jewish people and (at worst) as propagating an antisemitism that is not compatible with our calling as Christians.
Any change to the Book of Common Prayer must involve the lengthy process of securing a two-thirds majority in each of the houses of Bishops, Clergy and Laity in two successive General Synods, because it potentially means a change in Anglican doctrine or discipline.
The motion to delete the prayer was finally presented for consideration on the last day of General Synod and ended up being defeated in the House of Bishops.
Last year, Bishop Bruce Myers of Quebec indicated to the Council of General Synod that he intended to bring forward a motion to consider once again the deletion of the prayer. This is an issue that is close to the heart of Bishop Myers because he was for many years the person responsible for ecumenical and inter-faith dialogues for the Anglican Church of Canada, and thus he has been directly and personally involved with discussions concerning our Jewish friends.
Some members of The Prayer Book Society of Canada felt it would be better to put forward a proposal either to modify the existing prayer or to come up with an acceptable replacement prayer.
After consultation with some bishops and theologians, we realized that any prayer that explicitly prayed for the conversion of the Jews, however gently worded, would find no traction at General Synod and would be rejected out of hand. Bishop Myers will not consider any prayer that singles out the Jews for conversion.
The final draft of a new prayer was submitted to Bishop Myers, who then shared the new prayer with several other members of the Canadian House of Bishops, with members of the Council of General Synod and with members of the Canadian Rabbinic Council for their feedback. This is the proposed prayer as it currently stands:
For Reconciliation with the Jews
O GOD, who didst choose Israel to be thine inheritance: have mercy upon us and forgive us for violence and wickedness against our brother Jacob; the arrogance of our hearts and minds hath deceived us, and shame hath covered our face. Take away all pride and prejudice in us, and grant that we, together with the people whom thou didst first make thine own, may attain to the fulness of redemption which thou hast promised; to the honour and glory of thy most holy Name. Amen.
It should be stated clearly that the Prayer Book Society of Canada understands and appreciates why the governing authorities of the Anglican Church of Canada want to see the original prayer deleted. Anyone acquainted with Church History will know that there is a long, sad and regrettable history of Christian violence directed against Jews. In the wake of the atrocities perpetrated against Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, it is completely reasonable that our Jewish neighbours and dialogue partners would be concerned about any prayer or message that would seem to imply that the Church is singling them out for aggressive proselytization.
None of this implies that the Prayer Book Society is giving up on mission and witness to the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and his saving message of peace and reconciliation for all the world. The three prayers “For the Extension of the Church” in the “Prayers and Thanksgivings upon Several Occasions” section of the BCP (pp.40-41) are not being altered in any way, and we will continue to pray that our Lord’s Kingdom will be extended and that people will continue to be called into fellowship with Christ in his Church. TAP
The Rev. Gordon Maitland is National Chairman of the Prayer Book Society of Canada. This article is excerpted from his writings in the PBSC’s Newsletter of Easter 2018 and Michaelmas 2018.
A Rationale for the Prayer ‘For
Reconciliation with the Jews’
By Chris Dow
The prayer ‘For Reconciliation with the Jews’ (FRJ) is neither an entirely new composition nor a revision of a single existing prayer, but rather a pastiche of material from various sources, including the original prayer we propose to replace (FCJ), the Book of the Prophet Obadiah, the 1970 Roman Liturgy for Good Friday and the Jewish Mourner’s Kaddish.
The new prayer retains the opening address of the original it seeks to replace:
O GOD, who didst choose Israel to be thine inheritance:
God has a special and intimate ownership of His beloved covenant people. He cherishes them as His highly-valued treasure – the vessel through whom He will bless and redeem all nations of the world.
“… as regards election, they [Israel] are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” (Romans 11:28b-29, ESV)
[Editor’s note: The whole chapter of Romans 11 is worth reading as background for this prayer.]
have mercy upon us and forgive us for violence and wickedness against our brother Jacob; the arrogance of our hearts and minds hath deceived us, and shame hath covered our face.
The petition asking God to ‘have mercy upon us and forgive us’ arises from the Church’s acknowledgment of its history of supersessionist ‘arrogance’ and anti-Jewish ‘violence and wickedness.’
Supersessionism, also known as replacement theology, asserts that the Gentile-majority Church has superseded or replaced the Jews as the sole covenant people of God; thus only the Church can now rightfully claim to be the true Israel because God has rejected the Jews and annulled His covenant with them due to their blindness and hardness of heart in their rejection of Christ. This hard and hostile form of supersessionism never became official dogma, but has had a considerable influence in the Church since the Patristic period. The roots of supersessionism were formed even earlier. After the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Romans in A.D. 70, Christians began to think that the Jewish way of life had been providentially replaced in God’s economy of salvation. Thus began a long process of ‘de-Judaization’ in Christian thought.
In its crudest manifestations, supersessionism has demonized and scapegoated the Jews as ‘Christ killers,’ twisting passages such as Matthew 27:25 (‘His blood be on us and on our children’) to assert that the Jewish people as a whole invoked a curse of permanent guilt upon themselves for the Crucifixion. This gave rise to prejudicial fears that incited pogroms against Jews in Medieval Europe, beginning a terrible pattern of banishments, discriminations, forced conversions and persecutions by Church and state that killed hundreds of thousands of Jews even before the twentieth century.
Then came the Shoah, meaning ‘calamity’ in Hebrew, more commonly known as the Holocaust: the horrific nadir of anti-Semitic violence and wickedness that systematically exterminated six million Jews in Europe.
The long, dark history of the Church’s supersessionist ‘arrogance’ and ‘violence and wickedness’ towards the Jews is what is acknowledged in this penitential prayer and forms the basis of the petition that pleads for God’s mercy and forgiveness.
In Romans 11:17-18 St. Paul reminds Gentile Christians that since they have been graciously grafted into Israel, they ought not to be arrogant towards the Jews. As we have seen, Paul’s warning has been mostly ignored by the Gentile-majority Church for the past 2000 years, as its attitude towards the Jews has been precisely one of arrogance and superiority.
As those who belong to Christ, we are descendants of Abraham and Isaac, heirs according to promise (Galatians 3:29). Thus the Church is Israel, but not in such a way as to replace Jewish Israel; and if we are to repent of this supersessionist impulse, we must counterbalance our claim to be Jacob/Israel with the contrite admission that we are also, in some sense, his carnal and violent twin brother Esau. “Because of violence to your brother Jacob, you will be covered with shame” (Obadiah 10).
Take away all pride and prejudice in us,
This petition is retained from FCJ and is a most appropriate request given the prior acknowledgment of the Church’s history of anti-Jewish arrogance, violence and wickedness.
and grant that we, together with the people whom thou didst first make thine own, may attain to the fullness of redemption which thou hast promised
FRJ is a penitential prayer that the Church prays for itself and its attitude toward the Jews. The emphasis here is on Jews and Christians together as people of God and siblings in the Lord. This togetherness is not a present reality in this age, but we plead that it would be in the age to come when we attain to the fulness of redemption that God has promised, and so with perseverance we wait eagerly for it (Romans 8:25).
The Church and rabbinical Judaism were born at about the same time – in the first century AD around the destruction of the Second Temple. Both are ‘the offspring of a religion based on the Hebrew Bible’ and are ‘parallel claimants to be Israel after canonical Israel.’
Perhaps, in God’s infinite mercy and unfathomable providence, the historical struggles between Jews and Christians shall be the birth pangs of a common redemption, ‘as the vision of Revelation 7 indicates.’
to the honour and glory of thy most holy Name. Amen.
FRJ’s final aspiration originally ended with the words, ‘through thy well-beloved Son Jesus Christ our Lord.’ This is a standard appeal that the prayer be heard and granted through Jesus Christ in His role as our heavenly Intercessor. Our Jewish consultants for this project felt that this implied that the redemption of the Jewish people is to be achieved through Jesus Christ, thus contradicting the project’s stated aim of renouncing supersessionism.
This raises a vitally important question: can Christian theology ever be entirely non-supersessionist? In my view, this is doubtful. Though hard and hostile supersessionism must certainly be rejected, it would seem that a much softer, irenic and more theologically sophisticated form of supersessionism is inherent to the claims of the New Testament, which presents Jesus Christ as the long-awaited Davidic Messiah, who died for the sins of the whole world and rose again according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3-4), thus fulfilling the Law and the Prophets and inaugurating a New Covenant that emerges from the Old. Rabbi David Novak has said that this ‘soft’ kind of ‘Christian supersessionism need not denigrate Judaism. It can look to the Jewish origins of Christianity happily and still learn of those origins from living Jews, whom Pope John Paul II liked to call ‘elder brothers.’
Christian supersessionism can still affirm that God has not annulled his everlasting covenant with the Jewish people, neither past nor present nor future.’ In fact, it must affirm this, because if God has broken His original covenant with Jewish Israel, then there is no tree onto which the Gentile Church can be grafted (Romans 11:17-21). Rabbi Novak has even said that Christianity must be supersessionist in this soft way if it is to be truly Christian, otherwise it devolves into a vapid post-Christian pluralism. ‘Theological relativism cannot be the way forward, which is why supersessionism cannot be avoided in good faith. It can only be disciplined by nuanced theological reflection.’ TAP
The Rev. Chris Dow is Priest-in-Charge of St. James’ Church, Caledon East, in the Diocese of Toronto and, with Gordon Maitland, was a key contributor to the prayer ‘For Reconciliation with the Jews.’ To read Dow’s full article “For Reconciliation with the Jews: A structural analysis and rationale” see http://prayerbook.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/PBSC-Newsletter-Lent-2019.pdf
Endnotes
1 That being said, Robert Louis Wilken has argued that the Patristic view of the Jews was ‘more nuanced than often recognized.’ See his essay entitled, ‘The Jews as the Christians saw them,’ First Things (May 1997).
2 Jaroslav Pelikan, ‘The True Israel,’ The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 21.Pelikan adds, ‘Christian theologians writing against Judaism seemed to take their opponents less and less seriously as time went on; and what their apologetic works may have lacked in vigor or fairness, they tended to make up in self-confidence. They no longer looked upon the Jewish community as a continuing participant in the holy history that had produced the church. They no longer gave serious consideration to the Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament or to the Jewish background of the New. Therefore the urgency and the poignancy about the mystery of Israel that are so vivid in the New Testament have appeared only occasionally in Christian thought.’
3 Gerald McDermott, ‘Death at the Tree of Life,’ First Things (November 2018).
4 ‘The statement ‘the Church is Israel’ somehow needs to take into account the fact that the Israel that is made up of Jews is not self-evidently a part of the Christian Church in experiential terms, and that Christians (Jewish and Gentile in national origin) and Jews are clearly two distinct groups with respect to theological claims and the order of common life before God.’ Ephraim Radner, ‘Israel, Jew and Gentile,’ Church (Cascade Books, 2017), Kindle Location 2669.
5 Ephraim Radner, ‘Israel, Jew and Gentile’ Church, Kindle Location 2713. In the great eschatological vision of Revelation 7, the great multitude from every Gentile nation gives praise to God after those sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel.
6 David Novak, ‘Edith Stein: Apostate Saint,’ First Things, (October 1999).
7 Gavin D’Costa, ‘A New Zionism,’ First Things (June 2018).
8 David Novak, ‘Supersessionism, Hard and Soft,’ First Things (February 2019).
