Leora Batnitzky
MY TITLE IS “LOVE AND LAW.” In the contexts of the histories of Judaism and Christianity, it would be easy to interpret love as a stand-in for Christianity and law as a stand-in for Judaism. Love and Law would then mean Christianity and Judaism and if we understand the phrase love and law in this way, love and law might easily become love or law—or Christianity or Judaism. Yet when thinking about Calvinism and Judaism these dichotomies do not pertain. Both Calvinism and Judaism emphasize love and law. So I begin by stressing the conjunction, the and, and not the disjunction, an or, in my title.
Throughout this chapter, I describe Calvinism and Judaism in very general terms. Undoubtedly, this will lead to some oversimplification, but I hope nevertheless to paint a broad picture of the issues at stake in thinking about the relation between Judaism and Calvinism. The chapter has two sections. In the first section I consider seven striking parallels between Judaism and Calvinism. In the second section I argue that where Judaism and Calvinism differ is not on their views of God’s nature (which are rather similar) but instead on their views of human nature. In the conclusion of the chapter, I briefly consider the implications of this difference for thinking about Abraham Kuyper’s “common grace.”
SIMILARITIES BETWEEN JUDAISM AND CALVINISM
Dichotomies between “spirit and flesh” or between “faith and works” in which the former represent Christianity and the latter Judaism, are familiar ones, especially for the intellectual inheritors of Luther’s reading of Paul (which pretty much means all of us). Let us recall Luther’s preface to Romans, of which he writes that it is “the most important piece of the New Testament [and] purest Gospel.” On Luther’s reading of Paul, “the law increases sin … a person becomes more and more an enemy of the law the more it demands of him what he can’t possibly do.”1 In his commentary on Galatians, Luther continues: “Paul sets here the spirit against the flesh. … Flesh … is here taken for the very righteousness and wisdom of the flesh, and the judgment of reason, which seeks to be justified by the law … Paul says therefore … if you will so end in the flesh, that is to say, follow the righteousness of the law, and forsake the spirit, as you have begun, then know you, that all your glory and affiance which you have in God is in vain.”2
Yet neither Calvinism nor Judaism affirms a dichotomy between love and law or between spirit and flesh in the way that Luther has come to be read. Calvin’s relation to Luther is, of course, a complicated subject, but, at the very least, in writing about Galatians, Calvin offers a different reading of law: “When Saint Paul said that the Law was given because of transgression, it came not in his mind to rehearse all the fruit and profit which the Law bringeth with it: for (as I have already said) it serveth also for our instruction, that we might learn to discern between good and evil, and again it quickeneth us up, as though God should give us strokes with the spur, to make us apply ourselves the more diligently unto him.”3 Law, for Calvin, allows human beings to “strive continually” and “to advance day by day.” In his Lectures on Calvinism, Kuyper accentuates the interplay between gospel and law and between the old covenant and the new one. In Kuyper’s words, “for the Calvinist, all ethical study is based on the Law of Sinai, not as though at the time the moral world-order began to be fixed, but to honor the Law of Sinai, as the divinely authentic summary of that original moral law which God wrote in the heart of man, at his creation. …”4
Just as Calvinism does not reject law in order to affirm spirit, so too Judaism does not reject spirit for the letter of the law. To offer just a few, very basic examples: Jews are commanded by the Torah not to follow the commandments but to live by them (v’chai bahem). The first lines of the Jewish creed, the Shema, make the interconnection between spirit and letter or love and law absolutely clear: “Hear O Israel. The Lord your God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be in your heart.” These words are recited by observant Jews upon waking in the morning and before going to sleep at night. These words are also an integral part of the daily morning and evening liturgies. All of which is to say that the affirmation of love and law are at the very center of the Jewish tradition.
Now Judaism is of course an interpretive tradition. The Torah (or the law) encompasses both “the written Torah” (Torah she b’chtav) and “the oral Torah” (Torah she b’al peh), or the letter and the spirit. Rabbinic Judaism considers those who reject the spirit for the letter heretics, an issue that played itself out during the Middle Ages in controversies between rabbinic authorities (including Maimonides) and Karaite Jews who adhered only to the letter of the written law.
In their interactions with their Lutheran interlocutors, German Jewish thinkers were especially sensitive to the accusation that Judaism was synonymous with the dead letter of law. Clearly having Paul’s statement in mind that “the written code kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6), the eighteenth-century German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the father of modern Jewish thought, defined Jewish law as follows: “The ceremonial law itself is a kind of living script, rousing the mind and heart, full of meaning, never ceasing to inspire contemplation and to provide the occasion and opportunity for oral instruction.”5 In a very different intellectual environment, a contemporary of Mendelssohn’s, Rabbi Chaim of Volozin, one of the great Lithuanian rabbis of the eighteenth century, expresses the same idea in different terms. Likening rabbinic commentary to “hot embers,” Rabbi Chaim writes that “the embers light up when one blows upon them; the intensity of the flame that thus comes to life depends on the length of breath of the person who interprets.”6
The view that Judaism adheres to the dead letter is often accompanied by the assumption that Jews believe that by adhering to the dead letter of the law they are saved (or justified). Let us recall Luther’s statement that “Paul sets here the spirit against the flesh. … Flesh … is here taken for the very righteousness and wisdom of the flesh, and the judgment of reason, which seeks to be justified by the law.” However, Jews do not believe that the law justifies them. Rather, from a Jewish theological perspective, God’s grace precedes law. It is in fact as a result of God’s grace that the Jewish people received the law.
Recent historical scholarship on Paul helps us to appreciate another way in which Judaism and Calvinism both differ from the accepted reading of Luther’s view of justification. In his now well-known article of 1961, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” the former dean of Harvard Divinity School and the former bishop of Stockholm, Krister Stendahl, rejects the common view that the Apostle Paul opposed the law. Stendahl sees the responsibility for misunderstandings of Paul’s view of the law as lying “with the great hero of what has been called ‘Pauline Christianity,’ i.e., with Martin Luther.” Luther, Stendahl argues, anachronistically privileged the introspective conscience of the individual over and against the question of membership in God’s covenant. According to Stendahl, “we look in vain for a statement in which Paul would speak about himself as an actual sinner.” Stendahl reformulates Luther’s conception of justification—“In Romans the principle of justification by faith is a principle of mission.”7 This means, in the words of the Anglican bishop, N. T. Wright, that “‘justification’ is not about ‘how I get saved’ but ‘how I am declared to be a member of God’s people.’”8 A grace/law dichotomy makes sense neither for Jewish theology nor for Calvinist theology. Grace and law, or better, grace and practice, are inextricably linked, which means that justification is fundamentally social and not individual.
This brings us to another affinity between Judaism and Calvinism: neither is a religion, at least not in the sense that the father of liberal Protestant theology, Friederich Schleiermacher, understands religion. Schleiermacher, who was, of course, a Lutheran, holds that “religion maintains its own sphere and its own character only by completely removing itself from the sphere and character of speculation as well as from that of praxis.”9 Samson Raphael Hirsch, the nineteenth-century founder of what today is called modern Orthodoxy, explicitly rejects this account of religion for Judaism:
Judaism is not a religion, the synagogue is not a church, and the Rabbi is not a priest. Judaism is not a mere adjunct to life: it comprises all of life. To be a Jew is not a mere part, it is the sum total of our task in life. To be a Jew in the synagogue and the kitchen, in the field and the ware-house, in the office and the pulpit, as father and mother, as servant and master, as man and as citizen, with one’s thought, in word and in deed, in enjoyment and privation, with the needle and the graving-tool, with the pen and the chisel—that is what it means to be a Jew. An entire life supported by the Divine idea and lived and brought to fulfillment according to divine will.10
Kuyper emphasizes this very same point with respect to Calvinism. He writes that the Calvinist
does not hold to religion, with its dogmatics, as a separate entity, and then place his moral life with its ethics as a second entity alongside of religion, but he holds to religion as placing him in the presence of God Himself, Who thereby imbues him with His divine will. Love and adoration are, to Calvin, themselves the motives of every spiritual activity, and thus the fear of God is imparted to the whole of life as a reality—into the family, and into society, into science and art, into personal life, and into the political career. A redeemed man who in all things and in all the choice of life is controlled solely by the most searching and heart-stirring reverence for a God who is ever present to his consciousness.11
Part and parcel of Kuyper’s rejection of a Schleiermachian definition of religion is his insistence on what he calls “the organic bond between generations.” This bond, Kuyper maintains, must be understood in terms of the church’s covenantal relationship with God. Kuyper writes:
It is perfectly true that the church is the “gathering of believers” and that however broadly this term is applied, it has no room for unbelievers or non-believers. But the confession of the Covenant, which in turn is bound up with the organic bond between generations, gives rise to tangible difficulty here. If one adopts a Pelagian posture, holds exclusively to the existence of individual persons, and posits that only those who personally profess Christ as their Savior belong in the church, one indeed has the means of determining who does and who does not belong to the church—but one also comes into immediate conflict with the Covenant, with the bond between generations, and hence with the practice of child baptism. If, on the other hand, one is convinced on the basis of Scripture (1) that the covenant idea may not be abandoned, (2) that the bond between believers and their offspring is a holy organic connection which must be strictly honored and (3) that, consequently, a church which holds exclusively to adult baptism proceeds from a false principle, this individualistic position simply proves untenable. The same path also loses the Scriptural teaching that the church has significance for the world, for the development of human life, for civil society and its natural life potential.12
It is on the issues of the organic bond between the generations and covenant that we find the closest overlap between Calvinism and Judaism. Covenant and the organic relation between the generations are perhaps the defining features of the Jewish tradition. For example, we read in Deuteronomy 29:14–15: “Not with you alone who are standing here today in the presence of the Lord our God, am I making this covenant with its oath, but also with those who are not here today.” Or, as the American Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod has put it:
The Jewish family is … the space in which the future membership of Knesses Israel [the congregation of Israel] is prepared. For Judaism, these future generations are not merely abstractions. In a capital case, according to the Mishnah, witnesses who are to testify against the defendant are warned that if they are not telling the truth, the blood of the accused and that of his potential descendants who will not be born because of the death of the accused will be on the witnesses’ head. To cut off a Jew is to cut off a line and thereby to become guilty of the murder of future generations. That is how real unborn Jews are to Jewish consciousness.13
For Jews, the covenant between God and the people of Israel and the subsequent organic bond between generations stem from God’s absolute sovereignty: “All is given from the one shepherd” (Ecclesiastes 12:11). God may make a covenant with whomever God chooses. So too, as wholly sovereign, God has no obligation to make a covenant with anyone. This means that God’s covenant with the people of Israel can only be a gracious act on God’s part: “The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people; for you were the fewest of all people: But because the LORD loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, hath the LORD brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 7:7–8).14
A belief in God’s absolute sovereignty also forms the theological basis of Calvinism. Only a wholly sovereign God could choose to create a covenant with his chosen elect. Election, by definition, comes from God. The acceptance of God’s covenant is then a choiceless choice or what Calvin calls “irresistible grace.” Yet it is from this choiceless choice that true freedom will arise. In the Jewish tradition this dynamic is captured in the Israelites’ response to Moses after he reads the book of the covenant: na’aseh v’nishma, “we will do and (then) we will hear” (Exodus 24:7). Similarly, for Calvin, true freedom arrives only by way of God’s predestinational choice.
For both Judaism and Calvinism, the covenantal relation is political in two basic senses. First, God’s covenant concerns a special, and indeed exclusive, relationship between God and God’s elect. This special, everlasting relationship is expressed in Exodus 19:6: “You shall be for me a treasured people, a nation of kingly priests.” Second, covenant, for both traditions, forms the basis of all political association. In the Hebrew Bible we find this secondary sense of covenant described in 1 Chronicles 11:3: “All of the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron, and David made a covenant with them in Hebron before the Lord.”
Calvin’s and subsequently Kuyper’s engagement with the political implications of covenant are well known, and the relation between Calvinism and modern politics is of course a topic of continuing interest. In the context of our consideration of parallels between Calvinism and Judaism, the seventeenth-century Calvinist thinker Johannes Althusius (1557–1638) is particularly significant. Althusius, in the words of one recent commentator, sought to show how
each new layer of political sovereignty is formed by covenants sworn before God by representatives of smaller units, and these covenants eventually become the written constitutions of the polity. … These constitutions define and divide the executive, legislative, and judicial offices within that polity, and govern the relations of its rulers and subjects, clerics and magistrates, associations and individuals. They determine the relations between and among nations, provinces, and cities, and between and among private and public associations—all of which Althusiaus called a form of “federalism” (from foedus, the Latin term for covenant).15
Historically speaking, Althusius’s federalism is consistent with the basic framework of organized Jewish life in the medieval and early modern periods. Jewish communities were semiautonomous corporations that existed along with other corporate bodies loosely held together by the state.
More important, perhaps, Althusius’s thought bears a deep affinity with normative Jewish political thought. The rabbis interpreted 1 Samuel 8 as delineating the proper conditions, powers, and limitations of kingship in relation to God’s law. Medieval commentators developed this view further, asking and arguing about whether a king administers divine law, what kind of discretionary power a king might or might not have, whether a king is beholden to Noahide law, and, most basically, what the ultimate relation is between a king’s law and the Torah’s laws. Different medieval Jewish philosophers gave different answers to these questions, but they all agreed that the king’s laws and the Torah’s laws are of a piece with one another. That means, however, that the relationship is configured between the king’s laws and the Torah’s laws: both have political, moral, and theological status. Once again, this is because, for Jewish thought as a whole, God is the creator of all of creation, which encompasses the most mundane and the most exalted aspects of human life and experience. But human beings are also God’s partners in creation. The relation between God and human beings mediates all law, divine as much as human. From a political perspective, neither a king’s laws nor the Torah’s laws are wholly sovereign. Instead, their sovereignties overlap and their relation must continually be negotiated. Alan Mittleman, following the lead of the late Israeli scholar Daniel Elazar (1934–1999), concisely summarizes the basic structure and vision of Jewish political thought:
Covenant is the essential, ongoing structural element of Jewish political existence. Indeed, covenant is the constitutive mode of Israel’s being. Israel’s covenant with God creates and recreates forms of political organization, all of which are federative (that is, covenantal) in nature. In federative forms of organization, power is diffused across competing institutional centers. Since ultimate power is God’s alone, human institutions are deabsolutized and conditional. Descriptively, federative or covenantal organization is the typical form of Jewish polity. Normatively, it is the optimal form of Jewish political order.16
Kuyper’s delineation of what he calls “sphere sovereignty” has important affinities with the view of Jewish political thought that I have just outlined. In Kuyper’s words, “original, absolute sovereignty cannot reside in any creature but must coincide with God’s majesty.” Yet “our human life, with its visible material foreground and invisible spiritual background, is neither simple nor uniform but constitutes an infinitely complex organism. … Call the parts of this one great machine ‘cogwheels,’ spring-driven on their own axles, or ‘spheres,’ each animated with its own spirit.”
Let us sum up the important parallels between Calvinism and Judaism that we have discussed. First, as opposed to views informed by readings of Luther, neither Calvinism nor Judaism affirms a dichotomy between love and law (or between spirit and flesh). Second, both traditions understand justification not in terms of individual salvation but rather in terms of membership in God’s covenant. Third, neither tradition understands itself as a religion based upon individual belief. Instead, both traditions emphasize what Kuyper calls the organic bond between the generations. Fourth, a shared belief in God’s absolute sovereignty undergirds Judaism and Calvinism’s respective conceptions of covenant. Fifth, God’s absolute sovereignty goes hand in hand with the doctrine of election. Only a wholly sovereign God may choose his elect. Six, for both Judaism and Calvinism the special covenant between God and God’s elect forms the basis not just for the relationships within the community of the elect but also for all human relations. And seventh, that God is absolutely sovereign means that no human or human realm is sovereign. This gives rise to overlapping spheres of sovereignties in human life.
Let us turn now to consider Kupyer’s “A Common Grace” and the Jewish tradition’s affirmation of what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks calls “The Dignity of Difference.”
A COMMON GRACE AND THE DIGNITY OF DIFFERENCE
Given the striking parallels between Judaism and Calvinism, it should not be surprising that Kuyper’s “a common grace” and what Rabbi Sacks calls “the dignity of difference” bear important similarities to each other. After all, “a common grace” and “the dignity of difference” are both answers to the same question. This is a question that has always been put to the Jewish tradition and, because of its doctrine of election, Calvinism must answer the question as well: how can election be reconciled with universalism? How exactly does God’s promise to Abraham—“I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, and you will be a blessing” (Genesis 12:2)—work?
Calvinism and Judaism answer this question in a similar way. For both traditions, God’s special covenant with God’s elect reveals not only God’s sovereignty as elector but also God’s sovereignty over all creation. God’s revelation (for Calvinism, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and for Judaism God’s giving the Jewish people the Torah at Sinai) cannot be understood apart from God’s having created the world for all humanity. Franz Rosenzweig eloquently captures this dynamic when he writes:
The past creation is demonstrated from out (of) the living, present revelation—demonstrated, that is, pointed out. In the glow of the experienced miracle of revelation, a past that prepares and foresees this miracle becomes visable. The creation which becomes visible in revelation is creation of the revelation. At this point the experiential and presentive character is immovably fixed, and only here can revelation receive a past. But it really must do so. God does not answer the soul’s acknowledgment, its “I am thine,” with an equally simple “Thou art mine.” Rather he reaches back into the past and identifies himself as the one who originated and indicated this whole dialogue between himself and the soul: “I have called thee by name: thou art mine.”17
For Kuyper, Calvinism expresses this same dynamic: “Christ … is connected with nature because he is the Creator, and at the same time connected to grace because, as Re-creator, he manifested the riches of grace in the midst of that nature.”18
God the creator of all life lies at the heart of “a common grace” and “the dignity of difference.” In terms of their respective understandings of God, Calvinism and Judaism are not so different. For both traditions, God is wholly sovereign and God’s creation of the world is an act of divine grace. Let me stress that this is as much a Jewish view as it is a Calvinist one. Maimonides explains this well: “If we give a thing to someone to whom we are not obliged to give it, that action is called in our language grace or favor (chaninah). … God brings into existence and provides for, those towards whom He has no obligation to do so; for this reason He is called Gracious.”19
As I emphasized at the beginning, Judaism, like Calvinism, affirms both love and law. Judaism’s God is a compassionate and loving God who loves human beings even when they are not deserving of love. Despite caricatures that depict the Jewish God as a vengeful God and the Christian God as a God of mercy, the Jewish God is a compassionate God who shows mercy to his people. Claims that the Jewish tradition, and the so-called Old Testament, conceives of God as vengeful often refer to Exodus 20:6, which comes in the midst of the Ten Commandments: “He [God] does not remit all punishment, but visits the iniquity of parents upon children and children’s children, upon the third and fourth generations.” This verse does indeed describe from a biblical point of view what kind of God the Israelites’ God is. But to conclude, based on this verse, that the Jewish God is a God of vengeance is wrong, for a number of reasons, the most simple of which is that the verse immediately prior to this one describes God in very different terms: “The Lord! The Lord! A God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin.” The description of a compassionate, gracious God, who is slow to anger, is found not only in the New Testament but also right in the “old” one. Commenting on these verses, the rabbis maintained that God’s compassion was far greater than God’s retribution: “The attribute of [God’s] goodness exceeds that of retribution five hundred times. In the case of the attribute of retribution Scripture declares ‘visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children …’; in the case of the attribute of good it is stated ‘and showing mercy unto the thousandth generation.’ It is thus seen that the attribute of good exceeds that of retribution.”
Where Judaism and Calvinism part is not in their respective conceptions of God. Rather, they part in their respective conceptions of the human being. Kupyer’s notion of common grace and its relation to creation are revealing here. Kuyper writes: “What we call nature is everything that has its origin and law in the original creation. Though all this suffered under the curse which began to work after the fall, common grace averted the lethal consequences of the curse and made possible and certain the continued, be it afflicted, existence all that came from the original creation.”20 Common grace, for Kuyper, comes in only after the fall. Without common grace, “the elect would not have been born, would not have seen the light of day. … On that basis alone all special grace assumes common grace. But there is more. Even if you assumed that their temporal death had been postponed so that the human race could have made a start, but that for the rest sin in all its horror had broken out unhindered, you would still be nowhere.”21
Modern Jewish thinkers often claim that Judaism does not have a notion of sin. But this is a misconception. We need but recall Genesis 6:5 where we read about God’s view of humanity before the flood: “And the LORD saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time,” and God’s comment after the flood that “the devisings of man’s mind are evil from his youth” (8:21). The Jewish tradition for the most part sees the human being as at the very least tending toward sin. However, sin, for much of the Jewish tradition, is understood as a deviation from God that results from human freedom to do so. Sin marks not human fallenness but the possibility (though not ease) of following God’s law if one chooses to do so. As David Novak has noted, “the introduction of the term ‘sin’ (het) comes [only] after God’s rejection of Cain and his offering in favor of Abel and his offering. … It is plausible to conclude from the scriptural text itself that Cain has done something wrong since God then tells him, ‘Is it not so that if you do well, you will be uplifted, but if you do not do well sin (hat’at) crouches at the door, and unto you is its desire, but you shall master it” (Genesis 4:7). … The … point that emerges [here] is that Cain is responsible for his own actions. It is a matter of free choice, never one of inevitable fate.”22
Rabbi Israel Salanter, the founder of the nineteenth-century Mussar (meaning chastisement) movement, was one modern Jewish thinker who, in keeping with earlier pietistic Jewish traditions, emphasized human sinfulness. However, Salanter, also in keeping with earlier Jewish traditions, emphasized equally that the human being, by following God’s will, can change his nature. As Salanter put it: “Do not say that what God has made cannot be altered, and that because He, may He be blessed, has planted within me an evil force I cannot hope to uproot it. This is not so, for the powers of a human being may be subdued, and even transformed. Just as we see regarding [the nature of] animals, that man is able to tame them and bend their will to his will … and also to domesticate them … so has man the power to subdue his own evil nature … and to change … toward the good through exercise and practice.”23
Let us return to love and law. For the Jewish tradition, God is a loving God and creation is an act of grace. God graciously offers a blessing and covenant to Noah after the flood, telling him, “And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh” (Genesis 9:15). The special covenant between God and the people of Israel presupposes the covenant with Noah. If we translate the terms common grace and special grace to the Jewish tradition, God’s covenant with Noah would represent the former and God’s covenant with the people of Israel would represent the latter. In both cases, God’s graciousness lies in the laws that God gives to people to instruct them on how they ought to live. Love and law are not antithetical here; God’s love manifests itself in the gift of law.
For the Jewish tradition, the relationship between God and human beings is proclaimed by following God’s laws. Let us recall God’s description of Abraham in Genesis 18:19: “For I know him intimately and this is to lead to his commanding his children and his household after him, that they might keep the way of the Lord to practice righteousness and justice (tsedaqah u-mishpat).” For the Jewish tradition, it is difficult for us to walk in God’s path, but we can choose to do so and we can succeed. We will, however, never be perfect, for this is what it means to be human. Put another way, the Jewish tradition suggests neither that human beings can overcome the limitations of their humanity nor that they should try to. This sentiment is captured well in the Jewish ethical treatise Sayings of the Fathers: “It is not for you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
Kuyper’s conception of a common grace suggests a different view of human nature. Once again, in Kuyper’s words, “common grace averted the lethal consequences of the curse and made possible and certain the continued, be it afflicted, existence of all that came from the original creation.” Before special grace, common grace transforms nature and, indeed, human nature. Kuyper’s claim is that if common grace had not transformed our natures then there would be no goodness in the world whatsoever.
The implications of Kuyper’s conception of common grace as transforming nature play out in his views of love. For Kuyper, to love is to love as God does—unconditionally and without concern for ourselves. Human love is at best a deformed, lower form of love. Kuyper gives an example of this lower form of love, which, he writes, “can be seen in girls of inferior moral development, who, when they become mothers, fall almost desperately in love with their babes; while in others, who stand much higher morally, maternal love is much more moderate.”24
Judaism and Calvinism would seem to agree that a mother’s love for her baby is a natural form of love. Where they would differ is on their evaluation of such love. For the Jewish tradition, we are all too human, for better and for worse. Judaism emphasizes that, in the well-known rabbinic dictum, “the Torah speaks in the language of men.” God’s special love of the people of Israel is a model for human love, not because God loves desperately as humans do but because we humans love desperately. Most fundamentally, the Jewish tradition suggests neither that human beings can overcome the limitations of their humanity nor that they should try to. By contrast, Kuyper suggests that grace allows human beings to be Godlike—when they love unconditionally and without concern for themselves, as we read in Matthew 5:48: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
I HAVE ARGUED IN THIS CHAPTER that there are many striking parallels between Judaism and Calvinism. Both are traditions that value love and law and both are traditions based on a belief in God’s absolute sovereignty. Where Judaism and Calvinism differ, I have argued, is not in terms of their accounts of the divine but rather in their accounts of the human. By way of conclusion, I will suggest one implication of this argument, which is an argument concerning love, for thinking about Kuyper’s “A Common Grace.”
As I have argued, “A Common Grace” is an answer to a question that has always been put to the Jewish tradition: how can election be reconciled with universalism? This question, though, is also a question about human difference. How can Calvinism (or Judaism) live in a world in which everyone is not a Calvinist (or Jewish)? The Jewish tradition, I believe, has an answer to this question that is rooted in its affirmation of our human nature. The answer is that all human beings love what is theirs. Just as mothers desperately love their own children, peoples desperately love their own. These loves are indeed perverted when we are unable to see them as rooted in God’s gracious act of creation. But when we do properly understand our all too human loves as part of the majesty of God’s creation, we can respect, though not always agree with, the loves of others not in spite of but because of our own particular loves. Put another way, I can understand why another mother desperately loves her baby because I desperately love mine. Rabbi Sacks describes this far more eloquently when he writes:
Covenant tells me that my faith is a form of relationship with God—and that one relationship does not exclude others. … Nowhere is this more magnificently set out than in the vision of Isaiah in which the prophet sees a time in which the two great historical enemies of Israel’s past—Egypt and Assyria—will one day become God’s chosen alongside Israel itself: … “In that day Israel will be the third, along with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing on earth. The Lord Almighty will bless them, saying ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance.’”25
NOTES
An earlier version of this chapter was published in the Kuyper Center Review 2 (2011), 157–172.
1. Martin Luther, Preface to Romans, trans. J. Theodore Mueller (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Classics, 2003), xiv.
2. Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians, ed. J. I. Packer and Edwin Sandys (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998), 104.
3. John Calvin, Sermons on Galatians, trans. Arthur Golding (Audabon, NJ: Old Paths, 1995), 443.
4. Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Mulberry, IN: Sovereign Grace, 2001), 44.
5. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover, NH: University of New England Press, 1983), 102–3.
6. As quoted in Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), xvii.
7. Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” Harvard Theological Review 56, no. 3 (July 1963): 199–215, and Final Account: Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 14.
8. N. T. Wright, Paul in Fresh Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009): 122.
9. Friederich Schleiermacher, On Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23.
10. Samson Raphael Hirsch, “Religion Allied to Progress,” in Judaism Eternal, 2 vols., ed. I. Grunfeld (London: Socino, 1956), 2:243.
11. Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 72.
13. Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith (Lanham: Jason Aronson, 1983), 253–54-
14. It is worth emphasizing here that these verses in Deuteronomy follow Deuteronomy 6, the basis of the Jewish creed Shema Yisrael, discussed earlier in the chapter.
15. John Witte, The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10.
16. Alan Mittleman, The Jewish Political Tradition and the Founding of Agudat Israel (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 37.
17. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (New York: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 182–83.
18. Abraham Kuyper, A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 173.
19. Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, ed. and trans. Shlomo Pines, intro. Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 1:54.
20. Kuyper, A Centennial Reader, 174.
22. David Novak, Natural Law in Judaism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 32.
23. As cited and translated in Immanuel Etkes, Rabbi Israel Salanter and the Mussar Movement, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993), 289–90.
24. Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1900), 510.
25. Isaiah 19:24–25. Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations, 2d ed. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 203.