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PDF FormatAlthough Catholics and Protestants have long debated the nature and meaning of salvation, the doctrine of redemption through Jesus—of a messiah who saves humanity because it cannot save itself—unites all traditional Christians. A joint statement issued in 1998 by Evangelicals and Catholics Together, a group that includes some of America’s most influential Catholic and Evangelical theologians, articulates this shared theological belief:
God created us to manifest his glory and to give us eternal life in fellowship with himself, but our disobedience intervened and brought us under condemnation. As members of the fallen human race, we come into the world estranged from God and in a state of rebellion. This original sin is compounded by our personal acts of sinfulness. The catastrophic consequences of sin are such that we are powerless to restore the ruptured bonds of union with God. Only in the light of what God has done to restore our fellowship with him do we see the full enormity of our loss. The gravity of our plight and the greatness of God’s love are brought home to us by the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ…. The restoration of communion with God is absolutely dependent upon Jesus Christ, true God and true man, for he is “the one mediator between God and men,”15 and “there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”16
The difference between the Jewish and Christian approaches to the messiah can now be clearly discerned. Jews contend, as Rabbi Soloveitchik put it, that belief in the messiah by definitionmeans belief in our ability to become worthy of the messiah. Christians, on the other hand, argue that belief in the messiah by definitionmeans belief in our inability to become worthy of the messiah, in our needing the messiah to take our sins upon himself. For Christians, the coming of the messiah makes repentance possible; for Jews, repentance makes the messiah possible. Yale’s Evangelical theologian Miroslav Volf, asked by several American scholars of Jewish studies to reflect on the theological differences between Judaism and Christianity, responded by describing the contrast in the following fashion:
It is quite correct to say, with Abraham Heschel, that repentance is my response to God who is in search for me. But Christians claim more, significantly more.… God has gone to such lengths as to be able to tell me: “The sins that weigh you down have already been ‘taken away’!”17
Repentance, Volf argues, is made possible only because God has taken our sins upon himself. C.S. Lewis, in his Mere Christianity,describes the Christian approach to man’s moral capacity even more starkly, arguing that his ability to be good is predicated entirely upon Jesus:
Even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam—he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts…. That is why the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God…. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because he loves us.18
The debate over whether Jesus was the messiah is therefore also an argument about the inherent ability of man. For Christians, repentance is impossible if the messiah has not yet come; for Jews, the messiah cannot come if repentance has not yet occurred. Christians proclaim the coming of Christ by citing Christian scripture: “He saved us, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but in virtue of his own mercy.”19 Jews, often under pain of persecution, continued to insist that the messiah had yet to come, because it was up to us to bring him: “Israel will be redeemed only if it repents.”
III
These two approaches to redemption—and the differing attitudes toward human potential that they represent—are manifest most strikingly in the manner through which the two traditions depict the messianic lineage. The prophets—Isaiah most explicitly—describe the future redeemer of Israel as a descendant of the Davidic dynasty. At first blush, this seems the obvious choice. David, whom the Almighty affectionately calls “my servant,” was Israel’s greatest king and mightiest warrior. Yet a brief study of David’s lineage reveals an ancestry rife with sin, scandal, and sexual impropriety. This is evident already with Judah, David’s tribal forebear. The patriarch Jacob chose Judah as the forefather of the Israelite monarchy, a designation that passed to Peretz, Judah’s heir. Yet Peretz seems blemished; he was not conceived in the sanctity of wedlock, nor apparently with the purest of intentions. Tamar, widow of Judah’s first two sons and desperate for a child, engaged in deception in order to bring Judah to her bed:
She put off her widow’s garments, put on a veil, wrapped herself up, and set down at the entrance to Enaim…. When Judah saw her, he thought her to be a prostitute, for she had covered her face. He went over to her at the roadside, and said, “Come, let me come in to you,” for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law…. So he… went in to her, and she conceived by him.20
Thus did the ancestor of the messiah come into the world a son of sin and deception. With a final swipe at the messiah’s lineage, the Bible confirms our sense of the impropriety of Judah’s relations with his former daughter-in-law, noting that “he did not lie with her again.”21
Yet another scandal can be found in the story of David’s most famous female ancestor: Ruth, wife of Boaz, a Moabite who converted to the Israelite faith. Moab’s lineage was more questionable than even that of Peretz, tracing its biblical origins to a relationship that was not merely promiscuous, but incestuous: That of Lot and his daughter. Moab, moreover, is described in the book of Numbers as a dangerous enemy of Israel whose women enticed Israelite men to engage in idolatry, bringing plague and destruction in their wake.22 The fact that Moabite blood flowed through David’s veins—that Israel’s enemy is the ancestor of its greatest defender, and that an idolatrous child of incest fathered Israel’s messianic family—is shocking, and counterintuitive.
Even after David is designated the king of Israel and the ancestor of the messiah, his own choice of heir is counterintuitive. Of David’s children, the future of the dynasty rests not with the progeny of Michal, daughter of King Saul, but rather with Solomon, son of Bathsheba, whose relationship with David is tainted by sexual sin:
It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. David sent someone to inquire about the woman. It was reported, “This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her…. But what David had done displeased the Eternal.23
Once again, one of the messiah’s ancestors is enveloped in scandal. The book of Kings records that Israel’s elites challenged the accession of Solomon to the throne, supporting Adoniah, David’s eldest living son.24 The reluctance of these Israelites to embrace Solomon’s kingship was, perhaps, predicated on his lineage; it troubled them that a man of questionable background should rule God’s chosen nation. Yet they failed to understand that the rulers and redeemers of Israel were to be born not of purity, but of depravity.
The Christian tradition took this Jewish conception of the messianic heritage and turned it on its head. With the birth of Jesus, no longer will the lineage of the messiah be tainted by sin; indeed, the holiness of the Christian savior is assured by the purity of his creation:
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.… The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.… Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.”25
