Kinbar - Response to Rosner

7/28/2019 Kinbar - Response to Rosner

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Hashivenu Forum 2012

Beverly Hills, CA

The Vocation of Messianic Jewish Community

A Response to Jen Rosner, Messianic Jewish Life Together:

Covenant, Commission and Cultural Brokerage

Carl Kinbar

Jen Rosnerspaper, Messianic Jewish Life Together, is jam packed with insightfulcomments on a broad range of issues involving Messianic Jewish identity, community,

and vocation. I note especially her emphasis on covenant, the place of Yeshua in

Messianic Jewish life and thought, and the importance of right relationships with

Christians and the Church. At the end of this paper, I will respond to Rosners important

challenge that our vocation must reflect Yeshuas embodiment ofthe particularity of

Gods covenant with Israel and the universality of Gods call to discipleship.1

Near her conclusion, Rosner quotes from Mark Kinzers 2011 Hashivenu paper.Kinzer wrote that we can only understand our own calling as Messianic Jews in relation

to this greater two-fold community,2

the Jewish people and the Christian Church. I

submit that we need to begin with clear definitions of Jewish and Christian identity in

order to understand our vocational relationship with the Jewish people and the Church.

My response will focus on these definitions and how they inform the vocation of

Messianic Jewish communities.

In the first section of her paper, Rosner emphasizes the importance of construing

Jewish identity, community, and commission along covenant lines. She writes,

Covenant lies at the heart of the identity of the people of God, and our conversations

1 Rosner, 20.2Ibid., 30, quoting Kinzer, Messianic Jewish Community: Standing and Serving as a Priestly Remnant.

(Paper presented at the Hashivenu Forum. Agora Hills, CA 2011), 32.


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about Messianic Jewish community must be built upon the foundation of our inclusion

and participation in the contours of covenantal life.3

Covenant is inherently communal

and requires not only Gods action but human response, which is carrying out our

covenantal commission.4

I could not agree more.

Rosner and I agree that vocation flows from identity. Her approach is along the lines

of identity theory pioneered by Erik Erikson in the 1950s, which is necessary for

studying social identity formation and function, but does not address identity from a

clearly covenantal perspective. Therefore, I want to sort through some of her comments

on Jewish and Messianic Jewish identity and present what I believe are consistent,

covenantal definitions of Jewish and Christian identity.

Rosner begins her second section by noting that It is difficult to find an identity

marker analogous to being Jewish. . . Though I am only comfortable using this term in a

very qualified sense, the Jewish people are indeed called to be a sanctified ethnicity, as

Kinzer suggested last year.5

Rosner does not explain the qualified sense in which she

would use the term sanctified ethnicity and in fact, she does not use it in the remainder

of the paper. She continues, To draw upon the covenantal distinctives outlined above, it

is the corporate reality of the Jewish people that defines the particular identity of each

individual Jew. We make sense of our own unique stories within the context of the

larger story of the Jewish people; their story is our story in a profoundly determinative

sense.6

This description represents social identity, which relates to onesgroup

identifications and to ones assigned and chosen place in the social world, as well as to

processes by which one negotiates ones way through the social world.7

I believe that

something like this concept also underlies her later statement that it is the people of

3 Ibid., 2.4 Ibid., 5.5 Ibid., 7.6 Ibid., 8.7 Seth Schwartz, A New Identity for Identity Research: Recommendations for Expanding and

Refocusing the Identity Literature.Journal of Adolescent Research, Vol. 20 No. 3, May 2005 293-30.


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Israel andthe body of Messiah that fundamentally inform our core identity.8

Here,

identity is formed by membership in two covenantally-defined groups. But this does not

work in the case of Jewish covenantal identity because individual Jewish identity

actually is not defined covenantally by membership in the corporate reality of the Jewish

people and Messianic Jewish identity is not defined by two corporate realities, the

Jewish people and the Church. Let me explain with reference to Kinzers paper.

Kinzerwrites about the genealogically determined nature of embodied Jewish

identity.9

That is, the Bible and tradition narrowly construe Jewish identity in terms of

physical descent from the FathersAbraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This reflects the

covenant God made with the descendants of Fathers. Even in the case of conversion, a

person does not merely change beliefs or religion but enters a community of physical

descent. The identity markeranalogous with being Jewish is therefore the Jewish

body, male or female. For males, embodied Jewish identity is incomplete without

circumcision, the sign of the covenant.10

If I understand Kinzer correctly, this defines

both individual and corporate Jewish identity. Kinzer calls the corporate identity as a

common orsanctified ethnicity. I argue that there is no compelling reason to

construe covenantal identity any other way.

From a covenantal perspective, an individual Jew or group of Jews does not become

more, less, or anything other than Jewish as a result of membership in other groups.

Similarly, from a covenantal perspective, identity is not altered by history. If we

embrace the Jewish story, it will affect our social identity but not our covenantal

identity. I argue that when we are joined to Messiah, we do not receive a new or

additional identityMessiah has always been the goal of the covenant and the goal of

Torah. This is a critical distinction because our community vocation is fundamentally

tied to our covenantal identity; though it is certainly affectedby our membership in the

larger two-fold community of the Jewish people and the Church, it is fundamentally

defined by our covenantal identity as Israel. This perspective is also crucial for our

8 Rosner, 18.9 Kinzer, 28 fn38.10 Descent from the Fathers goes hand in hand with the promises made to the Fathers (Rom.15:8).


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personal sense of identity. It will be difficult at best to retain a profound sense of

membership in the Jewish community while thinking of ourselves as having a hybrid

identity.11

Based on this understanding of Jewish covenantal identity, we can also approach

Christian identity from a covenantal perspective. A Christian is simply a Gentile who

has been brought into the commonwealth of Israel in Messiah (Eph. 2:12-19). How does

this happen? Messiah Yeshua is a genealogically determined Jew, a descendant of the

Fathers (Rom. 9:5, etc.).12

He is also the one-man Israel.13

For this reason, when a

Gentile is joined to Messiah, she is simultaneously brought into relationship with the

commonethnicity known as Israel or the Jewish people. She is now part of the

commonwealth of Israel. She has been brought near into full and equal access to God

as a Gentile and without an obligation to keep Torah. Gentiles who are joined to

Messiah and Israel in this way constitute the Gentile Church.14

It seems to me that personal identity, corporate identity, and social identity are

deeply tied to one another, or should be. All Jews together make up the corporate

identity Israel and all Christians make up the corporate identity Church, which is

part of the commonwealth of Israel. Israel and the Church are expressed on earth by

social groups consisting of Jews (synagogues) or Christians (churches). In this scenario,

social identity derives from covenantal identity because its members have a clear

covenantal identity. So a group of covenantally defined Jews has a Jewish social

identity.

The question is whether Messianic Jewish communities should likewise express the

reality of Israel and therefore be preponderantly Jewish, or should they partly or equally

express the Church and include Christians? I argue that a community with a hybrid

11 Rosner, 13.12 Yeshua is the Head of the Church; but he does not possess a Gentile identity and is not the one-man

Church.13 On Yeshua as the one-man Israel, see Mark Kinzer,Postmissionary Messianic Judaism: redefining

Christian engagement with the Jewish People. (Brazos, 2005), 217-232.14 Within the commonwealth of Israel, the bilateral ekklesia consists of this Church and the body of Jews

who are joined to Messiah. I do not see any covenantal basis for the idea of a multilateralormultinational

ekklesia, though it is an important social reality. (See Rosner, 14-16.)


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social identity cannot maintain the identity of each group over a period of generations.

(In reality, all communities include some members who do not share the common

covenant identity. When that number gets large enough, the corporate identity has

become a hybrid.) What I have described here is a starting point for the life of Messianic

Jewish communities: they are Jewish social groups which express Israel in Messiah.

They should relate to the larger Jewish community and the churches without risking this

core identity.

Michael Wyschogrod, an eminent Orthodox Jewish scholar, depicts the

commonwealth of Israel in this way:

There are those whowithout overlooking Israels failures sense the

overwhelming love with which God relates to this people and who find it possible

to participate in that love. Those who do, become adopted sons and daughters in

the house of Israel. The others practice a Christianity that dwells in a house no

longer shared with Israel.15

But how many Christians or Jews actually think this way? When we speak of

engagement with the Jewish community, we are speaking of a community which has no

concept of a commonwealth of Israel in which Gentiles share. When we speak of

engagement with the Church, we are speaking of a Church that essentially dwells in a

house no longer shared with Israel. I agree with Rosner that Messianic Jews must

concretely witness to the deep and abiding connection between these two larger

communities.16

The connection that we must witness to is the commonwealth

connection: the Church exists with Jews in the commonwealth of Israel. This is the

deep and abiding connection that has invisibly bound Jew and Christian since the first

century.

Rosner believes that we are now at a place where we can and must begin to re-

engage with the world of Gentile Christianity.17

I agree that it is crucial to lay aside

15Abraham's Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations. (Eerdmans, 2004), 174.16 Rosner, 20.17 Ibid., 19.


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attitudes and misconceptions that hinder relationships or even much contact with

Christians. But I do not know what a movement-wide engagement with the Christian

world would look like. More importantly, while some individual Messianic Jews are

vocationally committed to engage with the Church world, our primary communal

identity is the Community of Israel and our first priority is to engage with the Jewish

world, with the common ethnicity of which we are a part. We have made progress in

that regard but I do not yet see a critical mass of Messianic Jews making a serious effort

to engage with the wider Jewish community as healthy and unashamed followers of

Yeshua. If this is true, it would be a critical mistake to redirect our scarce time and

resources to engage with the Christian world as a movement.

Our Vocation

As Rosner writes, To be Israel is to be tasked with a particular vocation in the

world, a vocation made manifest through concrete daily practices infused with holy

meaning whose significance ultimately affects all of creation. It is through these

distinctive Jewish practices that we find God and make him known in the world.18

Kinzer is more specific, arguing that

. . . our primary communal task is not teaching or preaching, announcing the

Good News or advancing social justice. We are summoned to do all those things,

but for us they must be subordinate to the explicit worship of God, and only as

such do those things become for us a form of worship. The priestly service of the

Messianic Jewish community, like the priestly service of all Jews, centers on the

study of the Torah and the prayer regimen of the Siddur.19

On page 20, Rosner presents a challenge that goes to the heart of our priestly

vocation. She writes, In his life and mission Yeshua perfectly embodies both the

particularity of Gods covenant with Israel and the universality of Gods call to

discipleship. As Jewish followers of Yeshua, we must likewise hold within ourselves

and reflect within our communities [italics mine] the unique reality of Jewish existence

18 Ibid., 9.19 Kinzer, 28.


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as well as the universal scope of Gods redemptive purposes.20

Messianic Jews must

internally and externally reflect Yeshuas way of relating to the world

Brit Hadashah exhortations to imitate Yeshua seem to relate to his life on earth.21

We draw strength from the ascended Yeshua but we do not imitate him as such.

Following this line of thought, I note that Yeshuas life began when he became

[Jewish] flesh and dwelt among us [Jews]. (Jo 1:14). He was sent only to the lost

sheep of the house of Israel (Mt. 15:24). He lived and died as a Jew who had very little

recorded contact with Gentiles. Yet, his entire life, death, resurrection from the dead,

and ascentwere part of his priestly vocation for Israel and the whole world.

I am not suggesting that we artificially limit our contact with Gentiles. Our situation

is not fully parallel to Yeshuas because we live with Christians in a commonwealth

intentionally limiting contact with Christians would be a serious violation of the unity

that Yeshuas vocation brought into being. So I agree 100% with Rosners statement that

we must not be a people [merely] concerned with its own well-being and consumed by

narcissistic navel-gazing.22

At the same time, Yeshua shows us that the priestly

vocation does not rely on social engagement with Gentiles or Christians. At the same

time, following Yeshua, our vocation must be undertaken intentionally and completely

for Israel and the whole world. This, in fact, seems to have been Israels intended

vocation from the beginning as a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Exod. 19:16).

20 Rosner, 20.21 E.g., John 13:15;1 John 2:6.22 Rosner, 29.

Documents

Kinbar - Response to Rosner