This is adapted from an essay in Pluralizing Dialogue: Insights, Actions, and Implications in Eva Fleischner’s “Judaism in German Christian Theology Since 1945″(Seton Hill University, 2024).
Eva Fleischner’s 1970s theological project began in response to the murder of over six million Jews, including members of her extended family. While primarily a survey of German Christian theologians, Fleischner centered her exploration on the question of Christian mission—a question her Jewish interlocutors understood as urgent and essential for Christians to address in light of the horrors of the Holocaust. Fleischner understood that theological anti-Judaism and racial antisemitism had deformed and distorted her own Christian capacity to listen to Jews.1
In her life and career, she centered a practice of deep listening and developed meaningful friendships with Dudley Weinberg, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Irving Greenberg, Zalman Schachter, and Michael Wyschogrod.2 As a result of these interreligious friendships, Fleischner was able to acknowledge Jews as full human and spiritual beings, as religious others who brought theological gifts Fleischner sought to receive. She listened, and she learned, and she began to ask theological questions of her own tradition, questions that were the result of her interreligious relationships and her present-day concerns immediately after the Holocaust and Vatican II.
Fleischner’s theological method, and her friendships with prominent Jewish religious thinkers, may appear to be primarily dialogues of theological exchange. However, these friendships began as dialogues of action and dialogues of life; they are examples of a post-Holocaust response from both Christians and Jews to develop real interreligious friendships. In reflecting on her intellectual and spiritual journey at Marquette University during the time of her doctoral studies, Fleischner talks about first discovering the history of theological anti-Judaism in class and in texts—reading Martin Luther, the church fathers, and then Jean-Francois Steiner and Elie Wiesel.
“It was at this crucial moment in my journey that, blessedly, I came into contact for the first time with a living Judaism, with Jews—modern American Jews—whose faith deeply informed their lives…. No longer could I consider Christians the exclusive witnesses to God in the world.”3
For Fleischner, the dialogue of action was addressing antisemitism in all its forms, and the dialogue of life was happening when she joined Jewish friends for Shabbat.
Fleischner recounts a poignant story of relational interreligious theology in practice—grounded in encounter. First, she was deeply moved by Abraham Joshua Heschel’s telling of a conversation he had with Catholic theologian Gustave Weigel on the eve of his death. In his seminal essay “No Religion Is an Island,” Heschel wrote:
Gustave Weigel spent the last evening of his life in my study at the Jewish Theological Seminary. We opened our hearts to one another in prayer and contrition and spoke of our own deficiencies, failures, hopes. At one moment I posed the question: Is it really the will of God that there be no more Judaism in the world? Would it really be the triumph of God if the scrolls of the Torah would no more be taken out of the Ark and the Torah no more read in the Synagogue, our ancient Hebrew prayers in which Jesus himself worshiped no more recited, the Passover Seder no more celebrated in our lives, the law of Moses no more observed in our homes? Would it really be ad Majorem Dei gloriam to have a world without Jews?4
Fleischner was so moved by learning of this encounter that she wanted to know Weigel’s reply. More than a decade after Abraham Joshua Heschel’s death, she reached out to his widow Sylvia Heschel and spent a Sunday afternoon with her. Fleischner tells us about that afternoon conversation:
So the two of us sat there wondering and talking, and soon we were joined by the Heschels’ daughter, Susannah, and a friend, who were visiting that Sunday. We read the whole passage aloud, slowly. And suddenly the answer emerged, quite clearly. “We opened our hearts to one another in prayer and contrition and spoke of our deficiencies, failures and hopes.” That was how their discussion began: in prayer and contrition. How could Fr. Weigel’s response to what followed have been anything but a profound affirmation of Judaism as a living religion worthy of continuation? The four of us, as we sat in the Heschels’ living room that sunny Sunday afternoon, felt in agreement, reassured and at peace.5
Having been moved and intrigued by an interreligious dialogue on the page, Fleischner sought out her own interreligious encounter with Sylvia and Susannah Heschel. Fleischner explains: “I know how I would have responded to them [Heschel’s questions]: the survival of Judaism and the Jewish people is ad Majorem Dei gloriam, to the greater glory of God! I believe more and more Christians nowadays share this view. Those of us who do must rethink how we understand our Christian faith in relation to Judaism. This necessarily requires our reformulating traditional Christological doctrines. Our efforts to reinterpret the meaning of Christ are in continuity with a process that engaged the early church.”6
As a Catholic scholar-practitioner of interreligious dialogue in the twenty-first century, I agree with both Eva Fleischner’s conclusion and her methods. Rather than viewing religious difference as an obstacle, Fleischner saw it as an opportunity for mutual learning and spiritual growth. Her words were prescient. She saw both the theological and epistemic tension between dialogue and mission, foretelling the battles since Vatican II between Catholic thinkers about these two terms. To what extent mission will be reimagined, including the roles that dialogue and ongoing encounter with difference will have in that process, is an ongoing struggle.
In her 1975 book, Fleischner sketched a possible Catholic future in which Christian mission was truly reshaped: becoming not exclusively a project of proclamation, but rather speaking paired with listening. And importantly, Fleischner asserted that theologies of mission must welcome the fact that Christians themselves can and should be changed through interreligious encounter. For Fleischner, mission must be reimagined through a dialogical lens, and theologies of mission must be accountable not only to Christian tradition but also to interreligious friendships grounded in mutuality and respect.
After listening to her Jewish friends, Fleischner returned to Christian tradition to evaluate the state of mission theology. She made several important claims: she rejected supersessionism and dogmatic triumphalism, and she was suspicious of absolutist claims to truth. Instead, Fleischner reclaimed the theological possibilities of “dogmatic pluralism,” as practiced in the early Christian church, as the bedrock for a new understanding of mission that affirmed the value of religious diversity.13 She envisioned dogmas and beliefs in conversation; she understood the uncertainty of such a prospect but nevertheless was committed to it.
Eva Fleischner was building the scaffolding of a Catholic theology of encounter.
- Eva Fleishcner’s 1970 theological work is reprinted in Pluralizing Dialogue.
- Eva Fleischner, “Encountering the Living God—in a Living People,” in The Memory of Goodness, 180–181
- Fleischner, “Encountering the Living God—in a Living People,” 179–180.
- Abraham Joshua Heschel, “No Religion is an Island,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, (January 1966), 129.
- Fleischner, “Encountering God Anew—In a Living People,” 184.
- Fleischner, “Encountering God Anew—In a Living People,” 184. I discussed this episode with Susannah Heschel, who affirmed the encounter between her, her mother, and Eva Fleischner.
Heather Miller Rubens is the executive director and Roman Catholic scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies.
Read the full text of Heather’s chapter, “Developing Theologies of Encounter: Eva Fleischner, Fratelli Tutti, and the Unfolding Legacy of Nostra Aetate.”