INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE
An Exchange of
Views between Thomas J. Nash and E. Michael Jones
Mr. Nash: Invincible Ignorance
I appreciated Dr. Jones’
tone in his response to my letter October 2004 (“Privilege and Blessing”) that
primarily addressed his June 2004 article (“Is St. John an Anti-Semite?”). And I want to again reiterate my
respect for Dr. Jones for his scholarship and long-time service to the Church
on various fronts. However, I
submit respectfully that Dr. Jones did not accurately reflect my position in
saying Mr. Nash proposes a dichotomy which may have currency in the culture
wars but has no theological basis.
Mr. Nash proposes a distinction between ADL Jews and “faithful Jews.”
Dr. Jones focused solely on
my use of the term “faithful Jews,” even though I used the term “religious
Jews” much more frequently (seven). Nevertheless, given a clearly
established context, it is not illegitimate to use the term “faithful Jews”
equivocally, i.e., referring to those Jews who faithfully follow the basic
tenets of the moral law as they understand them in their Old Covenant
form. In addition, it is well-founded in Catholic theology to speak of
non-Catholics, including Jews, who are either faithful or unfaithful in following
the general moral law written on their hearts (cf. Rom. 2:14-16). Indeed,
for those who are invincibly ignorant, the Church teaches that this will be the
basic standard by which they will be judged.
There are, of course, those
who are struggling with invincible ignorance about our most holy religion.
Sincerely observing the natural law and its precepts inscribed by God on all
hearts and ready to obey God, they live honest lives and are able to attain
eternal life by the efficacious virtue of divine light and grace (Pope Pius
IX’s 1863 encyclical Quanto Conficiamur
Moerore, no. 7; cf. Vatican II, Gaudium
et Spes, no. 16; Catechism of the
Catholic Church (CCC), nos. 846-48).
I left no doubt in my letter
that I believe that Jews are mistaken about Jesus Christ; that they can only be
saved by invincible ignorance if they don’t accept Christ; and that, because we
can’t presume upon such ignorance, we need to work to help them accept Him as
members of His Catholic Church, which is contrast to the views of some others
in the Church. Unfortunately, in response, Dr. Jones didn’t acknowledge
these clearly stated and important points in my letter, e.g.: that “God made an
indissoluble covenant with the Jews, and so, like a faithful spouse, He
continues to seek out the full reconciliation of His beloved through their
embrace of the fulfillment of His covenant. And so we as disciples continue to yearn for the full
reconciliation of the Jewish people to God in His Church” (cf. Vatican II, Nostra Aetate (NA), no. 4). The Church
does dogmatically teach that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah and thus that “
All salvation comes by Jesus
Christ through His Catholic Church, and we cannot presume upon a
non-Christian’s invincible ignorance (cf. CCC, no. 846-48); yet, I’m worried
that Dr. Jones’ review
[of Roy Schoeman’s Salvation is from the
Jews] and article may serve as impediments to evangelizing Jews. Indeed, I don’t think many Catholics
consider that a number of actions done in the name of Jesus toward Jews during
the last 2,000 years have actually impeded the mission Our Lord gave His Church
(cf. Mt. 28:18-20).
All too often, Jews have
been vilified for their religious heritage instead of being shown the love of
the Savior. Too often they’ve been
condemned for Jesus’ death instead of observing Christians who were ready to
emulate the Savior, even to the point of dying for them. One can justly and constructively
criticize irreligious Jews without having to gratuitously alienate religious
Jews. And one can constructively criticize the actions and
scriptural analysis of religious Jews, i.e., in a way that is likely to be
heard and therefore more likely to bear fruit.
When Jews see Catholics living
their faith with genuine love, they’ll be more likely to believe in Jesus and
thus become “completed Jews,” as Father Arthur Klyber described his becoming
Catholic.
While Dr. Jones cited Nostra Aetate in his favor, NA does not
speak of any Jew who has not accepted Christ as necessarily “worse than a
pagan.” Nor does NA speak of all Jews as being liars, nor as members of
the synagogue of Satan. Nor does NA say that all Jews have “rejected Abraham and Moses and the entire Jewish
religion well,” as Dr. Jones seems to imply in his response, and uses
Further, Dr. Jones continues
to not distinguish between Jews’ objective error in not accepting Christ
vs. their subjective culpability in doing so, which can vary from person to
person. Plus, as noted, there are manifest and major differences between
Jews re: following the basic tenets of the moral law, specifically the
aforementioned law of God written on their hearts. Whatever his criticism of the Jews, St. John Chrysostom would
not disagree with my points re: distinguishing between objective wrongdoing and
subjective culpability, nor do my points here conflict with the directives of
the Fourth Lateran Council.
Finally, there is the very
important issue of which approach will be most likely to bear fruit in leading
Jews to become Catholic. We must not compromise the truth, of course, but
we must also avoid expressions and actions that can gratuitously undermine or
derail our efforts in advancing the Church’s mission to the Jews.
Dr. Jones: The Stone of Tolerance
Mr. Nash’s discussion of
invincible ignorance is beside the point here. It applies to those who don’t
know of the coming of Christ as the Messiah. These people can be saved if they
follow the moral law. Those who reject Christ cannot be saved even if they
follow the moral law—an admittedly unlikely prospect. I have no way of judging
the soul of any man, so I simply cannot tell if any one person is among the
damned or the elect at the time of his death. However, I think I did show in
the three articles from my book on the Revolutionary Jew which have thus far
appeared in Culture Wars that
Talmudic Judaism is not the religion of Moses and Abraham; it is rather a
revolutionary ideology based on the rejection of Christ. If that is the case,
then no one who follows that religion can be saved because no one who rejects
Christ can be saved. Many Jews are not religious, but the distinction between
“faithful” or “religious” Jews and “secular” Jews is irrelevant when it comes
to the question of Christ. Both groups reject him as the Messiah. From the time
of the events recounted in the Gospel of St. John, the Jew has defined himself
as a rejecter of Christ, something evident in the passage on the parents of the
man born blind, who refused to speak “out of fear of the Jews,” even though
they too were Jews, because the “Jews threatened to expel from the synagogue
anyone who accepted Christ as the Messiah.” The “Jews” did that then, and they
do it today. I can judge no one’s
soul, but if there is one group on the face of the earth which cannot claim to
be invincibly ignorant, it is the Jews because they were instructed by God
himself through the law and the prophets. However, the very fact that Jews are
taught by their Talmud to vilify Christ, mitigates individual culpability,
which is, as I have already stated, beyond my ability to judge. I have known
Jews who seemed to be honorable men, and I have known Jews who have seemingly
gone to their grave defiantly rejecting Christ. The fate of their immortal
souls is up to God. The only Jew I fear is the Jew who comes to me looking for
Christ and who receives from me the stone of tolerance rather than the bread of
eternal life. That happened once in my life, and I had made up my mind that it
was not going to happen again.
In order to put this
discussion in context, I would like to talk for a moment about the converse of
my statement that Jews, the people instructed by God Himself, cannot possibly
claim invincible ignorance, by talking about the case of one individual, in
this case, Sam Shapiro, someone I had known for over 20 years until his death
in late December 2004. Sam had written a number of articles for both Fidelity and Culture Wars; he lived around the corner; he would call me on a
regular basis, and yet the relationship was not one which I would call
symmetrical. He could and did call me whenever he felt like talking; when I
called him, however, he would often seem distant and unavailable.
That asymmetry continued to
the end. Roughly one year ago, I got a call from him after a gap of several
years. I had written an article on his wife and her involvement in witchcraft
as a professor at
Then roughly one year ago I
got a call from Sam, who told me in his typically direct fashion that when he
looked into the mirror he saw the face of a dying animal. Sam had cancer and
thought he was dying at the time. He was dying, but not in the way he thought.
I countered by saying that at moments like this we should think about the four
last things?
“What are they?” he asked.
“Death, judgment, heaven, hell,” I answered. “I don’t believe in any of that,”
he said. And that was that. For a while at least.
I got another call in
October. Sam had had a heart attack and was in the hospital awaiting a
quadruple bypass operation. His wife had died in June; his children were living
someplace else. I was, he told me, the only person he could turn to at the
moment. Would I mind taking care of his affairs in case he died? That meant
primarily, as he told it, shipping his body off to the lab at Indiana
University, where he was going to be chopped up into pieces and passed around
to the needy in some ghoulish rite that reminded of the John Prine song “Please
Don’t Bury Me.” Again, on the
phone and for the days of his recuperation, I brought up the four last things.
Or, let’s say, I tried to bring up the four last things in a hospital room
where the television is constantly playing. I remember trying to talk about the
final judgment, when suddenly Sam interrupted me by saying, “Look at that.” He
pointed to the television, which ironically was showing a documentary of people
dying in spectacular accidents. So naturally I got caught up in the footage of
the people tumbling out of the hot air balloon, being crushed as their vehicles
overturned, etc., and the conversation ended before it began.
Things continued in that
vein on a daily basis. I visited him just about every day, something that he
mentioned with gratitude more than once. “The rabbis never came to see me,” he
said at one point, “but you did.” At another point, he became pensive and said,
“Think of all the students I’ve led astray.” His son was in the room at that
point, and he added, “universities are subversive.” I was tempted to disagree but said nothing.
Universities may or may not
be subversive, but Sam and his wife certainly were. Sam was fired from a
teaching job in
Sam was released from the
hospital a few days after his quadruple bypass, but within a matter of days,
infection set in and he was back in the hospital. This time, since he was in
for the long haul, he was transferred to a quasi-nursing home at
When I showed up at the
hospital the next day, the doctor and the Hersh book had done their work. Sam
was no longer interested in conversion because Kennedy was a “bad
Catholic.” I tried to explain the
irrationality of his position, but as I said before, we enjoyed an asymmetrical
relationship. It was a bit like talking to my deaf grandfather. He could
initiate conversations, but I could not. I could only respond to what he said.
For the next few days, Sam would complain about the doctors. In particular the
one who had given him the Hersh book struck him as anti-Catholic, and he would
complain about getting weaker. Any attempt to steer the conversation to the
four last things was dismissed, rebuffed or ignored. Finally, one day he
started talking about some physics professor who had explained to Sam how big
the universe was and small and insignificant we were by comparison. I replied
by saying that at one point metaphysics, or natural theology, was seen as
flowing naturally from physics. People who thought that way felt that human
destiny was determined by the stars, but that was now known as astrology and
not something to be taken seriously. Sam must have been offended by what I
said, because he said that he was a sick man, that he was tired of arguing with
me, and that he would be happier if I didn’t come to visit him anymore. Roughly
two weeks later, I found out that he had died a few days after my last visit.
That wasn’t quite the end of
the story. As soon as I found out that Sam had died, I called the priest who
had suggested that I instruct Sam in the faith. I found out that he had visited
Sam in the time between my last visit and his death. Sam, the priest told me,
had shown no interest in the conversion which had prompted my conversation with
the priest in the first place. The priest felt that the fact that Sam’s
daughter was in the room might have inhibited their conversation, but I doubt
it. I think Sam had made up his mind when he asked me not to come visit him. I
cannot generalize about individuals. Sam was a Jew, and Jews cannot be
invincibly ignorant. But Sam the individual wasn’t ignorant either. His adult
life was an ongoing internal struggle between Sam the Jew, whose life was based
on the ethnically conditioned rejection of Christ, and Sam the Israelite, who
was drawn to Christ as his savior. In the end, at least from my limited
perspective, it looks as if the Jew won out in that struggle.
Thomas J. Nash is a Senior Information Specialist at Catholics United for the Faith (CUF).
E. Michael
Jones is the editor of Culture Wars.
This exchange was published in the
February, 2005 issue of Culture Wars.
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