Confessing Christ in a Post-Holocaust World: A Midrashic Experiment

(Hardback)

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The questions posed by the Holocaust force faithful Christians to reexamine their own identities and loyalties in fundamental ways and to recognize the necessity of excising the Church's historic anti-Jewish rhetoric from its confessional core. This volume proposes a new framework of meaning for Christians who want to remain both faithful and critical about a world capable of supporting such evil. The author has rooted his critical perspective in the midrashic framework of Jewish hermeneutics, which requires Christians to come to terms with the significant other in their confessional lives. By bringing biblical texts and the history of the Holocaust face to face, this volume aims at helping Jews and Christians understand their own traditions and one another's.

Reviews

"It is the genius of Henry Knight's discussion that he not only addresses the critical post-shoah questions for believing Christians: he expounds a method of approach that keeps the dialogue open."-Franklin H. Littell Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
"What a marvelous book! Here is a Christian Midrash, full of humane scholarship, driven by Christian and Jewish learning, sustained throughout by profound dialogue. Knight has dared to apply the Holocaust rigorously as a reorienting event for theology. He boldly reorients Christian thinking, reimagines Jesus' role and God's, while remaining deeply faithful to the distinctive power of the Christian and the Jewish traditions. Amazingly, in doing all this, he has harnessed the searing fire of the Shoah, turning it into a sun of righteousness, bringing healing."-Rabbi Irving Greenberg President Jewish Life Network

Author Bio

HENRY F. KNIGHT is University Chaplain and Associate Professor of Religion at The University of Tulsa, where he teaches courses on Christian Theology, the Holocaust, and Jewish-Christian Relations. He has written several scholarly articles and coedited a book, The Uses and Abuses of Knowledge (with Marcia Sachs Littell, 1997).