ABSTRACT
The Christ-event occurred in Israel, and the Christian Scriptures were formed out of the interaction of the early communities within this environment. In 1975, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, for example, issued a statement on the Pauline corpus in which they said that Paul's theology of Judaism has its more negative aspects that have been overemphasized through the centuries in Catholic teaching. Christians used polemical statements to respond to local issues but were certainly not constructing an antisemitic theology. Rosemary Ruether's theory that antisemitism is the opposite side of Christology focused this whole discussion most radically and demanded a response. David Tracy has urged that Catholics return to history and the world, a position which was mandated by Vatican II as well as by such earlier commentators as Friedrich Heer. Tracy has attempted to retrieve the authentic proleptic christology that Ruether had initially suggested.
