An Invisible Sign of an Impossible Grace

Friday, December 19, 2008

“This is my body, broken for you.”  Christians have interpreted these words, and the Eucharistic event they invoke, in a variety of ways.  To the Roman Catholics, the Eucharist involves transubstantiation, whereas Lutherans recognize Christ’s “real presence” with the elements.  Reformed thinkers claim Christ is spiritually with the elements, whereas Zwinglians reject any form of presence and insist that the Lord’s Supper is a symbolic act.  What is common in these accounts is that the Eucharist is associated with presence.  The Eucharist is taken to be a symbol that brings Christ to us, really, spiritually, or symbolically.  Indeed, most Christian thinking on sacramentality focuses on Christ’s presence in the event, rather than absence.  Following Derrida’s deconstruction of the sign and his critique of the metaphysics of presence, however, it becomes problematic to think of the Eucharist as an event that makes Christ present to us.i  How, then, might we interpret the Eucharist in terms of absence rather than in terms of Christ’s presence?  I contend that, rather than destroying sacramentality, Derrida provides us with fertile ground on which to develop an alternative account of Eucharist.  John Caputo in particular has shown that Derrida’s later thought, particularly his notion of the “messianic,” is actually amenable to religion.  In what follows, I would like to sketch briefly the contours of Derridean messianic deconstruction, which in turn will help us to think through a Eucharist without presence.  The questions before us are therefore what a Derridean Eucharist might look like, what its key features might be, and what strengths such a theory might have.

To begin, we need to examine how Derrida understands the concepts of intention and fulfillment.  Caputo refers to Derrida’s “phenomenology,” if one may call deconstruction an outgrowth of phenomenology, as “hyperbolic.”ii  In contrast to Husserl, for whom intuition fulfils intentions, at least partially, for Derrida intentions are never fulfilled because what is intended can never be made present.  Why is this so?  Derrida explains that intuition fails to bring about fulfilment because the fulfilling presence it presupposes is actually the function of non-presence.  This means that Husserlian phenomenology aims at a presence it cannot have.  Thus, the reach of intention exceeds its grasp and our intentions are unable to deliver the presence they seek.

Many of Derrida’s interpreters take the disintegration of fulfilment to be the advent of a nihilistic universe of relativistic meaning.  Interestingly, he does not treat the failure of fulfilment as an occasion for despair, but rather as a cause for hope.  The world does not collapse into nihilism because of the infinite deferral of presence.  Rather, this deferral has positive consequences.  Derrida’s twist on Husserl is to claim that intentions are able to function even when they are not brought to fulfilment.  The sign, in other words, is not dependent upon its ability to bring the signified to presence.  Thus, intentions are “hyperbolized” in that they are decoupled from fulfilment, left to continually grasp at a presence they can never have.  As a consequence, our intentions are able to “leap ahead” of where fulfilment could possibly go.iii  The decoupling of the intention/fulfilment pair frees intention to intend things that can never be fulfilled in the present moment, for example, the perfectly just society. 

Without fulfilling presence, one’s orientation toward the world begins to look a lot more like faith than knowledge.  The content of this faith is not theological.  Rather, Derridean faith involves intending the impossible in the absence of fulfilling knowledge. Deconstruction thus enables a person to make a leap of faith toward a fulfilment that is always futural.  As Caputo explains, deconstruction is not directed toward present fulfilment.  Rather, deconstruction is always turned what is to come, toward the “Messiah.”  To be sure, Derrida is not speaking of a coming historical figure that would be the present fulfilment of our hopes.  He distinguishes sharply between his “messianic” and the “messianisms” of various religious and philosophical traditions.  Derrida’s Messiah, rather, is always in the future.  Were the Messiah to come to fulfilment in the present, he or she could no longer be the Messiah, for the Messiah structurally is always what is to come.iv  This is Derrida’s messianic: not the hope for a historical Messiah, but hope and expectation directed toward the fulfilment that is always structurally in the future.  As the mode our unfulfilled intentions take on, the messianic is not what is hoped for but the very structure of hope and expectation.v  What we have in the present is never enough and always pales in comparison to the expectations we have toward the future.  The messianic therefore also involves a posture of humility – we can never lay hands on the presence we hope for.  This religiosity of deconstruction is, as Caputo notes, always holding vigil, praying and waiting and hoping for what is always in the future, saying, “Come.” 
     
Derrida identifies a prophetic function in the messianic.  There is an “inadequation” between the messianic future and the now.vi   Yet, in describing this prophetic moment, we find ourselves caught in an aporia.  On the one hand, the future we hope for is not the determinate future, so it cannot serve as a regulative norm that will allow us to emulate that future in the present.  What is coming is a surprise.vii  This “undecidability” means that the future is not fixed, that the justice to come is always to come.  Our desire for the Messiah thus shows us that we are not there yet.  This allows us to resist any form of triumphalism or self-aggrandizement, or the temptation to believe that we have reached the pinnacle of human progress.  We are not there yet.  In fact, the structure of the “there” we seek is such that we will never, properly speaking, get “there.”  The “there” is always to come. 
     
On the other hand, we are faced with the impossibility of inaction.  We do not know yet what the justice to come is, but we must nevertheless do justice now.  This prophetic function commands us to “responsibility for here and now.”viii  We must not collapse under the weight of judgment, or abandon all hope and simply wait for the future to arrive.  As Derrida understands it, the future that is hoped for never arrives in the present, for it is not a future-present.  Nevertheless, this future must come now. Waiting will not suffice.  Thus, we must blindly feel our way through this justice that cannot wait.  The character of expectation, then, is transformed from a passive “waiting” to an active “doing.”  To expect, in this sense, is to actively seek, to struggle toward the future to come, and to do the work of justice that is never finished, for what we call “justice” is never the justice to come.  One must do this humbly, for we do not know what is coming.

Derrida says that he “quite rightly passes for an atheist.”ix  Yet, he admits in his autobiographical writings and interviews that he is a man of prayer.x  Given this apparent disjunction, what does this tell us about the character of Derridean faith?  Faith, for Derrida, does not have an object that we can hold in mind, for we are never quite sure what we are hoping for or what we have faith in.  What we desire is always much greater than what we think we desire.  Thus, praying involves making an address without knowing who or what one addresses.  It is directing one’s intentions at that which one cannot fully intend, that which one does not and cannot understand.  God is always beyond fulfillment, even beyond our intentions, and cannot be understood in this fashion.  Thus, in this sense, God is always the unknown God, and always, according to Derrida, “strikes dumb the order of knowledge.”xi  For Derrida, faith really does involve a “leap,” for it does not consist in knowledge and does not commit to a particular “theism.”  Thus, faith in the Messiah is still faith in what is to come, rather than knowledge of it.

Deconstruction, considered religiously, is a “purer faith, a more perfect prayer,”xii one that desires that which it does not understand.  It begins by detaching our intentions from fulfilment and ends by leaving us radically open to a messianic future that is always structurally to-come.  It is faith that leaps after God, desires God, without knowing who or what God is.  Directed toward the future that is never present, the faithful person seeks that deferred fulfilment of the messianic advent.  Unquenchable desire for God also shows us the messianic future “to come” is always greater than what we ourselves can achieve; the moment that, in our hubris, we believe we have brought it about is the moment of our fall. Yet, we have no choice but to keep our gaze fixed on the promised future, a future that is always “not yet.”

Derrida’s messianic expectation is relevant to Christianity because, although we confess a historical Messiah in Jesus Christ, the Messiah who has-come is at the same time the Messiah to-come.  Derrida, I believe, gives us not a theology, but a way to understand God’s absence.  In the age after the Ascension, we experience the Messiah’s absence from history, and so like Derrida must look toward messianic fulfilment.  Thus, we cannot claim to possess Christ’s presence, or to have Christ exclusively, because Christ is always to come.  The recognition of this absence requires us to reinterpret our understanding of God.  Our relationship can and must never be a having or a holding or an understanding, or even a perceiving (where, in Levinas’ sense, perception is always per-ception, laying hold of).  Perhaps the most important insight we can glean from Derrida’s messianic is the necessity of being humble with regard to our talk about God.  Instead, our faith can only be one of expectation.  This is the structure of faith qua faith.  This is not the same as knowing, for we do not have faith in our doctrines or theologies.  To claim faith in God is to claim an expectation, an intention yet to be fulfilled, but which hopes for fulfilment.  This great desire, according to Derrida, this hunger for the divine presence with us, is faith.  In this ravenous desire for God, we find a faith for the time after Jesus’ ascension.

This brings us back to our point of departure: the sacrament of Eucharist.  We noted from the outset that deconstruction makes the notion of Christ being made present in the sacrament problematic.  As we have seen, however, utter chaos is not the end point in Derrida’s thought, and thus must not be the endpoint in our thinking about the sacrament.  Traditional Christian Eucharistic theology revolves around Christ’s promise to be present wherever “two or three” are gathered in his name.  Deconstruction does not deny this promise, but reframes it.  The promise to be present in the Eucharistic act is seen not as fulfilled in the temporal, not in the present moment, but in the future, as a promise that remains promise because it has yet to be fulfilled.  On this interpretation, God does not become present in the moment of the feast, as a guest at the table among us, even in some mysterious way.  Rather, Christ is the guest of honour at the Eucharistic feast who has yet to arrive, whose arrival is delayed.  We, the faithful, do not leave the table, but remain seated, waiting for the guest of honour to arrive.xiii  The Lord’s Supper becomes a vigil, the very act in which our expectation is embodied.  To eat the bread and drink the wine, in this light, is precisely to look toward the fulfilment that is not yet.  It is to expect the guest’s arrival at the feast.  The Lord’s Supper thus takes on a messianic function in that, in the absence of present fulfilment, it structures our hope for the fulfilment to come.

There are two key moments to this messianic function I will discuss in turn.  The first is the recognition of absence.  To acknowledge with Derrida that the sign cannot bring about its signified is to confess that Christ is not physically with us, that Christ is risen and sits at the right hand of God.  The absence of the divine from history, in which Emmanuel, God-with-us, is not-with-us, is felt bitterly by those who come to the table.  It is because we intend the presence that we recognize and mourn the absence.  We identify this divine absence with the injustice and sin of our world.  It is precisely what we long for, which is absent, that casts judgment on the shortcomings, sins, and injustices we bring with us to the table.  Whatever true Eucharist is – and we do not know this! – we do not have it yet.  The Eucharist thus serves a prophetic role, reminding us how we fall short in comparison to what we intend in the sacrament.  The sacrament calls us into question.  To come to the table is thus to find oneself under judgment.  Indeed, in sitting at the table and hoping for fulfilment, we are forced to recall those who have been excluded from the table, and thus, from community with us.  The Eucharist, even as it reaches toward fulfilment, serves as our humble confession that our present feast is imperfect.

Because the Messiah is not with us here in the present, and because the future in which the Messiah comes is not a future-present, but a future that is always and remains to come (à venir), we have no choice but to say, “Come” (venir).  This posture of anticipation, this orientation of expectation and hope, is the only response we can give to the situation we are presented with.  This is Derrida’s aporia of urgency: “Justice, however unpresentable it remains, does not wait.”xiv  Or better, the Eucharist, however un-presentable it remains, does not wait.  We must say, “come.” We must seek it earnestly and continue to pray for it.  We must continue to demand the coming Kingdom of God because, though it is to come, the presence we demand is needed now.  This immense need is precisely what the empty seat at the table shows us.  In this sense, the Eucharist is a demand, or even a plea, for God to be with us.  Eucharist, then, would not be a mystical union, but the act of our crying out like the psalmist, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” in the midst of a world that needs the Messiah now. 

The second moment in this messianic sacrament is the anticipation of fulfilment.  This begins in the emptiness of absence, but does not stay there.  In essence, it moves beyond despair into hope.  In eating the bread and drinking the wine, we do not look toward the past or present, but toward the future, when people will come from east and west, from south and north, and sit at table in the kingdom of God.xv  The Eucharist thus always points us toward the messianic age and the kingdom of God to come.  Part of this hopefulness is that we can always say, “Come.”  It is not only that we must do this, but also we are actually freed to do this.  We are freed to have faith in the fact that there is something more than the status quo.  We are freed to dissent, to question, to ask, “Is this all that there is?”  We are freed from self-satisfied complacency.  In short, that the messianic future is always still before us means that we need not accept the fallen world as immutable and never put up with another injustice, because we as human beings always have farther to go.  We can always say, “come,” for we have never reached the future we hope for in Christ, the fulfillment of justice and the advent of God’s reign on earth.xvi  In this sense, partaking in the Eucharist is like walking on a never-ending road toward God.  There has never been a final or definitive Eucharist because what the Eucharist hopes for is always in the future. It is as if, in eating the bread and drinking the wine, we find that our bellies remain empty.  The joy of anticipation is thus the promise that we can always continue to ask for more.  In short, in the Eucharist we dream of a God who is beyond our imagination, and thus, always takes us by surprise.

Thus, we are both bound and freed to partake of the Eucharist again and again.  The Lord’s Supper is both a mandate and a promise.  Those who come to the table are never simply recipients of the sacrament, but active petitioners, called to recognize the fallenness of the present and to summon forth the messianic future.  This is both the promise and demand of this Eucharist.

Augustine famously describes the sacrament as a “visible sign of an invisible grace.”  Following the forgoing analysis of Derridean “sacramentality,” it would seem that this Augustinian formula is actually quite consistent with a messianic Eucharist.  The sign, the act of eating the bread and drinking the wine, is itself visible, but following Derrida, we must say that the sign fails to bring about a visible grace, God’s presence.  Thus, the grace remains for us invisible, as Augustine puts it, but also non-present, always just out of reach.  The invisibility of sacramental grace, in Derrida’s sense, is not invisibility to scientific methodology, but the invisibility of the impossible, or the messianic grace that is always in the future.  It is a grace that we always hope for and expect.  Thus, the Derridean take on this classic Augustinian formula might be that the sacrament is a “visible sign of an impossible grace,” where impossible here denotes the fulfilment that is always in our future.  The grace we long for is impossible, for we do not know quite what we long for, but seek it in the act of faith, returning to the table again and again saying, “Come.”

i Two caveats:  First, I take as given the denial of presence; there are of course arguments against this, which I have not the space to explore.  Second, I leave aside the question of whether such an account is orthodox.  My question is theoretical, rather than dogmatic.
ii John D. Caputo, “The Hyperbolization of Phenomenology,” in Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 68.
iii Ibid., 71.
iv Ibid., 73.  Cf. Maurice Blanchot, Writing the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 141-2.
v Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, ed. and with commentary by John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 23, 161.
vi Ibid., 24.
vii John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 56.
viii Derrida, Nutshell, 24.
ix Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 155.
x John D. Caputo, “Shedding Tears Beyond Being: Derrida’s Confession of Prayer,” in Augustine and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 96-7.
xi Helene Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 31.
xii Caputo, “The Hyperbolization of Phenomenology”, 76.
xiii Cf. Mark 25:1-13.
xiv Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 255.
xv Luke 13:29, Matt. 8:11
xvi Cf. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, translated by Lycette Nelson (New York: SUNY Press, 1992), 108.

Ponderings on Kierkegaard's Diary of a Seducer

Thursday, March 20, 2008

The following is from an assignment for my Theology and Literature class. The book in question is Soren Kierkegaard's Diary of a Seducer, which is exactly what it sounds like: it is the diary of a man named Johannes who sets out to seduce a young woman named Cordelia. The following excerpt appears toward the end of the novel:

“As being-for-another, woman is characterized by pure virginity. For virginity is a form of being which, in so far as it is a being-for-self, is really an abstraction and it only appears for another… The being of woman (for the word ‘existence’ already says too much, since she does not subsist out of herself) is rightly characterized as charm, an expression suggesting a vegetative life; she is like a flower, as the poets are fond of saying, and even the spiritual is present in her in a vegetative manner. She is wholly contained in categories of Nature, and so she is free only aesthetically. She only becomes free in a deeper sense through the man, and that is why we say [in Danish] at frie, and that is why the man ‘frees’ [frier].”
- Soren Kierkegaard, The Seducer’s Diary, 121-2.


Toward the end of the novel, when Johannes has set the final part of his plan into motion, causing Cordelia to break their engagement as a final act of seduction, Johannes waxes philosophical for several pages and sketches, in brief, his vision of the proper relationship between men and women. As noted in the selection cited above, Johannes view is that a woman is, essentially, being-for-another. We must note, of course, that Johannes does not mean being-for-another in the sense of selflessness and humility, virtues that the Kierkegaard would no doubt value as essential to the Christian life. Rather, according to his view, a woman is has no existence, has no being in herself, much as the flower has no beauty except to an admirer. A woman can only have existence in relation to another, namely, to a man. Just as that which is charming must be charming to someone, women, on Johannes’ view, only have being insofar as they live out their relation to men. In fact, he goes on, it is only in and through this relation to men that women have any freedom at all. The woman, as Johannes interprets Genesis, is the man’s dream given life. On his view, there is a complementary relationship between men and women, but that relationship is not symmetrical. In other words, the woman, on his view, provides that moment of beauty, that aesthetic, charming pleasure to the man’s life, but she does not complete him in any meaningful way, for his is already complete. Conversely, it is the man who brings the woman to completion. She is only in relation to another. Moreover, we must remember Johannes odd theory about boys and girls. Boys are born, he thinks, and gradually grow into men. Girls, on the other hand, are not really “born” at birth, but are rather “born” a second time when they reach womanhood. The mechanism for this birth, he thinks, is the experience of love, which, of course, is something that only a man can bring to a woman’s life. Thus, we see that, for Johannes, a woman can only be complete in her relationship to a man.

In a bizarre way, this schema of gender relations allows Johannes to picture himself as something of a philanthropist, as someone who is actually doing these young women a favor by seducing them. After all, he notes early on that his intention is to seduce Cordelia in such a way that she will think herself to be acting freely, but will in fact be caught in Johannes’ tangled web of lies and treachery. Nevertheless, he seems to think that this kind of freedom – the freedom to “choose” a man, to respond favorably or unfavorably to the man’s attempts to win her heart – is the only kind of freedom a woman can know. This “aesthetic” freedom, if it can be called freedom at all, is all that is possible for women, who must live out their lives as being-for-another. In a sense, Johannes seems to admire this aesthetic freedom that women exercise. After all, after discussing how men “sue” for women’s attention and women then choose, he says, “In a sense the man is more than the woman, in another he is infinitely less.” This could mean that, in general, he regards men more highly than women because they are free in a more robust kind of way; free, for instance, to construct elaborate plots to ensnare the hearts of young women. He does recognize, however, that the woman’s freedom of choice, in which she can actually reject these attempts to win her heart, is significant. Moreover, he also early speaks of his distaste for rape. Thus, he does seem to respect this ability to choose, if the act of choice itself is understood in this limited, aesthetic sense. Thus, in a way, what Johannes seems to see himself doing in these seduction is not only creating pleasure for himself, but also constructing an elaborate scheme in which the woman (in this case, Cordelia) is able to exercise her aesthetic freedom, her ability to choose or decline a relationship with Johannes. The brilliance of these schemes is that while Cordelia is “allowed” to exercise her freedom in the limited, aesthetic sense, she is nevertheless not free in a larger sense because she has been manipulated by Johannes. Thus, they both get something they need; both are put in situations in which they are able to exercise their freedom, though in radically different ways that are dependent on their roles (as Johannes sees it) as men and women.

Johannes’ ponderings about men and women draw my mind, quite naturally, to the doctrine of theological anthropology, or our theological understanding of human nature. In the Reformed understanding of creation, we learn that it was not only the man, but the man and the woman both who were made in the image of God. Thus, there is no basis for adopting, as Johannes clearly has, the interpretation of women as incomplete or malformed men. A faithful reading of the creation accounts indeed tells us that both men and women, made as they were in the image of God, are part of creation, and thus, very good. On account of the fact that both women and men are formed in the imago Dei, there is no theological basis for the notion that women are somehow incomplete and men complete.

Once we have asserted, on theological grounds, the equality of men and women, the question still remains as to what the proper relation between the sexes might be from the Reformed perspective. This, of course, gets us into somewhat murkier territory, as the models both biblical writers and theologians have proposed for the relationship between men and women have been conditioned by their historical contexts, and to a large extent, these historical contexts have led these authors to prefer a model of male dominance in which, for example, the man is the head of the household. The conversation gets considerably more murky when we consider romantic relationships between two men or two women. While I do not want to map out here a complete model for how Reformed theology informs gender relations, I do want to offer a few insights. We must always begin the conversation by noting, at the beginning, that Reformed theology places high value on the notion of imago Dei. Creation on God’s image tells us not only that we are God’s children, but also that each of is gifted. Each of us possesses God-given gifts that are unique and special. Thus, I believe it is faithful to Reformed theology to say that, in any serious relationship, each party brings something to the table. I bring my gifts, while you bring yours. Thus, we must note that, from this theological perspective, there is no human relationship that is one-sided. That is, there cannot be a relationship in which I bring everything and you bring nothing, as Johannes seems to think. This may be true in terms of finances, or attraction, or interest, but it is not true in terms of the innate giftedness of each human person. Thus, I am calling not Johannes’ interpretation of gender relations unfaithful because of its notion of complementation. We do, I think, complement one another, but (a) not in ways that are predetermined (i.e. each person is unique and has unique gifts) and (b) not because one party is “incomplete” without the other; rather, each person in a relationship is a whole human person insofar as they are made in the image of God, and thus, no addition is needed to make them complete. The complementation that takes place through human relations is thus not two halves making a whole, but rather the mystery of 1 + 1 = 3, or the emergent properties of two people coming together. But that is, most certainly, a matter for another entry. In any case, what is unfaithful about Johannes’ ponderings about gender is his proposition that women are incomplete, and thus, must rely on another to be. This does not cohere to Reformed theology whatsoever.

What, if anything, can we learn from Johannes’ antiquated ideas about gender? I am hesitant to say that we can learn anything from his ponderings, as they seem to lead us inevitably to a world of hierarchy rather than unity and solidarity. Yet, there is perhaps one small insight that can be gleaned from this passage and that is this: there is a sense in which all of us (not just men or women) being-for-another. I see two ways we can understand this, one existential and the other sociological. The existential first. In existentialism, one of the main emphases is for a person to be a free, autonomous agent. Sartre, who was influenced by Kierkegaard, thought that the ideal person would be able to make the “criterionless choice,” that is, the choice that is not conditioned by what other’s think. This, for the later existentialists, is the crux of the “leap of faith,” the ability to rely on no one other than oneself and be the heroic individual who stands up against the conformity of the world. In this existentialist context, being-for-another is the opposite of the ideal; it is precisely what a person should try to avoid. While I am not sure I want to accept wholesale the existentialist program, there is wisdom in the insight that one cannot allow oneself to be, fully, being-for-another. We must be who we are, who were created to be, not merely means toward some other person’s end. Thus, I think it is faithful to say, in response to this existential interpretation, that we must all guard against becoming being-for-another, which is to say that we must not allow ourselves to dissolve into the group and lose our individual giftedness. Second, there is also a sociological interpretation, which to some extent contradicts the existential interpretation: human persons, to the extent that they participate in communities, are who they are largely in relation to the others. I myself, for example, am who I am in large measure because of my relationships to my family, my friends, my fiancée. These people make me who I am; without them, I would not be the same person. In this respect, we are not monads, but are constituted by our interactions with other people. Thus, according to this perspective, it would be foolish for me to try to be a fully autonomous individual; not only is this foolish, but it is moreover impossible. Both these insights on the term being-for-another have their merit. The existentialist insight reminds us of the beauty of our individual giftedness, while the sociological insight reminds us that we nevertheless need others, that we are called into community. The former guards against self-deprecation, the latter guards against pride. The two, then, must be held in creative tension.

My Grand Finale

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

As most of you (I'm sure) know, I have no aspirations toward the vocation of preaching. Nevertheless, senior preaching is a required course at the seminary and, this morning, I gave what was my only sermon for the class and, perhaps, the last sermon of my career. Read it and weep:

"Knowing Love and Unknowing Love"

It's our tendency as human beings to try to make sense of things. If you stop and think about it, we're doing it all the time. The ancient Greeks did it when the figured out that lightning was caused by the anger of the sky-god, Zeus. Anger = lightning. Sir Isaac Newton did it when he figured out that the force of gravity causes objects to fall to the earth. Sigmund Freud did it when he explained human urges as a conflict between Id, Ego, and Superego. The point is that when, in our comings and goings in the world, we run up against something that is strange and unfamiliar or that does not make sense, we do our best to make sense of it. We're efficient little explainers, that's for sure. We've created entire professions whose job it is to explain the inexplicable, to make the world make sense to us. The expectation behind all this investigating and explaining, of course, is that the world is, ultimately, the kind of thing that can be fully explained. Physicists talk about Grand Unification Theories and Theories of Everything; the idea is that, eventually, we will come up with a theory that will be sufficient to explain all phenomena in the universe. Nothing will be left out. The world, such as it is, will stand explained and fully comprehensible.

At least, that's the hope. And we all hope for this, even those of us who don't buy into the scientific idealism implicit in Grand Unification Theories, don't we? We all hope for a world in which nothing is beyond our ability to ask Why? Or How? Secretly, perhaps, we all like our worlds to be neatly tied up with no loose ends or little bits that don't make sense.

Thus, we aren't quite sure what to do when we come across something that, even after a great deal of investigating and examination, just doesn’t seem to make sense. That is, something that is so foreign to our everyday experience that it just doesn’t seem to cohere at all. Perhaps you have experienced a glimpse of this. Terms in a theology book that don't make sense, for instance. Or a loved one's unexpected actions, behavior that seems to come out of left field and doesn't cohere with what you know to be true about the person. Or getting lost on the way to a friend's house, ending up in a completely strange neighborhood. This January, I took part in a seminary trip to Indonesia. Our first major outing during the trip was to visit the Christian village of Blimbingsari, far in the north of Bali. When we arrived, I discovered, much to my chagrin, that we would be staying in the homes of people in the community, rather than in the relative emotional safety of a hotel. As a former college choir member who regularly went on tour, I have come to dread the word, “homestay.” The term conjures up images of awkward, forced conversations in unfamiliar living rooms and the strangeness of sleeping in another person’s bed. Nevertheless, there was no reprieve. All alone, with no fellow seminarian for company, I arrived at the home of a Balinese woman who spoke not a single word of English. After a few initial moments of awkwardness, we muddled through “conversation” for a few minutes. At first, we tried out hand gestures, but found that even these were a bit foreign to one another. For example, she at one point emphatically said . I had absolutely no idea what this meant and politely declined. Then she attempted to show me pictures of her family, pointing to each person and trying to indicate where they were and what they were doing. Again, I did not understand. Finally, we resigned ourselves to watching television, which unfortunately was also in Indonesian and almost completely inexplicable. Eventually, she left me alone to do some household chores. Sitting in this woman's house, near nobody who spoke my language, listening to television that I did not understand, alone in a Balinese village thousands of miles from home, I suddenly felt the Otherness, the incoherence, the difference. I was, so to speak, a fish out of water, and for a few minutes, nothing in this place seemed to fit with my experience of the world. It was a strange feeling. In a way, I felt liberated by the Otherness of it all, by the foreignness of the situation which was so different from my everyday experience of the world; everything seemed strange and new. On the other hand, though, I felt trapped and stifled, stranded on a desert island and surrounded by the Otherness.

And yet, as I said, this was only a glimpse, a mere taste of Otherness, and thus I don’t want to push the example too far. After all, the woman and I had more in common than not. We were both human beings, both Christians. We both ate and drank and drew breath. The list goes on and on. But in that moment in which I sensed an otherness that did not cohere to any of my experiences, that could not be readily assimilated, that could not be immediately explained, I felt the stir of panic. But I have this crazy hunch that, in spite of our best efforts to render the whole world explicable, to assimilate everything back into the familiar and ordinary, a lot of us feel that uncomfortable twinge of panic more often that we would like to admit. Let’s face it – the world is a scary and sometimes bewildering place. And while we like to comfort ourselves by noting what efficient little explainers we are, by assuring ourselves that we’ve pretty much got a handle on most things, deep down, I think many of us sense that this is self-delusion. In fact, as we begin to move away from the youthful intellectual idealism of the Enlightenment, we are beginning to see more and more that we cannot hope to have objective knowledge of all things in our world, that we are more limited – dare I say, more frail and finite – than our Enlightenment era brothers and sisters cared to admit. Thus, we are left in a bit of a bind: it’s our nature to try to make sense of things, but it seems that there are some things out there that are just too foreign, just too Other for us to make sense of… what are we to do? The world just doesn’t make sense!

It is something of a truism to note that, in the context of a world in which there are, despite our valiant efforts to explain anything and everything, many uncertainties, a great number of people find immense comfort in the teachings of Christianity. Whereas the world is a confusing place that oftentimes doesn’t make sense, in which ideas and circumstances twist and change from moment to moment, we tend to believe that the Church is a place of steadiness, of stability. A sure and sturdy foundation, founded upon a Rock of Ages, as it were! Those who place their trust in the teachings of Christ find great respite there in the midst of a confusing and rapidly changing world in which our efforts to explain and understand are sometimes futile. But the Church is different from that, isn’t it? In contrast to that world, the Church is something of a shelter in the storm, a place of refuge and strength and familiarity. It is a place where, nurtured by divine grace and divine love, things make sense. A place of warmth and comfort. A place of assurance. Here, in this place, the deep human desire to have understanding and closure is finally satisfied.

At least, that’s how we tend to think of the Church and of the teachings of Christianity. And so imagine the shock, the bewilderment, the alterity of arriving at your beloved Church on Sunday morning, relaxing into the cushions of your usual pew, and really hearing, perhaps for the first time, the command, “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Such language! Such words! What a command! But does it make sense? Love the ones who, by definition, one does not and must not love? What folly! How might one understand the command Jesus gives in this passage? Is this something that can be appropriated in such a way that it makes logical sense? That is, can we find a way to make this command reasonable? Can we harmonize it with a world in which, on nearly every occasion, we love the neighbor and hate the enemy? After all, does it not make practical sense to love one’s family, one’s friends, one’s coworkers, and to hate those who wish one harm, such as business competitors, identity thieves, or even terrorists? Or is this command, finally, a rupture of practical wisdom, a betrayal of the comfortable, mundane familiarity of the church environment, the one place that a person can always count on for reassurance and constancy? I choose my words here carefully and say betrayal deliberately, for after all, do many of us not come to Church to be comforted, not disturbed, and to receive inspiration and practical wisdom, not be thrown into intellectual and spiritual turmoil by commands that seem to be folly. So, yes, I wonder whether or not this difficult command might in fact be a betrayal of all we hope the church community to be.

Of course, there are ways we can try to make sense of this command, ways to assimilate it back into our common understandings of life. Some, for instance, have suggested that the passage was never intended to be taken literally. These scholars point out the command to love one's enemy, in addition to the other commands offered in the Antitheses, can never be perfectly followed by flawed and sinful human beings. In fact, they go on to say, the severity of Jesus' commands is intended to show us exactly how sinful we are; in contemplating the ideal to which Jesus calls us, we will understand our complete and utter moral bankruptcy, and thus, feel compelled to appeal to the merciful grace of God. In other words, according to this view, the command to love one's enemy is a teaching tool, an example that has pedagogical value rather than moral weight. Others argue that the command to love one's enemy could be viewed as a means to an end. That is, in loving one's enemy and praying for persecutors, we may initiate a change in his or her heart. That is, our actions will cause a change of heart in our enemy, and they will, in fact, cease to be our enemy at all. Or, love of enemy could be a tactic designed to confuse the enemy. After all, we generally think that one ill turn deserves another, and our foes expect us to return evil for evil, so what better way to confound one's enemies than by showing love where once was hatred, mercy where once was mercilessness, kindness where once was cruelty. Or, finally, we also attach all sorts of caveats to the command. The theory just war comes to mind, which states that, of course, one should love one’s enemies, but in the instance that they attack your country, it is right and just to respond with proportional action. Such a caveat acknowledges that, of course, love of one’s enemies is the ideal, but for the purposes of living in a messy world, it is prudent to defend oneself against violent aggressors.

In these and many other ways, we make sense of Jesus' commands. We assimilate them. We explain them. But are these ways of reading the command too quick and easy? The answer is yes. When read the command to love one's enemies as a means to an end, or a tactic, or a pedagogical tool, then we have missed the point entirely and have in fact domesticated the saying. Reading and hearing the command, “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” should not be a comfortable, easy, fully explicable experience. The moment this command becomes just another element of the world to be explained, we have already failed to understand the saying.

Thus, we must understand the utter radicality of what Jesus is asking his followers to do. That is, to love the one whom by definition, you do not love. When we step into the world of this passage, we must allow ourselves to experience something like the culture shock of my homestay in Bali. For at least a moment, we must forsake the comfort and joy of too easy explanations and begin to let the difference wash over us, bringing us slowly but surely to the panic of feeling oneself lost and alone in Otherness. Hear the passage again: “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Allow the passage to confront you in all its alterity. This is not the kind of saying that can be readily domesticated, that can be made to cohere with our common sense understanding of the world. We cannot fit this command neatly into the system of explanation we construct to make sense of the world. In this command, God is calling us, if only for a moment, to forgo our constant explaining and rationalizing and grasping at the truth. We are asked to bracket, if only for a moment, our need to have the answer, to know the answer. We are called, rather, to enter into a moment of unknowing in which the Otherness of the command encounters us as something that goes completely beyond our experience. Forsaking for the moment all that we know about enemies, all that we know about prayer, and all that we know about love, these categories are left in a kind of flux. And when the moment passes, we no not arrive on the other side of these considerations with an explanation, or with knowledge that can be grasped and controlled, but only the realization that the love to which God calls us is not reducible to an economy.

When one experiences love for the enemy, one begins to understand that love – at least not as Jesus wants us to understand love – is not a reciprocal relationship. It's not, in other words, like the way Christmas often is around the office. You know what I'm talking about. A coworker unexpectedly gives you a gift; a kind gesture, to be sure. But now, out of gratitude tainted by obligation, you feel compelled to return the gift, to add this person to your Christmas list. Thus, what has happened here is not gratuity at all, certainly not a freely given gift with no strings attached. Insofar as the coworker, on some level, expects to receive a gift in return, the gift has not been truly given. And, on the other hand, insofar as I the recipient feel obligated to give my coworker a gift in exchange, the gift has not been truly received. The same is true, according to this passage, of love. If I love you because you love me, then I do not truly love you, at least not in the deep spiritual sense Jesus wants us to love. After all, anyone can readily love those who love them in return. But what is gained? If love is reciprocal, then it is only an economy and is not, in fact, a gift. When love enters into an economy, Jesus tells us, it ceases to be love at all. Thus, it is only in loving the one who cannot and will not return love, our very own enemies, that we can understand what love truly is. This is the paradox of the passage. It cannot be reduced to a form that is explainable. In fact, in many ways, it makes no sense. Pragmatically speaking, it is ridiculous to love one's enemies. As Nietzsche aptly noted, the love of enemies is a sign of weakness. Insofar as I am engaged in love, I am not on my guard, and surely my enemy will take advantage of the situation to do me in. Likewise, what are my friends likely to think when they learn of my love for the enemy? This is not hard to discover; you can try it out today! Tonight, when gathered with your friends and loved ones, start talking about your love for Osama bin Laden. Really, try it! See how much closer it will bring you to your friends.... no, love of enemies is not practical. It does not make sense. It cannot be assimilated back into our everyday experience of the world and thus domesticated. No matter how hard we try to make sense of it, the command to love one’s enemies stands apart and confronts us with its alterity.

So, in the end, faced with an Otherness than cannot be domesticated and reduced to practical wisdom, faced with a command that seems folly, the following of which is just as likely to alienate one’s friends as to express love toward one’s foes, where are we to locate the graceful moment in this text. For there is, I think, grace in the command to love one’s enemies, but it not a cheap grace, an opiate that dulls the force of the command and takes away its ethical potency in our lives. In other words, the grace in this command is not a get-out-of-jail free card that nullifies our moral obligation. This hard, but genuine grace is none other than this: that there is a love that is more than economy, a love that is not reducible to oneself. In other words, what we learn here is that there is love, REAL love, but a difficult kind of love. This is not the warm fuzzy variety extolled by greeting cards and romantic comedies. No, the love spoken of here is that which, transcending the Self, realizes its ethical obligation toward the Other, and thus shows no partiality toward any human being. It is, so to speak, the recognition of the imago Dei in every human person, or the recognition of all people as genuine ends in themselves. The grace in Jesus’ words here is not that this kind of love is simple or easy. Rather, the grace is precisely that we need not despair! That this kind of love is real, that it is out there, even if it defies logic and explanation. The grace is that, in beginning to see love as one’s basic orientation toward all persons, friend and enemy cease to be categories that divide us one from the other. That is, our attitudes of relative friendliness or aggression cease to be the primary motives behind our interaction. This is precisely the grace here, that in the midst of a hard command that cannot be domesticated or assimilated back into practical wisdom, that confronts us from Beyond with its impenetrable alterity, nevertheless grants us a new posture with which to greet our fellow human beings, one that goes beyond mere categories and stereotypes to something more basic. We are not being asked to like all people or always to agree. We are, rather, being commanded to greet one another in love. In a way, this is much harder than loving one’s neighbor and hating one’s enemy. But in another way, a way that does not quite make sense, that is not readily understood and explained, it is much easier.

So, be troubled by this passage. Let it assail you with its alterity. Let the command have its way with you. Rather than assimilating it and domesticating it and turning it into something it is not, let it assimilate YOU! Encounter this command Face-to-Face in all its radical Otherness. And be disturbed. Begin to unknow what you think you know about your enemy. And what you think you know about love. And in this unknowing, in which you encounter love that is a rupture of the economy, in which you see that love of the enemy is not merely an ideal, but rather an obligation, you will see the grace of this antinomian command. But it will not come all at once, and do not expect it to, for in the end, loving one’s enemy does not make sense. What folly!

Are We Really Any Different?

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Tomorrow is the President's Colloquium here at Austin Seminary. The idea is to take controversial issues facing the church and discuss them in a civil, academic setting. Anyway, the topic of this semester's colloquium is, "Joining and Being Church: What's Not Negotiable." The underlying idea of this, I think, is to figure out exactly what beliefs are required of a person who wishes to be a part of the church, in particular, the Presbyterian Church. According to the flier, "They will discuss whether or not there are universally agreed upon minimum standards of belief for becoming a member of a church in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and they will examine related matters of theology and ecclesiology." My guess is that there will indeed be some disagreement upon whether there are indeed 'universally agreed upon minimum standards of belief.' That much is quite likely. What bothers me, though, is the implicit and unexamined notion that, whether or not we agree upon what they are, there are INDEED minimum standards of belief. That is, even if we cannot agree upon what they are, there are certain propositions to which one MUST give intellectual assent in order to be part of the church-community.

Prima facie, this seems like a fairly uncontroversial and unproblematic thing. After all, shouldn't members of a Christian church have to have SOME minimum amount of beliefs that are in some way consonant with the tradition? Isn't that part of what defines the community, that is, our general agreement about a set of religious propositions? Without this agreement, one might wonder, what is the basis of our unity? For Protestants, there is no visible basis for unity, like the Roman Catholics have in the Pope of Rome. Thus, for Presbies, our unity must subsist in a unity of belief... right?

Presbyterians, at least the Presbyterians I know and am proud to call friends and colleagues, like to talk about how important the stewardship of the mind is in Reformed thought, how we encourage our members to think for themselves and would never, never act like those craaaaazy fundamentalists who define what it is to be a Christian so stringently. But, when we start talking not about WHETHER there are minimum standards of belief, but rather WHAT those minimum standards of belief are, are we really so different from our friends the fundamentalists? Sure, we won't call them fundamentals. We will make it sound innocuous by calling them "minimum standards." Who wouldn't agree to minimum standards, after all? But aren't we doing the same thing that they are doing, that is, boiling the life of faith down to the essential beliefs so as to more stringently define the bounds of our community? Minimum standards, whatever, they are, become just another way of saying, "You're in, and you are out." Isn't this exactly what happened at St. Andrew's here in Austin?

Now, granted, I haven't been to the colloquium yet. However, I just wanted to go on record - such as it is - with my reservations about the topic itself. And, for the record, my personal opinion is this: when we look to the life of Christ as portrayed in the New Testament, we find not a community that was dependent on belief. Hell, if that was what it was all about, Jesus would have booted his disciples out long before they reached Jerusalem. No, the unity of Jesus' community is based upon human action, upon orthopraxis. Jesus spent much of his time, it seems to me, teaching by example. We don't find gospels filled with doctrine and creeds; instead, what we find is Jesus living out the fullness of his God-consciousness in community with those whom he called friends. Thus, when it comes to trying to discern what the essentials of belief are that allow for admittance into the Christian community, my response is that we must look to each individual person, not as a collection of belief or propositions, but as a whole person who has something to offer the community.

Christmas in August

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Christmas came early this year in the form of a wonderful tract placed upon my windshield this morning. I really could not ask for a better tract. Seriously. The headline reads, "Global Warming and the Deterioration of the Ozone," so when I picked it up, I figured it was an environmentalist flier. Oh, how wrong I was! Upon reading the tract, I discovered that it was actually from a fairly crazy sect called the House of Yahweh, whose leader believes that the world will soon be destroyed by nuclear war. Upon further investigation, I found out that the leader, who calls himself Yisrayl Hawkins, actually predicted that the devastating nuclear war would begin on June 12, 2007. Whoops!

Anyway, the best part is this: the guy starts ranting about sexual sins and tells the grossly uninformed reader that such sins cause "bugs" to accumulate in the body. These bugs, according to Yisrayl, are more than germs; rather, they are unnatural, not of this earth, and this is the reason why people suffer from STDs. But it gets better. He argues that these unnatural bugs, which are passed from the body, travel up into the atmosphere, where they attack the natural, good bugs that are a part of the Earth's ecosystem. The result of this attack of the evil, sexual bugs is (you guessed it) the depletion of the ozone layer and global warming. The conclusion: sexual perversion is the cause of global warming.

This guy should win a Nobel Prize or something...

Denial

Thursday, June 14, 2007

The notion that, for 8 hours a day, human persons can be transformed into machines and considered something less than human for the purposes of their work is demonic. I have been reminded this week of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative. He says, and I'm going to butcher this, "Treat others also as ends in themselves and never as mere means." Do you feel like an end in yourself when you go to work, or do you feel like mere means to some other agent's ends?

There is no goal - financial, ecclesiastical, etc. - that is worth denying the full humanity of any living person. It has struck me how true this is for labor, but also how true it is in other realms. Though many thinkers in labor do not agree with me, I think this leads us right into thinking about the struggles of LGBT persons. The denial of the full humanity of lesbians, gays, bisexual, and transgender persons has, for many Christian denominations and institutions, become a means to the end of maintaining the status quo. Those who know in their heart of hearts that their full humanity cannot be denied are keeping their mouths shut in order to maintain the steady flow of tithes or donations. This is demonic. Don't you realize that when you allow your conciliatory instincts to override your thirst for justice, you are denying the full humanity of others? I am thinking specifically about what is going on at Austin Seminary.

Again I say, there is no purpose or cause for which we should ever deny the full humanity of every person. The appearance of the person's Face in the Same, that is, the inbreaking of the Other which can be seen through tghe marvelousness of human consciousness and individuality, is not something to be brushed aside lightly.

I think I am getting to that point in social justice training where I feel like criticizing just about every institution...

Zossima, Justice, etc.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

The following is an exerpt from the "The Russian Monk" section of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In this passage, Zossima, an old Russian monk, reflects on an encounter with his former servant, Afanasy. Some background might be helpful. Before joining the monastery, Zossima was a soldier of moderately high social class. One evening, after enduring romantic frustrations, he returned to his barracks and savagely beat his servant Afanasy out of frustration. Later, he realized the horror of what he had done, and in complete defiance of societal norms, knelt before his servant and begged his forgiveness. Years later, whilst roaming the country as a beggar, Zossima meets Afanasy on the street and is welcomed into his home. Zossima has this to say about the encounter:

I had been his master and he my servant, but now when we exchanged a living kiss
with softened hearts, there was a great human bond between us. I have thought a
great deal about that, and now what I think is this. Is it so inconceivable that
grand and simple-hearted unity might in due time become universal among the
Russian people? I believe that it will come to pass, and that the time is at
hand.

He continues,

It is impossible that there should be no servants in the world, but act so that
your servant may be freer in spirit than if he were not a servant. And why
cannot I be a servant to my servant and even let him see it, and that without
any pride on my part or any mistrust on his? Why should not my servant be like
my own kindred, so that I may take him into my family and rejoice in doing so?
Even now this can be done, but it will lead to the grand unity of men in the
future, when a man will not seek servants for himself, or desire to turn his
fellow creatures into servants as he does now, but on the contrary will long
with his whole heart to be a servant, as the Gospel teaches.

Zossima here has some interesting things to say. I often worry about systemic injustice, about how my I am standing on the backs of so many who are poor in order to have my prosperity. Much as I long for social justice, it's hard to conceive of the revolution that will overturn our current system of economic injustice and leave in its place a perfectly just society. If modernity has taught us anything, it's that we simply cannot engineer utopias.

So, faced with vast and systemic injustice, what are we to do as ethical citizens? Do we have permission to simply cower in the corner because we have not the power to overturn the system? No. If Zossima is right, injustice (e.g. masters and servants) will always be with us. The best thing we can do is to live if our own actions were the universal maxim (ala Kant). That is, one must behave with fairness and justice toward all people that he or she would expect his or herself, even in the face of a system that disempowers some and empowers others. We must treat all people with repect and dignity.

So why all this? First, perhaps as a response to my earlier post about the now but not really. Second, it's my exegesis of Kurt Vonnegut's one ethical rule: "God dammit, you've got to be kind." Simplistic, perhaps. But it seems to me that changing the world begins with an attitude of basic kindness toward the Other. Real kindness, not just toleration. Kindness that empowers the Other to be human. And when we are kind, when we allow the Other to be human, we ourselves become human.

Now (but not yet) or Now (but not really)

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

The following is a bit of heretical theological struggling on the part of yours truly.

How do we define justice in society? What makes for a just society? Some philosophers (such as Rawls) have defined justice as fairness. The just society, then, is one that is fair. How can we tell if our society is fair? By utilizing what is known as the maximin principle. Imagine a set of players set about to construct a society in which all will have to live. Here's the catch: they are behind a veil of ignorance such that they can't know a priori where they will end up in the society. They could be millionaires, they could be beggars. There is no way to know. Thus, the theory holds that these rational players would set up a society so as to maximize the minimum. By ensuring that the worst possible position in the society is still acceptable, or maximizing the minimum, the society is most fair to the most people.

The problem is that people don't get to set up their society before they enter the world. Economic systems, rather, are already in place. Moreover, people can't decide not to enter the system at all. All enter the system into preexisting economic and social conditions which they cannot have chosen. There is no sense of maximizing the minimum such that it will be fair for everyone getting born into the world. In other words, people are thrust into positions in the world which they (1) cannot rationally choose for and (2) cannot rationally choose against. Once you are born, you are born into particular historical conditions. Maybe your family is wealthy. Maybe your family is deeply in debt. The point is that these starting positions have a profound effect on the outcome of your life. Since it's not something you can choose, it is not, strictly speaking, fair. Thus, the rich are, by and large, rich not because of some great cleverness on their part, but because they have been born into conditions the predispose them toward wealth. The same goes for the poor. And these systems perpetuate. There is never a new veil of ignorance, never a new chance to reset the society so as to maximize the minimum for all players. Life is unfair.

How are we to deal with this systemic unfairness? Religion often offers an answer. Judaism, in particular, offers a poignant answer to the problem of systemic economic injustice. Judaism describes time in terms of sabbatical cycles. The week is six days punctuated by a Sabbath day of rest. After six years, the seventh year is a sabbath year in which farmers must allow their fields to rest. And after seven sabbatical cycles (49 years), the fiftieth year is the Year of Jubilee. In this year, servants are set free and debts are forgiven. If anyone has acquired new property at the expense of another, it is returned. Poverty was relieved as all land was given back to its original owners. The economic system, in other words, was reset. Thus, although a greedy landowner might try to snatch land from his poorer neighbors, in the Year of Jubilee, this is undone. This does not, of course, eliminate poverty. But it does provide a measure of fairness in that gross economic disparity is not allowed to endure indefinitely. There is a limit placed upon such disparities, after which time they are reversed. Society is reordered to make it fairer. And the cycle repeats itself. No servants are permanent servants. No debts are permanent debts.

It seems to me a good system. It's not clear, of course, that it was ever fully implemented, even in biblical times. What concerns me is what Christianity has done with the concept of Jubilee. Jesus, in many ways, the fulfillment of the Jewish concept of Jubilee. He comes to proclaim relief to the poor and release to the captives. Jesus is the hope of the people, performing miracles and indeed feeding their hunger. When he enters Jerusalem, people lay down palm leaves before him and cry, "Hosanna!", (or "save now!"). The people were hungry for justice. They wanted to be liberated from social and economic oppression. But Jesus was not the political savior they hoped for. Within a week, he was dead, and hopes for revolution were dashed.

What I want to do now is not debate whether or not there was a literal, physical resurrection, but rather critique the way the Church has interpreted Jesus' Jubilee. The Church, after Jesus was gone, came to understand Jesus as the one who came to save humanity, to liberate them. But, my contention is that they spiritualized the concept of Jubilee. Instead of coming to save our bodies from social and economic bondage, Paul and others argued that Jesus had in fact come to save our souls from spiritual bondage. Notice the move that has been made here. In the move from physical to spiritual bondage, the struggles of the here and now have been devalued. The fact that I am under the brutal rule of Rome, for instance, suddenly pales in comparison to the weight of sin from which I must be liberated. The real problem, according to the Church, is our sinfulness. Thus, we must repent and be saved.

And so I do. I repent and accept God's salvation in Jesus Christ. My soul has been saved. Of course, I am still poor. But now it does not matter, for my treasure is in the kingdom of God. I am promised reward in the next life, so why bother with the pains and struggles of this one. In fact, the Church encourages me to think of this struggles as a good thing, as a means of strengthening my faith in God and breaking away from the bondage of the world, which is of course sinful.

And so what about our bodies? Does Jesus not promise the Kingdom of God? We proclaim that Jesus has won this victory over sin, and yet I am still bound by sinful poverty. Christian theologians deal with this disconnect by talking about eschatology, the "now, but not yet." Jesus did indeed win victory on the cross, but the inbreaking of God's kingdom is still in the future. Someday. And so, we affirm that Jesus is Lord even in the midst of a sinful world. Jesus is Lord now, but not yet. God's dominion here on earth is now, already established in the person of Christ, but has yet to be fully realized.

But what meaning does this really have for people? What meaning does the Kingdom of God have if it is not now? Christian eschatology tells us to wait, or even to yearn for the eschaton, the culmination of history in which God will finally rule in every heart. It seems to me that at the root of "now but not yet" there is a fundamental disconnect. On the one hand, Christians feel they must affirm that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ represent God's victory and the inbreaking of God's Kingdom here on earth. On the other hand, they cannot ignore the harsh realities of the world around them: war, poverty, and the like. The Kingdom is, quite clearly, absent. Or at least hidden. Christian theology tells us that we must accept the tension, live into the tension between the now and the not yet, between Christ's victory and suffering in the world. My question is, simply, why? Why must we accept this tension as something valid? It seems to me that the "now but not yet" is more accurately described as the "now but not really." What meaning does redemption have for us if it does not mean a Year of Jubilee? What is the Church doing proclaiming spiritual repentence and doing little about systemic injustice? Where is our Year of Jubilee?

I suppose my concern is that Jubilee, the redemption of the land and the people, cannot be spiritualized and still remain Jubilee. Either the people are redeemed, or they are not. Either the poor are given back their land, or they are not. Christianity tries to have it both ways. This is a big point of contention for me. How can Christians faithfully proclaim redemption in the here and now when it is, empirically, not really?

Holy Crapshit! We're Screwed!

Monday, March 12, 2007

Levinas on Revelation

Thursday, March 08, 2007

The Bible itself tells us that its origin in supernatural. Some men heard the voice from heaven. The Bible also warns us against false prophets. Thus prophecy is suspicious of prophecy, and the person who commits himself (sic) to the Revelation runs a risk. We can see here a warning to be vigilant; this is an essential part of the Revelation, which does not leave worry behind.
- Emmanuel Levinas, “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” 203.

Stated from the outset, the “problem” Levinas addresses in this article is that of the fact, rather than the content, of the Revelation, exemplified by the dual Torah of Judaism. His contention is that theologians and other thinkers get so wrapped up in describing and debating the content of revelation that they miss the scandal that is revelation itself. In revelation, he argues, we experience an “irruption” of truths from the outside. Here, again, we distinguish between revelation and insight. The Revelation about which Levinas speaks is not a set of moral truths articulated by ethicists or theologians after years of critical reflection. Such truths, while perhaps profound, are nevertheless internal to the physical realm. They are nothing other than syntheses of ideas that already exist. Levinas, rather, argues that revelation is an invasion of truths from outside the physical realm. Revelation, then, is that which comes not only from outside the self, but from outside all conceivable selves, outside of selfhood itself. It comes from outside the observable, physical realm. It is an in-breaking of the Wholly Other. First and foremost, Levinas wants the reader to wrap his or her mind around the enormity of this proposal and its consequences on our perception of religiosity and reality itself. To experience or even to acknowledge revelation is to propose an order that is not exhausted by the physical; that is, to acknowledge an in-breaking of the Wholly Other is to say that, first, there is something or someone that is Wholly Other and, second, there is something or someplace from which this Wholly Other can break into the physical realm, e.g. something beyond what is readily observable. For revelation to have meaning, according to Levinas, the word “supernatural” has to name something. In other words, there must be something “beyond the natural” to which the term “supernatural” refers. This is precisely the scandal of revelation that is missed when we jump to quickly to the particulars of revelation’s contents.

The experience of revelation itself is interesting, according to Levinas. It is, of course, the invasion of truths from outside. In that sense, revelation is something that is totally beyond the self. However, revelation must come to a particular person, to a particular mind. Revelation must be appropriated by the person to whom something is revealed. Or, to say it another way, revelation requires a recipient; it is always revelation to someone. Thus, while revelation comes from outside the self, and indeed from outside the observable realm, it nevertheless comes to a particular self. Even if the revelation is revealed to more than one person, as Levinas contends occurred at Mt. Sinai, each individual mind nevertheless must appropriate that experience. Thus, while revelation is something that comes from totally outside the self, it is also radically subjective. This is to say that revelation depends on a subject.

It is this radical subjectivity of the experience of revelation that Levinas addresses in the quotation above. As Levinas observes, the Bible itself, while on the one hand claiming supernatural origins, nevertheless argues against false prophets. The danger here is readily apparent. If Revelation is that which comes from outside the “closed order of totality,” then it is not something that is readily subjected to scientific inquiry. Revelation cannot be dissected and studied as can a cadaver. Even abstract theories such as general relativity have their basis in the physical realm, so that they can be studied and analyzed, and importantly, confirmed or disconfirmed, by means of scientific inquiry. Not so for Revelation. Revelation cannot be captured in a laboratory beaker and subjected to analysis. Moreover, revelation is radically subjective in that it comes to particular minds and not others. Thus, many people can claim to have experienced revelation and there is no scientific way to adjudicate between competing claims. Suppose, for instance, that I experience a revelation that leads me to believe that God is love. My friend, on the other hand, claims to have experienced a revelation that told him that God is vengeance. How might we adjudicate between these claims? It is my word against his. As Levinas indicates, the Bible itself advises a hermeneutic of suspicion with regard to claims of revelation. Committing to one version of revelation over another, he argues, is risky business. There is always the possibility that we will turn out to be wrong. Thus, Levinas’ analysis implies that the best posture to assume with regard to revelation is that of humility.

How might we respond to the aforementioned scenario from a Christian perspective? As our class discussions have indicated, the way we adjudicate claims to revelation is by means of the tradition. Over time, Christians who have come before us have experienced revelation in a particular way. While their experiences are by no means identical, over time we see particular patterns emerge. For example, we find that most Christians have experienced God as love, rather than vengeance. Thus, when my friend experiences God in revelation as vengeance, the weight of Christian tradition indicates that this “revelation” is probably false. Guarding against false prophecy, as Levinas indicates, means that we owe it to ourselves to scrutinize experiences of revelation and to test them against the tradition. Tradition, then, provides much wisdom as we try to sift through individual experiences of revelation. We would do well to remember that particular Christian doctrines – such as the Trinity or Atonement – are not in themselves revelation, or even necessarily revelatory. Rather, it is perhaps better to say that those who have experienced revelation come to describe their experience in and through the various doctrines of the Christian tradition.

This issue leads quite naturally to a pressing question: is the Bible revelation? This is a complicated issue, to be sure, to which I want to offer but a preliminary response. In an important sense, the Bible is not revelation. There is little or no basis for thinking that the Bible, in its present form, constitutes the direct words of God, transmitted straight from the Divine mind to the written word on the page. Such a theory of inspiration is not biblical. Thus, we cannot treat the Bible as if it were dropped from heaven, so to speak, fully formed and in English. The Bible and the contents therein did not themselves come from beyond the closed order of totality, but are rather the products of a literary process that occurred in history. So what is the relationship between the Bible and revelation? We could say that the Bible is a witness to revelation; that is, the authors had experiences of revelation that led them to write texts describing those experiences. The reader, then, experiences the author’s revelation “second-hand.” On this model, the Bible’s reader doesn’t experience revelation herself, but rather reads about another’s experience. But it seems that there is more to it than that. Christians who take the Bible seriously find themselves not just reading about revelation, but also experiencing revelation in their reading and reflecting. Thus, we could say that the Bible isn’t simply an account of revelation, but that it mediates revelation. On this model, reading about revelation leads inexplicably to the experience of revelation. The problem here, of course, is that not everyone who reads the Bible will necessarily experience revelation. Maybe, then, we could modify this proposal to say that the Bible points toward revelation; that is, in describing the revelatory experiences of the authors, the reader is encouraged to enter a state of being in which she is more receptive to the experience of revelation. On this model, reading the Bible as a witness to revelation opens one to the possibility of revelation in one’s own life. Clearly, this issue is a complex one and cannot here be solved. Perhaps further reading in Levinas will provide some illumination.

Myth and Identity

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Below are my reflections from the Holocaust and Spirituality course I took over Jan term. It's rather long, but give it a read if you have the time and tell me what you think.

During the course of my studying the Holocaust this January, one topic that particularly captured my imagination was Richard Rubenstein’s discussion of the relationship between myth and anti-Semitism. Given the place myth occupies in religious discourse, both Jewish and Christian, it seems important and appropriate to me to explore how precisely Christian myth might be linked to anti-Jewish or even anti-Semitic sentiment. In this paper, I aim to do just that. I shall begin by attempting to define myth and will then proceed to explicate Christian myths involving the Jews. Finally, I will analyze these myths and ask whether Christian thinkers can find a creative way to demythologize the concept of the Jewish people in order to foster a more authentic and productive Jewish-Christian dialogue.

The great scholar of mythology, Joseph Campbell, says that myths are “a manifestation of symbolic images” that act as “guideposts” in the lives of those who hear and remember the myths.[1] Myths, in other words, are much more than stories about deities and ancient peoples; they do more than merely entertain, they guide our lives. If myths were stories with merely literal meanings, they would be of little use to us. If I took literally, for example, the story of the devil tempting Jesus in the desert, it would have very little meaning for my life. After all, I do not often wander in deserts for forty days at a time, nor have I ever been visited by a tempting devil. If, however, I read the story as having mythological, symbolic content, the story can now inform my life in a way that it could not if it merely related literal, historical content. Namely, it tells me something about how I can resist the temptations I find in my own life. Thus, it is my contention that myths, which are generated by particular societies, use symbolic language to tell us who we are. Regrettably, the term “myth” has almost a pejorative meaning in religious circles. It is assumed that referring to a religious story as a “myth” is tantamount to claiming it to be untrue. I have two responses to this. First, the claim that the only kind of “real” truth is empirical, literal truth is an unfortunate product of modernity. However, I contend that truth can be related by stories that are not literally true. If, for example, I relate to you the story of the boy who cried wolf, I am probably not telling you a story that literally occurred in history. This does not mean that the content I am relating to you is untrue; rather, through using such a story, I am in fact communicating something true about the importance of integrity and telling the truth. In other words, the truth of a story is not limited by its historicity or factuality. To put it another way, we live in a world that allows not only for prosaic truth, but for poetic truth as well. Myths, I argue, offer not prosaic truth, but poetic truth. Second, many myths are indeed based in historical reality. The myths surrounding King Arthur, for example, are probably based around a literal historical figure that, in some way, inspired the telling of stories in his honor. Though myths may be based in historical fact, they oftentimes grow to include material that goes beyond historical fact. This does not negate the kernel of historical fact that is at the core of such myths.

Thus, when I talk about Christian mythology, particularly the myth of Christian origins found in the Christian New Testament, I am speaking of the set of stories, based in historical events of the first century in the Near East, that use symbolism and metaphorical language to identify and define the Christian community as such. Christian myths are true for us insofar as they are our stories; that is, stories about who we are and how we came to be the Christian community. Mythology, thus, is inextricably tied to identity. Myths, in other words, tell truths about the communities in which they originate. The in-group – that is, the culture or group that tells the story – almost always identifies with the heroes of the myths. The Romans, for example, identified with the noble Romulus, not the rebel brother Remus, in the Roman myth of origins. Thus, the Christians see themselves as the heroes of the myths of Christian origins. This means that, despite his being a member of the Jewish community, Christians who read the New Testament often identify Jesus and his disciples not as Jews, but as Christians. In other words, Christians see Jesus as sufficiently distinct from his religio-cultural context for him to transcend the boundaries of both culture and religion to become the prototypical Christian, the founder of the Christian community. For Christians, then, Jesus is one of us; he is the original Christian hero over and against a culture who tried to put a stop to his ministry.

At least, this is how the myth portrays Jesus. If Jesus, the original Christian, is the story’s hero, then all who oppose his ministry are the villains of the story. Since Jesus’ preaching takes place within a mainly Jewish context, most of those who oppose Jesus are in fact Jews. This fact is not brought to the fore in the earliest gospels. In Matthew and Mark, for example, Jesus is portrayed as an itinerant Jewish preacher who preaches among the Jewish people. It is significant that the main references to “the Jews” as a group in Mark, Matthew, and Luke occur in the Passion narrative in which Jesus is asked by various parties, especially Roman officials, if he is “king of the Jews.” Thus, any conflicts he encounters are always shown to be intra-Jewish conflicts. Jesus encounters opposition in Matthew, for example, not from the Jews as a people, but from particular sects within Judaism such as the Pharisees. However, by the time John’s gospel was written, probably late in the first century C.E., the social situation had changed. Whereas Christianity was, early in the century, an intra-Jewish purity movement, by the end of the century animosity had grown between those who claimed Jesus as the Messiah and traditional Jews who did not, causing these proto-Christians to leave the synagogues and differentiate themselves from their Jewish brothers and sisters. This historical development is reflected in John’s portrayal of Jesus and the Jews in his gospel. In John, Jesus is clearly differentiated from the Jews and the Jews as a group are portrayed as displaying significant animosity toward Jesus and his followers early on in his ministry. Jesus’ identity as a Jew himself is downplayed. Thus, John’s gospel portrays the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees, for example, not as an intra-religious conflict about the meaning of the Law, but rather as an inter-religious struggle between first century Judaism and the proto-Christianity of Jesus and his followers. Since Jesus is the hero of the story, those who oppose him, the Jews, are made into the villains. I don’t think it is an accident that the name of Jesus’ betrayer is Judas; that is, the Hellenized form of the Hebrew name “Judah.” This means that Jesus’ betrayer is, in fact, the entire Jewish people who refused to accept Jesus of Nazareth as their Messiah.

Though its chief agenda is never attacking the Jews as a people or as a religion, and the gospel message is certainly one of love and forgiveness, I nevertheless read the gospels as portraying Jesus as the prototypical Christian hero over and against a particular villain, the Jewish people. It has always been interesting to me that, despite the fact that the Romans occupied Judea during his ministry and, thus, were directly responsible for any and all executions that took place in the region, the Jews (both in the gospel texts and in subsequent tradition) are always portrayed as having greater responsibility for the death of Jesus. It seems to me that the reason for this strange emphasis on Jewish responsibility has to do with the doctrine of Israel’s election. After all, both the Jews and Christians saw the Romans as pagans. Thus, the Christians could not blame the Romans for failing to understand the meaning of the Messiah. The Christians viewed the Jews, however, as God’s chosen people, the people to whom the Messiah was promised. Their intimate relationship with God through the Mosaic Law, in early Christian thinking, made the Jews culpable for not accepting Jesus as the Messiah. The anti-Jewish sentiment in the gospel ranges from the implication that the Jews are blind insofar as they cannot see that Jesus is their long-awaited Messiah to open accusations against the Jews for their role in the death of Jesus, such as that found in Matthew’s gospel,

When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said. “It is your responsibility!” All the people answered, “Let his blood be on us and on our children!” Then he released Barabbas to them. But he had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified.[2]

In each gospel, it is shown that, to one degree or other, leaders among the Jews persuaded the Roman officials in Jerusalem to put Jesus to death, despite the Roman officials finding Jesus innocent of any crime against the state. Again, this is meant to demonstrate that the Romans, while they did carry out the death sentence, only did so at the urging of the Jews.

Thus, my contention is that, while not anti-Semitic as they do not attack the Jews as a race, the gospels nevertheless contain clear anti-Jewish elements. In the telling of the gospel story, particularly the passion narrative, the Jews are mythologized into the villains of the tale. At best, they are unbelievers. At worst, they are Jesus’ very persecutors. In his book, Who Killed Jesus, John Dominic Crossan argues that the negative portrayal Jews receive in the gospel accounts may have originally been intended as propaganda used by the small sect of proto-Christians against the much larger group of traditional Jews who rejected Jesus of Nazareth as the Jewish Messiah. Despite its origins as a piece of religious propaganda designed to discredit traditional Judaism while simultaneously promoting the proto-Christian sect, the mythologization of Jewish people, specifically casting the Jews in the role of the villain, became dangerous as the Christians grew to be a powerful, cohesive group distinct from the Jewish synagogue. Crossan argues, “By the fourth century, Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire, and with the dawn of Christian Europe, anti-Judaism moved from theological debate to lethal possibility.”[3] In other words, stories that were used as propaganda by a small, splinter sect against a traditional majority take on an entirely new meaning when they are used by the politically-legitimated dominant religion of a world empire. The original intent of vilifying traditional Jews and Judaism through the Christian origin myths may have been polemical. When, however, the need for proto-Christianity to assert itself polemically against the Jewish majority disappeared, all that remained was the anti-Jewish sentiment expressed through the mythologization of Jews as Jesus of Nazareth’s chief ideological adversaries. Here we see the danger. With Christianity’s rise to political power, the stage is set for those who identify with the “persecuted hero,” Jesus, to turn the tables on Jesus’ supposed “persecutors.” The problem, of course, is that there is little or no differentiation between the mythologized Jews of the gospel stories and the actual Jews of history. Because the gospel myths form the basis of Christian identity, Christians necessarily continue to see themselves as the heroes, but moreover, the persecuted heroes. Their taking violent action against the Jews, then, is seen as justified religiously insofar as the Jews of history are seen to be the same as the Jews of Christian myth.

Given the place Jews occupy in Christian mythology, how can we hope to create an authentic Christian-Jewish encounter? As Richard Rubenstein argues, “Christian thought on Jews and Judaism extends from Jesus to Judas but knows no middle ground.”[4] Rubenstein here points to the peculiar relationship between Christians, Jews, and Christian mythology. The Jewish people, on the one hand, figure prominently in the stories of Christian origins found in the New Testament. In this sense, the Jews are characters in the Christian mythology that serve a particular literary and mythological purpose. On the other hand, Jews are at the same time real people in the world that are not reducible or identical to their role in Christian mythology. Though a rather crude comparison, we might compare this peculiar situation to that faced by actors who play famous characters. William Shatner, for instance, has portrayed a multitude of characters in his career. Recently, he has even won Emmys for his performance on the program Boston Legal. However, no matter what successes he has in other areas, Shatner is always remembered first and foremost as the Captain Kirk from Star Trek. He is unable to escape the role in which he was cast in a particular set of stories. The case, I think, is similar for the Jewish people from the Christian perspective. When a Christian encounters a Jew for the first time, the Christian’s primary frame of reference is the way in which the Jews have been portrayed in the New Testament. Thus, before any words are exchanged between the Christian and the Jew, the Jewish participant in the encounter has already been “typecast.” This is, I think, different from stereotyping. Stereotypes, after all, arise from irrational and often untrue assumptions about groups of people. The “typecasting” that goes on in the Jewish-Christian encounter, however, is directly linked to the identity-forming myths that form the foundation of Christian thought. In this way, the “typecasting” of Jews that results from their being mythologized is not simply irrational, but almost pre-rational as it is directly tied to those basic stories that create identity. In the Jewish-Christian encounter, the Christian already has in mind these various myths, many of which involve Jewish characters, which inform his or her perceptions of the Other. Thus, in the best of situations, the Christian has in mind Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as the prototypical righteous Jews. In the worst of encounters, the Christian has in mind Judas, the prototypical Jewish betrayer character. As Rubenstein argues, “In any event, philo-Semitism is as unrealistic and as pernicious as anti-Semitism, for it destroys our most precious attribute, our simple humanity.”[5] Thus mythologized, the Jew becomes either a paragon of virtue or an example of the worst of literature’s traitors.

The simple answer for how to undo the anti-Jewish sentiment within Christian thought is to demythologize the Jewish people. This would be a two-pronged project. On the one hand, it would require demythologizing the doctrine of Israel’s election as the chosen people. After all, Christianity sees Jesus’ arrival in human history as the fulfillment and completion of God’s act of electing Israel; it is the election that necessitates the Messiah and gives the Christ-event meaning. On the other hand, this project would require the demythologizing of the Jews as Jesus’ ideological foes, that is, as the villains of Christian myth. This latter project is, I think, possible through fostering a better understanding of the history that underlies Christian myth. Specifically, the mythologization of Jews as Jesus’ adversaries can be overcome by understanding the reasons why the gospel writers chose to portray the Jews in such a negative light. It is furthermore important to understand Jesus, not as the prototypical Christian, but as a Jew who preached among Jews. Jesus himself was not a Christian, but was in fact a Jew; this fact cannot be overemphasized in Christian education. Jesus’ various conflicts were primarily intra-religious; that is, he came into conflict with various Jewish sects over the interpretation of the Law. It was only much later that Christians differentiated themselves from the Jewish religion. During Jesus’ ministry and in the years immediately following, the members of the Jesus movement were also members of the Jewish community, albeit heretical members due to their acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah. Thus, “the Jews” as a people were not Jesus’ ideological opponents, and thus, cannot rightly be considered the villains of the Jesus story. It is therefore my contention that the villainization of Jews can indeed be overcome, but only through a thorough and nuanced understanding of the history behind Christian origins, a historical account that dares to go behind and beyond the information presented in Christian mythology. This demythologizing project need not destroy or disfigure Christianity in the process; the Christian message does not fundamentally depend on maintaining the Jewish people as ideological foes.

However, I must agree with Rubenstein that it is not possible to demythologize the doctrine of Israel’s election without “radically altering” the Christian message.[6] In other words, the meaning behind the Christ-event, and thus Christianity itself, depends on the doctrine of Israel’s election. Israel’s election is the foundation upon which is built the doctrine of God’s election of the Church through Jesus Christ. Thus, while Rubenstein thinks that it is possible for Judaism to jettison the notion of being God’s chosen people (at least in principle), Christianity, ironically, is even more theologically committed to sustaining the Jewish origins myth of Israel’s election (in order to maintain the myth of its own origins) than is Judaism. To demythologize Israel’s election, thus, would be to radically reconceive a central dogma of the Christian faith. This is not a project easily undertaken, nor is it one, I would wager, that many Christian theologians would be interested in taking on.

Thus, if myths do indeed serve to form group identity by defining both the in-group and the Other, and if these guiding myths are utterly indispensable for Christian identity, how can we hope to create authentic encounters between Christians and Jews? Clearly, the complete demythologization of the Christian myths involving Jews is not feasible. Because of this, as Rubenstein laments, Jewish persons will always remain, to some extent or other, mythic persons whose identities from the Christian perspective are defined not only by who they are as human beings, but also by the guiding myths of the Christian religion. Even if Christianity is able to escape, through careful historical reconstruction, the tragic mythological story that has for centuries framed the Jewish people as the enemies of the Christian Messiah, Jews nevertheless remain characters in the cosmic mythological drama of God’s election of Israel through the covenant with Abraham and the Law given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. There is no simple answer to the question of how to proceed. Myths, such as those that lie at the heart of Christianity and help its adherents form group identity, cannot be undone by scholars and theologians, even those myths that are not conducive to the religiously pluralistic world of the twenty-first century.

As I have argued, a system-wide demythologization of the mythical Jewish person is not feasible. Thus, it seems to me that the only way to generate authentic Jewish-Christian dialogue is through changes made not on the systemic, but on the personal level. History seems to show that an entire group of people cannot, at the bidding of prophets or philosophers or politicians, change its collective mind about another entire group of people. Martin Luther King, Jr., though certainly a visionary, did not eradicate racism against African Americans in the United States. Rather, racist attitudes toward African Americans have persisted in this country long after those views have been denounced prophetically and politically, and indeed, shown to be utterly irrational. In short, collective attitudes toward the Other are hard to change. Individuals, however, can engage in personal encounters that lead them to reevaluate their personal view of the Other. In the case of the Jewish-Christian dialogue, Christianity as an institution cannot (without significant theological restructuring) offer a completely demythologized vision of the Jew. Individual Christians, however, can participate in encounters with individual Jews in which, through honest, authentic conversation and the genuine meeting of minds, the Christian can come to see the Jew not as a mythic figure or character in the Christian story cycle, but as a real human being. Only on the personal level, I contend, can the Christian come to understand that the mythic Jews of the Christian origins stories cannot be readily conflated with the real Jewish people of history. The mythic Jew, from the Christian perspective, will always be the Other. That is, the in-group of Christianity is, to a certain extent, defined by its juxtaposition of Judaism. Thus, the mythic Jews, who are framed in the gospel stories as opposing Jesus and thus Christianity as a whole, help the in-group to form its identity over and against Jewish identity. However, when the Jewish conversation partner is revealed to the Christian as not being identical to the mythic Jew of Christian mythology, but rather a complex human being who is not readily categorized, the Christian is free to realize that the Jew is no longer the Other. In breaking through her mythological lenses to see the humanity of her Jewish conversation partner, she now realizes that the two are united by a commonality that runs deeper than any theological disagreements, namely, their simple humanity.

This favorable result – that is, the Christian coming to see that the Jew is not identical with the mythic Jew of Christian stories – can only happen, I believe, through an open and honest encounter in which neither party is intent on pushing his or her religious or political agenda on the other. I think this is more of a struggle for the Christian since the mythic Jew in Christian mythology is always one who must be evangelized. The Jewish participant, I argue, must overcome a different set of struggles in striving for open, honest dialogue with the Christian participant. This is because, on the one hand, the there is no mythologized Christian in Jewish mythology, and thus, the Christian does not need to be demythologized from the Jewish perspective; but, on the other hand, the Jews have been the victims of innumerable tragic encounters with the Christians that have resulted from the failure of the latter to see the Jews as human persons rather than mythic figures. Thus, while the Christian must struggle to overcome her evangelical impulse and mythic vision of the Jewish participant, the Jew must struggle with the dark specter of history that threatens to preclude the possibility of earnest dialogue. Clearly, it is a complex set of variables that must go into any genuine Jewish-Christian encounter. It is, perhaps, the difficulty of navigating these variables that leads leaders in the Christian community to not pursue with vigor dialogue with the Jewish community, and vice versa. Yet, this inherent difficulty cannot be our excuse for failing to engage in dialogue with the Other. If Christians are to join their Jewish sisters and brothers in proclaiming, “Never again,” we must commit to the difficult, messy process of creating personal encounters between Jews and Christians in which each can learn from the other. It is incumbent upon leaders in both traditions to create safe spaces in which this dialogue can take place in earnest.

In this paper, I have argued that the Christian identity is formed by a particular set of myths, myths that both define the Christian as hero and simultaneously cast Jews in the role of adversary. This mythologization of Jewish people, I have argued, is in part responsible for anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic attitudes among Christians that have led to numerous tragedies throughout history. In response, I argued that we must undertake a demythologization of the Jew, first as Jesus’ adversaries, and secondly as the mythic chosen people. The latter, I have argued, is only possible through authentic, personal encounters between Jews and Christian in which neither pushes his or her religious or political agenda on the other. The result of such encounters is each party coming to identify with the Other through their common humanity.

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[1] Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), 46.

[2] Matthew 27:24-26

[3] John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1995), 32.

[4] Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 2^nd Edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 21.

[5] Ibid., emphasis in original.

[6] Ibid.