Dual Citizenship: Two-Natures Christologies and the Jewish Jesus 9780567661357, 9780567664471, 9780567661364

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Dual Citizenship

Dual Citizenship Two-Natures Christologies and the Jewish Jesus Kayko Driedger Hesslein

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2015 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Kayko Driedger Hesslein, 2015 Kayko Driedger Hesslein has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. 189 constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-6135-7 PB: 978-0-5676-8167-6 ePDF: 978-0-5676-6136-4 ePub: 978-0-5676-6134-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hesslein, Kayko Driedger. Dual citizenship : two-natures christologies and the Jewish Jesus / Kayko Driedger Hesslein. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-567-66135-7 (hardback) 1. Jesus Christ–Natures. I. Title. BT212.H47 2015 232–dc23 2015018443 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Josh, Akira, and Hiro

Contents

Part 1 Dual Citizenship 1

2

Nonsupersessionist Theology and the Challenge of Incarnational Christology The theological necessity of Jesus’ Jewishness The matrix of difference – Jewishness, humanity and divinity, particularity and universality Processing difference Definition of terms Supersessionism, antisemitism, and anti-Judaism Jewishness Chapter Outline Summary ‘But You Can’t Be Both!’ – Multiple Loyalties in Theories of Multiculturalism Theories of difference – processes and agencies Processes for negotiating difference Assimilationism Fragmented pluralism Cosmopolitanism The possibility of multiple loyalties Interactive pluralism and rooted cosmopolitanism Summary

1

3 4 8 11 13 13 16 17 18

19 19 22 22 26 28 31 31 35

Part 2 Constituent Parts

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3

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Contextual: Jesus as Human Citizen Jesus is consubstantial with us Jesus the Second Adam/New Being Critiquing the representative Second Adam/New Being

39 41 44

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Contents

Jesus the Jew Critiquing the representative Jew Jesus as one of the oppressed Critiquing the representative oppressed Consubstantial with particularities – citizenship based on contextual universalism Summary

50

Universal: Jesus as Divine Expatriate Jesus is consubstantial with the divine The divine nature as immutable Logos The divine nature as Spirit – Revisiting Logos The divine nature as transcendent Other Critiquing the transcendent Other Relational transcendence A new interpretation – Transparticularity and the ‘unassimilable Other’ Summary

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Part 3 Establishing Relationship 5

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You Never Leave Your Homeland Behind: Contextual Universalism in the One Person Approaching unity The Chalcedonian Definition Unity and singularity Unity and multiplicity A process for uniting difference Summary Living in the Diaspora: Overlapping Memberships and the Two Natures Difference and isolation Difference and hybridity (the third space is no space) Thinking both/and A process for differentiating unity Summary

52 56 59 66 74

77 79 85 88 90 94 97 102 105

107 107 110 112 123 127 137

139 139 145 152 154 155

Contents

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Part 4 The Transparticular Person – Passing through Chalcedon

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At Home: The Contextual Universals of the Jewish Jesus Contextual universals Jesus and non-Jews Jesus and Torah Suffering and not-suffering Death and not-death Living Abroad – The Overlapping Memberships of the Living Christ Overview Jesus today – Normative and not normative Conclusion

Acknowledgements Bibliography Index

161 164 169 173 177

181 181 183 186 189 191 208

Part One

Dual Citizenship

1

Nonsupersessionist Theology and the Challenge of Incarnational Christology

Jesus was a Jew. Jesus is a Jew. The theological implications that lie between these two statements, along with the presuppositions that enable one to disagree or agree that they belong together, are multiple. As Pope John Paul II stated: Those who regard the fact that Jesus was a Jew and that his milieu was the Jewish world as mere cultural accidents, for which one could substitute another religious tradition from which the Lord’s person could be separated without losing its identity, not only ignore the meaning of salvation history, but more radically challenge the very truth of the Incarnation. John Paul II, October 13, 19971

For most Christians, the now-past Incarnation leads to the present Resurrection, and the birth of this particular human leads to arguments for this human’s divine status. What one argues about Jesus as human in the Incarnation thus becomes relevant for what one argues about him as transcendent in divine Resurrection. What one claims about Jesus as divine within history becomes relevant for what one claims about his ongoing humanity in the Resurrection. Yet while the continuity of the argument remains the same, the argument itself is founded in difference. The human nature is qualitatively different from the divine nature. The historical Jesus is qualitatively different from the resurrected one whom Christians follow. Jesus’ religious identity as a Jew was (and is) different from that of his followers today. So how can these simultaneously present differences serve as the theological underpinnings for an Incarnational Christology that proposes two natures in unity? 1

John Paul II. ‘Address of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to a Symposium on the Roots of AntiJudaism’. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/1997/october/documents/hf_jpii_spe_19971013_com-teologica_en.html Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 1997. (Accessed 18 April 2012.)

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For reasons that will be addressed in the chapters to come, I have chosen to approach the differences present in the Incarnation through a lens of citizenship and multiple loyalties as they are understood in political theory. For many people, the metaphor of multiple citizenship is evocative while the reality is challenging. How can one person hold citizenship in two or more countries? How can one be loyal to two governments? The arguments against multiple citizenship rest on claims that multiple loyalties, or irreconcilable differences, create an impossible tension that cannot be resolved in an individual. While some countries recognize dual citizenship status, these policy shifts are recent, occurring in the last few decades, and always with caveats. Insofar as citizenship implies full and recognized participation in a clearly defined and bordered community, with the ‘rights and responsibilities’ thereof, this work engages with the cognitive dissonance arising from increasing numbers of individuals embracing dual (or more) citizenship and transnational affiliations. It utilizes citizenship as a provocative analogy for embodied participation, rather than from the perspective of the technicalities of the policies themselves. In doing so, it offers an opening into the dissonance encountered in the theological claim that Jesus is both human and divine – a dual citizen – and both historically Jewish and central for contemporary Christians.

The theological necessity of Jesus’ Jewishness Barbara Meyer argues that ‘there is no traditional theological category for the Jewishness of Jesus and no developed discourse of its theological meaning’.2 Despite the acceptance of Jesus’ religious historical context, ‘Jewishness has mainly been referred to as qualifying the human nature of the Son.’3 To fill the gap that Meyer laments, this book undertakes an exploration of the relationship between the human and divine natures that seeks to integrate Jesus’ Jewishness into the doctrine of the Incarnation as more than just a qualification. 2

3

Barbara Meyer, ‘The Dogmatic Significance of Christ being Jewish’, in Christ Jesus and the Jewish People Today: New Explorations of Theological Interrelationships (eds. Philip A. Cunningham, Joseph Sievers, Mary C. Boys, Hans Herman Henrix, and Svartvik Jesper; Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2011), 144. Meyer, ‘The Dogmatic Significance of Christ being Jewish’, 151.

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I am not the first to attempt such an endeavour. In A Theology of the JewishChristian Reality, Paul van Buren argued that the Christian encounter with Jesus is really an encounter with Jesus the Jew, and therefore an encounter with the God of Israel.4 By virtue of Jesus’ participation in God’s enduring covenant with the Jewish people, Jesus also invites Gentile Christians to participate. Following van Buren, Clark M. Williamson argued that the God of Jesus and the Gospels must be understood as the God of Abraham, Moses, David, the covenants, and the Exodus story, as this is the God of Jesus the Jew.5 According to Williamson, Christian theology must make itself consonant with the covenant theology witnessed by the house of Israel in their Scriptures. Christians are merely guests within this house, neither builders nor tenants of it.6 Kendall Soulen, in The God of Israel and Christian Theology, objects to the ‘narrative unity’ or ‘canonical narrative’ prevalent through Christian history as one that ‘unifies the Christian canon in a manner that renders the Hebrew Scriptures largely indecisive for shaping conclusions about how God’s purposes engage creation in universal and enduring ways’.7 He proposes using the covenant of Abraham as a hermeneutical lens to reinterpret the Bible, critique Christian theology, and construct a new vision of God that speaks to ‘God’s overarching purpose and work as Consummator of the world’.8 Yet, the deeply convincing (and convicting) concerns of the above theologies notwithstanding, the emphasis on covenant theology has not resulted in any significant changes to Christian theology. While Christian theologians have become more conscious of the obvious antagonism and hostility of explicit and easily identifiable anti-Jewish remarks stemming from the Adversus Judaeos tradition identified by Ruether, even nonsupersessionist theologians have not 4

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Paul van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, 3 vols. (New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1938–1988). Clark M. Williamson, A Guest in the House of Israel: Post-Holocaust Church Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993). Mary C. Boys also diligently follows the path of nonsupersessionist covenant theology; however she emphasizes church education rather than systematic theology. Therefore, while she reframes the narrative of the Christian story to account for nonsupersessionism, she does not offer any constructive suggestions about Christ per se. Mary C. Boys, Has God Only One Blessing? Judaism as a Source of Christian Self-Understanding (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 2000), 83–5. It must be noted that the subtitle of her book falls into Boesel’s category of ‘interpretive imperialism’ (discussed below), as it frames Judaism solely in terms of its usefulness for Christian identity formation. R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), 31. The original sentence is entirely in italics. Soulen, The God of Israel, 117. The ambiguity of this statement is discussed in Chapter 3.

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succeeded in integrating Jesus’ Jewishness in a way that moves beyond it being incidental and contingent.9 They have not successfully proposed a Christology in which Jesus’ Jewishness is normative, or at the very least formative, for the divine Word. Why have current nonsupersessionist Christologies failed to incorporate Jesus’ Jewishness theologically? First, the intense focus on combatting the Adversus Judaeos tradition has moved nonsupersessionist theologians to adopt a singular approach to reversing supersessionist theology, an approach that focuses exclusively on covenant and the concept of Israel. In doing so, covenant theologies – sometimes known as Christian theologies of Israel or of Judaism – have sought to overcome supersessionism by reconciling the differences between Jewish and Christian interpretations of God’s actions in history.10 Van Buren, Williamson, and Soulen, in addition to other theologians committed to nonsupersessionism, frame the problem as one of covenant and propose re-evaluations of covenant-based differences. I suggest, however, that the focus on difference as it is found in interpretations of covenant history interpretation is misplaced. The pervasiveness of the Adversus Judaeos tradition, by focusing on the difference between God as represented in the Jewish texts and God as represented in the Christian writings, has trapped theologians into focusing on the issue of covenant(s), with the result that they 9

10

Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1995, reprint). John Pawlikowski succinctly retells the story of Wolfhart Pannenberg’s complete turn-around on his understanding of Jesus and his relationship to Judaism: in Pannenberg’s first edition of Jesus: God and Man, he described a reified and singular Jewish religion, which he identified Jesus as being in direct conflict with. However, after becoming more aware of the heterogenous nature of Second-Temple Judaism(s), as well as the contextual bias of the Gospel writers, he concluded that Jesus was within the religious thought of Judaism at his time, and thus not in conflict with the law. While Pannenberg mentions this change in the Afterword of his second edition, Pawlikowski notes that ‘unfortunately the body of the text in the second edition remains as is. The corrective information is confined to a footnote’. John Pawlikowski, Christ in the Light of the Christian-Jewish Dialogue (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2001), 42. In addition to the works mentioned earlier, see also Scott Bader-Saye, Church and Israel after Christendom: The Politics of Election (Boulder, CO: Westview,1999), John Howard Yoder, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited (eds. Michael G. Cartwright and Peter Ochs; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003). Pawlikowski develops a nonsupersessionist Christology, but it is not sufficiently developed to review. In the process, he reviews the Incarnation Christologies of Charlotte Klein and Monika Hellwig, arguing that Klein ‘does not delve into the unique features of Incarnation theology’, and that Hellwig must be explained ‘phenomenologically’ rather than in actuality. Pawlikowski, Christ in the Light, 10, 11. Also, for an overview of ‘postliberal Christian theologians’ writing nonsupersessionist theologies, see Peter Ochs, ‘Judaism and Christian Theology’, in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918 (eds. David F Ford with Rachel Muers; Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 3rd edn, 2005), 645–62. None of the theologians Ochs reviews, however, are explicitly focused on Christology.

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ignore the differences presented together in the person of the Incarnation. Theologians have attempted to resist anti-Judaism by examining Jesus within the context of the covenants, but have not incorporated a Christological understanding of Jesus as a Jewish individual who is also divine. While covenant theologians have addressed a serious interpretive fault in Christian theology, they have not addressed Jesus in a manner that explores the specificity of differences that constitute Jesus Christ. Instead, they focus on Jesus as the representative Jew that embodies the continuity of the covenant and not on his unique instantiation as a human individual who is also the divine Word. Their failure to address the differences of humanity and divinity that constitute the very particular individual whom Christians proclaim as Christ is caused by their focus on covenant, and prevents them from addressing the theological implications of Jesus’ Jewishness for both his human and his divine natures. The singular focus on covenant theologies has allowed theologians to continue developing Christologies that reject the theological indispensability of Jesus’ Jewishness. For example, the nonsupersessionist theologian Chris Boesel has constructed a Christology that does not integrate Jesus’ Jewishness as formative. Boesel argues that Christians have been constantly engaged in a task of interpretive imperialism, a Christian hermeneutic of Jews and Judaism (including Jesus) that is based on Christian resources to the exclusion of Jewish self-definition.11 Yet, his resistive approach to interpretive imperialism, which proposes a Christology of the ‘particularelsewhere’, concludes with a kind of open-ended ‘soft’ supersessionism, wherein Christians humbly confess that, for now, Christ appears to fulfil the covenant but they nevertheless stand with ‘the Jewish neighbor’ in awaiting the (return of) the Messiah. For Boesel, the Jewishness of Jesus is only incidental and contingent, and not normative or influential on the Word, a representation explored here in Chapter 3. Equally problematic for Christology, the emphasis on Jesus’ Jewish humanity as determined by the covenant with Israel leads to a reduction in, and in some cases dismissal of, the claims for Jesus’ divinity. For example, van Buren, respecting what he understands to be the Jewish context of Jesus, argues that no Jew, including Jesus or his followers, would claim that a human 11

Chris Boesel, Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference: Christian Faith, Imperialistic Discourse, and Abraham (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008), 7.

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is divine, and thus all claims regarding the divinity of the historical Jesus are to be interpreted only allegorically and in no way literally.12 Soulen proposes that Jesus was not a ‘Redeemer’ sent to save the work of the ‘Creator’, but rather a ‘guarantee’ of God’s faithfulness to the Abrahamic covenant, proving God’s role as that of the ‘Consummator’ whose work began in Genesis and continues in the Christian Scriptures. Problematically, Soulen does not say why a guarantee of God’s faithfulness is necessary, or whether Christ is essential or additional to God’s work as Consummator, and so risks making the participation of the divine nature of Jesus Christ ‘largely indecisive’ for the narrative unity of God’s work.13 Soulen’s nonsupersessionist Christology ultimately denies the divinity of Christ in favour of his humanity as he proposes that unity is achieved through human agency, and not divine or shared agency. This renders the particularity of Jesus’ Incarnation irrelevant, and Jesus becomes additional to the covenantal promise, not essential to it. Williamson, too, emphasizes the continuity of the covenant so strongly that the divine nature of Jesus becomes peripheral and supplemental, rather than necessary, to the one person of the Incarnation. Given the failures of these scholars committed to nonsupersessionism and Christian theology, the question arises: is the task of developing a nonsupersessionist, two-natures Christology possible?

The matrix of difference – Jewishness, humanity and divinity, particularity and universality This book argues that both treatments of Jesus’ divinity and his humanity, and the treatment of his particularity as a Jew, are determined by negotiations of difference. In Boesel’s interpretation of Ruether’s work, ‘the relativizing

12

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‘The son of God, in scriptural usage, is clearly not God himself ’ (1:81). ‘He was and is a man, a Jew, not a second God, heaven forbid, not a deified man, but just a man … For us Gentiles in the Way, then, Jesus is not the Lord, but our Lord’. Van Buren, Part 1, 85. See also Part 3, 7, 89, 258. While van Buren does argue that the Jesus experienced by post-Resurrection Christians, i.e. Christians of today, is divine because of kerygmatic experience, he outright denies that the Jesus who walked Jerusalem over 2,000 years ago was divine. As is examined more closely in Chapter 3, van Buren’s theological privileging of the present Christ over the Jesus of history contradicts his argument for the necessity of incorporating Jesus’ Jewishness. Soulen uses this phrase to critique replacement and displacement theologies treatment of Israel’s covenant with God. Soulen, The God of Israel, 16, 32, 83, 109.

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of the particular in relation to the universal simultaneously accomplishes a relativizing of the particular in relation to other particulars’.14 This book takes this claim seriously, in that it argues that the relativization of Jesus’ particular humanity in its relation to and difference from the transcendent divine is intimately related to the relativizing of Jesus’ Jewishness in relation to its difference from other human particularities. The process by which one negotiates the difference between Jesus’ divine nature and his human nature reveals the process by which the difference of his Jewishness is understood to be constitutive of who he is and of what he accomplished. Inversely stated, the treatment of Jesus’ Jewish difference is reflected in the doctrine of the Incarnation, because the treatment of his Jewishness reveals the process by which theologians negotiate the separation and unity of the different natures in the one person. The relationship of the difference between Jesus’ human and divine natures, and the difference of his Jewish particularity, is clarified by Rita Dhamoon’s observation that all differences are related. Using feminist theory to question the locations of power and the ways in which power is used to privilege certain differences over others (i.e. white feminist theory that privileges gender over race or class, or race theory that privileges race over gender and ignores the unique oppressions suffered by black women), Dhamoon investigates the creation and signification of identities through processes that form and are formed by ‘privileging and penalizing relations of difference’.15 Following Dhamoon, I approach the difference of Jesus’ Jewishness through an examination of difference as it is negotiated in the Incarnation, rather than difference as it is implicitly addressed in covenant theology. The degree to which difference is theologically negotiated in the person of Jesus Christ is the presupposition that influences the degree to which Jesus’ Jewishness is integrated into one’s theology of the Incarnation. Because the matrix of differences in Jesus lies along the divine/human and universal/particular (Jewish) poles, focusing on the placement of difference along one binary exposes placement along the other. In this book, I uncover these privileged and penalized relations of difference, in order to demonstrate that doctrines 14 15

Boesel, 137–8. Rita Dhamoon, Identity/Difference Politics: How Difference Is Produced and Why It Matters (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2009), 119. Emphasis added.

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of the Incarnation contain a critical matrix of binaries: human/divine, Jewish/ Christian, immanent/transcendent, and historical-contextual/universal. Matrices are complex, and so this book addresses three braided differences that affect the perception and inclusion of Jesus’ Jewishness in theologies of the Incarnation. The first is the negotiation of difference between Jesus’ existence as a human in general (i.e. a member of homo sapiens sapiens) and his existence as an individual Jewish human living in Israel during the Second Temple period. The second difference is that of Jesus’ human nature and his divine nature. The third is the negotiation of difference between his existence in the past as a Jewish human and his status as the living Christ who is in an ongoing relationship today with Christian believers from temporally and spatially diverse contexts. This book rests on the argument that, in fact, these three negotiations are formative of one another and that how one understands the first difference affects interpretations of both the second and third concerns. By addressing these interrelated concerns, and by positing alternative processes for negotiating these differences, a theology of the Incarnation emerges that presents Jesus as a particular and unique Jewish instantiation of the human race, that recognizes the equal (not equivalent) presence of the divine and human natures in Jesus Christ, and that argues that this particularly instantiated human is in relationship with those who are not of his time, place, or context. Creating a theological framework for Jesus’ Jewishness that moves beyond Jesus’ religion as merely incidental requires an understanding of Jesus that navigates difference so that Jesus’ Jewishness remains indispensable while Christian claims to Jesus’ divinity are retained. To say that Jesus, as a human, was influenced by his Jewishness (as he was by the other factors of his human existence) and to claim that he was divine is to argue that his Jewishness integrally affected his divine nature insofar as his human nature is integral to the Incarnation. It is to argue for Jesus’ status as a dual citizen and as a participatory claimant to multiple affiliations. Only by viewing the difference in the Incarnation as a relationality, wherein the two natures engage in an interactive pluralism that constitutes the one person, can Jesus’ Jewishness be formatively integrated into an understanding of the one person. An appropriate measure of success for a non-replacement, nonsupersessionist Christology is one that determines whether Jesus’ Jewishness is formative of his human existence, which is in turn formative of

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his existence as one person.16 In traditional Christologies, the divine nature has been constitutive alongside the human nature in the divine person of Jesus, an arrangement often defined as the hypostatic union. In this situation, divinity is normative of the person. However, as I argue, this is not a true union (what I will categorize as interactive pluralism), but either a fragmented pluralism that segregates the two natures or an assimilation of the human nature by the divine. In a true union, both humanity and divinity relate in mutual formativity. The claim that Jesus is human is a claim that he is Jewish, and thus his Jewish humanity must formatively influence his divine nature and the one person. An emphasis on co-formativity, or mutual interaction, will serve as a benchmark for establishing the integration of Jesus’ Jewishness into Christology in a nonsupersessionist way. The Christology that emerges in these pages will attempt to negotiate difference in a way that allows Jesus’ human and divine nature to be fully participatory in the one person. The Jewishness of Jesus will no longer function as a mere token of nonsupersessionism, but instead will be incorporated in a theologically coherent presentation of Jesus’ historical particularity and his divine universality and transcendence that, when brought together, deepens contemporary Christians’ relationships with the historically contextualized Jesus Christ.

Processing difference Negotiating difference is a process. The goal of this book is not to justify the claims for Jesus’ Jewishness or for his divinity, but to articulate the processes of differentiation entailed in understanding the Christological significance of Jesus’ Jewishness. The why or whether of this designification is not explored, but rather the how, so that post-Holocaust-sensitive Christian theologians may avoid inadvertently repeating the errors of the past. While Peter Ochs 16

An alternate term to nonsupersessionist is post-supersessionist, as proposed by Kendall Soulen. The latter term, however, implies that supersessionism is something that occurred and concluded in the past, and is no longer a concern in the present. Although Soulen surely does not intend that the word should have this meaning, I prefer to use non- rather than post- to highlight the continued existence of supersessionism. Kendall Soulen, ‘Post-Supersessionism’, in A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations (eds. Edward Kessler and Neil Wenborn; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 350–1.

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has argued strongly for the ‘correlation’ between postliberal Christian theology and nonsupersessionism, concluding that only those theologies that demonstrate characteristics of postliberalism are compatible with the goals of nonsupersessionism, he omits the reminder that correlation is not causation.17 Ochs’ work does not address causes. Unless the cause is determined, Christians employing a postliberal framework may find their theology inside or outside the parameters of nonsupersessionism without any idea of how they arrived there. In order to prevent this and any other unintentional arrivals, the initial focus of this book is on the underlying analytical presuppositions and the resulting processes that surround the negotiation of differences that influence Christologies. To illuminate processes of differentiation, I turn to interdisciplinary thinkers whose works engage political philosophy, feminist theory, transnational studies, and international relations theory, collecting them under the heuristic category of multicultural theory.18 While the details of this theory and the processes that are used to negotiate difference are explored in greater detail in the next chapter, a summary is in order at this point. These thinkers share the central argument, developed in critical theory, that hegemonic and homonormative a priori claims are illusory and do more harm than good. Their theories challenge the psychoanalytical ideal that difference, particularly internal difference, is necessarily a site of tension, fear, and uncomfortableness. The psychoanalytical approach to difference relies on the strangeness and foreignness of the Other, and argues that anxiety is experienced as a result of conflict between strange and familiar. Yet, there is something of a circular argument present in this logic: the Other is strange

17

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Peter Ochs, Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 257. Multicultural theory – or multiculturalism – as a theoretical field of study is only twenty years old and the diverse applications of the term ‘multiculturalism’ both limit and increase attentiveness to the significance of race, gender, and religious affiliation in political identity. Stephen May, Tariq Modood, and Judith Squires differentiate between its use in the field of political theory and in the field of social theory and sociology: in political theory, the concept of multiculturalism is framed within arguments of citizenship, immigration, ethnicity, and the accompanying minority rights, and is therefore related to issues of policy and institutional actions. In social theory and sociology, multiculturalism focuses on identity formation, both internally and externally derived; it therefore is related to issues of cultural acceptance and engagement. Stephen May, Tariq Modood, and Judith Squires, ‘Ethnicity, nationalism, and minority rights: Charting the disciplinary debate’ in Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Minority Rights (eds. Stephen May, Tariq Modood, and Judith Squires; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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and produces anxiety; that which causes anxiety is labelled as ‘strange’. This stranger anxiety develops from the a priori supposition that difference does not emerge internally, but externally, and is therefore threatening. Political and social theories of difference grounded in the lived experiences of people in multicultural communities disrupt this argument, as they encounter the realities of transnational living and multiple citizenships. In doing so, these theorists offer a vocabulary that not only allows the deconstruction of processes, but also envisions a new process for negotiating differences. They provide new ways of thinking, which argue that difference does not destroy wholeness but constructs it. By deconstructing the negotiation of difference through frameworks developed in the areas of multiculturalism and political theory, this book moves theological conversation from its roots in philosophy to an interdisciplinary engagement with the social sciences. As a result, it offers to theology a new methodology that is grounded in reflection on actual experiences of difference rather than in theoretical abstraction, while adapting it to a specifically theological context. Therefore, as this book progresses, these theorists will help not only to identify processes that seek to eliminate difference in the Incarnation, but also to introduce new ways of understanding the relationship between the differences of Jesus’ human and divine natures in the one person of the Incarnation.

Definition of terms Supersessionism, antisemitism, and anti-Judaism Supersessionism is the Christian belief that the Christian church replaces the Jewish people, because the arrival of Jesus superseded the covenant that God established with the Jewish people through Abraham. Often justified by an appeal to Hebrews 8:6–13, it argues for the ‘abrogation or obsolescence’ of the Jewish covenant with God due to the arrival of Christ.19 While supersessionism as a manifestation of Christian triumphalism has existed since the beginning of Christians’ interpretations of the significance of Jesus, the development of Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate facilitated the identification of 19

Soulen, ‘Post-Supersessionism’, ‘Supersessionism’ in Kessler, 413–4.

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explicit supersessionism in theological texts. Although opinions on forms of supersessionism vary, and its connection to anti-Judaism and antisemitism is much debated, Christian theologians concerned over the treatment of Judaism share the concern that supersessionism is an ethically troubling component of Christian theology. The degree to which it is inevitable or undoable is contested. Because of the lack of consensus, supersessionism is described and defined in a number of ways. Chris Boesel identifies a ‘soft’ supersessionism, which he describes as the belief that the covenant promises God established with Abraham fall to the Christian Church, displacing but not replacing the Jews. Soulen describes this as an ‘economic’ supersessionism, in which historical narrative determines that Israel is no longer necessary to prove the trustworthiness of God’s promise since God now has the Church.20 Boesel also identifies a ‘hard’ supersessionism, also known as replacement theology, in which Judaism is replaced by Christianity in the relationship with God.21 Michael Vlack describes this as ‘punitive’ supersessionism, wherein Jews are now being punished for having rejected Jesus’ claim to divinity. In addition to displacement and replacement theologies, there is also a third category constructed by Soulen and echoed by Vlack: ‘structural’ supersessionism. This describes the narrative persistent in Christian stories of God that completely ignores the contributions of the Hebrew Scriptures to shaping Christianity. In such cases, ‘Hebrew Scriptures [are rendered] largely indecisive for shaping conclusions about how God’s purposes engage creation in universal and enduring ways.’22 The logic of hard or punitive supersessionism leads unarguably to antiJudaism, by which Christians have justified blood libels, Crusades, and death camps, and claimed that these are punishments demanded by God. When it comes to ‘soft’ supersessionism, identifying the ways in which supersessionism leads to anti-Judaism and antisemitism is more challenging. It is easy to trace

20 21

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Soulen, ‘Post-Supersessionism’, 29–31. See Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, also Edward H. Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Anti-Semitism (revised and updated, forward by Philip A. Cunningham; New York, NY: Paulist, 2004). As well as Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present (New York, NY: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002), cited in John T. Pawlikowski, ‘Historical Memory and Christian-Jewish Relations’ in Cunningham, 15. Soulen, ‘Post-Supersessionism’, 31.

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the lines of replacement and punitive theology from anti-Jewish hatred and violence to the terrors and genocide of the Holocaust, but the path of soft supersessionism is not so easily followed. To help, Marc Saperstein identifies a ‘continuity model’, which draws a straight line from supersessionism to anti-Judaism and the Nazi Party’s attempted genocide, and a ‘discontinuity model’, which frames supersessionism and anti-Judaism within conversations of antisemitism and argues that the latter was influenced by cultural, ethnic, political and economic factors, and not just religious.23 Soft supersessionism lies somewhere closer to the pole of discontinuity than continuity, yet that does not mitigate the damage inflicted. If only for that reason alone, this book traces the faint movements of soft supersessionism, and draws clearer lines connecting the discontinuity of soft supersessionism and Christology.24 Before moving on, the difference between anti-Judaism and antisemitism must be clarified. A frequently referenced trope is that anti-Judaism is a resistance and/or antagonism towards Jews as faithful practitioners of the Jewish religion, while antisemitism is antagonism towards those who fall within the ethnic category of Jews as determined by their genetic descent. It can thus be argued that it is possible to be anti-Jewish (against the religion) without being antisemitic (against the people), or vice versa. Susannah Heschel objects to this separation. She argues that history of the encounter between Judaism and Christianity demonstrates that the separation between religion and ethnicity is not so easily made.25 Consequently, when it comes to Judaism, a difference between antireligious and antiethnic arguments cannot be established. Both are inseparably intertwined and to target one is to target the other. Bearing this in mind, Heschel nevertheless argues that anti-Judaism is appropriate when engaging explicitly theological writing, and so this book follows her usage.

23

24

25

Marc Saperstein, ‘Christian Doctrine and the “Final Solution”: The State of the Question’, in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide (eds. John K. Roth and Elizabeth Maxwell; New York, NY: Palgrave, 2001), 815–22. Boesel also introduces the term, ‘interpretive imperialism’, which is a reading of Jewish texts and constructions of the theologies that involve Judaism, such as the covenants, Jesus and so on in ways that determine identities for Judaism and Jews without any Jewish input. This perception of interpretive imperialism comes from a postcolonial viewpoint that is suspicious of any description of the marginalized that is solely determined by the majority. Susannah Heschel, ‘Historiography of Antisemitism versus Anti-Judaism: A Response to Robert Morgan’, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33.3 (March 2011), 257–79.

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Jewishness Having addressed the definition of anti-Judaism, it is equally important, if not more so, to address the definition of Jewishness. What claims are being made by asserting that Jesus was Jewish – that Jesus was (and is) a Jew? From the outset, the term ‘Jewish’ is anachronistically problematic when applied to an individual living during the Second-Temple period, as Jewishness as a definition of one’s religious identity was a term constructed by Christians during Greco–Roman times.26 Anachronisms notwithstanding, the use of the term solely within a religious context is also misleading, as self-identification as a Jew can be determined by ethnicity, nationality, or one’s halakic adherence.27 Within Jewish communities, the consensus on a single characteristic to define one’s membership among the Jewish people is contested, and has changed over the centuries. To claim that Jesus is Jewish is both historically incorrect and subject to misinterpretation. Yet, Jesus exists within the continuity of what is now modern Judaism. To separate Jesus from this community by defining him as an Israelite, a Palestinian, or anything other than a Jew risks a supersessionist bifurcation of Judaism into its true form (as Israel during the Temple period) from which Jesus emerged and its corrupted form (as Schleiermacher described the mummified religion of Enlightenment Judaism) which Jesus now rejects.28 To counter the Christian triumphalism that occurs in such narratives, this book presupposes that Jesus was (and is) a member of the people of Israel, who identify themselves as chosen by God, and who are now known as Jews. According to Seth Schwartz, membership is defined through halakic relationship (either minimal or maximal) to Temple, Torah, and the one God.29 Ruth Langer concurs, arguing that a Jew’s ‘proper behavior before God is defined first and foremost by the terms of Israel’s covenant with God, the Torah’.30 While the nuances of Jesus’ Jewish relationship with Torah will be 26

27 28

29

30

Ruth Langer, ‘Jewish Understandings of the Religious Other’, Theological Studies 64 (2003) 255, 257–58. Langer, ‘Jewish Understandings of the Religious Other’, 255, 257–58 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 113. Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Langer, ‘Jewish Understandings of the Religious Other’, 267.

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explored more thoroughly in Chapter 7, his identifier as Jewish in this book serves as a reminder of his continuity and continued relationships within the historical and contemporary communities of the people of Israel.

Chapter Outline George Steiner argued that ‘Judaic sensibility is the highest form of morality and ethics and that the messenger of that sensibility, Jesus the Jew, has been stolen and perverted by Christianity, used again his own people, and in that violation and violence has brought an end to Christianity’s flawed enterprise.’31 The first task of this book is to identify and thereby decolonize the Christian abduction and assimilation of Jesus, manifest in the divine colonization and assimilation of the human. But it is not enough to leave the colonies and oppressed people in a state of deconstruction. The second task is therefore to offer a new model that refuses colonial and assimilatory mechanisms and embeds multiple differences into the very structure of Christology. After a deeper exploration of the methodological underpinnings of this work in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 addresses theological anthropology and the process by which Jesus’ humanity is determined as constitutive, with particular focus on understandings of his humanity as Jewish. This chapter includes the important question of the process by which Jesus’ particular humanity can be negotiated in his relationship with other humans, both those contemporary with him and those contemporary with us. Chapter 4 explores the divine nature of the Incarnation and questions whether historical interpretations of the consubstantiality of the divine nature have hindered or contributed to an understanding of the interactive relationship in the Incarnation. The processes for relating the human and divine natures in the one person of the Incarnation are examined in Chapter 5, which focuses on processes that attempt to unify difference, and Chapter 6, which focuses on processes that attempt to separate them. Each chapter in the book begins with a review and critique of Christologies ranging from classical to contemporary, identifying the 31

Marc Ellis summarizes Steiner’s claim, but does not provide an original citation for Steiner. Marc H. Ellis, Unholy Alliance: Religion and Atrocity in Our Time (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 48.

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processes of differentiation engaged by each. Each chapter ends with a new proposal for how difference and multiple loyalties might be negotiated in the specific arena addressed that appeals to particular developments in multicultural theory. Each proposal then provides a new platform for understanding the chapter that follows. Chapter 7 brings together the constructive proposals from each of the previous chapters and applies them to the challenges of understanding Jesus’ historically constituted Jewish life in light of his status as the resurrected Christ.32 Chapter 8 addresses challenges facing contemporary Christians that emerge from multiple claims to relationship with a Jewish Jesus Christ. Throughout, they are evaluated on the basis of benchmarks for a nonsupersessionist, interactive Christology, which is developed throughout the book.

Summary This book weaves its way through a diverse collection of Christologies that negotiate the difference between the human and divine natures in the one person of the Incarnation. Using frameworks developed in multicultural theory, it exposes the processes utilized in such negotiations, highlighting the ways in which they successfully or unsuccessfully preserve difference and maintain the unity of the Incarnation. Along the way, this work offers new visions for the human and divine natures of Jesus Christ that make possible a relationship of interactive pluralism in the Incarnation. In this new Christology, the differences of the historical particularity of the human nature and the transcendence of the divine nature are interpreted as constitutive of Jesus Christ in both their separation and their unity. Through this interpretation, this book offers a new understanding of the Incarnation that establishes the theological necessity of Jesus’ Jewishness, paving the way for a relationship between both historical and contemporary contextual Christologies.

32

This book does not separate ‘Jesus’ from ‘Christ’ as a means of indicating that ‘Jesus’ means only the human individual and ‘Christ’ means exclusively the Incarnated Word. As this book argues, ‘Jesus’ did not exist historically without the participation of the divine nature, and ‘Christ’ would not exist for Christians without the participation of the human nature. The appearance of the terms separately is the result of a desire to provide some literary variance in sentences, and is not theologically significant.

2

‘But You Can’t Be Both!’ – Multiple Loyalties in Theories of Multiculturalism

Theories of difference – processes and agencies Divergent definitions notwithstanding, the study of multiculturalism is a study of difference. As a means for understanding how difference is negotiated, it foregrounds questions about the meaning of ‘unity’ and how difference is perceived as constituting or disrupting it. Such questions are critical for explorations in Christology and the incarnation, forming the basis for theological inquiries into the unity of the disparate natures in Christ from Cyril of Alexandria to Anselm of Canterbury to Karl Barth and beyond. As contemporary theologians deconstruct the significance given to unity and seek to incorporate the margins by decentralizing homogeneous unity, the questions about the relationship between unity and difference(s) become pressing. Given the focus of this book on difference, I will build from the categories of differentiation defined by Douglas Hartmann and Joseph Gerteis. These researchers reframe the diverse concepts of multiculturalism from a purely cultural framework to one that is more sociological, in order to focus on the ways in which differences interact at multiple levels, from individual to group to nation.1 This framework ‘is intended to make sense of theoretical visions of difference’.2 As such, it provides a heuristic framework for processes of differentiation that may be productively applied to theologies of the Incarnation. Hartmann and Gerteis propose four categories of responses to 1

Douglas Hartmann and Joseph Gerteis, ‘Dealing with Diversity: Mapping Multiculturalism in Sociological Terms’, Sociological Theory 23(2) (2005), 219.

2

Hartmann and Gerteis, 222.

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difference, which are used throughout this book: assimilationism, fragmented pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and interactive pluralism.3 This chapter reviews these four in detail, but it is important to note here that I diverge from Hartmann and Gerteis’ attribution of them as ‘categories’, calling them ‘processes’ instead. As Thomas Hylland Eriksen observes, ‘culture is naturally not a solid object, even if the word unhappily is a noun. Culture is something which happens, not something that merely exists; it unfolds through social process’.4 Theology, like culture, is not an object but a process, and so examining theological conclusions requires examining the processes that lead to such conclusions. Multiculturalism, like the development of theology, is a power-driven process that continually affects the lives of actual individuals. Examining processes therefore necessitates reflection on the roles of agency and power in determining difference. While Hartmann and Gerteis make note of the ways in which boundaries exclude and include others, they do not mention who decides what is normal and what is different. Rita Dhamoon, working in the fields of identity and political science, makes a strong (if lengthy) case for examining processes rather than identities, noting the importance of attending to power.5 In making the shift away from overdetermined claims made about identities and categories, the specific processes and systems of differentiation that constitute and govern subjects as these identities can be directly and explicitly critiqued. While such deconstruction is not unique to intersectionality, the study of interactive processes and systems opens up critical accounts of the specificities of power, including an analysis of what practices of differentiation do to social relations, how difference making organizes 3

4

5

A defining characteristic of theories of multiculturalism is the acknowledgement of a multicultural reality. While assimilationism is not in itself multicultural, it is one of the responses to a multicultural reality. Under this definition, Hartmann and Gerteis include assimilationism as a response to difference and therefore include it in the rubric of multiculturalism, since it proposes its own unique process for incorporating difference and achieving order, or unity. Thomas Wylland Eriksen, ‘What Is Cultural Complexity’, in Jesus Beyond Nationalism: Constructing the Historical Jesus in a Period of Cultural Complexity (eds. Ward Blanton, James G. Crossley and Halvor Moxnes; London, UK and Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2009), 9–24. The focus on ‘identity’ rather than processes is prevalent in the study of multiculturalism, even those that emphasize the multiple factors involved. For example, Leo Driedger emphasizes that ‘identity tends to be multidimensional, clustering around a multiplicity of factors’. In the ethnocultural context to which Driedger refers, these factors include ‘language use, religious practice, endogamy, parochial education, choice of ingroup friends, use of ethnic media, and participation in ethnic voluntary organizations… [as well as shared] historical, national, and regional experiences’. This multidimensionality exposes the heterogeneity within groups, challenging the presupposition of singular identities, yet continues to rely on the static nature of identity rather than on the fluid nature of process. Leo Driedger, Multi-Ethnic Canada: Identities and Inequalities (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), 130.

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subjects in varied and changeable ways, how subjects perform and resist modes of differentiation, and how interacting processes of differentiation and systems of domination are reflected and configured through each other.6

Dhamoon is not alone in her argument that processes reveal more about the treatment of difference than identities do. Himani Bannerji makes a similar argument, in her definition of multiculturalism as ‘a mode of the workings of the state, an expression of an interaction of social relations in dynamic tension with each other, losing and gaining its political form. It is thus a site for struggle,… for contestation’.7 Bannerji emphasizes that multiculturalism, along with its definitions and the processes by which it might be achieved, is never a static or passive state. To stay attentive to Dhamoon and Bannerji’s concerns, I give particular attention to the dynamic locations of agency in processes of negotiating difference. Agency also functions to clarify which process of differentiation is taking place. In this book, I define agency as the ability to determine one’s actions but additionally, to be able to influence those with whom one is in relationship. It is, when framed in terms of power, the ability to wield power over one’s self, the capacity to resist another’s imposition of power on one’s self, and the authority to wield power (albeit temporarily) over another. Agency assumes the presence of difference, in that the self and the other is always a relationship of difference. In Incarnational Christology, agency will become a means for determining the active presence of human nature in the face of divinity. Whether Christ maintains human agency while in relationship with the divine will reveal the depth of human participation in the Incarnation. This understanding of agency thus depends on the language of co-formativity and co-determinacy, which I develop in more detail in Chapter 4. Briefly, co-formativity is the degree to which each party influences the actions and decisions of the other party, while co-determinacy is the degree to which each party determines the actions and decisions of the other party. In both cases, interaction ranges in degree from partial to total and reveals the mutuality of the parties involved as well as their role in determining the processes of differentiation. In order to deepen our identification of and engagement with the mechanisms used to negotiate the tension between humanity and divinity, the agency of both natures will also be 6

7

Rita Dhamoon, ‘Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality’, Political Research Quarterly 64(1) (March 2011), 235. Himani Bannerji, The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender (Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2000), 120.

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considered. It is my hope that in doing so, insights will be gained into how the processes used to navigate the difference between Jesus as the Word Incarnate and Jesus as Jewish condition our theological conclusions.

Processes for negotiating difference Assimilationism Assimilationism is the process wherein difference is put aside in order for an individual or group to be acceptable to the normative group, either voluntarily or forcefully. Differences are those things that do not conform to the normative image.8 Three significant presuppositions ground arguments for assimilationism: (1) all humans share at least some universal characteristics, (2) this shared universality means that all humans can innately transcend their particular contexts, and (3) characteristics that are shared (i.e. universal) have ‘moral and ontological primacy over differences’.9 Both explicit and implicit arguments in favour of assimilationism arise from the conviction that unity is destabilized by difference. The policies guiding early immigration in the USA stemmed from arguments that immigrant populations who remained unassimilated contributed to the disorganization and dislocation of both immigrants and citizens. Although implicitly rooted (in part) in racism, the horror of civic and economic instability was explicitly invoked, revealing the presuppositions that stable unity is predicated on homogeneity and the sharing of universal characteristics. Assimilationism was recommended, building on and contributing to the presupposition that multiple belongings or loyalties are impossible.10 8

9

10

For a historiographic approach to various interpretations of the meaning and promotion of assimilation, see Nancy L. Green, ‘Time and the Study of Assimilation’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 10(2) (2000), 239–58. Bikhu Parekh. Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002., 18. Christiane Hartzig and Dirk Hoerder, ‘Transnationalism and the Age of Mass Migration, 1880s to 1920s’, in Transnational Identities and Practices in Canada (eds. Vic Satzewich and Lloyd Wong; Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia, 2006), 36–7. In Canada, John Porter’s foundational The Vertical Mosaic (1965) argued that collective values and shared identity are indispensable for social cohesion and existence, and that stable social order requires strong political leadership that advocates a clear national unity and eschews cultural particularity (i.e. difference) of any kind. Porter’s examination of the cultural segregation of the strata of economic leadership (labourers, managers, executive, elite executives, etc.) led him to argue that support of ethnic diversity strengthened enclave mentality and reinforced the vertical mosaic. Assimilation to a single culture would eliminate the problematic economic elitism that resulted from diversity. John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1965).

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The ‘melting pot’ ideal of American multiculturalism exemplifies the assumption that diversity destabilizes unity and that assimilationism is the best way to manage difference. ‘Exaggerating differences’, as an architect of modern American multiculturalism put it, leads to the reinforcement of hostile stereotypes and thus to a segregation that ultimately weakens a common unity rather than strengthening it.11 Such an argument operates on the presupposition that permitting differences results in an untenable tension that must be avoided. Assimilationism assumes a singular approach to unity, where the governing power wields sole agency in order to determine unity, rather than a multiply-determined approach, where unity is co-determined by individual parties. Schlesinger, drawing on John Stuart Mill, proposed assimilation (although neither gives it that explicit label) or conformity to a common national identity as the only way forward, longingly reflecting on the mythical Golden Age of America’s vaunted multiethnic unity as a time when ‘individuals… melted away ethnic difference’ in a country whose national identity ‘transcends the diverse ethnicities that come to our shore’ – America’s melting pot.12 We now ask, what is the process by which this homogeneous, undifferentiated unity is achieved? How is difference negotiated and managed and thereby transformed into similarity? Hartmann and Gerteis identify two critical steps that enable transformation. The first step is the identification (or even creation) of qualities that mark particular individuals or groups as members of or Others to the normative population. Physical characteristics or identifiable behaviours, such as eating customs, manner of dress, interactions with the same or the opposite gender, child-rearing practices, religious customs, or birth/death rituals, are categorized as similar to or different from the norm. In assimilationism, a second step flows immediately from the first: jettisoning the now-identified qualities that differentiate individuals from the 11

12

Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, revised and enlarged (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1991), 112. Schlesinger, 17. Emphasis added. A similar position is held in Canada by Neil Bissoondath, who argued that immigrants to Canada should assimilate, learn its language and culture, and give up the connections (described in terms of negative characteristics like violence, gang life, old-fashioned values) that might tie them to their homeland. Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (Toronto, ON: Penguin Books, 1994). The fact that Bissoondath, of South Asian origin, himself immigrated to Canada in the 1970s from Trinidad contributes much to his popularity amongst Canadian assimilationists.

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norm. In order to conform, ‘individuals… lose the characteristics of prior outside identities’.13 They must ‘shed their previous markers of group identity’.14 Individuals are thus encouraged to enter the public arena without identifiable markers of their own private identities. A Sikh soccer player is required to put aside his turban on the field.15 Muslim girls may not wear their hijab with their school uniforms.16 Americans are upbraided for speaking loudly in public spaces abroad.17 As Hartmann and Gerteis summarize, ‘assimilation takes place when out-group members are allowed to enter fully into civil life on the condition that they shed their polluted primordial identities’.18 The process of assimilationism is not always immediately obvious: superficial acceptance of diversity can mask assimilationism. In more subtle cases, difference is tolerated only insofar as it falls within a normative definition of what constitutes difference. Ascertaining this requires assessing treatments of difference through the lens of agency. Assimilationism, when viewed this way, is a process wherein the assimilated subject is no longer allowed to exist in and for his or herself. The assimilated subject exists for the purpose of supporting the assimilating body. Permissible characteristics are assimilated to serve the dominant party, and undesirable characteristics are ignored or rejected because they cannot be made to contribute to upholding the larger body. 13 14 15

16

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18

Hartmann and Gerteis, 226. Hartmann and Gerteis, 227. In 2013, the Fédération de Soccer du Québec banned Sikh players from wearing turbans on the field, resulting in an effective ban on Sikh men playing soccer. A similar ruling was enforced in 2007, when FIFA banned Muslim women from wearing a headscarf or hijab on the soccer field. In the latter case, the ruling was made on the basis of the safety of the player, and overturned after a safer hijab was designed, and after considerable public outcry. The FSQ overturned its ban in June 2014. Katherine Wilton, ‘Quebec Won’t Allow Turbans in Soccer Despite Ruling from Canadian Body’, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, June 15, 2014. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/ quebec-soccer-federation-reverses-turban-ban-1.1319350 (Accessed 28 July 2014). ‘Muslim Soccer Players Allowed to Wear Headscarves’, CNN, July 6, 2012. http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/06/sport/ soccer-headscarf-ban (Accessed 1 July 2013). Herman Tutehau Salton, ‘Free to Wear Whatever They Want? The Muslim Veil and School Symbolism in the Law and Politics of the USA’, International Journal of Public Law and Policy 3 (2013), 227–62. In 2002, on the TGV from Paris to Nice, I witnessed a British woman stand up from her seat, turn around and chastise the Texan couple talking behind her, saying, ‘This is not America, and your loud conversation is not appreciated. This is a public space and we are all entitled to a quiet ride. Please lower your voices.’ Her opening words indicate that she believed that in America, loud public conversation is the norm, thus contributing to the construction of the ‘loud American’ identity. She expected the American passengers to ‘put aside’ their American behaviour and to adopt volumes that demonstrated their assimilation into European train travel etiquette. Jeffrey Alexander, ‘Theorizing the “Modes of Incorporation: Assimilation, Hyphenation, and Multiculturalism as Varieties of Civil Participation”’, Sociological Theory 19(3) (2001), 243. Emphasis added.

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Notably, identifying these qualities requires separating the characteristic or behaviour from the subject. The identifiable quality is made adjacent to the subject: it is rejected as constitutive of the subject. Such a move fractures the subject’s agency over his or her whole person. Assimilating the body of the subject while simultaneously rejecting constitutive characteristics removes agency from the subject and reveals the danger of assimilationism. Eva Mackey provides an illuminating example of this more subtle assimilationism in her assessment of the government of Canada’s treatment of aboriginals and First Nations’ Peoples. Mackey argues that the goal of a government engaged in nation-building is the creation of an ‘ “entire governable population”, which implies that diverse peoples must be made “governable” ’.19 She observes that governments control difference and the different by institutionalizing difference as ‘multiculturalism’.20 Her study examines Canada, and the federally funded Canadian Museum of Civilization/ Musée Canadien du Civilisations (CMC/MCC). The museum, across the river from Canada’s national capital, heavily emphasizes the presence and influence of First Nations’ People in creating the country’s national identity. Yet the Native peoples are presented by the museum as part of the heritage of Canada, which reifies them as from the past and out-of-date and does not represent examples of their modern existence that do not conform to traditional behaviours. The diversity among First Nations’ tribes is used to shore up the origin-myths of Canada’s multiculturalism and its inclusion of difference.21 ‘Multiculturalism’ is used to manage and limit actual diversity, assimilating it into a normative definition of what constitutes difference, for the purpose of creating a homogeneity. The CMC/MCC engages in a process of assimilationism, masked by the use of ‘multiculturalism’ and a superficial acknowledgement of difference, that removes the agency of the people represented and constructs difference in service to its own existence. Assimilation is a negotiation of difference that refuses to negotiate, enforcing homogeneity by denying the constitutive and co-formative agency of difference. In Christology, the same process of assimilationism occurs, 19

20 21

Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), 17. Mackey quotes from Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 16. Mackey, 50 and Chapter 3. Mackey, 85.

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along with similar consequences. The question in Christologies that address the two natures of Jesus Christ is whether one nature assimilates the other. In the process of negotiating the difference between the two natures in order to bring them together in one person, are certain characteristics of one nature rejected in order to eliminate tension with the other? Does the divine nature retain the characteristics that make it particularly divine? Does the human nature retain the characteristics that make it humanly particular? Specifically, as the human nature of Jesus is integrated into the divine person, are the Jewish characteristics of his human existence, which differentiate him from nonparticular humanity, assimilated in ways that reject or demean them, and pave the way for their supersession, or can a new process of integration be undertaken that affirms Jesus’ participation as both a human and a divine citizen?

Fragmented pluralism Fragmented pluralism is one response to the erasure of difference effected by assimilationism. In fragmented pluralism, groups coexist in the same space but do not interact. Fragmented pluralism – ethnic enclaves, segregation, or ghettoization (either internally or externally enforced) – is also used by dominant powers to maintain the status quo by managing difference.22 Unlike assimilationism, fragmented pluralism acknowledges that naturally occurring difference cannot be eradicated and, in some cases, is essential to the stability of a given group. However, the same presupposition that forms assimilationism forms fragmented pluralism: multiple loyalties are divisive. Both ‘isms’ argue that multiple-group identifications divide loyalties and threaten stability, presupposing that one can be truly loyal to only one thing at a time. In fragmented pluralism differences are not jettisoned, but are quarantined into strictly defined groups with impermeable boundaries, a kind of ‘cultural apartheid’.23 Achieving unity presents a challenge to the coexistence of two irreconcilably different groups. How is it achieved in the vision of fragmented pluralism? 22

23

Warren E. Kalbach and Madeline A. Kalbach, Perspectives on Ethnicity in Canada: A Reader (Toronto, ON: Harcourt Canada, 2000), 141. Bissoondath, 83.

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To achieve a unity of the singular, tensionless focus on a common object, the boundaries between various groups must be demarcated and patrolled. To avoid arriving at the undesirable and assumed divisiveness caused by multiple loyalties, groups and the individuals within them must be prevented from interacting. To that end, the process of achieving fragmented pluralism requires the prior or parallel step of establishing a homogeneous identity for each group. In order for strict boundaries to be clearly demarcated, who is inside (and who is outside) the boundaries must be clearly defined. To enable such definitions, strict, generalizing categories must be used, which are themselves determined by the dominant group. Daniel Boyarin identifies a similar strategy in the early religious developments of the Christian church and rabbinic Judaism, and uses David Chidester’s description of the apartheid nature of comparative religion to argue that ‘conceptually organizing “human diversity into rigid static categories [was] one strategy for simplifying, and thereby achieving some cognitive control over”’ the pluralism of the time.24 Whether within religious or ethnic groups, thin identity markers are used to demarcate uncrossable boundaries that nevertheless prevent interaction. As Hartmann and Gerteis argue, fragmented pluralism is really ‘assimilation into group difference’, which are themselves assimilated into a single identity.25 Unity is constructed through multiple assimilations, constituted by differences that are isolated and non-interactive. If fragmented pluralism ‘has worked to actively create the nation and practices of insulated communities’, one must question its usefulness as a process for developing an interactive two-natures Christology.26 In a unity developed by way of fragmented pluralism, the co-formativity that constructively constitutes the whole is missing, and differences are isolated in order to maintain the harmony of coexistence. Already, the implications for Christology arise. Most obviously, can a relationship of the human and divine 24

25 26

Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 14. Hartmann and Gerteis, 231. Bannerji, 48. While the reality is that such strict segregation between communities is highly uncommon, that does not prevent groups from idealizing total insulation and segregation. See, for example Daniel Boyarin’s perspective on the intertwined history of Jews and Christians in the first few centuries CE (Border Lines), as well as the essays in Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007).

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natures of Christ exist in this process? Less obviously, can a Christology that relies on a human existence for Jesus, wherein he is generically human, or ‘a second Adam’, follow the process of fragmented pluralism without descending into assimilationism? Or is it the case, as I suspect, that Christ’s representative humanity overruns the particularities of his human existence? In Chapter 3, we will examine what happens to Jesus’ individualism when he is called to function in his representative status, and when he is segregated as a ‘universal human’ from his particular, Jewish group of origin. As we will see, negotiating difference through a process of fragmented pluralism will encounter difficulties in maintaining both the particularities of his historical context and the generic or universal characteristics necessary for him to function as a representative participant in human nature.

Cosmopolitanism Difference is valued by theorists who promote cosmopolitanism.27 However, these theorists endorse difference only insofar as it does not conflict with the autonomy of an individual, focusing on the voluntary nature of the associations entered into by diverse individuals. At the heart of theories of cosmopolitanism is a desire to reinstate the agency that assimilationism removes. Cosmopolitanism, then, is a negotiation of difference where individuals are able to be selective about which characteristics of a community (or communities) they wish to adopt or by which they wish to be shaped. The process by which cosmopolitanizing takes place demonstrates its similarities with assimilationism: the fracturing of a given group into characteristics or qualities from which an individual can choose entails a rejection of the accompanying qualities, signalling that those rejected qualities are less desirable or less worthy of contributing to the identity of the individual. The bringing together of disparate characteristics creates a hyphenated individual, who has been made subject to categorization. As Alexander observes, ‘it is precisely because differential valuation remains that 27

Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). David H. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1995), 84. Jeremy Waldron, ‘Cosmopolitan Norms’, in Another Cosmopolitanism, Seyla Benhabib, Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig, Will Kymlicka (ed. Robert Post; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 83–101.

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hyphenation, like assimilation, is not only an ambiguous but a highly unstable social form’.28 Equality is not found here. The process of cosmopolitanism also demonstrates its similarities with fragmented pluralism, insofar as differences are reified. Appiah raises the concern that in conversations about multiculturalism, ‘every “culture” represents not only difference but the elimination of difference: the group represents a clump of relative homogeneity’.29 For advocates of cosmopolitanism, the differences within difference only become noticeable, and therefore problematic, when protecting them conflicts with the rights of an individual to pursue autonomy and agency in decision making. Therefore, in cosmopolitanism, group qualities that conflict with individual freedom are neutralized. Alexander describes this process as a double movement of isolating and borrowing.30 This neutralization is achieved by isolating or ‘partitioning’ characteristics, in order to facilitate their adoption or rejection.31 This first move echoes those in assimilationism and fragmented pluralism, and facilitates the mutual goal of preventing conflict caused by the interactions of difference by eliminating true difference. Jung Ha Kim further complicates cosmopolitanism’s claims to neutrality by exposing the location of agency in this process. She argues that the second step of cosmopolitanism, in which a partitioned characteristic is transferred from one subject to another, is based on borrowing. Examining the importation of non-Western spiritualities and religions by Westerners, Kim makes the startling observation that ‘borrowing… can be seen as a new and subtle form of 28

29 30 31

Alexander, 248. Alexander’s use of ‘unstable’ here betrays his underlying assumption that difference compromises stability. Appiah, 152. Alexander, 240. Appiah, 223. This missing interaction, or involuntary partitioning, is accompanied by a decreased obligation of one individual to another. In fact, it is this very lack of obligation that permits an individual to live an entirely voluntary life of freedom of choice. If one is not in relation with any other, one is not bound, voluntarily or involuntarily, to consider the other’s needs or desires. For cosmopolitanism, this is entirely the point. This dearth of involuntary relationships is generally presented as a positive contribution to unity, particularly when governed by strong legislation that allows for individual difference. However, it is problematic for those who advocate for group rights, and for those who do not hold individual freedom as the highest value. For these people, cosmopolitanism can become a tyranny that prohibits solidarity among group members. What is missing from Appiah’s vision is any call for the individual to serve the other. While Appiah certainly would not prevent an individual from pursuing a path of service to and sacrifice for others, his call for rooted cosmopolitanism prevents an individual from being compelled to care for another; it is a self-centred approach to difference that denies the necessary and constitutive bond in human relationality.

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controlling and possessing the Other’.32 In other words, action and agency rest with the borrower, and the lender’s permission or refusal is neither required nor recognized (just as the rich man appropriated the poor man’s lamb in Nathan’s tale to King David). While Kim acknowledges, in ways similar to Homi K. Bhabha’s recognition of mimicry, that borrowing changes both parties from what they were before, she argues that, ‘regardless of the subtle mutuality… appreciating the Other must not be equated with appropriating the Other’.33 Both fragmented pluralism and cosmopolitanism imply what assimilationism makes explicit – that someone else is in charge of the process. Agency lies with the one who demonstrates their superior management of the differences under discussion. Control over categories of difference and the maintenance of boundaries, as a demonstration of power, are used to homogenize diversity and exert authority. Individuals who maintain their too different differences do not freely contribute to the formation of the managing body. Participation and agency are controlled entirely by the managing body. This is a risk about which proponents of cosmopolitanism and individuals’ free choice seem unaware.34 Cosmopolitanism presents ‘a face that emphasizes diversity so long as that diversity conforms to procedurally liberal norms’.35 That is to say, cosmopolitanism’s definition of difference determines the kind of diversity allowed. In an institutional body, be it state or church, difference is understood through a teleological lens, where the goal of the institution 32

33 34

35

Jung Ha Kim, ‘Spiritual Buffet: The Changing Diet of America’, in Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology (eds. Rita Nakashima Brock, Jung Ha Kim, Kwok Pui-lan and Seung Ai Yang; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 80. Kim, 80. Alexander, 245. Further, the claim to voluntary association is elitist, and does not recognize the ways in which identity is often involuntarily imposed by others. Mark Redhead, Charles Taylor: Thinking and Living Deep Diversity (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2002), 130. Claiming a life of privileged cosmopolitanism is to take part in a kind of ‘cultural objectification’ that claims qualities of the Other in a Saidian orientalizing fetishization. Richard Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998) in Mackey, 66. And what about hybridity? Often brought into conversation with or just prior to cosmopolitanism, hybridity presents as an attempt to negotiate differences while respecting multiple agents. Yet all qualities are not valued equally, as Alexander’s critique highlights: ‘The notion of ethnic hyphenation, however, does not in any sense suggest the equal valuation of core and outsider qualities; to the contrary, significant stigmatization remains.’ Alexander, 245. This differential valuation is the product of a group’s attempt to manage difference, in this case through hybridity. Mackey, 83. The explicit challenges of hybridity for Christology are more deeply explored in Chapter 6, but here it is sufficient to note Mackey’s caution to avoid placing ‘one’s epistemic security in the dialectical opposition between repressive homogeneity (the erasure of difference) and revolutionary hybridity’. Mackey, 167. Redhead, 130.

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is the aforementioned ‘governable’ difference.36 The dominant power thus institutionalizes a cosmopolitan type of multiculturalism in order to control it.37 Declarations of tolerance, inclusion, or even encouragement of difference do so on the condition that difference falls within the instituted norms and definitions of difference. What are the implications for contextual Christologies developed through cosmopolitanism? When Jesus is acknowledged to be an individual Jew, and thus the spiritual predecessor for Christian adoption into the Abrahamic covenant, is the normativity of this fact for his person integrated or rejected? Does the process of selective cosmopolitan Christology include certain qualities of difference in order to legitimize Christians’ claims on the Jewish God, (though never made normative for the Christian way of living), but reject other qualities? What happens to Jesus’ specifically Jewish existence when his identity as a human is defined through a generically human, or ‘second Adam’, characterization? Individuals cease to become individuals when the particularities of their historical contingencies are relativized or expunged. Is the same true of Jesus Christ? Later chapters will explore the question of whether Jesus ceases to be a human individual when the concrete particularities that contribute to Jesus’ existence are excluded from contemporary presentations of him. How his differences as a human individual prevent or facilitate his identification with multiple and diverse communities will also be explored. Whether, through the process of cosmopolitanism, he can be both human and divine, individual and representative, will be critically examined.

The possibility of multiple loyalties Interactive pluralism and rooted cosmopolitanism Theorists of both interactive pluralism and rooted cosmopolitanism share the observation of all multicultural theorists that difference exists.38 Their proposals are undergirded by the supposition that difference is an inevitable 36 37 38

Mackey, 25. Asad, 16 in Mackey, 50 and see all of Chapter 3. For further proposals of rooted cosmopolitanism, see also Will Kymlicka and Kathryn Walker, ‘Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Canada and the World’, 1–27, and Scott Schaffer, ‘Cosmopolitanizing Cosmopolitanism: Cosmopolitan Claims Making, Interculturalism, and the Bouchard Taylor Report’, 129–55 in Kymlicka and Walker.

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and desirable constituent of human existence: ‘as Prina Werbner (2006, 496) notes, we used to ask “whether the local, parochial, rooted, culturally specific and demotic may coexist with the translocal, transnational, transcendent, elitist, enlightened, universalist and modernist.” But today, “the question is often reversed to ask whether there can be an enlightened normative cosmopolitanism which is not rooted, in the final analysis, in patriotic and culturally committed loyalties and understandings” ’.39 They reject the attempts of assimilationism, fragmented pluralism, and cosmopolitanism to lessen the tension evoked by differences. The processes of interactive pluralism and of rooted cosmopolitanism differ from the previous in several significant ways and inform this book’s development of its Christology. First, they reject any attempt to create a state of unity. Instead, unity is a process of becoming rather than a state of being.40 According to Hartmann and Gerteis, the most important characteristic of interactive pluralism is its welcome of and reliance on ‘a new and constantly redefined macro-culture’.41 This process is reactive, rather than normative, and constituted, rather than constitutive. How this flexibility is achieved is discussed below, but it is important to note here that this dynamism is foundational for negotiating difference and unity. Difference is never a onetime introduction of not-same to same. Instead, it is a constant and ongoing relationship as ever-new differences appear.42 The influx of new people, new ideas, and new factors constantly challenge any unity based on homogeneity. It is a ‘polycentric’ process that incorporates ‘contending ideals and idealities’ in a dynamic way.43 The most recognized advocate for the model of interactive pluralism is philosopher Charles Taylor. Taylor draws on Herder and Durkheim, who assume difference to be integral to a culture on the basis of the unique

39

40

41 42

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Kymlicka and Walker, 10, citing Prina Werbner, ‘Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, Theory, Culture and Society 23(2–3) (2006), 496–8. Emphasis added. Joseph-Yvon Thériault, ‘Universality and Particularity in the National Question in Quebec’, in Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Canada and the World (eds. Will Kymlicka and Kathryn Walker; Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2012), 74. Hartmann and Gerteis, 232. For a thorough examination of the challenge to static definitions of national unity or collective identity posed by constant immigration, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Makings of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 184. Harry H. Hiller, Canadian Society: A Macro Analysis (Toronto, ON: Pearson Education Canada, 4th edn., 2000), 290. Emphasis mine.

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difference of each person, to assert that ‘people can also bond not in spite of but because of difference. They can sense, that is, that the difference enriches each party, that their lives are narrower and less full alone than in association with each other. In this sense, the difference defines a complementarity’.44 This emphasis on mutual formativity comes from Taylor’s belief that identities are constructed in community, not autonomously, and that ‘a person’s unique sense of individuality is derivative of his or her existence in a given society’.45 Taylor’s ‘communitarian’ goal is a multicultural, diverse society/nation that requires interaction with the Other in order to improve the whole. He rejects any pluralism that elevates the segregated, isolated rights of individuals as paramount. According to Taylor, the process for achieving this pluralism must begin with ‘Other-understanding’ and the actual recognition of difference. Otherunderstanding functions in two ways. First, it expands the range of possible values to be shared. Once the maximum range of possible values has been determined, groups can choose together which values are already shared or are worth pursuing together. Second, Other-understanding expands and relativizes one’s own perspective because our engagement with the Other and exposure to new presuppositions causes us to identify and articulate our own.46 In such articulations, their a priori status is challenged by the lack of universal acceptance. Exposure to the range of possibilities and the extent of potentialities provides us with more information to decide whether to maintain or to relinquish our presuppositions, including multiple perspectives of differences. Taylor develops this dialogical Other-understanding from Hegel’s philosophy, where it is ‘effected by an integrated, nonindividuated agent. This means that for those involved in it, its identity as this kind of action essentially depends on the sharing of agency’.47 In this non-individuated sharing, ‘a great 44 45

46 47

Taylor, Sources, 191. Emphasis added. Redhead, 85. I believe that Taylor’s sense of the human person as constituted by community comes from his membership as a (Roman Catholic) Christian. Comparing unity composed of difference to an orchestra with many instruments, Taylor writes that ‘the ultimate richness comes when all the different voices or instruments come together; it is something they create in the space between them. (The theology behind all this finds its source in certain crucial Christian doctrines, e.g. the Trinity and the Communion of Saints.) Charles Taylor, ‘Living with Difference,’ in Debating Democracy’s Discontent: Essays on American Politics, Law, and Public Philosophy (eds. Anita L. Allen and Milton C. Regan; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998), 215. Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 152. Charles Taylor, ‘The Dialogical Self ’, in The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science and Culture (eds. David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman and Richard Shusterman; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 311.

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deal of human action happens only insofar as the agent understands and constitutes himself or herself as integrally part of a we’.48 Yet Taylor’s reliance on Hegel makes his proposal problematic and jeopardizes Taylor’s attempt to preserve difference side-by-side in an integrated yet non-individuated way. As is explored in Chapter 5, Hegel goes beyond interactivity, even mutually formative interactivity, to argue for the sacrifice (i.e. sublation) of the constituent individuals in service to the new creation. The ‘synthesis’ of thesis and antithesis totalizes and thus erases both parties. This is not interactive pluralism, but assimilationism via hybridity, a process exposed as problematic above. Although Taylor does not go as far as Hegel in making the newly combined creation normative (prevented as he is by a commitment to decentralized authority that avoids an establishment and enforcement of normativity by preventing any geographical consolidation of power), he still refers to a ‘we’ that defines and integrates the individual. My concern is not this integration per se, but the ways in which non-individuation and the ‘we’ resolve too easily in aufgehoben. Taylor’s interactive pluralism does not sufficiently allow for the ongoing action of multiple agencies, and therefore cannot stand as the sole foundation for an interactive Christology. Kwame Appiah proposes ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ as a response to the above concerns. ‘Rootedness’ recognizes the existence and even necessity of relationships between individuals, or between individuals and cultures/groups, as relationally constitutive of the group or norm. Rooted cosmopolitanism emphasizes the ways differences are brought into conversation in one subject (rooting them). Appiah proposes a cosmopolitanism wherein individuals find a common bond between them due to their shared concerns over local issues or threats to autonomy. In this vision, a completely fractured society is avoided by different parties/individuals agreeing at the level of the ‘local and contingent’, where particularity is encountered.49 In the process of rooted cosmopolitanism, differences are identified as those things which are particular to the subject. That is, they are identified without reference to what is determined as normative, rejecting comparison by either similarity or dissimilarity. These differences are reframed as constantly changing localities or particularities because as the subject relates to and engages with 48 49

Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 173. Emphasis mine. Appiah, 253.

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others, his or her context is continually shifting, sometimes bringing particular similarities into relief, sometimes highlighting differences.50 In this process, differences are not meant to be transcended, but to be reframed as localities. Yet while Appiah proposes that these particularities are rooted, the exact process by which particularities then relate to commonalities remains unspecified and so rooted cosmopolitanism is underdeveloped for constructing an interactive Christology. Taylor’s interactive pluralism and Appiah’s rooted cosmopolitanism offer an initial vision for constructing a new interpretation of the Incarnation that relies on interactivity and the co-formativity of difference between the two natures of Christ. Taylor’s emphasis on obtaining multiple perspectives in the relation of the self to Other, and Appiah’s proposal that difference is localized provide a foundation on which to build an argument for mutual interaction and co-formativity between the various differences that constitute the incarnated person of Jesus Christ: the difference of very specific humanity and the difference of divinity that constitute the one person of Christ, and the difference of Jewish and representative humanity that do likewise.

Summary The central questions underlying this book fall into two areas: whether and how. Can the unique, individual and particular be related to the universal and transcendent, and vice versa? How is such a relationship accomplished? Can the Jewish Jesus relate to millions of believers through the contingencies of history and locality? How do different differences relate? To answer the how question, several processes for negotiating difference have been reviewed, so that they might be identified in Christology. Assimilationism and other processes for negotiating difference operate under a certain set of presuppositions that determine both the steps in the process and the outcome. The following chapters will unearth these presuppositions in theologies of the Incarnation, and identify the ways in which they influence processes of negotiating difference in classical and contemporary Christologies.

50

Thériault, 74.

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Despite the processes summarized in this chapter, ‘in practice, assimilation, hyphenation [cosmopolitanism], and multiculturalism [interactive pluralism] blend into one another, and in real historical time particular communities participate in all three of these processes at the same time’.51 Identifying the role of power and who has agency helps to differentiate between the processes and answers the whether question by helping to construct a new process for negotiating the difference between Jesus’ divine nature and human natures in the person of the Incarnation.

51

Alexander, 248.

Part Two

Constituent Parts

3

Contextual: Jesus as Human Citizen

Jesus is consubstantial with us Centuries of Christian theology have professed that Jesus Christ, the Incarnation of God, saves and redeems. Certainly there are nuances and debates within the framework of this concept – saves whom? redeems how? when? – but that the heart of Christian theology is soteriology is here taken as a given. For Jesus Christ to impart salvation to another, however, means that Jesus must function, at a minimum, as a representative in order to bring that other into the redemptive circle. Jesus Christ must represent more than his individual self in the encounter with God. Yet representation has ambivalent consequences. While representation offers a foundation for soteriology, this chapter will explore the consequences when a representative functions, as it too frequently does, through processes of fragmented pluralism that descend into assimilationism. Representation relies on idealization, which in turn relies on categorization. A category is constructed from a set of shared characteristics, which are used to include or exclude objects from that category. Henri Tajfel, working in social identity theory, defines categorization as ‘certain generalizations reached by individuals whose main function is to simplify or systematize, for purposes of cognitive and behavioral adaptation, the abundance complexity of the information received from its environment by the human organism’.1 Categories do not allow for contradictory diversity. When differences are encountered, the category is broadened and redefined to incorporate such diversity. At that point, newly 1

Henri Tajfel, ‘Social Stereotypes and Social Groups’, in Intergroup Relations: Essential Readings (eds. Michael Hogg and Dominic Abrams; Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press, 2001), 133. My thanks to Lalnunzira Bangsut for exposing me to the work of social identity theorists.

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established characteristics are used to include or exclude. The representative of any given category must exhibit those shared characteristics without exhibiting ones to the contrary. Representatives must therefore reduce an entire group to a single subject, which is accomplished through homogenizing reductionism.2 As Stuart Hall notes, representation is ‘always constructed… and thus can never be adequate’, hinting at troubling outcomes for Christologies that rely on categorizations and representations of Jesus as a human.3 In this chapter, we will explore three types of Christologies, each of which presents Christ as a human on the basis of differing characteristics. The first type is Christ as the Ideal Human or the Second/New Adam. Ideal Human/ New Adam Christologies involve a generic and universally defined humanity, which is historically located, but in a representational, and thus nonparticular or aparticular, way. I will explore whether a model built on a representational Ideal Human can avoid assimilating the historical individual Jesus into a larger universal archetype, given that representation functions only through generalizations and homogenizing categorizations. The second type is Christ as the Jew. In these Jesus as Jew Christologies, I explore the narrower focus of Jesus as Jewish, and examine select theologies that emphasize this aspect of Jesus’ context. The question raised will be whether these Christologies repeat the methodological mistake of the first type by making a singular category of humankind (i.e. Jewish) representational of Jesus. What are the consequences for Jesus’ actual historical Jewish instantiation when he is described in Jesus as Jew Christologies? Finally, I explore contextual Christologies that emphasize Jesus as a human who suffered from injustice as other oppressed groups around the world do. Ostensibly, these Christologies recognize the problems of marginalization and resist relying on reified descriptive categories that contribute to the eradication of difference. However, building on Margaret Kamitsuka’s critique of representational Christology, I will question whether the representations of contextual Christologies separate Jesus’ body from his actions and exclude his particular lived experience as a Jew, due to their

2

3

Dhamoon ‘Considerations’, 234. Dhamoon exposes the ways in which identities are conflated with ‘categories of difference’. Stuart Hall, ‘Who Needs Identity?’, in Questions of Cultural Identity (eds. Paul Du Gay and Stuart Hall; London: Sage, 1996), 6. Hall observes that this representational Othering occurs even when one assigns representation to one’s self.

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reliance on the processes of assimilationism. I will investigate whether the contextual theologians, who assimilate Jesus into their own contexts and claim his representational function for themselves, eradicate the very differences of Jesus’ Jewishness that establish his human consubstantiality and citizenship. It may be that a new anthropology is necessary for interpreting what constitutes the human nature of Jesus Christ. At the end of the chapter, I will explore a new Christological foundation for an interactive Christology that allows Jesus to be Ideal, Jewish, and contemporarily contextual while remaining particularly embedded in his historical context and relationships.

Jesus the Second Adam/New Being In order for Jesus to save, be it through death and resurrection or as a model for righteous living, he must somehow represent or identify with the subjects to be saved. Thus, arguments for Jesus’ humanity address the degree to which he is human. Only superficially human and his ontological identification with humans does not hold and salvation does not occur – he must be a citizen, and not a resident alien. Instead, he must be ‘truly human’, in the language of Chalcedon. After the early Church debates against Docetism and before the rise of historical consciousness in eighteenth-century Europe, the humanity of Jesus was expressed generically and representationally; the historical reality of the human Jesus was rarely explored. However, as interest in the flow of history increased from the beginning of the sixteenth century, theologians in the eighteenth century began to explore the historical conditions of the human Jesus. Jesus’ humanity was proved through his historical existence, since instantiation in time and space is the undebatable universal characteristic of all humans. Jesus’ representative humanity came to be framed through the lens of his historically conditioned existence. In this section, I first briefly summarize two examples of representative Christology and then revisit each in more depth in order to explore the problematic processes by which they negotiate difference in Jesus’ humanity to achieve a representational Christology. We begin with Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose work exemplifies Christologies that build the case for Christ’s humanity on the basis of him fulfilling the ‘ideality’ of humanity. Schleiermacher’s Ideal Human is the

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perfect ‘subject of the God-consciousness’ made concrete. While humankind was created with the potential to be receptive to this God-consciousness, and to live in immediate self-consciousness emerging from the ‘feeling of absolute Dependence’, Schleiermacher is explicit that only Christ himself is able to actuate it in the fullest.4 As the Second Adam – ‘a new Creation’ – the historical reality of the Incarnation of Christ actualizes and concretizes the ideal of God-consciousness.5 Operating on the belief that human particularity is an indispensable characteristic of human existence, Schleiermacher develops his ideal of the Second Adam by drawing on the Kantian insight that all understanding is conditioned by our context: ‘the pure historicity of the Redeemer, however, involves also this fact, that He could develop only in a certain similarity with His surroundings, that is, in general after the manner of his people’. For example, as a person embedded in a particular historical environment, with actual historical relationships, the human Redeemer developed as all other children in his situation did. Further, as a human, ‘even this Godconsciousness, however original in its higher powers, could only express or communicate itself in ideas which He had appropriated from this sphere’.6 Following Schleiermacher’s logic, the Redeemer would not have expressed ideas about God using Zoroastrian parallels, but would have relied on Jewish conceptions of God, or on parables from his local environment. Despite this assurance of Jesus’ historical embeddedness, Schleiermacher argues that the redemptive Ideal Human transcended his existing religious environment (i.e. Second Temple Judaism) in his apprehension of God, moving beyond his context because of his God-consciousness: ‘His particular spiritual content… cannot be explained by the content of the human environment to which He belonged, but only by the universal source of spiritual life in virtue of a creative divine act’, by which Christ became the Word (as it were).7 Contrasting the Redeemer’s historical conditionality with his ‘universal source of spiritual life’, it becomes evident that Schleiermacher is working with the

4

5 6 7

Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (eds. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, Reprint; New York, NY: T&T Clark, 2008), 15, 142, 260, 368. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 367 and 380. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 382. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 381.

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tension between historicity and ideality, or, as he comes to define it, the tension between the human and divine natures.8 This tension is common in Christology, and we will engage in a critical examination of Schleiermacher’s process for resolving it after examining another, more contemporary, example. One hundred and fifty years later, Paul Tillich sharpened this tension with his proposal of Jesus Christ as ‘the New Being’. In Tillich’s method of correlation, the finite is brought together with the infinite to resolve the anxiety of not-being.9 The finite is that which is concrete, particular, and, as human, an individual who is self-dependent. The finite human lives in history, is concerned about the threat of not-being in the face of being, and thus lives a life of estrangement and anxiety.10 By contrast, the infinite is that which illuminates the constraints of the finite, both ontologically and eschatologically. The very limitations of the finite point to a need for reconciliation with the infinite, and to the necessity for an ontological origin that is external to all (finite) beings.11 Thus, the infinite is outside of time and space, is unbounded, and is universal. The two relate through a tension between finite and infinite that is ultimately reconciled in Jesus the Christ, who is ‘the final manifestation of the New Being in time and space’.12 In this revelation, the finite (i.e. human fleshly incarnation of Jesus) is brought into contact with the infinite (the Logos, pre-existent and post-crucifixion Christ) and transformed. The finite exists as Being, but is New because it transcends the limits of that existence. In Tillich’s logic, the finite’s transformation by the infinite is inevitable, because only the infinite can provide resolution to the threat of not-being, a threat which defines the very nature of finite existence. The incarnation of Jesus Christ is this reconciliation of finite and infinite. As the New Being, Jesus’ historical Incarnation concretizes the ‘final revelation’ of the power of love (the message brought by the infinite) by sacrificing that historical existence to that message. In the Incarnation of this human, the New Being is made manifest, where being is that which exists in concrete time and space, and where the Newness comes from the fact that this being 8 9

10 11 12

Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 381. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume Two: Existence and the Christ (Chicago, MI: The University of Chicago Press, 1957), 88. Tillich, II, 97. Tillich, II, 66 and 125. Tillich, II, 98.

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is not estranged by the threat of not-being, due to its transformation by the infinite. In this relational paradox, Tillich seeks a middle path to overcome the tension between divine and human, or universal and particular, rather than having one assimilate the other: ‘Any diminution of the human nature would deprive the Christ of his total participation in the conditions of existence. And any diminution of the divine nature would deprive the Christ of his total victory over existential estrangement.’13 The universal divine encapsulates the particular and finite human, both preserving and extending from it.14 Jesus Christ is the New Being because he is the historical manifestation, or representative, of this encapsulation.

Critiquing the representative Second Adam/New Being Yet, the problem of representation is the problem of assimilation. In the process of assimilationism, a single individual is assigned representational status as the ideal or perfection of a group; the individual is assimilated into the group. In this process, the unique characteristics of the individual that contradict the predetermined, universal characteristics of that group are set aside. The group assimilates the individual. When examined through the lens of agency, an observation by Chris Boesel is revealing: ‘the project of universality is the means by which I possess the world, and the other – the neighbor – in knowledge’.15 In representation, the universal or ideal enables possession, a state in which the possessed has no agency. Laurel Schneider also observes that the affirmation, or representation, of Jesus’ human body as generally or universally human ‘is a rejection of his actual, truly heterogeneous body (which actually constitutes his distinction from all other bodies, all other humans) in favor of a general, ideal, exchangeable body of sameness, which can therefore be only a pseudobody’.16 Individuals should not be reduced to categories, as this removes their individuality. Schneider’s disagreement with the classical theology of 13

14 15

16

Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume One: Reason and Revelation, Being and God (Chicago, MI: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), 142. Tillich, I, 239 and 252. Boesel, 211. Boesel develops this from Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (trans. Alphonso Lingis; Pittsburgh, PA: Dusquesne University Press, 1969), 46. Laurel C. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (London: Routledge, 2008), 173.

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Incarnation is that it ‘disallows any distinction in matter and so achieves the same Docetic, body-denying result’.17 Consequently, ‘actual bodies in all their irreducible uniqueness and singularity disappear’.18 Applying Schneider’s observations to Tillich, I argue that when Jesus’ human nature is assimilated into the broad category of Ideal Human or the New Being, his representative humanity obscures the particularities of his human existence. His individualism is replaced by his representative status, and he is segregated as a ‘universal human’ from his particular, Jewish group of origin, in the same ways that the moniker of ‘citizen’ obscures the diversity and uniqueness of participation of each individual in the formation of their country. In this process, Jesus’ identity as a human is defined entirely through a generically human, or New Being, characterization. Just as individuals cease to become individuals when the particularities of their historical contingencies are relativized or expunged, Jesus Christ also loses his individuality. Schneider describes this process as ‘the logic of the One [that]… abstracts bodies into classifications, types, and identities’.19 A nonspecific Ideality or Newness of being human reduces and covers over Jesus’ specific Jewish historicity. We now return to Schleiermacher and Tillich to identify the process of assimilating representation in their Christologies. Although Jacqueline Marina argues that ‘Schleiermacher can quite consistently claim that Jesus must function inside the parameters of what is completely human while still functioning as the archetype in which all human relation to God must be sought’, she does not account for the process by which Schleiermacher’s emphasis on an archetype overrides his inclusion of the historically situated individual.20 As observed earlier, Schleiermacher acknowledges the historical conditioning of Christ’s temporal location, but here we see that he views that particular conditioning as corrosive to a true religious relationship with God. Following the process of assimilationism, Schleiermacher argues that the religious context that constitutes him must be set aside in order for Christ to function as the sinless Ideal Human. Jesus must be freed from the 17 18 19 20

Schneider, 165. Schneider, 165. Schneider, 167. Jacqueline Marina, ‘Christology and Anthropology in Friedrich Schleiermacher’, in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (ed. Jacqueline Marina; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 160.

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‘detrimental influences’ of his historical context that would lead him to resist God’s activity within him; he must be inured from the historical influences that would lead him to sin so that as he grew from infancy to adulthood, he would develop an innate resistance to sin.21 It is true, as Haight notes, that for Schleiermacher the ‘anthropologically common experience of absolute dependence is always mediated historically’.22 However, it is equally true that despite Schleiermacher’s historical mediation, he is not historically integrative. The inclusion of Jesus Christ’s history is vague and theologically irrelevant to the content of his experience of the transcendent. Schleiermacher is unable to consider a human history that is simultaneously relevant alongside transcendent experience – multiple participation is excluded. Consequently, while Schleiermacher acknowledges the constitutive effect of historical context on Jesus’ human development and on the ways in which he expressed his experience of the indwelling of God, Schleiermacher denies the effect of that context on Christ’s spiritual existence. Christ’s humanity serves only as the ‘organism… which both receives and represents’ the divine power of God, as a kind of ‘intelligence’.23 The functionalism that, for Marina, demonstrates the true humanity of Jesus Christ is actually a utilitarianism in which his archetypal transcendent experience of Absolute Dependence overwrites the particularities of his human life. After identifying characteristics of the Ideal Human, Schleiermacher argues that this human perfection is fulfilled only by the Second Adam, Jesus Christ.24 This is because, while Jesus is ‘altogether like all those who are descended from the first [Adam]’, this Second Adam has ‘an unhindered potency of the Godconsciousness’.25 In making this statement, Schleiermacher is arguing that

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Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 387. In Schleiermacher’s anthropology, humans are naturally without sin, but contextualized by their environment to sin. Applying an anachronism to Schleiermacher’s theology, sin is nurture, not nature. Roger Haight, Jesus, Symbol of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 304. Haight, 304. To be fair, Schleiermacher was not the only theologian of his time whose Christology ended with assimilationism. As Susannah Heschel explains, ‘Protestant theologians [of the nineteenth century]… delimit Jewish influence on Christian origins and separate Judaism from what was truly extraordinary about Jesus. They asserted that they sought the historical Jesus, but they elevated the ahistorical Christ elements within him’. Schleiermacher is therefore one example among many. Susannah Heschel, ‘Jesus as Theological Transvestite’, in Judaism since Gender (eds. Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt;London: Routledge, 1998) 189. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 367 and 365.

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this consciousness completely determines Jesus’ actions – he incorporates his awareness of the Infinite into his self-consciousness so that there is no conflict, and thus no multiple participation.26 In the Incarnation, ‘there can have been no active state in Christ which, regarded as existing for itself, did not arise from the being of God in Him, and was not perfected by the human nature’.27 Initially, this move appears to be an assimilation of the infinite by the finite, as the human nature perfects the divinely originated active human state. Indeed, Schleiermacher strenuously objects to any interpretation of the Incarnation, including orthodox ones, that result in Christology wherein ‘the divine person has assumed the human into the unity of its Person…. It makes the personality of Christ altogether dependent upon the personality of the second Person in the Divine Essence’.28 However, Dhamoon’s test of agency exposes the reverse. While agency is initiated by Jesus’ human nature, in that his self-consciousness incorporates the God-consciousness and not the other way around, the final agent in the Incarnation is the God-consciousness and not the human subject. Only the human who is also the Second Adam is able, because of his fully realized God-consciousness, to subjugate the self-consciousness to the God-consciousness. This is a process that begins with God and not with the human subject; it is the historical embodiment of ideality.29 Each moment of decision entered into by the historical Jesus is resolved by a ‘domination’ of the divine that is ‘complete in the sense that nothing was ever able to find a place in the sense-nature which did not instantly take its place as an instrument of the spirit’.30 The human self-consciousness is dominated and made an instrument by the God-consciousness, achieved through the assimilation of Jesus’ historical particularity by his ‘Ideal Human’ God-consciousness. The same process that privileges universal representation and erases individual particularity is repeated in Tillich. On the one hand, Tillich argues that ‘the New Being has appeared in a personal life’, necessary because only in the life of an actual human being can the finite, existential being come together 26 27 28

29 30

Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 368. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 408. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 399. Such a dependence either leads to a Docetic view of Jesus’ humanity or to a fracture of the Trinity. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 368 and 384. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 383.

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with the infinite essential being.31 However, Tillich is adamant that ‘Jesus as the Christ is the bearer of the New Being in the totality of his being, not in any special expressions of it’.32 Tillich is saying that everything Jesus said and did arises out of ‘expressions of the New Being’, and is not important in its particularity or historically constituted individuality.33 This means that the essential being, that is the Logos, is driving the action of the existential. The New Being’s existence as finite and historical is necessary, but, as Moltmann points out, the New Being could just as easily have ‘had another name’.34 The point is not that the New Being was actualized as this particular Jewish man from Nazareth, but that he was actualized at all. For Tillich, significance lies in the general ‘concreteness’ of existence; the particulars are irrelevant.35 In the process of emphasizing the general, representational status of Jesus as the New Being, Tillich sets aside the actual particulars of Jesus’ historical life. Tillich argues that if the words of Jesus are attributed to the human nature, then Jesus is just another prophet or legalistic judge: ‘It is the replacement of Jesus as the Christ by the religious and moral teacher called Jesus of Nazareth’.36 For Tillich, particularizing and making historically relevant the concrete existence of Christ is not only irrelevant, but it also disrupts faith. Therefore, any understanding of agency in the Incarnation in which ‘the salvation of mankind [sic] would be dependent on the contingent decision of an individual man’, is not permitte.37 Tillich here betrays his presupposition that multiple-formativity and multiple-agency is not possible, as he argues that the historical particularity of Jesus cannot be formative of his concrete existence, otherwise the decision to endure suffering and death, which leads ultimately to reconciliation of the finite and infinite, would rest in human hands, and not God’s.38 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Tillich, II, 120. Tillich, II, 120. Emphasis added. Tillich, II, 120. Tillich, II, 114. Tillich, II, 114. Tillich, II, 122. Tillich, II, 12. Here, Tillich displays some contradiction. He states that ‘the decision of the Christ against succumbing to the temptations is an act of finite freedom and, as such, analogous to a decision by anyone who is finite freedom, i.e. by any man…. At the same time it is, as in anyone who is finite freedom, a consequence of his destiny. His freedom was imbedded in his destiny’. Tillich, II, 129–30. Tillich resolves this tension by appealing to the hand of God. ‘The decisions of Jesus in which he resisted real temptation, like every human decision, stand under the directing creativity of God (providence).’ Tillich, II, 130. (For his definition of destiny, see Tillich, I, 184–6.)

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Tillich’s resistance to any theology that emphasizes the historical ‘uniqueness’ of Jesus is that it ‘cuts him off from everything before the year 1 and after the year 30. In this way the continuity of the divine self-manifestation through history is denied not only for the pre-Christian past but also for the Christian present and future’.39 Tillich rules out the possibility that the historical and the extra-historical (or transcendent) can coexist in one person. Therefore, the historical existence of Jesus is important for Tillich only in its utility: Tillich describes the significance of Jesus’ Jewish descent as ‘symbolic’, while arguing for a New Being who is in, but also before and after history.40 In the process of assimilationism, the particulars of an individual or group are voluntarily or forcefully set aside or rejected in order to fit in with the larger group. In Tillich’s Christology, the final revelation, which demonstrates the truth of the ground of Being and the irrefutable message that the finite is overcome in the infinite, takes place when Jesus of Nazareth, the medium of finite existence, sacrifices himself to Jesus as the Christ, the living message of the conquering of the finite by the infinite.41 In this assimilating sacrifice, the historical context of Jesus, including his religious particularity, is rejected. Tillich explicitly states that Jesus Christ ‘crucified the particular in himself for the sake of the universal. This liberates his image from bondage both to a particular religion – the religion to which he belonged has thrown him out – and to the religious sphere as such’.42 Here again we see Tillich’s emphasis that the particular must be assimilated by the universal or, in Tillichian terms, the absolute. There is no scenario in Tillich’s schema in which the finite particular existence continues to exist once the Resurrection (the overcoming of the finite by the infinite) has occurred. The process of assimilationism is irreversible. Christologies of both Schleiermacher and Tillich rely on theological anthropologies that assimilate the particularity of Jesus into a general human representation. The question becomes, then, whether Christologies that rely on the humanness of Jesus can incorporate his body as more than simply a utilitarian mechanism (one that dies, no less)? Can the process of assimilationism be avoided? Can the particulars of the finite and historically 39 40 41 42

Tillich, II, 135. Tillich, II, 135 and again on 136. Tillich, I, 133. Paul Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1963), 81–2.

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located human, in this case a man from Nazareth during the Second-Temple period, play a role in the formation of the person of Jesus Christ who is also the human par excellence?

Jesus the Jew The move to take account of the historical reality of Jesus emerged out of the New Quest for the historical Jesus which objected to ahistorical interpretations of Christ’s presence that relativized Jesus’ historical existence, arguing that generalized representations made ‘the particular features of the real, historical human being Jesus of Nazareth and the arbitrary occurrences of his life inessential’.43 The Ideal Human archetype needed to be replaced by an understanding of Jesus’ human nature as constituted by his specific Jewish embodiment. Jesus should be considered exclusively from within his context of Judaism, and not as a representative of the universal human; Christology should centre on the Jewish historical reality of Jesus.44 Paul van Buren’s theology is an exemplary model of New Quest-based Christologies that emphasizes the necessity of accounting for Jesus’ Jewishness. Van Buren has argued that the Christian encounter with Jesus is really an encounter with Jesus the Jew. In this Christology, Jesus functions historically as the representative of God’s covenant with Israel. Van Buren frames the theological necessity for Jesus’ Jewishness in the biological continuity of Jewish blood, and thus the continuity of the covenant, present in Jesus’ veins. Jesus, due to his genetic inheritance, therefore stands in for Israel, Sinai, Torah, Abraham, and the entire history of God’s relationship with the people of Israel as a living example of the obedience to God that is commanded in Torah. Jesus

43

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Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (New York, NY: SCM Press, 1974), 91. Moltmann offers a concise list of critical texts: Ernst Käsemann, ‘The Problem of the Historical Jesus’, in Essays on New Testament Themes (London: SCM Press, 1964), 15–47; Ernst Fuchs, ‘The Quest of the Historical Jesus’, in Studies of the Historical Jesus (trans. Andrew Scobie; Naperville, IL: Alec R. Allenson, Inc, 1964), 11–31; Gerhard Ebeling, ‘Kerygma and the Historical Jesus’, in Theology and Proclamation (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1966), 32–81; James M. Robinson, A New Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: SCM, 1959); Rudolph Bultmann, ‘The Primitive Christian Kerygma and the Historical Jesus’, in The Historical Jesus and the Kergymatic Christ (eds. Carl Braaten and Roy A. Harrisville; New York, NY: Abingdon Press, 1964), 34. Moltmann, Crucified God, 107, fn 4.

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is Israel in that he is the light to the nations (the Gentiles) that draws them to the God of Israel.45 Using the phrase ‘the Jew Jesus’, van Buren frequently remarks that Jesus was a Jew, which van Buren characterizes as argumentative, stubborn, and determined by the covenant.46 Because van Buren interprets Jesus as the historically embedded representational Jew, he categorically rejects any suggestion that Jesus was God, since no Jew would ever claim to be divinized or equate being the Son of God with being God or claim messianic status.47 Further, Jesus’ disciples would never have claimed such a thing on Jesus’ behalf, since they were also Jews. To accommodate this understanding in his Christology, van Buren argues that the traditionally described divine person of Christ has no agency to either direct Jesus’ actions or determine his decisions. That is not to say that van Buren is proposing a purely humanist Jesus; according to van Buren, Jesus was authorized by God to ‘speak and act in [God’s] name’.48 God speaks through him, insofar as Jesus embodies the word of God by being obedient to God through Torah observance. God was ‘unqualifiedly involved in, committed to and responsible for’ the man (just a man) Jesus.49 Further, that Jesus was born a Jew was ‘an act of God’.50 As far as the title of Son of God goes, Jesus was God’s Son in that he had an intimate relationship with God, as all children of Israel do.51 Jesus is not, however, more than that: ‘He was and is a man, a Jew, not a second God, heaven forbid, not a deified man, but just a man.’52

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48 49 50 51 52

Paul van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, Part 2: A Christian Theology of the People Israel (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1983), 249. Paul van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, Part 3: Christ in Context (New York, NY: SCM Press, 1988), 57, 62, 63, 74, 75. Van Buren, Part 3, 87, 89. This understanding of the acceptance of messianic claims in SecondTemple Judaism has since been challenged by biblical and historical scholars. For a brief overview, see Michael Hilton, ‘Messiah’, 291–2, James S. McLaren, ‘Messianic Movements’, 292–3, and Jesper Svartvik, ‘Akiba’, 9 in Kessler. See also David B. Levenson, ‘Messianic Movements’, in The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 530–5. For a more in-depth discussion, see James H. Charlesworth, with J. Brownson, M. T. Davis, S. J. Kraftchick, and A. F. Segal, eds., The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). Van Buren, Part 1, 79. Van Buren, Part 1, 83. Van Buren, Part 2, 241. Van Buren, Part 1, 80. Van Buren, Part 1, 85.

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Critiquing the representative Jew ‘Jesus the Jew’ problematically establishes Jesus as a representative of a particular group by relying on static and reified stereotypes of Judaism that mask the particularity of Jesus’ own Jewish instantiation.53 This process of establishing and relying on stereotypes is a process of assimilationism wherein Jewishness is identified by certain characteristics – for van Buren, adherence to the Law, kosher practices, loyalty to the Temple, descent from Abraham and David, circumcision (amongst males), and citation of Scripture. Next, these characteristics are selectively assimilated while the remaining are rejected. In the creation of these stereotypes, individual differences that contradict generalized characteristics are ignored, lest they disrupt the homogeneous picture being drawn. It is a problem of reductionary representation to the Ideal Human repeated on a more localized stage. This selective process of assimilation most often occurs as a process of cosmopolitanism, masking the totalizing results. Examining (mostly friendly) portrayals of Jesus since 1967, James G. Crossley argues that ‘in many cases mere lip service is paid to “Jesus the Jew” whereby Jesus must be explicable in his Jewish context but must also be in some way different from his Jewish context. This approach is what I would call a “Jewish…but not that Jewish” approach.54 As in cosmopolitanism, in Jesus-the-Jew Christologies, Jesus is acknowledged as an individual Jew in order to establish him as the spiritual predecessor for Christian adoption into the Abrahamic covenant. The normativity of this fact for his person is rejected: ‘He’s a Jew, but he transcends those narrow religious boundaries.’ This cosmopolitan Christology facilitates assimilation by bordering difference; certain aspects of Jesus’ difference (Abrahamic descent) are highlighted in order to legitimize Christians’ claims on the Jewish God, though never made normative for the Christian way of living, while other qualities (obeying cleanliness laws) are rejected outright. Before returning to van Buren’s Jesus-the-Jew Christology, I want to explore how the motif of Jesus the Jew can be used to support supersessionism – identifying the process as it occurs in a hostile environment makes it easier to 53

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They also rely on biblical and historical scholarship that must be continually updated as new discoveries are made. James G. Crossley, ‘Jesus the Jew since 1967’ in Blanton et al., 132.

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discern the process in a friendly one. Andrew S. Jacobs offers an illustrative case study, looking specifically at early Church interpretations of the theological significance of Jesus’ circumcision.55 He argues that Jesus’ circumcision, recorded in Luke, was used to prove that Jesus was Jewish, thereby fulfilling Scripture’s promise of a Messiah from the house of David. However, Jewish circumcision was then used to demonstrate the debased corporeality of the human (Jewish) body and the superiority of the divine nature that condescends to take it on.56 Examining Tertullian, Origen, and Cyril, Jacobs argues that ‘Jesus’ circumcision, then, represents this Christian absorption of Jewish carnality…. Christ took on circumcision, but seemingly only as proof of his universal humanity’.57 Jesus proceeds to overcome this Jewish carnality by transcending his human nature and assimilating it into the divine. The circumcision of Christ becomes the sole signifier of Jesus’ Jewishness, is superseded by Christ’s baptism, and thereafter ‘functions as a shorthand not for the eradication of Judaism… but for the transformation of Judaism into Christianity’.58 The complexity of Jewish identity is reduced to a single identifier, which Jesus represents and then supersedes in a precise process of assimilationism. Ironically, this reified Judaism occurs in both pro-Jewish/philo-Semitic Christologies as well as in anti-Jewish/anti-Semitic ones. Marc Ellis warns against the ‘romanticization’ of Jews by Christians who emphasize the status of Jews as God’s chosen people, because it continues to deny the diversity of Jews as a people. He elevates George Steiner’s concern over ‘the mythical, magical, and theological categories which for Christian define the Jews and from which Jews may suffer in the future’ when their actions do not conform to these predefined categories of chosenness and holiness.59 Zygmunt 55

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See also Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010) for an example of how biblical historical scholarship of Jesus was used to reject his Jewishness. Andrew S. Jacobs, Christ Circumcised: A Study in Early Christian History and Difference (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 134. Jacobs, 56. For an analysis of Origen, see Jacobs, 53–4. For Tertullian, see Jacobs, 83–4. For Cyril, see Jacobs, 130–33. Cyril, in Homilia 12 in Lueam, argues for the ‘absolute Jewishness’ of Jesus’ submission to the Law, and then for the ways in which Jesus as the divine Christ ‘obviates that Jewishness’. Jacobs, 130. Jacobs, 58. Emphasis added. Ellis, 53. Ellis cites George Steiner, ‘The Long Life of Metaphor: An Approach to the Shoah’, in Writing and the Holocaust (ed. Berel Lang; New York, NY: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 163.

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Bauman’s term allosemitism – the Jew as Other – clarifies that in both philoand anti-Semitism, the problem is one of Othering. Creating a picture of the Other excludes the particularity of the individual and relies on stereotypes that ultimately assimilate.60 Bauman identifies in particular the problematic separation of ‘the Jew as such’ from ‘the Jew next door’, where ‘the Jew’ as an abstract concept is compared with the Jew one knows, proving both Jews to be inadequate.61 Jesus as the Jew is often used as the example of this contrast, being held up as both the abstract and the neighbouring Jew, thus proving the inadequacy of all other contemporary Jews and their failure to be ‘proper’ Jews as Jesus was. Given this ambivalence, I now draw attention to van Buren’s treatment of the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth and to Schneider’s argument that individuals are irreducible. Van Buren emphasizes, to an extreme, that Jesus is Israel, is the Jew, and is the Jewish light to the Gentiles. While van Buren is attempting to redress the suppression and obliteration of Jesus’ Jewishness over the past almost 2,000 years worth of Christologies, his positing of Jesus as the Jew results in the same problem that comes from positing any individual as the representative of his or her group. By writing about ‘the Jew Jesus’, van Buren reifies Jesus’ own character into something defined entirely by a monolithic religious community (van Buren’s comments about the diversity of Judaism during Jesus’ time notwithstanding, as his characterization of that diversity is sweeping and generalized). For example, van Buren overdetermines what he understands to be the Jewish context of Jesus for his formation and argues that no Jew, including Jesus or his followers, would claim that a human is divine, and thus all claims regarding the divinity of the historical Jesus are to be interpreted only allegorically and in no way literally.62 Seeking to avoid supersessionism, van Buren presents a Jesus who is utterly isolated from 60

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Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern’, in Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’ (eds. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus; Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 143–56. Bauman, 148. Van Buren, Part 1, 81: ‘The son of God, in scriptural usage, is clearly not God himself ’. Part 1, 85: ‘He was and is a man, a Jew, not a second God, heaven forbid, not a deified man, but just a man…. For us Gentiles in the Way, then, Jesus is not the Lord, but our Lord’. See also van Buren, Part 3, 87, 89, 258. While van Buren does argue that the Jesus experienced day-to-day by post-Resurrection Christians, i.e. Christians of today, is divine, due to the very nature of the experience, he explicitly denies that the Jesus who walked Jerusalem over 2,000 years ago was divine. Chapter 5 reviews in more detail Christologies that privilege the ‘present’ Christ over the Jesus of history and the resultant irrelevance of Jesus’ Jewishness.

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the unique constellation of formative relationships in which people find themselves as individuals existing within singular historical particularities; Jesus is not a Jew, individual and irreplaceable, but the Jew, representative of a reified Israel. In fact, nonsupersessionist theologians often fall short because they reduce Jesus’ Jewish humanity to a historically embedded embodiment of the continuing relationship of God with Israel. John Pawlikowski engages in historical Christology but presents a Jewish Jesus who is reduced to a representation. He does not speak of the particularity of Jesus as an individual living an inexchangeable life and consequently dilutes the singular formativity of the divine nature on Jesus by claiming that Christ’s relationship to divinity is not unique, but that it simply ‘implied that each human person is somehow divine so that he or she somehow shares in the constitutive nature of God’.63 The difference between Christ and humans is not so much a qualitative difference as a quantitative one. Indeed, if the revelation of Christ demonstrates that every person has the capacity for the kind of divinity that gives us a share with God, Pawlikowski risks proposing the exchangeability of Christ for any other Christian. The specific Jewish human who cannot be exchanged, and with whom God had a particular, and unique, relationship is invisible and at risk of being disappeared. Kendall Soulen’s Christology also demonstrates a reducible Jesus, describing him as representative of the covenant. That is, Jesus stands in the covenant tradition so deeply that his life is a ‘guarantee’ of God’s relationship with Israel.64 While Soulen intends to establish continuity between Hebrew and Christian Testaments, he is conflating covenant history and Judaism so that Jews are only and totally determined by their relationship with the covenant. Of concern is the fact that Jesus is determined as an idea and not as an individual. This erases the particularities of Jesus as a person, thus remythologizing him as the embodiment of covenant and not as an individual. Further, by emphasizing covenant as the sole director of the biblical narrative and the primary lens for interpreting God’s relationship with humanity, Soulen rules out any chance that Jesus might change the plot. Jesus has no agency in his life; his

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Pawlikowski, 115. Soulen, 157 and 159.

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existence does not change the outcome of the narrative. While Soulen writes that ‘everything turns on Christ, but not everything concerns Christ’, he does not say how things turn on Christ.65 One cannot say the same thing about Abraham or Moses: that their existence did not change the outcome of the Jewish narrative about God’s involvement in history. Without Abraham there would be no people, and without Moses there would be no Torah relationship. But for Soulen, it appears that without Jesus, the God–human relationship would continue much as it had. Jesus is a ‘guarantee’ of God’s covenantal bond, made so by God, but a guarantee is similar to a booster shot.66 It only continues the work begun by the initial vaccination – on its own it can do nothing. In Jesus-the-Jew Christologies, Jesus is entirely determined by the traditions (van Buren and Soulen would say covenants) of his faith. Jesus exhibits no personal agency, no divine agency, and is simply a body at the command of a religious tradition. Jesus, in this view, is totalized by his status as a Jew. Like the Christology of Jesus as the Ideal Man or the New Being, the particular individual that was Jesus is assimilated in the process of being made a representative.

Jesus as one of the oppressed In the latter half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twentyfirst, kergymatic Christology and liberation theologies have come together in new ways under the guidance of non-North American and non-European theologians. Gathered under the admittedly generic category of postcolonial or, more accurately, contextual Christologies, these Christologies have put aside dogmatic and orthodox considerations, along with strict adherence to the history of Jesus, in order to develop Christologies that respond to the specific contexts of marginalized communities. R. G. Sugirtharajah describes this contextualization as a hermeneutical process that is justified by its parallels with what he sees as the Hellenic contextualization of the early church.67 In these Christologies, theologians are disinterested in biblical scholarship regarding the historical facts of Jesus’ life and are instead concerned with ‘the contextual 65 66 67

Soulen, 175. Soulen, 165. R. S. Sugirtharajah, ed., Asian Faces of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 3.

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relevance and essential significance of Jesus’ for those who are oppressed.68 Jesus comes to represent oppressed and marginalized communities and individuals by being reimagined in new contexts. The process of contextualization is laden with ambivalence. Contextualizing Jesus entails first removing him from his original context and relationalities as an inhabitant of Galilee during the first century CE. It is important at this juncture to emphasize the necessity of this removal; without such a move, Jesus is restricted from being in relation with anyone other than those who shared the same space–time coordinates and relationalities as he. Just as I cannot have a relationship with Marie Curie, the Polish Nobel Prize winning physicist who lived in France and died in 1934, neither can an individual from Guadalupe have a relationship with a man from Nazareth who was born and died more than 2,000 years ago. One of the two must be relocated, and in this instance, it is the latter. Therefore, Jesus is brought into a new context, complete with its own constitutive and formative community and relationalities. However, to become a legitimate member or citizen of the new environment, Jesus undergoes a process of contextualization (or assimilationism) that breaks ties with the old context in order to establish new ones. The intention behind the process is to attribute characteristics to Christ that are contemporary, recognizable, and relatable for those desiring a relationship with him. These new characteristics can include a contemporary sexuality, a contemporary gender, a contemporary race, a contemporary occupation, and even a contemporary religious practice. Thus, we have, as Kwok duly notes, a black Christ for the civil rights movement, the Bi/Transvestite Christ for the LGBTQ community, and the Shakti Christ for the women of India.69 Viewing the process from a postcolonial lens, Kwok gives a reason for this process: ‘Deconstructing the white and colonial constructs of Christ… allows marginalized communities to claim the authority to advance their own christological claims’.70 Postcolonial 68

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Sugirtharajah, x. Interestingly, in the same volume, Byung Mu Ahn argues that Korean minjung Christology rejects kergymatic Christology as Eurocentric and problematically focused on Christ’s Lordship while they simultaneously ‘block the way to the historical Jesus’. Ahn describes Jesus as associating with the oppressed (minjung), and even diffuses blame for Jesus’ crucifixion by introducing the Roman political authorities as culpable, along with ‘the Jewish ruling class’. However, Ahn does not identify Jesus’ affiliation with the marginalized as being informed to any degree by his Jewish upbringing. Byung Mu Ahn, ‘Jesus and People (Minjung)’, in Sugirtharajah, 163–72. Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 174–82. Kwok, 182.

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contextual theologians resist oppressive and totalizing interpretations of Jesus by bringing him into new and previously marginalized contexts. Nevertheless, while this contextualization is often carried out as a crucial form of resistance to traditionally oppressive Christologies, the process that liberates Christ from history has troubling outcomes, given its reliance on a singular-constitution model of human formation. Contextual Christologies come in as many forms as there are contexts. Chapter 7 explores several contextual Christologies as they address the interaction of the two natures in the Incarnation. Here, I focus on Brian Bantum’s work as it emphasizes the contextual humanity of Jesus. Even as Bantum’s Christology necessarily adds new perspectives to the pantheon of diverse contextual approaches to Christology, it demonstrates that the problems that accompany the contextualization process occur even in leadingedge theology. Bantum contextualizes Jesus Christ as mulatto in order to disrupt static and essential views of race, particularly previously normative colonial descriptions of mulatto/a (i.e. hybrid) identities. Bantum’s Christology builds on a particular understanding of the physical body of Christ and involves a contextualization of that body into that of the mulatto/a. Consequently, he necessarily addresses incarnational and embodiment issues as seen through the lens of race. Bantum’s main argument is to present the category of mulatto/a, of which Jesus is a representative, as ‘a dissonant bodily performance’ that ‘occup[ies] a nebulous space in between the claims of what is white and black’.71 His characterization of mulatto/a counters traditional binarily opposed understandings that argue that The mulatto/a is not a positive identity, but rather a tragic identity of negation wherein its existence is marked by a ‘neither/nor’.… Notions of mixture within embodied existence are not displayed in people as dilutions of their mother or father. Rather, I argue that mulatto/a existence displays a complication of personhood insofar as it asserts the interracial person as full, whole, complete.72

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Brian Bantum, Redeeming Mulatto/a: Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 41. Bantum, 92.

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For Bantum, the interracial person as performative embodied identity disrupts the discursive identity created by the dominant powers to facilitate rejection. In the embodied Jesus, the neither/nor model is converted into a both/and paradigm. As Christ is mulattic in his existence and in the ‘mutual adherence and transgression’ of his human and divine natures, the ‘abnegation of mixed bodies opens up and incorporates, conjugates Christ and humanity into a both/ and’.73 While the body of Jesus represents the site of resistance to singularly constituted racial identities, and thus offers enticing possibilities for the work this book is undertaking, closer investigation of Bantum’s process exposes the stumbling blocks in his representative, contextual Christology.

Critiquing the representative oppressed Margaret Kamitsuka’s critique of the ways feminist theology handles difference in terms of Jesus’ masculinity offers some useful assessments for my critique of contextual Christologies’ process for negotiating Jesus’ historical Jewishness. Particularly, Kamitsuka is concerned that feminist theologians that take issue with Jesus’ maleness and replace it through what I describe as contextualization have a ‘representative approach to Christology’ that selectively appropriates Jesus’ actions as the replicable characteristics of Jesus, rather than his gender.74 While this type of contextualization allows feminist theologians to relocate Jesus from his male historical context to their own without losing his soteriological effectiveness, Kamitsuka argues that ‘each community’s construal… becomes a discursive regime’.75 The process by which contextualizing theologians select characteristics to retain or reject creates new boundaries for interpretations of Jesus that continue to totalize his individuality, albeit in non-misogynistic ways. Kamitsuka challenges the assimilation of Jesus’ body into any given contextual norm by arguing through Foucault that contextualization, or assimilationism, is laden with ambivalence, as ‘the symbol of Jesus’ male body [is] both oppressive and liberating, [is] dominating and empowering’, and rejecting his maleness because of the undesirability of the first set of 73 74

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Bantum, 118, 119. Margaret D. Kamitsuka, Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 106. Kamitsuka, 79.

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characteristics necessarily rejects the desirable second set.76 Kamitsuka criticizes theologies that focus exclusively on gender oppression for overlooking the complexity of systemic marginalizing, particularly as it intersects with race, class, and heterosexism. The monofocal view of oppression is too often used to excuse the assimilationist processes undertaken by the oppressed, who marginalize others in their turn.77 Kamitsuka’s critique of single-oppression orientation can be expanded to uncover the problematic process utilized by contextualizing Christologies, allowing me to argue that the same process and critique applies to their theological negotiations of Jesus’ Jewish difference. Mayra Rivera, defending mestizaje/mulatez contextualizations, makes explicit the necessity for recognizing the presence of multiple agents in subject formation during processes of contextualization: ‘Choosing mestizaje/mulatez as privileged metaphors for the articulation of identity implies that the singularity of an individual becomes unthinkable outside a network of relations.’78 Rita Dhamoon, who criticizes culture-focused approaches to identifying and/ or resolving difference, laments the use of what she provocatively labels ‘unidimensional signifiers of difference’ that ignore the role of sociopolitical institutions in forming culture.79 Christian contextual theologians, on the other hand, tend to categorize sociopolitical economic concerns, along with race and gender, under the rubric of ‘culture’, but they do so at the expense of religion. While contextual theologians emphasize contextual networks, they tend to focus only on certain ones: political, social, cultural, familial, ethnic, and racial. They often overlook or subsume under ‘cultural’ religious networks that constitute people, and in particular, the ones that are formative for Jesus. We return to Bantum’s Christology as an example of this assimilation process. His work begins with the critique that James Cone, by making Jesus black in order to contextualize him for the black power movement, is engaged in a ‘conflation of Jesus’ particularity as a Jew completely within

76 77 78

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Kamitsuka, 109. Kamitsuka, 40. Mayra Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 80. Dhamoon, Identity/Difference, 34.

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his sociopolitical position as an oppressed Jew’.80 Bantum objects to Cone’s re-contextualization of Jesus as oppressed and black because such a move separates Jesus from the nuances of his particular Jewishness, which was not determined only by oppression, as blacks are also not determined only by racism. Bantum insists that ‘our confession of Christ is bound to the particularity of Jesus’ body as born of flesh and Spirit’.81 Bantum’s point is well made. American black theologians who relocate Jesus into the African-American context risk speaking too generally of Jesus’ historical body. James Cone, whose work has been foundational for African-American theologies, argues for the necessity of incorporating the historical Jesus but then qualifies that historicity: ‘The historical kernel is the manifestation of Jesus as the Oppressed One.’82 Cone references Jesus’ birth in a stable, his baptism, and his revolutionary prophesying without pointing to the core of Jesus’ historically religious context of Temple and Torah. Moving forward several decades, Dwight Hopkins likewise references Jesus as one who liberates the oppressed, and describes Jesus’ ‘African and Asian ancestry’ while omitting the contextualization of Jesus as an Israelite or Palestinian.83 Apart from mentioning slave theology parallelisms between Jesus and Moses, Hopkins does not reference anything beyond Jesus’ historical particularity as a member, or leader, of an oppressed group. Neither Cone, as Bantum points out, nor Hopkins refers to Jews or Israelites, the Temple, Torah, or any other particularity of the historical Jesus. Instead, Jesus is situated solely within a dualism of black–white that does not recognize any other constitutive elements. Hopkins explicitly expresses the hope that Jesus, as the Spirit of liberation, ‘sweeps through black people with a dethroning of the false theological white portrayals and replaces within black consciousness the true blackness of God and Jesus’, but does not accommodate the religiously Jewish formation of Jesus that lies outside the black–white spectrum.84

80 81 82

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Bantum, 4. Bantum, 10. James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), 113. Dwight N. Hopkins, Shoes that Fit Our Feet: Sources for a Constructive Black Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 264. Hopkins, 263.

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Even Bantum himself separates out the religious particularity of Jesus’ Jewishness from the body of Jesus and then passes over its formative significance for Jesus by emphasizing only Jesus’ racial particularity. Highlighting Matthew’s genealogy as evidence that Jesus is mulatto, through the lineage of the ‘impure’ Ruth, David’s great-grandmother, Bantum engages in an eighteen page description of Jesus’ work as a mulatto that describes the ‘new way of being’ that was inaugurated through Jesus’ new interpretation of God’s mission for Israel.85 Any reference to the pluriform religious context that shaped Jesus in his thinking, such as his relationship with Gentiles or his approach to halakic observance, is absent altogether. Jesus’ ethnic mulatto identity overshadows his religious identity. Perhaps this is to be expected, if ‘race is the key prism through which all postcolonial analysis is refracted’, as it has been throughout the history of the United States, and particularly in the slave theology undergirding African-American theology.86 However, people are more than just their race, and have been colonized in ways that affect more than their race. In Second-Temple Judaism, race is commingled with religion, and segregating the two is problematic, especially for Christologies that emphasize Jesus’ historically located body but then attempt a relocation. Bantum clearly demonstrates that his focus on the importance of race prevents him from seeing the importance of religion, an embodied component for a Second-Temple Jew. While Bantum’s Christology comes closest to presenting a multiply-constituted Incarnational Christology, his superficial biblical hermeneutic overlooks Judaism’s constructive influence on Jesus and disconnects his method from his application.87 Very recently, a contextual Christology with roots in liberation theology has been introduced that highlights the ongoing desire amongst diverse communities of Christians for highly specific contextual Christologies, as well as the dangers inherent in such projects. Palestinian liberation theology, as developed by Naim Stifan Ateek and supported by Sabeel, an 85

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Bantum here refers to Matthew 1.5 but does not take note of Rahab’s inclusion in that same verse, who was the Canaanite woman who hid Joshua during his scouting trip. Bantum, 120–38. Pramod F. Nayar, Postcolonialism: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York, NY: Continuum, 2010), 1. For the specific ways in which slave theology has contributed to African-American theology, see Dwight Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over: Slave Religion and Black Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000). Bantum’s hermeneutic is particularly evident in his exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus is set up against Jews and the law. Bantum, 125–8.

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Anglican/Episcopalian advocacy network, is a unique liberation theology that advocates against what Ateek describes as oppressive military practices by Israel against Palestine. It rightly challenges postcolonial Christian theology, and also post-Holocaust theology, for failing to acknowledge the suffering of Palestinians in their relationship with Israel.88 Ateek proposes, as a Palestinian response, a model for nonviolence that he argues comes from the new way introduced by the life of Jesus Christ. To build his argument that Jesus’ way of nonviolence is novel, Ateek first locates Jesus within his Second-Temple Israelite context. Jesus lived in Romanoccupied Palestine, struggling as a member of an oppressed group within that land, and thus offers the contextual and geographical context to which Palestinian Christians, an admittedly marginalized group, can relate. Jesus is, like contemporary Palestinians, oppressed and faced with several options for negotiating this oppression. According to Ateek, the Jews of Jesus’ time followed one of four Jewish practices, which reflect their relationship with the Roman oppressors. The first was the path of the Zealots, which was the way of revolutionaries advocating armed struggle. (Ateek specifically highlights the extremists in this group but does not mention any moderates.) Jesus did not follow this group, as he rejected violence. The second practice was followed by the Essenes, who left Jerusalem to escape conflict with the Temple system. Because Jesus refused to disengage from his community, he cannot be numbered amongst the Essenes in seclusion. The third practice was that of the Herodians and the Sadducees, who were ‘pragmatists and realists’ who accepted and even collaborated with the oppressive forces in order to survive.89 Jesus did not encourage collaboration or passive acceptance of oppression, and hence did not follow the teachings of this group. Finally, there were the Pharisees, ‘religious fanatics who adhered to the letter of the law’.90 This group, according to Ateek, observed religious rules literally but superficially, for which reason Jesus rejected them as well.91 Instead, Jesus presented ‘another 88 89

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Ellis, 54. Naim Stifan Ateek, A Palestinian Christian Cry for Reconciliation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008), 94–5. Ateek, 95–6. For rigorous historical scholarship which contradicts Ateek’s view of Pharisees as ‘religious fanatics who adhered to the letter of the law’, Ateek, 95, see Schwartz, especially 87–99, and Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 119–66.

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way’, one that has no precedent in the Jewish religious diversity that Ateek presents, which is the way of love, justice, and mercy. What is troubling about Ateek’s theology is the level of unchallenged supersessionism that dominates his interpretation of Jesus’ human existence. He reifies Jewish society during Jesus’ time, separates Jesus from his Jewish context, and denies that Jesus was constituted or determined by his Jewishness in any way. Ateek repeats the assimilatory contextualization process whereby certain elements of Jesus are retained, such as his rejection of violence and his perception of God as love, but he rejects or suppresses other elements, namely Jesus’ adherence to Torah (which aligned him with the Pharisees), and his use of the metaphors of the minor prophets in challenging injustice.92 Further, Ateek ignores the roots of Jesus’ love ethic, which build from the Jewish commandment to love God and to love one’s neighbour as one’s self. In addition to offering questionable resolutions to the Israeli–Palestine conflict, Ateek creates a Jesus who is independent of his historical context and advocates a soft supersessionism bordering on anti-Judaism. Contextualization is a necessary process for Christologies that want to remain meaningful and relevant for contemporary believers. Ateek’s desire to draw attention to the suffering of Palestinians has its roots in Christian fellowship with the suffering of Christ. Yet, the results of such contextualizations are ambivalent. On the one hand, without such a move, the very spatially and temporally bound human existence of Jesus prevents him from being in relationship with anyone who does not share his same historically specific context. On the other hand, these contextualizations follow a process of cosmopolitanism leading to assimilationism, and, as noted in Chapter 2, embody ‘a new and subtle form of controlling and possessing the Other’.93 This appreciation turned appropriation of Jesus borrows him from his original historical context and becomes a form of control and possession of him, determining what is appropriate or inappropriate in his new context. Problematically – and ironically given theology’s explicitly religious foundations – what is too often considered inappropriate is Jesus’ religious 92

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The index for Ateek’s book shows no entry for ‘Torah’, ‘Law’, ‘Covenant’, and the entry on ‘Old Testament’ includes sub-fields of ‘new theology breaking into’, ‘not providing binding theology’, and ‘theology of, as Christian enterprise’, referring to the Old Testament being foundational for Christianity only insofar as it is fulfilled in the New Testament. Ateek, 222. Kim, 80.

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Jewishness; his ethnic, colonized, and/or minority status are considered appropriate in the new context, while his religion is rejected. In fact, Sugirtharajah explicitly acknowledges that in Asian contextual Christologies, ‘the perceptions of Jesus that emerge may not resemble either in form or content portrayals of him depicted in the Christian scriptures. They also raise the question of why Jewish thought patterns have to be the norm for the christological enterprise of people who are not familiar with their nuances’.94 The question that Sugirtharajah does not explore is whether it is even possible to separate Jesus, and his message and mission, from the Jewish thought patterns that constituted Jesus’ norm without embracing an entirely constructed (albeit contemporary) Jesus who emerges as a figment of one’s theological imagination. It would appear that only by this process can Jesus be separated from the untranslatable (or undesirable) elements of his original location and assimilated into a new context. Removing him from his historical particularity brings the possibility of universal relationality, as all contextualizations become theoretically possible in Christ, who is now a blank slate. Therefore, Kwok Puilan asks, but does not answer, ‘what are the implications of the deemphasis of Jesus’ Jewishness when Jesus is transposed to another culture…?’95 I have made explicit some of the implications, and noted that because the process of contextualization necessarily erases certain particularities, Jesus is contextualized in ways that reject his Jewishness. William E. Arnal critically examines the ‘role of the figure of Jesus in negotiating, commenting upon, and reflecting modern issues of identity, especially national identity’, and expresses deep concern that theologians who construct Jesus within their contemporary context do so in order to emphasize only select historical particularities that support their own national agendas, consequently ignoring the holistic historical Jesus.96 Arnal laments that the nationalization of Jesus in order to draw contemporary parallels with colonial histories has been used to justify interpretations of the Gospels that ignore Jesus’ historical affiliations. He elaborates on the consequences of such scholarship:

94 95 96

Sugirtharajah, ix. Kwok, 184. William E. Arnal, ‘Jesus as Battleground in a Period of Cultural Complexity’, in Blanton et al., 99–118.

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Since, however, the ‘historical’ arguments about Jesus seem to be intermixed freely with all sorts of normative consequences and motivations, it would probably be most honest to separate the historical from the normative concerns as much as possible, and confess that the reconstruction of Jesus to suit contemporary stances is an act of theology, an imaginative foray into the questions of human identity which only possesses (and indeed only needs) subjective warrant.97

So what is to be done? As Arnal notes, ‘a major problem is that while the figure of Jesus is indeed invested with all kinds of contemporary cultural resonances, and while he is a sufficiently empty signifier to be invested with a variety of content, that content is not infinitely malleable. That is, the figure of Jesus does have some invariable (or nearly so) content attached to him as an inevitable part of the package….’98 While I disagree with the extent of Arnal’s reduction of Jesus to a ‘sufficiently empty’ signifier, Arnal and I share the same concern over the extremes to which contextual theologies have gone in their assimilation of Jesus as their representative. Yet, even as contextual Christologies’ assimilation of Jesus dehistoricizes him and risks dispensing with his Jewishness, these Christologies necessarily challenge twenty centuries worth of attempts to make Jesus representative of only the dominant, majority Christian (i.e. male and usually white). Their expansion of categories of representation make Jesus accessible to previously marginalized communities. The question of Jesus’ representation in contextual Christologies becomes one of how Christology can negotiate the multiple contextual images of Jesus while at the same time retain his particular individuality as a Jewish human. How can his humanity accommodate multiple citizenships?

Consubstantial with particularities – citizenship based on contextual universalism The processes involved in defining Christ as human and in situating him as representative of particular groups are problematic. Representation, whether universal or contextual, erases the particularities of the individual Jesus in service to the community being represented. Yet, abandoning the capacity 97 98

Arnal, 113. Arnal, 113.

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of Jesus to represent all of humanity, Israel, and contemporary marginalized Christians destroys the soteriological necessity of Jesus’ human nature, and so the problems of contextualization and assimilation push us to further questions. Does the process of contextualization inevitably become one of assimilationism that must separate Jesus from his Jewishness? Does an emphasis on Jesus as one-of-us, either in the New Being model as an Ideal Human or in the particular model that contextual Christologies envision, necessitate that Jesus abandon his originating identity as a Jew? If one operates with the presupposition that humans cannot tolerate multiple, even contradictory, formative relationalities without disintegrating the individual person, the answers to these questions confirm the theologies we have already examined. But we are dealing here with the reality of multiplicity – multiple relationalities, multiple contexts, multiple representations, multiple loyalties, and multiple differences. A new Christology, however, must establish a universal characteristic of humankind – a prerequisite for citizenship – that Jesus shares with all humans, while respecting the multiply-constituted singularity of each human individual. Further, to avoid the presupposition in the above paragraph, the possibility for a multiplicity of full overlapping memberships in multiple contexts must be explained. Finally, having established the human capacity to engage fully in multiple contexts, the case must be made for the necessity of this engagement to be mutually formative and influential.99 Following these parameters, Christ, as human, becomes a singular individual constituted of, representative of, and participatory in multiple differences. An understanding of human nature that universalizes multiple differences without enforcing a homogeneity of difference must be developed. Differences construct us, insofar as semioticians argue that signifiers construct the subject.100 Multiple differences, as presented to an individual 99

A note of contextuality is necessary here: the theorists I am using refer to the self from the context of ethics, but I am using the self as one’s sense of being. Rather than referring to the ethical self which constitutes others, I am referring to the ontological self as it is constituted. This is not to say that the self in ethical terms is unimportant. Considering the self in terms of ethical actions is a necessary correction to the ontological, transcendental self that philosophical theology uses and that leads to an ignorance of the lived existence of subjects in a particular historical existence. Nevertheless, I restrict myself here to only the ontological self. 100 For more on signification, semiotics, and identity, see Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), particularly the Introduction, 1–23, and Chapter 7 ‘Arguing with the Real’, 187–222. See also Levinas, Totality and Infinity.

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through relationships, contribute to a multiply-constituted subject. The multiply-constructed identity that Dhamoon examines is not an ‘additive understanding of identity [that] simply appends one dimension to another and maintains a unidimensional categorization of identity. Such a perspective continues to emphasize some dimensions of identity at the cost of examining the interdependency of multiple dimensions’.101 An additive process simply creates an infinite list of Jesus’ characteristics: Jewish, male, Asian, third-world, queer, migrant worker in which the identities stack up but do not influence one another. Instead, Dhamoon is arguing that humans are constructed in their multiplicity. The interdependence of multiple communities within one body creates the subject.102 The process is more multiplicative than additive, and this process, impossible without difference, is what constitutes a person. Since difference and multiple-subjectivity form the subject, and together constitute the one characteristic that every individual shares as universal, what ensures the individuality and irreplaceability of each subject? Schneider proposes that just as difference is common to all, it also protects individuality: ‘Without attention to difference… actual bodies in all of their irreducible uniqueness and singularity disappear’.103 Differences themselves are not repeatable, and the multiple-subjective webs of relationality in which each individual exists are unique and cannot be replicated. Dhamoon’s multiple subjectivity of the individual occurs in infinite variation because different ‘differences’ are related, though not replicable. As Dhamoon explains, differences are contingent and contextual, but not independent of one another. For example, I am a Christian female, Jesus was a Jewish male. There are two differences at play: religion and gender. That I am Christian has a formative effect on how I interpret (perform, according to Judith Butler) my life as a female, and that I am female has a formative effect on how I live out my Christian faith. The same was true of Jesus, irrespective of whether we know the exact historical details. Jesus’ gender influenced how he acted out his religion, just as his religion affected his performance of gender. We 101

Dhamoon, Identity/Difference, 35. Emphasis added. It is important to note at this point that Dhamoon is explicit that signifiers emerge from centres of power. There is no ‘meaning-making’ (construction of identity by and of the self) that exists apart from its effects of either privileging or penalizing the subject, and, following Foucault’s logic, Dhamoon argues that such ‘making’ is constituted by and ‘constitutive of power’. Dhamoon, Identity/ Difference, 69. 103 Schneider, 165. 102

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each are constituted by the negotiation of difference within ourselves, but our differences are not the same. Our differences are different. Yet, the intradifference of myself and Jesus are also interrelated: this Christian female finds her path to God through that Jewish male. Jesus’ religious-gender difference forms mine.104 An individual’s relationship with the Other depends on mutual formation, the presupposition for an interactive pluralism. Just as differences within one subject are co-formative of that subject, as in the interplay between faith and gender, differences between subjects are also co-formative of one another. Human relationality entails the mutual influence and formativity of one with the other. A one-way influence is not a relationship. Without mutual influence, the relationship between humans is reduced to that of a master and a slave. Human relationality is defined by the multiple construction of formativity that requires the agency of the Self and the Other. As the Levinasian proposal that we allow the Other to shape the Self is expanded so that we see ourselves as the Other to an other Self, we realize that we are shaped by the Other, just as the Other is shaped by us.105 A singly formed relationship is not a human one; participating in something shared means to have agency and influence and to be subject to and influenced by relationship. To be human is to participate in the lives of others, not simply to either react to others or be passively shaped by them. Jesus, as a human, is thus formed by membership in multiple communities and by those with whom he is in relationship, and forms those communities and those individuals in relationship. So, then how can one difference relate to another difference? The multiplyconstituted self is particular and unique, due to the particular and unique combinations of difference which she or he navigates. So, how does this unique individual relate to another unique individual? How does the contextual, particular Jesus of Nazareth participate in the contextual particularities of someone completely different from him, without being reduced to a representational-type humanity that aims for the lowest denominator of what is common? As Schneider asks, ‘what to do with the singularity of Jesus’ body’,

104

The question of whether my religious-gender difference informs Jesus’, or rather the question of whether Jesus Christ is influenced by individuals who are non-contemporaneous with him, is addressed in Chapter 4. 105 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 38–40.

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especially when that body is being called to stand in for an infinite variety of human differences?106 Namsoon Kang proposes cosmopolitanism as the basis for this kind of difference-based relationality, where cosmopolitan theology ‘challenges the liberal, humanist notion of the unified, essentialized subject, and views the subject as contradictory and multi-layered’.107 Kang defines cosmopolitanism as a set of ‘voluntary affiliations [that] engages the complexity of one’s multiple identities’.108 To avoid any emphases on particularity, which might appropriate the Other, she redefines the ethical frame of cosmopolitanism as an impartial justice that ‘transcends’.109 This impartial justice is brought about by ‘a new Cosmic Christ who urges us to begin a great work to live and build the Reign of God on earth’.110 The new universal community that engages in this work is composed of ‘overlapping interests and heterogeneous or hybrid subjects’ who work together to build the all-inclusive Reign of God. Yet, Kang’s use of cosmopolitanism does not make room for the individuality of Jesus, or of any other person, to contribute to what constitutes the normative Reign of God. While Kang recognizes the ‘partiality’ of individuals in this Reign through her advocacy of the term trans-provincialism, she does not explore the ways in which impartiality itself, a key feature of God’s reign of justice, suppresses difference.111 The ‘great work’ of the Reign of God is not contextually influenced by the particularities of the individuals who appeal to it. Instead, the Cosmic, and cosmopolitan, Christ imposes an impartial system of justice on individuals who may or may not agree that what he brings is just for them. Such an imposition is not based on relationality between differences, but comes from an external homogeneity that imposes relationality externally. 106

Schneider, 165. Schneider does not, however, answer that question. Instead, she explores the question of the particular Jesus being made to stand in for all of humanity, as developed in substitutionatonement soteriologies, but leaves the details of Jesus’ singularity and particularity unexplored. She moves the singularity of Jesus from the realm of soteriology to that of theological anthropology, but since she does not explore the uniqueness of the person of Jesus, she continues to leave him abstract and theoretical, and vulnerable to representational appropriations. 107 Namsoon Kang, ‘Toward a Cosmopolitan Theology: Constructing a Public Theology’, in Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology, (eds. Stephen D. Moore and Mayra Rivera; New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2011), 277. 108 Kang, 262. 109 Kang, 266–7. 110 Kang, 278. 111 Kang, 271.

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Toni Erskine constructs a more effective application of cosmopolitanism by examining the negotiation of difference in contemporary geo-political conflicts. Studying the construction of relationships between ‘strangers’ and ‘enemies’, Erskine argues that we are each and all particular, but that the existence of particularity as a human characteristic creates a universalism that results in the creation of multiple and fluid communities held together by individuals’ shared particularities.112 That each human is constituted of particularities is a universal human trait (and, indeed, the only one), and that we each participate in this universality is the basis for relationship with one another. To exemplify what she terms ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’, which I will develop more fully as ‘contextual universalism’ in Chapters 5 and 6, Erskine refers to a poem in which the subject, a soldier, finds himself forming relationships with other soldiers, in differing and various ways, according to the unique set of circumstances that each share: past history, present situation, work, leisure, sports, upbringing, and so on. This poem describes the multiplicity of particulars encountered by and constituted within one individual: Pried from the circle where his family ends, Man on his own, no hero of old tales, Discovers when the pose of lone wolf fails Loneliness and, miraculously, friends. Finds how his comradeship with one depends On being both from London, say, or Wales, How with the next a common job prevails, Sport with a third, and so the list extends. Nation and region, class and craft and syndicate Are only some: all attributes connect Their own with his kind, call him to vindicate A common honour; and his self-respect Starts from the moment when his senses indicate ‘I’ as the point where circles intersect.113 112

Toni Erskine, Embedded Cosmopolitanism: Duties to Strangers and Enemies in a World of ‘Dislocated Communities’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2008). Chris Boesel, in a similar vein, proposes the ‘particular-in-general’ as a term that describes ‘a universalizable structure of irreducible particularity and singularity’ that can bring together Jewish and Christian concerns in a nonsupersessionist theology, but he does not go on to develop that phrase in more depth. Boesel, 219. 113 John Manifold, ‘Recruit’, in Collected Verse (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978), 68. Reprinted with permission. In Erskine, 178–9.

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The intersecting circles demonstrate participation in multiple and fluid communities as different particularities are shared. One man shares with the speaker the same place of origin, another man shares the same livelihood, a third the same recreational pursuits. The very fact of sharing something in common with someone else, a ‘something’ that is uniquely contextually constructed for each individual, is the universality that brings together each person in his or her difference. The one human universality is that each individual is singular in his or her own contextual constituency. The universal characteristic of human nature is that individual human experience is constituted through the individual’s unique webs of relationality, determined by their own particular context. To be human is therefore to be a contextually embedded singular and irreplaceable individual in interactive relationships. This is a universal. The very fact of the contextuality of each individual is shared amongst all humans as a universal of human nature. This contextual universalism is further elucidated by Erskine’s reading of All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque’s famous work, in which the protagonist, Paul, after killing an enemy soldier at an intimate range is filled with remorse. As Erskine writes, ‘for Paul, recognition of the other’s particularity, rather than simply the epiphany of their “common humanity,” seems fundamental to his feeling of affinity and regret’.114 Paul’s connection with the dying enemy comes from the commonality they share of each being particular. Each one’s particular contextuality is a characteristic universally shared. This is what makes each human an individual, and simultaneously, what makes each human a member of the larger category of humankind. This is what makes Jesus an individual (that is, contextual), and simultaneously, what makes him capable of representing humankind (that is, universal). Yet, what are we to do with the contradictions or mutually exclusive characteristics that exist due to difference? How can an individual simultaneously participate in communities that appear to be mutually exclusive? How can Jesus, as Jewish, participate in an exclusively Gentile Christian community? Erskine offers a way forward through her expansion of Marilyn Friedman’s argument that a ‘complex’ subject can, due to ‘the combined effect of her various and varied constituents,… move back and 114

Erskine, 213, fn 72.

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forth among a plurality of partial identities’.115 Erskine expands Friedman’s argument to propose that partial participation can, in fact, be extended to full and multiple participations. Deepening multiple engagement beyond ‘back and forth’, Erskine argues that ‘even if one’s membership in a specific community is incompatible with membership in one of the communities to which the enemy belongs, the possibility remains that alternative ties and allegiances will, nevertheless, overlap’.116 These overlapping memberships can occur even when the constituting communities are in tension or at war because the complex interaction of diverse particularities – or subjectivities – within communities are built on at least one shared commonality: that each complex intersubjectivity is unique. The concept of overlapping memberships means that one can participate in the multiple subjectivity of multiple differences, fully and not just partially, despite tension.117 Jesus’ membership in the ‘universal’ human community, the Jewish community, and contemporary contextual communities entails full and overlapping participation in each. Overlapping memberships are translucent – they do not mask differences. Contextual particularities shine through to construct and inform the universal. To conceptualize this, I offer the (unfortunately static) analogy of full-colour gels used in theatre lights. When a blue gel (a transparent plastic square that fits in front of a theatre spotlight) is overlapped with a yellow gel, the light shining through onto the stage is green. Yet, the gels themselves are not confused, mixed, or changed – the blue gel still remains blue and the yellow gel remains 115

Marilyn Friedman, ‘Feminism and Modern Friendship: Dislocating the Community’, Ethics 99 (1989), 275–90. In Erskine, 168. 116 Erskine, 229. These communities are ‘territorially indeterminate’ and ‘dislocated’, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of community identification based on essentialisms. Instead, they rely on what Erskine describes as shared ‘understandings, values, identities, commitments, and morally constituting practices that we share… in a way that undermines the distinction between “us” and “them”, or at least renders the respective categories fluid enough that no meaningful appeal can be made to either in a way that necessarily precludes the other’. Erskine, 215. 117 Multiple subjectivity is frequently addressed in race theory. In particular, see Edwina Barvosa, Wealth of Selves: Multiple Identities, Mestiza Consciousness, and the Subject of Politics (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2008). Especially Chapter 2 ‘Mestiza Consciousness and Intersectionality: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework of Multiple Identities’. While Barvosa focuses on the internal contradictions that multiple identities create, and emphasizes nonsynchronous shifting into, out of, and across identities (in contrary to my proposal of simultaneous participation) – a process social identity theory describes as identity ‘salience’ – she argues for the ‘genuine’ and authentic nature of multiple membership. Barvosa, 72. Identity salience stems from the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and his concept of double-consciousness, although Du Bois’s idea points towards the tension and disintegration of an individual in the face of this duality, a presupposition I challenge. William Edward Burghart Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (ed. Brent Hayes Edwards; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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yellow. Displayed on the stage, however, the green light cannot be separated into its blue and yellow components. The components overlap to constitute something new and unique (red and blue will not produce green), without producing a half-blue, half-yellow striped or halved colour. The colours must be different in order to produce the final product, and to prevent either colour from being normative. As Erskine argues, overlapping memberships as full participation in multiple communities ‘militate against the acceptance of norms that advocate exclusion and enmity towards those outside any one community’.118 Differences are not excluded.

Summary Interpretations of the human nature of Christ have posed obstacles to an interactive nonsupersessionist Christology. In this chapter, I have argued that portrayals of Christ as the generic human (the new Adam) or the representative Jew (post-Holocaust Jesus) erase the particulars of his precise human existence. In the first instance, new Adam or new Being models ignore, suppress, or reject Jesus’ particularly Jewish existence as part of his general human condition (to be overcome), leading to either supersessionism or an anti-Jewish Jesus who hates his own people.119 In the second instance, post-Holocaust models of Jesus as the quintessential Jew or the continuation of Israel (cf. van Buren) homogenize the diversity of Jewish existence in the time of Jesus. They flatten out the actual experiences of Jesus of Nazareth, a particular Jew who led a particular life at a particular time in the history of Judaism. This reification of an individual not only contributes to a supersessionist and Othering attitude towards Judaism, but also isolates Jesus from the genuine characteristics of being human: contingent differences and the multiple contexts that form the multiply-constituted and multiply-determined human subject.

118 119

Erskine, 177. Amy-Jill Levine summarizes several common errors: Jesus rejected the warrior messiah imagery that ‘the Jews’ needed to overcome Rome and so was executed; ‘Jesus was a feminist in a woman-hating Jewish culture’; Jesus ‘broke through purity-based barriers’ that were foundational to Jewish identity; Jesus freed the oppressed from a ‘Temple domination system… that promoted social division between insiders and outcasts’; ‘Jews are narrow, clannish, particularistic, and xenophobic, whereas Jesus and the church are engaged in universal outreach.’ Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), 124–5.

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To preserve Jesus’ particularity as a Jewish human, I have proposed that each and every human is singularly irreducible and irreplaceable due to the contingent makeup of the multiple contexts and relationships (i.e. differences) that constitute them as individuals. Human existence is constituted, each in its distinctness, of these multiple multiplicities. Human citizenship is granted on the basis of living in this common singularity. As human, Jesus Christ is also constituted in this way. Jesus, as a human, participates fully in multiple communities of relationalities, just as every human does. In this participation, Jesus is formed by and forms those with whom he is in relationship: Jesus is constituted by his relationships with his Jewish disciples, his Jewish mother, his Jewish teachers, and also by his encounters with the Roman soldiers, the Samaritan woman, the taxpayers, and others. As a participant in these contextual communities, Jesus shares in the contextual universals of each community, from the all-encompassing community of humankind to the more restricted community of Second-Temple Israel to the even more restricted communities of contemporary marginalized groups. Yet, Jesus is, still, human. And, as such, he is limited in the reality of his relationalities by the constraints of temporal existence. In his human nature, he is no less, but no more, than we all are, and to claim that his ability to be in multiple contexts automatically translates to the actuality of being in a reality of multiple contexts across centuries is to describe something that is not human. At this point, we are left with questions: how to explain Jesus Christ’s relationship with Paul, and with Christians who have lived after his death? How is contemporary Christology to speak of the living Christian in relationship with believers when the human Jesus has not walked the earth for 2,000 years? Here we encounter the limits of the human and bodily nature of Jesus Christ, and find that the divine nature of Christ becomes theologically necessary in order to transcend the boundaries of finite human existence. Further, Jesus as only a particularly embedded human who lived and was influenced by his Second-Temple context is no more the only-begotten Son of God and Incarnation of the Word that Christians confess than any other human. In the context of Christology, to speak of Jesus as human must be accompanied by an understanding of him as divine, in order to maintain the Christian confession of not only his uniqueness but also his radicalness. To this we now turn.

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Jesus is consubstantial with the divine Current and historical interpretations of the divine nature of Christ either incorporate or reject Jesus’ Jewish human nature as a formative agent in an Incarnation of interactive pluralism. Mayra Rivera observes that our understanding of divinity informs how we understand humanity, but the reverse is also true: our understanding of difference among humans informs how we understand difference in the divine.1 Our anthropology affects our theology, which in turn affects our anthropology. Until we understand the divine nature in a way that takes into account our understanding of human nature, our theologies of the Incarnation are incomplete. Two understandings of Christ’s divine nature are potentially problematic: first, the divine nature of Christ as pre-existent Logos. Traditional Logos Christologies establish the continuity between the God of Creation and the incarnated Christ by identifying immutability as the characteristic that demonstrates consubstantiality. Without this continuity, Marcion’s dualistic split between Old Testament God and New Testament God would be validated and supersessionism would be a legitimate theology. Yet, does an emphasis on the pre-existent Logos ensure theological continuity? Or do Logos theologies rely too heavily on processes of assimilationism that renders the historically embedded subject of the Incarnation insignificant and irrelevant? The human body in which the Logos incarnates remains problematically abstract; there is no recognition from Logos theologians 1

Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 128.

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that the specific historical existence of the individual Jesus from Nazareth has any bearing on the reality of the Incarnation. To determine this, I will explore the processes used by Cyril of Alexandria, as a Logos theologian, to preserve what he considers the definitive characteristic of the divine nature, and a basis for consubstantiality: immutability. I will then explore whether it is possible to reframe the premise of Logos Christologies so that the consubstantiality of the pre-existent Christ is preserved, while making room for the mutable human nature to be a formative element in the one person of the Incarnation. The second problematic understanding often encountered in descriptions of the divine nature is that of transcendence. This characteristic, as rediscovered by Karl Barth, has been adopted or rejected, but never ignored, by theologians since. While Barth’s emphasis on transcendence as Otherness raises concerns across several theological loci (ecclesiology, soteriology, pneumatology), what becomes problematic here is the way in which this Otherness is negotiated in the one person of the Incarnation. Yet, rejecting Otherness altogether also proves undesirable, given the disparate differences between human and divine natures. Rejecting Otherness paves the way for assimilation by eliminating irreducible differences. In the section on transcendence as Otherness, I therefore explore the challenges of and responses to this way of negotiating difference. I then offer a new perspective for understanding the Otherness of the divine nature that preserves heterogeneity in the Incarnation while allowing for the possibility of a truly interactive relationship between the divine and human natures. Dismantling these obstacles must happen one at a time, using the method established in the previous chapter: first, identifying the process by which difference is negotiated – assimilation, cosmopolitanism, fragmented pluralism, or interactive pluralism – and then identifying the location of agency and the level of mutual influence present between the two natures. At the end of the previous chapter, the question was raised: how can the particular Jesus, who is contingently and uniquely different as all humans are, be in relationship with every Christian given the spatial and temporal limitations (finitude) of being human? Addressing only Jesus’ human nature leaves us with a gap. His divine nature is called on to fill that gap. The question when investigating Christ’s divine nature is: how does the negotiation of

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Christ’s divinity prevent or include the theological incorporation of Jesus’ Jewishness into our understanding of the one person? The opening claim of this chapter is that the way in which Jesus’ divine nature is understood (i.e. how we negotiate the difference of his divinity) sets a precedent for how we treat all Otherness, especially the Otherness of Jesus’ Jewishness. In other words, the way in which one negotiates the difference of Jesus Christ’s divine nature from his human nature either opens up the possibility of human interaction with God, or prevents it.

The divine nature as immutable Logos Logos Christologies attempt to preserve the consubstantiality of the Incarnated Word and God the Creator by arguing for the pre-existence of Christ. To accomplish this, a characteristic that is immediately identifiable as divine, as well as one that points to pre-existence, must also be identified in the Incarnation. In Logos Christologies, this primary characteristic has often traditionally been defined as immutability. The connection typically runs thus: God does not change or suffer. God has been and continues to be who God was before Creation. The Son of God is consubstantial with the Father from before Creation, as demonstrated by the Son’s immutability. Yet the Son must take on human flesh, which does suffer, in order to fulfil the soteriological equation. In this process, Logos Christologies rely on immutability to demonstrate consubstantiality, but at a cost. Cyril of Alexandria negotiates the difference between the two natures through the framework of the Incarnation, and it is the process by which he arrives at a singular, divine hypostasis that, despite his emphasis on the conjunction between the Word and the flesh, demonstrates that he is engaged in a process of assimilationism.2 Referring back to Hartmann and Gerteiss’ process of assimilation, qualities are identified, accepted or rejected, and then

2

As a reminder, we are evaluating the processes of Christological assimilation, which are engaged dynamically, rather than the vocabulary, which is typically engaged statically. For a lengthy examination of the diverse (and at times contradictory) interpretations of Cyril’s use of physis, hypostasis, and prosopon prior to and during the Nestorian controversy, see the detailed chart in Hans van Loon, The Dyophysite Christology of Cyril of Alexandria (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2009), 250.

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folded into or left out of the dominant power as appropriate. While Cyril does not take these steps in chronological order in his writings, we can identify them by looking at his work, On the Unity of Christ. Cyril establishes a clear and explicit articulation of the characteristics of the divine nature: God is ‘immutable by nature’, whose ‘unalterability [is] innate and essential to God’.3 Thus, in the Incarnation, the Word does not change into a human, but adopts the new state of flesh without transforming into it: the Word became human by ‘appropriating a human body to himself in such an indissoluble union that it has to be considered his very own body and no one else’s’ yet he ‘did not change himself into flesh’.4 Any human characteristic that threatens to compromise these divine attributes is separated from Christ and removed from the Incarnation, and the divine nature as the Word continues to exert the will of its nature over the human. Human decay upon death, for example, was not experienced in the Incarnation because the Word exerted its divine influence in its appropriation of human flesh.5 According to Dhamoon, the case for assimilationism is confirmed when one can identify that agency lies with only one party to the exclusion of others. In Christ, the human flesh is ‘economically appropriated’ by the divine, and Cyril uses appropriation as the means for the Word to take on the human body in a proprietary manner that avoids a reciprocal relationship between body and Word or human and divine.6 Using the illustration from Philippians 2:5–8, Cyril argues that the Word (as master) takes on the form of the human (as slave).7 This relationship is, like that between a master and slave, one in which power and agency exist with the former and not with the latter. Cyril insists on the impossibility of interactivity because he must protect the impassibility of the Word, which would be compromised 3

4 5 6

7

Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, (trans. John Anthony McGuckin; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1995), 54. Cyril, 63, 53–4. Cyril, 126. Cyril, 110. Van Loon summarizes the debate between Richard Norris and Thomas Weinandy regarding the symmetry of the natures: Norris argues for an asymmetrical ‘subject-attribute model’ in which ‘the Word is the subject while the incarnation is the predicate’, thus favouring divine agency. Van Loon, 544. Weinandy argues for a ‘composition model’ that emphasizes the oneness of the Incarnation that incorporates two natures symmetrically. Van Loon, 545. The focus of Norris, Weinandy, and van Loon is on the earlier works of Cyril, and not On the Unity of Christ, Cyril’s more developed work, and is therefore less useful here. Cyril, 75.

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by human agency. Consequently, the human flesh simply becomes a tool for the Word, rather than an active participant in the union. (Notably, in On the Unity of Christ, Cyril makes absolutely no reference to the specific historical context of Jesus.) Even the presence of the rational soul that animates human flesh does not contribute to the Incarnation or influence the Word in any way.8 The divine nature of the Word acts upon the human flesh through a singular physis (actualizing essence).9 While the physis is made concrete in this world through the human flesh, it is nevertheless brought into existence under the direction of the Word in the singular hypostasis.10 Although Cyril argues that Christ’s Incarnation displays a ‘double quality’, there is no equality between the two natures. The human nature is unequal to the divine nature and therefore prevented from acting as an influential agent in the hypostasis. Cyril requires this inequality and single actor because ‘something which is said to be “equal in honor” to something else cannot be numerically one with it; rather it is one alongside another’.11 Cyril argues that the human nature cannot be equal to the divine nature because he cannot conceive of equal multiples; he is constrained by his presupposition of singularity. The hypostasis is singularly constituted by the divine nature. This is not a process of fragmented pluralism where two natures exist on equal but separate planes – the hypostasis of the Logos maintains control over the human being.12 This is also not a process of interactive pluralism – the presence of flesh does not change God. The reverse occurs: the Logos 8 9 10

11 12

Cyril, 55. Norman Russell, Cyril of Alexandria (Oxford: Routledge, 2002), 40. A more explicit example of assimilation, and one that demonstrates the consequences of Cyril’s assimilation of the flesh for treatments of Jesus’ Jewishness, is exposed by Andrew Jacobs. Jacobs illustrates how Cyril’s use of the presence of the Word overwrites the human instantiation of the Word’s body as Jewish, specifically a circumcised Jewish male. Although Christ is circumcised, this fleshly example is de-signified by God, who overcomes the Jewish particularity of the flesh through his divine Spirit (Jacobs, 129–33). Insofar as the divine nature assimilates the human nature, assumes the body, and establishes itself hypostatically, the particularly Jewish humanity of Jesus is identified as undesirable and cast off. Such a move underscores the matrix of differentiation that exists between divinity and humanity, and Christianity (insofar as Christ is understood by Cyril to be Christian) and Judaism. Cyril, 120. The assessment of van Loon follows the process of fragmented pluralism. Van Loon argues that the divine will’s permission of the human nature to be hungry, tired and so on proves the presence of both natures (rather than just the human), and demonstrates unity. However, the granting of permission already presupposes a singular authority and precludes a mutually formative relationship. In Van Loon’s model, the actions of the human nature occur without influencing the divine hypostasis, the model of fragmented pluralism where a minority group acts independent of the larger group without being permitted to influence that larger body. Van Loon, 567.

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takes on the flesh of Jesus while rejecting his other human characteristics, a process of assimilationism. The immutability that Cyril deems an integral characteristic of the divine nature takes over the agency and formativity of the human nature, and the one-way interaction from the divine to the human nature prevents the mutually influential relationship of Jesus’ human nature. This insistence on immutability in Logos Christologies elicited twentiethcentury responses. Karl Rahner, recognizing the immutability of ‘God in himself ’, would not ascribe to the logic that such immutability means that God cannot change at all. Instead, he proposed that ‘He who is not subject to change in himself can himself be subject to change in something else.’13 Rahner accomplishes this because he differentiates between ‘God in himself ’, by which he means the Godhead, and God as the divine nature in the Incarnation. His argument in favour of divine change in the Incarnation stems from his belief in the participation of the human Jesus, which means that the person in the Incarnation demonstrated growth from ignorance to knowledge, awareness and development of self-transcendence, and physical and intellectual mutability. Just as all humans change, the person of Jesus changed in the Incarnation. To assert that the historical Jesus changed while the Logos remained unchanged would be to deny that there was a true coming together of the two natures. Therefore, God, in the human, underwent change. Initially, Rahner appears to be proposing an interactive Christology. He argues for a constitutive relationship wherein God participates in human reality and makes the destiny of humans (i.e. death) God’s own. God in God’s self cannot die, but humans can. Through the Incarnation into the human reality, God shares in the destiny and death of humankind, thereby taking on mutability in the enclosed context of the Incarnation: ‘because of the Incarnation, [God] himself, and not just the other, does have a destiny in the other’.14 For this reason, Rahner takes issue with the use of one ‘person’ as a descriptor of the Incarnation, deeming it insufficient for describing the participation of the human reality. The use of ‘person’ in traditional Logos Christologies, particularly as the term refers to the divine person, implies that 13

14

Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1978), 220. Rahner, 305.

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all activity and agency lie within God. Rahner’s objection is that this restriction excludes the human reality of Jesus, who has his own centre of activity and exists ‘in an absolute difference from [God]’.15 Rahner proposes instead the ‘two realities’ of the Logos, which appear to be a generous interactive pluralism. The ‘created’ human comes together with the Logos such that the human reality becomes the reality of the Logos. However, Rahner is unable to complete the transition to interactive Christology. According to Roger Haight, Logos-based Christologies, including that of Rahner, describe the Incarnation in terms of an enhypostatic union that nevertheless reduces the human component.16 Haight, building on the groundwork laid by Rahner, observes quite explicitly that in Logos Christologies, the attempt to preserve the oneness of Christ with the Creator, that is to prove the consubstantiality of the person of the Incarnation with God, leaves the human existence merely nominal. Adding to Haight’s interpretation, I argue that while Rahner comes very close to a process of interactive pluralism, insofar as he challenges the issue of the immutability of God by locating change in the death of Jesus, he does not allow for the possibility of dual agency, a move necessary for interactive pluralism. He thus remains within the bounds of assimilation. The relationship between the Logos and the human is constitutive in only one direction. God ‘creates the human reality by the very fact that he assumes it as his own’.17 It is God who creates, constitutes, assumes, and makes God’s own the human reality of Jesus. The entire process from Creation to redemption (through Incarnation) is driven by God. The human nature of Jesus effects no constitutive change on the divine, in the Incarnation or otherwise. While Rahner argues that Jesus demonstrates agency over himself, being obedient to God, surrendering, and giving himself over to God in authentic self-transcendence, this agency is derived from the Father.18 ‘The man Jesus exists in a unity of wills with the Father which permeates his whole reality totally and from the outset’, and Jesus ‘continually accepts himself

15 16 17 18

Rahner, 292. Haight, 441. Rahner, 222. Rahner, 393.

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from the Father.’19 In this relationship and complete surrender to God, he moves beyond his human limitations and accomplishes ‘what we are not able to accomplish’.20 In the Incarnation, the Father gives the man Jesus the tools to accomplish his own assimilation by the Father. Such a move allows the divine nature in the Incarnation to incorporate what is voluntarily offered by the human. In doing so, it raises the question, which Haight asks, of whether Jesus is truly human if he is the derived subject of God and does not play any determinative role as a human in his own existence.21 Rahner’s enhypostatic union is consubstantial with the Father, but not with humankind. There is no co-determinacy. As Haight notes, the lack of a hypostasis in Jesus’ human nature disqualifies him from being a true human person by rendering him necessarily abstract: ‘In short, that Jesus was an integral human being is compromised.’22 Rahner’s self-transcendent Jesus does not demonstrate human agency and thus falls short of demonstrating a true human nature. Rahner operates via a model of assimilation in which the human characteristic of mutability (finitude) is assumed by the divine nature in such a way that all action, though not agency, is located in the human reality. While Rahner argues that his Christology is an ‘ascending Christology’ because it is rooted in the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth, he states that ‘to this extent the terms “incarnation of God” and “incarnation of the external Logos” are the end and not the starting point of all Christological reflection’.23 While Rahner emphasizes the necessity of the human reality of the Incarnation, he does not recognize that the end determines the process: God and the external Logos replace the formative presence of the historical Jesus in the Incarnation. Rahner is not arguing for a co-determinative or mutually influential relationship. The mutability and finitude of the human does not change or redefine the character of the infinite. The circle begins, and ends, with God. By taking on the finite, the infinite transforms it so that it ‘is no longer in opposition to the infinite, but is that which the infinite himself has become’.24 Transformation is 19 20 21 22 23 24

Rahner, 303. Rahner, 303. Haight, 442. Haight, 289–90. Rahner, 177. Emphasis added. Rahner, 226.

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a one-way event.25 If the finite is assumed by the infinite, it no longer stands in a separate place from which it can maintain a relationship. It is assumed and no longer differentiated from that which has assumed it. That being the case, the particulars of the finite human body into which the Logos is incarnated become irrelevant. Historical realities notwithstanding, the relational contexts that shape Jesus’ decisions (the externalization of agency) are meaningless if all agency is already shaped by the divine nature.

The divine nature as Spirit – Revisiting Logos Spirit Christologies aim to reintegrate the participation of human materiality lost when Logos Christologies attempt to prove consubstantiality by emphasizing divine participation and rejecting human participation.26 Exposing the Logos Christologies’ tendencies towards a rejection or transcendence of human materiality, Spirit Christologies rely on the presence and movement of the Holy Spirit to re-present the humanity of Christ in immanent material bodies without abandoning divine consubstantiality. Their goal is to maintain the soteriological and redemptive significance of Christ while reinstating the necessity for participation of the necessarily mutable human body. Therefore, Christ materializes in the oppressed, particularly women, and brings about the kingdom of God through their actions. While Logos Christologies focus on the pre-existent Christ to preserve the consubstantiality of the Incarnation of Christ with the God of Creation, Spirit Christologies establish consubstantiality by focusing on the eschaton, and on post-death experiences of Christ as proof of the presence of the divine nature. Their proposals offer potential to bring together divine and human consubstantialities without sacrificing human agency, but the question arises whether they avoid relying on the divine to ‘manage’ the Incarnation and whether they successfully abandon the presupposition that only one nature

25 26

Rahner, 222. See Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1983), Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, 10th Anniversary edition (New York, NY: Crossroad, 2002), Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume III (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963).

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can truly determine the person. Do the processes by which Spirit Christologies manage the two natures result in multiple consubstantialities, or instead in sophisticated assimilationism? Roger Haight’s Antiochene-friendly Spirit Christology begins with Rahner’s Logos Christology from below. Haight expands on Rahner to emphasize the historical Jesus, introducing the nuance that ‘the symbol of the Spirit more forthrightly makes the claim that God, God’s very self, acted in and through Jesus’.27 Seeking to overcome the lack of human agency in Logos Christologies, Haight proposes that, through the Holy Spirit, God empowers and ‘activates human freedom…. Jesus’ human existence is fulfilled and not replaced’.28 Haight insists that God as Spirit enhances human freedom by empowering humans to be free. Yet, Haight is clear that the presence of God’s Spirit determines the participation of Jesus, stating that ‘God as Spirit is not present as the subject of Jesus’ being and action.’29 This qualification accompanies Haight’s description of Spirit moving in and through and within Jesus, but does not include the Spirit acting with Jesus.30 This activity of the Spirit precludes a mutually formative relationship, as it is founded on Haight’s presupposition that one cannot be both agent and subject, thereby compromising the agency and activity – the constitutive elements – of the human nature. The freedom that God grants to humans is externally granted, from outside of the subject, meaning it is only a partial freedom, the kind of freedom that a slave-owner might grant to a slave. If one argues, as I have, that humanity is constituted of multiple mutually formative relationships, in which withness and mutual influence are necessary, then Haight’s statement that ‘Spirit Christology more easily accommodates Jesus’ humanity’ is insufficient.31 Haight’s Spirit Christology does not accommodate the formativity of Jesus’ humanity on the divine Spirit. Jürgen Moltmann also criticizes Logos Christologies for their reliance on the characteristic of divine immutability to establish the presence of the divine

27 28 29 30

31

Haight, 451. Emphasis added. Haight, 453. Haight, 455. Haight, 451. Haight develops this idea with the help of Schillebeeckx’s Spirit Christology. ‘Jesus is filled with God’s Spirit and his very existence as a man is wholly the work of God’s Spirit.’ Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1979), 557. Haight, 465.

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nature in the Incarnation, because it comes at the cost of the human attributes and history of Jesus.32 To reinterpret the divine so that it includes the history of Jesus, he proposes a kenotic Trinitarianism that locates the entire historical and theological significance of Jesus Christ in the event of the cross and in the mutability (as suffering) of God therein, as it is made possible in the Holy Spirit. In this kenotic Spirit Christology, God as the Holy Spirit determines the beginning, middle, and end of Jesus Christ’s history as a ‘Spirit-history’.33 The immutability of God, understood to mean that God does not suffer, is reframed to argue that the Holy Spirit prevents the permanent separation of the divine and human, a separation caused by the suffering (mutability) of the Passion.34 The Holy Spirit functions in the same manner as the traditionally described ‘divine nature’, determining the person of Jesus Christ. In Jesus, the Spirit ‘indwells, initiates’, and ‘leads’ Jesus in his actions, and provides him with both the power to heal and the power to suffer.35 When the Spirit withdraws, Jesus can do nothing.36 Despite Moltmann’s argument that the Spirit ‘surrenders itself wholly to the person of Jesus’, and that Jesus’ consubstantial divinity with God is to be understood ‘not as hypostases of the divine nature, but as trinitarian relations in God’, the negotiation of the Holy Spirit/divine nature into the person of Jesus follows a process of assimilationism in respect to agency.37 The Holy Spirit is ‘the divine determining subject’ that leads Jesus into the wilderness and brings him to the Passion.38 In this process, Moltmann conflates the divine–human relationship in the person of the Incarnation with the Trinitarian relationship of the Father/Son and the Spirit: ‘the historical account of [Jesus’] life is also from the very beginning a theological account, for it is determined by his collaboration – his co-instrumentality – with the Spirit and “the Father”’.39 The result is that the activity of the divine nature, and the sole agency of the one person, is located outside of the person, where it is found in the Trinity. Moltmann emphasizes that the separation of Father and Son on the cross 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Moltmann, Crucified God, 82–111. Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus: Christology in Messianic Dimensions (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 71. Moltmann, The Way, 73. Moltmann, The Way, 174. Moltmann, The Way, 174, 192–3. Moltmann, The Way, 174. Moltmann, The Way, 72. Moltmann, The Way, 92. Moltmann, The Way, 74.

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finds its unity in the Trinity, not in the Incarnational unity of divine and human in the body and existence of Jesus Christ.40 This emphasis on the external Trinity rather than on any unity or coexistence internal to Christ rules out a fully interactive and mutually formative Incarnation. Further, Trinitarian kenoticism entails that God, however voluntarily, compromises God’s self through emptying. In other words, in kenoticism, God identifies attributes of God that are undesirable (in this case immutability and dispassion) because of their incompatibility with an Incarnation constituted of a suffering human. This is a process of assimilation that is reversed from previous examples; kenoticism entails an assimilation of the divine to the human condition, however voluntary and temporary such an assimilation may be. Like all processes of assimilation, Moltmann’s kenotic, pneumatological Trinitarianism is grounded in the presupposition that the tension of the divine and human natures as they stand is insupportable. Kenotic theology is built on the presupposition of a singularly determined unity where incompatibilities cannot coexist in their individual wholeness, and where one or the other (or both) must sacrifice some constitutive element for the sake of coexistence. Kenoticism is constructed without a consideration for the possibility of a multiply-determined unity. Both Logos and Spirit Christologies describe the divine nature of Christ in such a way that the human nature of Christ is excluded from playing a formative role in determining the person of the Incarnation. The problem lies not so much with definitions of the divine that establish the consubstantiality of the Logos of Christ with God the Creator or with the Spirit of God, but with the logic undergirding the definitions. This logic presupposes that divine immutability must assimilate human nature in the person of the Incarnation; mutual and multiple formativity is not considered.

The divine nature as transcendent Other In the early twentieth century, the primary characteristic of the divine was no longer Logos-based consubstantiality. Karl Barth’s early development of the interpretation of divine transcendence as wholly Other moved 40

Moltmann, Crucified God, 151.

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twentieth-century theologians to grapple with this characteristic, whether they sought to incorporate or argue against his early ideas.41 The process by which he argued for God as the transcendent Other determined his theological outcomes, particularly when it comes to an interactive theology of the Incarnation. Barth’s early conception of God emerged from his dialectical method, a Realdialektik that adapted the Kierkegaardian ‘infinite’ gap to frame the unbridgeable separation between the historically embedded reality of humans and the transcendent ‘reality’ of God.42 In this method, Barth needed to establish irreducible differences between humans and God, in which humans would be derivative of God, but not the reverse (as was the case in Enlightenment theology). Presaging a Derridean logic, Barth understood that a gap requires two disparate elements that cannot directly touch. The impossibility of reaching across the infinite gap from one side to the other presupposes both the place from which one stands and the place to which one is reaching. The infinite gap requires two dissimilar places between which to exist; a singular subject existing as a lonely island does not have any between or gap to cross over – there is nowhere over which to cross. To define the gap, Barth therefore needed to identify something that demonstrated the disparity and dissimilarity between God and humanity. To create a second ‘place’ that would offer an opposing boundary to humanity that would highlight the infinite gap, Barth fixed on transcendence as the characteristic that would stand opposite from and offer resistance to human immanence. If humans are enmeshed in history and in the flow of time that travels from past to present to future, then God, as the wholly Other, is transcendent – above human history and outside the path of time. God is ‘the 41

42

Using Barth’s early concept of God as wholly Other is not without its challenges, given the transition he made in later years to balancing what he perceived as a now inappropriate emphasis on the separation of God from the world. Karl Barth, The Humanity of God (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1960), 38. While Barth acknowledged its relevance to the time of its writing, with Nazi ideology attempting to replace worship of God, in his later years he recognized a new need to emphasize the humanity of God. Karl Barth, How I Changed My Mind (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1966), 51. Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans, (trans. Edwin C. Hoskyns; London: Oxford University Press, 6th edn., 1933), Preface to the Second Edition. For more on the different dialectical models found in Barth’s early work, see Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Also Michael Beintker, Die Dialektik in der ‘dialektischen Theologie’ Karl Barth (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1987). McCormack, working from Beintker, identifies four models: noetic, Realdialektik (two forms), and a ‘dialectic of life’. McCormack, 11–2.

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One who stands above us… who is in no way established in us, in no way corresponds to a human disposition and possibility’.43 God is transcendentally Other. This characteristic of the transcendence of God translates to Christ and the Incarnation in the veiling and unveiling of God to humanity, known as the time–eternity relationship.44 Barth explicitly identifies the Incarnation as the reality in which we see ‘eternity and time together’, and emphasizes that the transcendence of the Other must be maintained in order to understand the relationship of divinity and humanity in the Incarnation.45

Critiquing the transcendent Other The tension of Barth’s Realdialektik method exists in a Bhabhaesque third space of neither/nor. Describing the irreconcilability of humans and God, Barth states that the possibility of the one is always the impossibility of the other and the impossibility of the one, the possibility of the other. Considered under the viewpoint of the ‘first’ world, the ‘second’ ceases to be second, and from the standpoint of the ‘second’, the ‘first’ is no longer the first…. The second has its ground of being in the non-being of the first.46

Because the Other is other, the one and the Other cannot coexist or there would be no Other. Rather than risk the nonexistence of one or the Other, Barth attempts to maintain the dialectical infinite gap that separates the two. Yet Barth is unable to sustain the neither/nor nature of the dialectical model, and ends up in a model of Hegelian sublation. Barth’s dialectic ultimately resolves in an assimilated condition wherein there is an ‘overcoming of the first member by the second’.47 Despite Barth’s intention to occupy the neither/nor space to avoid capitulating to either an exclusion of humans or to an anthropocentric theology, his Realdialektik method 43

44 45 46 47

Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, Vol. 69 (trans. G. T. Thomson; New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1959), 37. McCormack, 266–70. Barth, Dogmatics, 37. Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief (München: Chr, Kaiser, 1922), 169. In McCormack, 267. Barth, 167. In McCormack, 267.

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cannot withstand the assimilating pull of Barth’s early conception of God as wholly Other. The early Barth’s God overtakes everything; and, as Barth notes, ‘the order is not reversible’.48 Insofar as the Incarnation is concerned, the dialectical presence of the Logos and the human nature resolves in favour of the former: ‘The human nature of Christ has no personality of its own; it is anhypostatos… Or, positively expressed, it is enhypostatos; it has personality, subsistence, reality, only in its union with the Logos of God’.49 The divine nature of Christ must characteristically assert transcendent superiority, and in doing so, overcomes and assimilates the human. While Barth describes this assimilation as enclosure, arguing that in Christ human existence is enclosed in the divine, by ruling out an independent hypostasis for the human nature, Barth eliminates the gap and demonstrates that the transcendence of the divine Other in the dialectical model excludes any co-determinative or mutually formative relationship. In later years, Barth attempted to resist giving theology entirely over to the aseity of the divine wholly Other. As he developed his theology, Barth explicitly acknowledged the theocentric focus of his theology, and the ‘subordinate’ position of anthropology.50 From within the framework that emphasized God as the centre, it is logical that humans would constitute a secondary, although still existent, presence. Yet, Barth himself came to recognize the unforeseen consequences that such a Christology would evoke: God was so wholly Other as to be completely disconnected from humans. To compensate, his work in The Humanity of God exhibits a more interactive approach to the relationship between divine and human and challenges the straightforward assimilationism of his earlier work. Barth rooted his later theology in Christology, which demands a more interactive model for considering the relationship between divine and human. Consequently, Barth argued that insofar as we confess God to be a living God by virtue of the Incarnation, we land at the ‘humanity of God’.51 For Barth, this 48 49

50

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Barth, 167. In McCormack, 267. Barth, ‘Unterricht in der christlichen Religion’, i. Prolegomena, 193; ET 157, in McCormack, 362. Emphasis in original. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I. The Doctrine of the Word of God, Part I (trans. Geoffrey Bromiley and Thomas Torrance; (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 718. In James C. Livingston, Modern Christian Thought: Volume 1, The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), 129, fn 19. Barth, Dogmatics, 45.

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phrase means that ‘the deity of the living God… [finds] its meaning and its power only in the context of His history of His dialogue with man, and thus in His togetherness with man’.52 Barth locates the infinite gap, along with the two sides bordering it, in the Incarnation that is Jesus Christ. He moves from his earlier neither/nor Realdialektik towards a more inclusive unity. In this unity, God ‘proves and reveals not in a vacuum as a divine being-for-Himself, but precisely and authentically in the fact that He exists, speaks, and acts as the partner of man, though of course as the absolutely superior partner’.53 The process of complete assimilationism, established to protect God’s transcendent Otherness, encounters a detour through the human nature. In this understanding, Barth closely follows Chalcedon, and comes close to proposing an interactive and mutually formative Christology. Barth argues that Christ exists without confusion or division, ‘wholly the one and wholly the other’.54 The divine nature of Christ remains consubstantial with God, unimpeded by the presence of a human nature: Certainly in Jesus Christ, as He is attested in Holy Scripture, we are not dealing with man in the abstract…. But neither are we dealing with God in the abstract: not with one who in His deity exists only separated from man, distant and strange and thus a non-human if not indeed inhuman God. In Jesus Christ there is no isolation of man from God or of God from man.55

Clearly, for Barth, the divine nature requires the human nature. In the person of the Incarnation, God and the man are mutual partners who ‘meet together and are together’ in dialogue. Barth even goes so far as to describe Jesus as interceding with the Father, something that is impossible with completely separate parties.56 The very principle of interceding with God presupposes the possibility that the intercession can be successful.57 It presupposes that the two parties are in a mutually influential relationship, and assumes the possibility, 52 53 54 55 56 57

Barth, Dogmatics, 45. Emphasis in original. Barth, Dogmatics, 45. Emphasis in original. Barth, Dogmatics, 47. Barth, Dogmatics, 46. Emphasis added. Barth, Dogmatics, 47. Successful intercession is not without Biblical precedent: See inter alia Abraham (Genesis 18.23–32), Elisha (2 Kings 2.23–4), the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7.24–30), the Persistent Widow (Luke 18.1–8).

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if not the eventuality, that the intercessee is receptive to – and can be changed by – the intercessor. However, despite Barth’s assertion of the togetherness of the divine and human natures in the Incarnation, he maintains that the relationship of the human to the divine is an ‘irreversible’ one-way process from divine to human.58 God acts and humans react from within that initial action; God speaks, humans hear. Further, when it comes to the test of agency, God remains the agent. Barth still holds to the idea of God coming down from on high, and incorporating the human into God: ‘God has and retains in this relation to the other one the unconditioned priority. It is His act. His is and remains the first and decisive Word, His the initiative, His the leadership….. His deity encloses humanity in itself ’.59 God remains the sole agent and constitutor of the human reality. The togetherness of God with man in the Incarnation is derived solely from the divine nature’s activity: ‘In the existence of Jesus Christ [as the hypostatic union], the fact that God speaks, gives orders, comes absolutely first – that man hears, receives, obeys, can and must follow from this first act. In Jesus Christ man’s freedom is wholly enclosed in the freedom of God.’60 Barth’s later Christology slides back to its earlier enhypostatic position. Barth’s later understanding and description of the divine nature as enclosing and thus taking on human nature is a benevolent assimilation, but an assimilation nonetheless. Barth asserts that the unity of the Incarnation is ‘given by the deity and thus the humanity of God’, but when the humanity of God is really an enclosure of humanity, only the transcendent wholly Otherness of God remains: humanity is simply, though gently, assimilated into that very transcendence.61 Barth exchanges the neither/nor process for a both-in-one process that assimilates the human nature in order to preserve the divine. Barth does not manage to reach the both/and model for which he is aiming. Does transcendence as a divine characteristic in the Incarnation inevitably require assimilation of the human?

58 59 60 61

Barth, Humanity of God, 48. Barth, Dogmatics, 50. Barth, Dogmatics, 48. Barth, Dogmatics, 56.

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Relational transcendence Transcendence has traditionally been used to establish that God and the divine nature is not derived from humankind. In The Touch of Transcendence, Mayra Rivera explicitly connects transcendence with Otherness, framing it as irreducibility.62 She identifies as problematic the Barthian separation protecting the Other’s irreducible transcendence because it separates God from humankind. Further, Barth’s attempt to preserve the irreducible Otherness of God categorizes (and in doing so homogenizes) humankind as that which is not God.63 Barthian theology paradoxically reduces human diversity in order to protect the irreducibility of God. Barth’s theological process requires static and fixed identities in order to maintain irreducible differences in unity. This denies the dynamic existence that is characteristic of both humankind and God. In this separation, Barth positions God as over and above humankind, through a process that objectifies humanity. Rivera resolves to prevent this homogenization of diversity by describing transcendence as a quality of God that ‘emerges from within reality and flows through bonds of relationality’.64 Rivera constructs this proposal by supplementing radical orthodoxy’s recognition of an infinite human diversity that can only be held together by divine transcendence with Ignacio Ellacuría’s proposal that transcendence is the transformative ‘unity of dynamic things’ that can only hold diversity together from internally constituted relationality.65 Rivera argues ‘that divine transcendence does not need to dissolve or even subordinate created differences. Indeed a relational transcendence touches creatures, embracing their irreducible differences’.66 Transcendence, for Rivera, is an encounter with the radically different that does not presupposes or results in the eradication of the difference of the encountered Other.67 This encounter takes place in the Levinasian Face of the Other, as ‘interhuman transcendence’, where the transcendent wholly Other (God) is encountered

62 63 64 65 66 67

Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 4. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 5. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 53. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 42. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 5. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 82.

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in the wholly other (persons).68 In the encounter of relationality, individuality and difference are preserved as the Self and the Other come face to face, or body to body, touching but not assimilating. This relationality constitutes infinite transcendence; the relation we have with the Other extends to the Other’s ‘relations with other Others’, and we engage in simultaneous multiple relationships.69 These ‘webs of relations’ are the sites of becoming (not being) for the Self and the Other.70 Rivera thus defines transcendence as ‘a relation with a reality irreducibly different from my own reality, without this difference destroying this relation and without the relation destroying this difference’.71 The relationality of irreducibles is made possible through a conscientious refusal to objectify the Other. Since the Other is not same/not Self, we cannot speak of a generic, Ideal, or categorized Other – every Other is specific and particular. Rivera’s juxtaposition of irreducibility and objectification stems from her use of Fernando Segovia’s proposal that the Other is ‘beyond the system’s epistemological limits’.72 Rivera connects the knowability of the Other with an objectification or reduction of them; a recognition of the irreducibility of the Other must be accompanied by a recognition of their unknowability. Following Rivera’s thought, irreducible diversity is protected from assimilating homogenization by refusing to speak in terms of knowability; diversity is protected by the radical Otherness inherent in relationality. In the context of the Incarnation, Rivera’s proposal appears to preserve the Otherness of the divine nature without requiring an assimilation of human nature: the infinite gap is not threatened by the multiple contextual differences encountered relationality. The presupposition of singular formation haunting previous Christologies is circumvented. Yet, multiply-constituting relationships notwithstanding, a closer examination reveals that the tendency towards assimilation remains strong. The apparent necessity of speaking of the Other in terms underived from the Self means that a Christology built on this kind of speech ironically assimilates the person of Jesus as the generic Other. His human singularity, along with the irreducibly transcendent nature of the

68 69 70 71 72

Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 55–6. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 117, 125. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 99. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 82. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 79.

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divine Other that makes him unique, are veiled in speech about the Other in general.73 When the self frames the encounter with the Other, particularly the Other that is Jesus Christ, the relationship devolves into parameters that are determined by the self. Because the self is not the Other, these parameters become either entirely self-referencing, or necessarily vague. This problematic speech about the Other (which we all utter from time to time) comes from the necessity of having no place from which to speak but the Self. That is, although Rivera dedicates an entire chapter to the question of the wholly Other, she speaks only about the Other in relation to the Self. She does not refer to where the Other comes from, only about its relationship to one’s self.74 This becomes a static relationality, wherein relationality becomes an a priori state, and where the Other has no agency or constitutive presence. This is evident in the way Rivera perceives the Other as Other, but never transitions to thinking of herself as Other to the Other. While she follows Derrida’s advice in arguing that we must leave a place for the Other, there is no reflection on the fact that to ‘leave (or prepare) such a place for the Other’, as she suggests, implies that we are the prior inhabitants of that place: we cannot leave a place we have not already been, nor prepare a place that we have not already entered.75 In her speech about relationality with the Other, the self frames the encounter, not the Other. She does not quite manage to enact Bhabha’s hope that, in the Third Space, we ‘emerge as the others of our selves’.76 Rivera’s proposal results in a mirrored reflection of Barthian assimilation; whereas in Barth’s model the Other encloses the human Self, in Rivera’s model the human Self determines and encloses the Other.

73

74

75 76

Hegel once remarked on the same subject that ‘singularity in general is something universal once more’. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, vol. 3 (trans. and eds. Peter Crafts Hodgson and Robert F. Brown; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 313–4. I address this elsewhere in Kayko Driedger Hesslein, ‘“Overlapping Memberships:” Interactive Multicultural Theory Meets Chalcedonian Christology’, Dialog, 53(3) (2014), 196–203. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 118. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 38–9. Moltmann also speaks of theological anthropology as considering humans the other of the Other. Moltmann, Crucified God, 90.

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A new interpretation – Transparticularity and the ‘unassimilable Other’ Consubstantial immutability and transcendent irreducibility share the concern of relating to difference without being assimilated by it. Logos theologians established consubstantiality on a foundation of immutability in order to protect the continuity of the Incarnated divine nature with the Godhead. Transcendence theologians established Otherness on a foundation of irreducibility in order to protect the relationality of human and divine across the infinite gap without sacrificing the distinctiveness between the two. However, implied in the primary concern, shared by both groups of theologians, is the assumption that relations change the relating parties. Immutability and irreducibility rely on the presupposition that singularly and internally constituted subjects are desirable and that multiply and externally constituted subjects are undesirable. Logos theologians’ concern with mutability is that the Incarnation and the divine nature might be constituted by or derived from that which is external to the Godhead. Rivera’s concern with transcendence is that it constitutes a person from that which is external to his or herself. In both cases, the move towards an assimilation of that which is external arises from the shared underlying presupposition that external constitution is undesirable and problematic: subjects are compromised when constituted (even in part) by that which is external to them. To address this problem, the presupposition – the constitution of the self (either divine or human) is compromised by any external influence – must be challenged. Bikhu Parekh’s idea of the unassimilable Other – relationality without assimilation – offers a challenge to this presupposition insofar as it concerns the immutability of the divine nature. Parekh, working in the field of multicultural theory, shares the concern expressed by Rivera that relationality carries a risk of reducing irreducible differences, and so advocates for intentional (cultural) diversity because it presents us with ‘unassimilable otherness’.77 The unassimilable Other is the one who stands in relation to us, and is different from us. The very fact of difference offers protection against assimilation by singularly constituted subjects; the very presence of the 77

Parekh, 167.

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Other confronts and dismantles the monist view of the Self that underlies assimilation and that ‘assumes… ontological primacy of similarities over differences’.78 It is the one who is unlike us and who cannot become us. The idea of the unassimilable Other offers a way to circumvent the processes by which we attempt to universalize transcendence and God in our own image, and the ways in which the transcendence of the divine nature assimilates the particularity of the human Jesus. The Other, particularly the Otherness of God, offers some protection from assimilation to the individual through a recognition of the radical difference between the divine nature and the human nature. Broadly speaking, if one asserts the ontological difference between humans and God, then one must argue that the alterity functions as a barrier between the two. Yet, barriers are sometimes necessary. Protection from assimilation or from being overrun is not a bad thing. The early patristic theologians who sought so desperately to protect the alterity of God from contamination by human sin and suffering did not share our contemporary anthropological concerns yet the construction of their arguments to protect God also serves to protect humans.79 The oft-cited Pauline verse, ‘neither Jew nor Greek’, ‘neither male nor female’ (Galatians 3.28), evokes fear in those who are Jewish, or male, or female, and happy to be that way. It raises the question whether Paul considered the ecclesial body of Christ to be non-gendered and non-Jewish.80 The anthropology that I have argued thus far, emphasizing the irreducible singularity of each human as a whole and the multiply-constituted and multiply-determined nature of those singularities, resists any attempt, 78

79

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Parekh, 18. See Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), 98 for a critique of the concept of the unassimilable Other. Ahmed’s concern is that, in the practical context of immigration in Australia, the categorization of groups into ‘unassimilable’ becomes a means for making them invisible. I would argue that the theological context of God as Other prevents God or the divine nature from becoming invisible in Christological discussions. Jaroslav Pelikan notes that Arianism operated on the a priori that God’s inviolable transcendence protected humanity’s ‘fragility’ from the destructive touch of the divine. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, Volume I: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 100–600 (Chicago, MI: Chicago University Press, 1971), 195. Daniel Boyarin argues strongly that Paul sought to resolve the difference of human materiality and human spirituality by assimilating the former into the latter. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). For rebuttals of this interpretation of Paul’s approach to difference and arguments that Paul emphasized difference within relationships of equality, see Pamela Eisenbaum, ‘Is Paul the Father of Misogyny and Antisemitism?’, Cross Currents, Winter 2000–2001, 506–24; Lung-Kwong Lo, ‘“Neither Jew nor Greek” Galatians 3, 28 Revisited’, Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi 27(2) (2010), 25–33; and Brigitte Kahl, ‘No Longer Male: Masculinity Struggles Behind Galatians 3.28’, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 79 (2000), 37–49.

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Pauline or otherwise, to erase the differences that constitute the individual because without them, there is no subject, no individual, no I. The radical difference of God from me, the human subject, is not one that prevents relationality, but one that protects me from being assimilated into the divine and thus losing who I actually am. The Otherness of the divine nature protects me from being totalized. The same Otherness protects the individual human nature of Jesus. If Jesus’ multiply-constituted subjectivity forms and determines who he was as a historically embedded individual, the assimilation of that human subjectivity – as his human nature – into an undifferentiated takeover of the human by the divine means there is no more human in that subject. In this scenario, there is only the divine nature. The human nature of Jesus, never mind the Jewish particularity of that human nature, is dissolved. The entire soteriological structure of Christianity collapses, whether one builds one’s argument on cross and resurrection or on deification. In this respect, the patristic theologians were correct – the human nature of Jesus Christ is absolutely foundational to the person of the Incarnation. At stake is the most appropriate way for preserving and negotiating it. The radical Otherness of the divine nature, just as it protects the individuality of each human, protects the individual human nature of Jesus Christ as well. The unassimilable Other is to be distinguished from the irreducible Other. Rivera’s model of irreducibility is framed by epistemology: knowledge leads to definition, which leads to categorization and reductionism (which leads to assimilation). By contrast, Parekh’s notion of the unassimilable does not stand in reference to knowledge: it might be known – or not known. Assimilation is no longer inevitable because engaging with the unassimilable Other does not require a knowledge or categorization of the subject. A gain or loss in knowledge of the Other does not determine the relationality of one with the Other, because a gain or loss does not lead to more or less assimilation. It doesn’t lead to anything. It allows for continued temporal relationality – consubstantiality – without compromising the integrity of the divine nature through that relationality. The unassimilable Other thus allows for the possibility of a multiplyconstituted divine nature: a multiply-relational God does not de facto compromise the divine nature in Christ. But what of the actuality of this multiple relationality?

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Here I bring forward Erskine’s concept of overlapping memberships from the previous chapter, and I propose that divine transcendence means that the divine nature is capable of full membership in an infinite number of overlapping communities and subjectivities. To say that God is transcendent is to say that the divine nature is not limited when it engages in relationalities with particular (i.e. individual) subjects. In the geopolitical context, Erskine introduces ‘transnational’ as a term to explain the transcendence involved in overlapping memberships. Transnational is universality ‘without the repression of difference’, and it assumes three things: (1) the existence of multiple and distinct communities – a global heterogeneity, (2) the possibility (if not actuality) of fluidity and travel between these communities (which itself presupposes that the boundaries of these communities are porous), and (3) the reality of individuals’ participation in multiple communities.81 Trans- is not to be confused with non- or a-. In other words, to claim the divine nature as transnational is very different from claiming it as non-national or nonparticular. A nonparticular or even aparticular description of God’s transcendence speaks to the divine nature as limitless in regards to whom it can include or to whom it can relate; the unassimilable Other resists the tendency to exclusionary boundary maintenance that humans tend towards by resisting the tendency to totalize that accompanies relations with any particular. But the attribute of non- functions as an anti-particular universalism that erases differences instead of including them. By contrast, the trans- perspective functions more specifically to counter the difference-erasing totalization that nonparticular, or in the case of political theory, global descriptions imply. Trans- is a fully and wholly participatory prefix: ‘Trans denotes both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something…. Transnationality also alludes to the transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the transgressive aspects of contemporary behaviour…. [It is] the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space’.82 The relationalities encountered by the post-Resurrection Jesus extend beyond the geographical limitations of borders. Therefore, I propose that, in

81 82

Erskine, 41. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 4.

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addition to the geographical and spatial references of multiple locations, we also consider the divine as transtemporal. That is, God is engaged in an infinite number of communities across time, not just across space. Transtemporality finds its roots in the argument that the Logos of Christ is pre-existent, eschatological, and Other. The divine nature exists at every point on the timeline and off it. Thus, the divine nature who acted in Creation, acts in our history, and will act (for us) in the eschaton, is the same Logos throughout. The actions that occur to us in a linear and chronological manner do not appear so to the divine nature, to whom such linearity is insignificant.83 In transtemporality, consubstantiality is maintained, transcendence continues, and the contextual differences contingent upon the particularities of history are preserved. Transnationality, however, brings its own problems to a postcolonially concerned Christology such as this one. Nations are founded on the homogeneity of recognized borders, shared national identity and, in many cases, the impositions of colonialism. The language of nationalities and citizenships serve more frequently to exclude particularities than to include them, and even transnationalism can be taken as movement from one enforced homogeneity of particularity to another. Transnationalism, despite Ong’s appeal, reinscribes in Derridean fashion the rigidity of nationalism rather than overcomes it. It soars over erected boundaries that ghettoize differences, leaving them constructed below. To maintain the transcendent spatiality of transnationalism, together with the transcendent temporality of transtemporalism, I propose the term ‘transparticularity’. The unique dynamics of each movement in time and each point in space create particular contexts that humans are limited in engaging, but which are limitless for God. Transcendence as transparticularity speaks to multiple contexts; it is contextualized and embedded in more than one place and one time. To be multiply-situated is to say that transcendence has its own unique and particular place but is not restricted by it; the places bordering the infinite gap still exist, but the divine nature resides on both sides simultaneously. To say that the divine nature in Christ is transparticular is to

83

For a grammatical example of transtemporality, see Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (New York, NY: Harmony Books, 1981), Chapter 15.

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say that this nature participates from a distinct standpoint – consubstantiality with the Godhead – in an infinite number of overlapping communities, each with their own universal particularities. It is, in the divine nature’s infinite relationality, to suggest that the divine is uniquely transcontextual. To say that the divine nature in Christ is the unassimilable Other is to say that he participates in this infinite number of communities without being assimilated by, or assimilating, any of them. The divine nature’s participation as the unassimilable Other across time and space reflects, as Rivera puts it, ‘God’s own infinite singularity’.84

Summary The challenges of interpreting the divine nature are twofold: avoiding a description of the divine nature’s pre- and post- Incarnation consubstantiality with God as the Logos and/or Spirit that leads to the neutralization and assimilation of particulars, and avoiding a definition of the divine nature’s transcendence or universalism that homogenizes all particulars. Strictly Logos-reliant Christologies, and the response of Spirit Christologies, have resulted in a divine nature removed from historical particularity. Further, the ahistorical divine nature has contributed to an ahistorical and at times antihistorical view of Jesus Christ’s participation in history through the Incarnation. In these Christologies, the Jewish humanity of Jesus, into which the Logos was Incarnated, is discarded as an impediment to both the transcendence of the divine nature and to the immaterial nature of God. An ‘out there’, extra-historical transcendent God contributes to a perception of God as universal in a way that is exclusive, rather than multiply-inclusive. In both cases, jettisoning the concepts of Logos and transcendence altogether is unsatisfactory. Without the pre-existence of the Logos or the resurrected Spirit of Christ, Christians would lose the consubstantiality of Christ with the Godhead and violate Christianity’s monotheistic claims by worshipping a human Jesus. Without the transcendence and Otherness of the divine nature, God and Christ simply became reflections of human nature, as Barth feared. 84

Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 136.

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To re-envision and reclaim the consubstantiality of the divine nature as the transcendence and Otherness of God, I have brought Rivera’s relational transcendence of the ‘irreducibly different’ divine nature together with Erskine’s proposal of transcendence as ‘transnational… inclusion without the repression of difference’, and described it as transparticularity.85 I have tempered the risk of boundary loss that effectively erases difference, a consequence that Rivera overlooks, by maintaining the Otherness of God as protection. This new understanding of divine nature emphasizes the trans of transcendence to argue that the universality of the divine nature signifies the potential to engage in an infinite number of relationships without exclusion, while protecting the infinite variations of difference from being assimilated into non-difference. The possibility of multiple relationality proposed for Jesus’ human nature is made an actuality in the transparticularity of the divine nature. The universality of the divine nature, infinitely inclusive across time and space, gives Jesus’ human nature access to relationalities beyond his humanly limited boundaries. The transtemporality of transparticular transcendence is an assurance that the divine nature of Christ is consubstantial with the Godhead, existing as the Logos before Creation and also utterly unlike and unassimilable to our contexts. Without the Incarnation, however, the divine nature cannot engage in the relationalities that the human nature does, as it would never have had a body with which to engage in any relationships. The capacity to engage infinitely and universally does not mean that it is actually happening – the divine nature requires an existential manifestation: the Incarnation of the Jewish Jesus now becomes theologically necessary in order to actualize the capacity. The human nature of Christ, the divine nature’s Incarnation into a human body, is that which corrects the ahistorical emphasis of the divine nature and brings the Logos concretely into history and into relationships. The divine nature must come together with the human nature without either nature losing that which makes it necessary and indispensable. This is the one person of the Incarnation.

85

Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 82. Erskine, 41.

Part Three

Establishing Relationship

5

You Never Leave Your Homeland Behind: Contextual Universalism in the One Person

Approaching unity In his human nature, Jesus Christ is an irreducible and irreplaceable individual. His particularity is constituted by his differences, which arise from his participation in overlapping memberships in diverse contexts. These memberships are constituted by the mutually formative relationships in which all humans engage. To be a citizen of humanity, then, is to be a unique and particular individual, formed by and forming those with whom one is in relationship. The Second Temple Jewish Jesus Christ, as fully human, is this. In his divine nature, Jesus Christ is the unassimilable and transcendent Other. The radical Otherness of his divine nature is consubstantial with God, the Creator, and provides for Jesus a different difference that sets him apart as unique in his Incarnation. Unassimilated to any singular context, the divine nature transcends the specificities of time and space in a boundaryless and inclusive manner. To be a citizen of divinity, then, is to be one for whom particularity is insignificant and transcendence manifests as universal inclusivity, transparticular and unrestricted by space and time. The Logos of God Jesus Christ, as fully divine, is this. Contrasted thus, the contradictions between Jesus’ human nature and his divine nature become evident. Attachment to particularity and difference conflicts with universal inclusivity; temporal boundedness conflicts with transcendent boundedlessness. Set side-by-side, the two natures contradict one another. Yet, the person of the Incarnation belies this conclusion, and in fact presents the two natures as necessary. The human nature of Jesus Christ

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needs the divine nature in order for the person to be more than simply a human being amongst all others, and the divine nature needs the human nature in order to engage with humanity in a manner that enables human reciprocity. In perichoretic fashion, we arrive at the interrelated relationship of the two natures in the one person. They must now be addressed as they are presented together. What ought a Christology in which the two natures interact to look like? What might be the parameters for a theology of the Incarnation rooted in the full presence and interrelation of the two natures? I suggest three benchmarks for a fully functioning relationship between Christ’s divine and human natures: (1) an equality between the two natures that respects the differences between humanity and divinity and allows them to exist without one assimilating the other, (2) full participation of the human and divine natures, and (3) a unity that is mutually formative and interactive. I define equality as a comparison between two different objects (or subjects) that avoids hierarchicalizing the two or ranking them on the basis of an externally derived (i.e. universal) value set. As Parekh argues, equality is not to be confused with equivalence.1 The latter reduces particularities by comparing them on a ‘universal’ scale, and results, in policies of multiculturalism, in each person being treated exactly the same, regardless of their particularities. A theory of equivalence would argue that people who are blind be treated exactly the same as people who are deaf, which would be problematic at crosswalks. A theology of equivalence would argue that Jesus’ divine nature and Jesus’ human nature be addressed exactly the same, leading to a confusion of identity, as evidenced by the communicatio idiomatum debates and misunderstandings between Martin Luther and John Calvin. Equality, by contrast, is based on a recognition of the difference of each subject and requires treatment on the basis of that difference. An equality-rooted theology of the Incarnation incorporates a recognition of the peculiar characteristics and does not allow one to subsume the other. Full participation is demonstrated by the degree of agency. Because the natures are treated equally but not equivalently, full participation is defined differently for each nature. However, broadly defined, full participation involves the uncompromised manifestation of each given nature, such that 1

Parekh, 240 and 261.

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neither nature sacrifices any definitive characteristics in union with the other. For the divine nature, full participation means the manifestation of the transcendental relationality that preserves the otherness of the human nature. The autonomy of the divine nature is not restricted by its relationship to partiality. For the human nature, full participation means an embodiment (consciously or subconsciously) dependent on multiple subjectivity in a mutually formative relationship. The agency of the human nature is preserved in its formation of others through relationality. The autonomous (though not isolated) agencies of both the divine and the human natures participate in their respective fullnesses. Unity, then, is the relationship of two parties that allows full participation of both natures and does not violate the integrity of one’s own or another’s nature. This relationship is determined by the characteristics of each nature and is the medium for allowing the nature to form one another, as all subjects in relationships do. If equality and full participation protect the uniqueness and agency of the two natures, unity protects them from complete dissolution and fragmented pluralism. The obstacles to attaining these benchmarks fall into either of two categories: (1) an overemphasis on the unity of difference or (2) an overemphasis on the separation of difference. These are interrelated with the obstacles of either (1) a description of universal or divine that is normative for the particular or (2) a dismissal of the universal that makes the particular normative of the divine. Ian Angus, who attempts to impose some clarity on the interrelatedness of differences in the context of Canadian multicultural policies, states: What is needed is a rethinking of the relation between particularity and universality or, alternatively stated, a recovery of particularity that is essentially connected to a discourse of legitimation with universalizing dimensions. The politics of multiculturalism is in a key location to address such a rethinking. It combines a recovery of a pre-rational sense of belonging with a claim to collective rights that must be articulated in universal terms.2

In other words, Angus is arguing that privileging the universal (as the inclusive establishment of rights for each particular) is the way for the particular to

2

Ian H. Angus, A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness (Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 135–6.

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claim collective rights for itself and for the other. Yet, how can the universalism (as inclusion) of the divine nature and the particulars of the human nature be brought together in a way that maintains equality, full participation, and unity?

The Chalcedonian Definition The words produced by the Council of Chalcedon attempt to strike a balance between emphasizing that Jesus Christ is universal as the pre-existent Logos (the Alexandrian school’s concern) and that he was also truly particular as a human (the Antiochenes’ concern). The Chalcedonian Definition establishes and distinguishes between two natures, sidestepping explicit assimilationism and going so far as to argue for two consubstantialities. Chalcedon describes in clear terms that the natures are united but distinct ‘without confusion, change, division, or separation’.3 To avoid both Nestorianism and Eutychianism, the Council emphasized a single hypostasis as the point of unity for the two natures: εἰς ἓν πρόσωπον καὶ μίαν ὑπὸστασιν συντρεχούσης. Enhypostasis is predicated on Jesus’ human nature not having its own hypostasis – the divine nature provides the hypostasis.4 This formulation presupposes that a prosopon can only be singularly formed, and that the singular prosopon forms a single unity in the Incarnation. The prosopon is constituted of, but not relationally influenced by, two natures but the possibility of two hypostases is excluded; singular membership in only one context is the only possibility. The concept of dual hypostases, or multiple formativities via overlapping memberships in contextual universals (as we will explore), was inconceivable. Yet, despite the (questionably) unanimous approval of the Definition at the Council, interpretations of the phrase ‘in one person and one hypostasis’ have provoked intense debate.5 Christologies surrounding Chalcedon vacillate

3

4

5

Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, ed., The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 2 volumes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), Volume 1, ‘V.34’, 204, fn. 53. V. C. Samuels, The Council of Chalcedon Re-examined: A Historical and Theological Survey (Madras: The Christian Literature Society, 1977), 171. Signing of the document took place after the attendees were told to accept the Definition as Emperor Marcian wanted, or risk having the Council relocated to Rome, where the matter would be decided by Pope Leo. One signer, Eustathius of Bertyes, went so far as to append his signature with the note, ‘signed this under pressure, not being in agreement’. Price, Chalcedon, Volume 1, ‘V.22’, 199. And Price, Chalcedon, Volume 2, 220, fn. 28.

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between assimilationism, where the divine person assimilates the human nature (the Eutychian challenge), and fragmented pluralism, where the natures exist simultaneously but in complete isolation from one another (the Nestorian challenge). This is due in no small part to the fact that Chalcedon simply declared a distinction of difference within the unity of the Incarnation without an explanation for how this occurred.6 It offered no strict definition for either prosopon or hypostasis, in part because its focus was to establish a distinction between the natures (without abandoning the unity).7 Its description of the Incarnation was thus open to multiple interpretations. The lack of clarity in the Chalcedonian Definition and the lack of awareness of the underlying presuppositions and processes for negotiating difference has resulted in consequences unforeseeable by the participants at Chalcedon, particularly as these consequences are concerned with Jesus’ Jewishness and the problem of supersessionism. This chapter and the next examine the issues of unity and distinction as theologians attempt to fit, reject, or exceed, the parameters of the Chalcedonian Definition. These attempts to relate the two natures and preserve the particulars of each nature fall into either of two broadly defined categories: (1) protecting the divine nature at the cost of the autonomy and integrity of Jesus’ human nature by emphasizing the person as divine, or (2) protecting human nature and agency at the cost of divine immutability and omnipotence by emphasizing the person as human. Both of these attempts are most often accomplished by emphasizing a singularly determined unity (frequently synonymous with the one person), which is achieved through a process of assimilationism. This chapter examines Christologies that negotiate difference in the one person by maintaining a unity of the two natures, while the next chapter examines Christologies that emphasize preserving the differences.8

6 7

8

Samuels, 181. John Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), 21. It would seem appropriate in a section that discusses Leo and the hypostatic union to spend time unpacking the complexities of communicatio idiomatum. I have chosen not to engage this issue here primarily because the communication of properties presupposes that a person or nature can be divided up into its component parts, some of which are assimilated or rejected. Dividing up a subject into parts is the second step in both assimilationism and in cosmopolitanism, which results in assimilationism. (The first step is the identification of those parts or characteristics.) The communication of idioms is therefore addressed as Calvin and Luther present it.

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Unity and singularity This section uncovers the processes by which unity is emphasized through a protection of the divine nature (regardless of how that nature is defined), and the cost to the autonomy and contribution of Jesus’ human nature. The early church theologians began discussions of the Incarnation with the issue of consubstantiality of Father and Son that established the pre-existence of the Word/Logos. In doing so, they assigned normative status to the divine nature and established its role as the assimilating agent. As we will see, this shaped the processes for maintaining unity in ways that inversely affected the incorporation of Jesus’ humanity, and in particular his Jewishness, as formative for the one person of the Incarnation. Is it indeed the case that such a process, repeated throughout the church’s development of Christology, necessarily relies on presuppositions that exclude the idea of multiple formativity as a viable interpretation of the relationship between the two natures and the one person of the Incarnation? Athanasius’s theology of the Incarnation offers the clearest example of the processes by which early theologians attempted to unite difference. Athanasius proposes that the particulars of the Word’s body are irrelevant, his argument establishing the logic of a process that follows simple assimilationism (when the group in power identifies and strips a person of whichever defining characteristics put him or her at odds with the normative characteristics of the defining group). When it comes to Christ, Athanasius, among others, has determined that the divine nature, as it reflects consubstantiality with the Father, determines the normative characteristics of Christ, giving him impassibility and omniscience, among others.9 Like other assimilatory processes, this becomes problematic when the defining characteristics actually constitute the subject, because the wholeness of the subject is then fractured in the process. Athanasius, like other assimilationists, presupposes that in order for Christ to take on a human body, the human body must be purified of certain undesirable attributes that might compromise the divine ones.

9

Athanasius, On the Incarnation: The Treatise De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, Penelope Lawson (trans), with Introduction by C. S. Lewis (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), §8.

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Consequently, Athanasius asserts in On the Incarnation, §17, that the body of the Word did not limit the Word, that the Word is both creating and created, that the Word is in the universe and sustaining the universe, and in everything giving without assuming corruption. In this passage, Athanasius explains that becoming embodied did not lessen the transcendence of the Word outside of materiality. The Incarnation therefore becomes the site of one-way transformation, where humankind is transformed but there is no reciprocity, as illustrated in Athanasius’ metaphor of the sun’s rays finding their way to earth.10 In this way, Athanasius avoids the consequence of the Word becoming corrupt in taking on human nature, and he protects the consubstantiality of the Word and the Father. Athanasius’ logic is predicated on unity without equality. This unification without equality is a key attribute in the process of assimilation, and is undergirded by an attitude that the Logos incarnates in the human for purely utilitarian purposes: ‘His body was for [the Logos] not a limitation, but an instrument, so that He was both in it and in all things.’11 The body is a tool, directed by the Logos. It is a passive agent of the Word, made so to protect the independence and incorruptibility of the Word. It is a one-way relationship; the body does not transform the Word: ‘His being in everything does not mean that He shares the nature of everything, only that He gives all things their being and sustains them in it.’12 The Logos unites the body to it, but continues to direct and manage it. The unity of the human and the divine in the Incarnation, insofar as it rests on the consubstantiality of the Word and the Father, comes at the cost of full human participation and agency in the Incarnation. Unity is constituted and determined singularly by the divine, and not by multiple agents. The assimilation of Jesus’ body into the divinely determined Incarnation allows Athanasius to argue against the Jewishness of Jesus’ human existence. Jews are corporeal, which stems from evil inclinations (as evidenced by their crucifixion of Jesus). Christ, as a Jew, shared the Jewish body with them, but only in order to demonstrate the complete assimilation of that Jewishness 10 11 12

Athanasius, On the Incarnation, §17. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, §17. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, §18.

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by Christianity.13 The initial identification of Jesus with the Jews, and indeed the characterization of Jews by Christians, allowed Athanasius to build on a process that then separated Jesus from his people in order to assimilate him to a Christian theology. David Brakke describes it thus: Athanasius created the Judaism that he needed, a static and uniform entity with these characteristics: first, a devotion to earthly (material, temporal, local) things rather than to heavenly (immaterial, eternal, universal) things; second, a stubborn desire to be separate, both socially and theologically.14

Athanasius separated out the first set of characteristics from Jesus and replaced them with the second, allowing him to separate Jesus from his Jewishness and assimilate him to the divine.15 In the process, this separation allowed him to speak violently against the Jews and to deny Jesus’ particularly Jewish corporeality. The one person of the Incarnation was formed only by the divine nature, and the constitutive formativity of the human nature was assimilated. The process of divine assimilation of the human was not restricted to the early church, however. Previously, in the chapter on the divine nature, I explored the Cyrillian hypostatic union and I argued that Cyril engaged in a sophisticated assimilationism: the Person in which the hypostatic union would be located was divine, present through a divine kenosis that ‘appropriated’ human flesh without properly changing into it.16 As his theology influenced Chalcedon, it carried on into developments and alternate manifestations of this process in the medieval ages. It is here we encounter Anselm of Canterbury’s argument that since a human was obligated to recompense God for human transgressions, the God-man must also be human. To accomplish this, God must assume an authentic human nature ‘from within “Adam’s race”’, but without sin, born of a virgin.17 To accommodate this, Anselm holds to the established orthodox faith that Christ is two natures, one divine and one human, in one (divine) person. 13

14 15

16 17

See Jacobs, 69. Also, see David Brakke. ‘Jewish Flesh and Christian Spirit’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 9(4) (2001), 453–81. Brakke, 478. Jacobs separately observes, ‘Athanasius was not merely perfecting the recipe of humanity and divinity that would produce a theologically palatable person of Christ but was rather crafting a sophisticated method for both rejecting and reappropriating the theological positions of heretical opponents.’ Jacobs, 85–6. Cyril, 54. Anselm, Anselm of Canterbury, Volume II Cur Deus Homo: Why God Became Man, Jasper Hopkins, and Herbert Warren Richardson (eds and trans) (Toronto, ON: Edwin Mellen Press, 1976), II, 8.

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Yet, Anselm’s Christology reflects the ambiguity of Chalcedon and vacillates between a process of fragmented pluralism and one of assimilationism. He argues that the two natures function differently from one another: In Christ, the diversity of natures and the unity of a person serve the following end: If the human nature was not able to do what was required to be done for restoring men, then the divine nature would do it; and if [what was required] did not at all befit the divine nature, then the human nature would do it.18

This coexistent, complementary functioning of two natures within one divinely determined body follows the process of fragmented pluralism: the different natures do not interact. They exist only in parallel, and are determined by the overarching unity of the larger (divine) ‘Person’.19 Demonstrating assimilationism, Anselm argues that the transformation of the human by the divine is a one-way process, and that only the divine nature has agency.20 The substance of the human nature, which includes the body, is naturally weak and low, but does not transmit this vulnerability or passibility to the divine nature. Rather, the human nature is exalted after being assumed by the divine person.21 Further, while the human nature has a will of its own, it submits to the divine will. Interestingly, Anselm believes that death is not part of human nature, but a result of human’s corruption. Thus, death pertains only to Christ’s human nature, while his divine nature retains its incorruptibility.22 Like the early Church fathers, he believes that there is a one-way path of normativity from divine to human, maintaining a singularly constituted or singly determined unity in the person. Human weakness does not corrupt the divine, thereby protecting God’s impassibility and avoiding the tension caused by the presence of two formative natures. Assimilationism takes place as assumption – the Word assumes human nature, which means taking on the bodily characteristics of living and dying while rejecting its characteristics of autonomous will.23 Anselm is clear

18 19 20 21 22 23

Anselm, Cur, II, 17. Anselm, Cur, II, 12. Anselm, Cur, I, 8. Anselm, Cur, I, 8. Anselm, Cur, II, 11. Anselm, Cur, II, 8

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to distinguish between ‘human’ and the ‘assumed human’ in order not to compromise the Word. The Word and the human are clearly not the same person, but the Word and the ‘human-as-assumed-by-the-Word’ can be.24 In this process, the assumed human (Jesus) is the Word, and the Word is God, but the assumed human (Jesus) is not God. Regardless of whether Anselm expresses the Incarnation in terms analogous to fragmented pluralism or to assimilation, it is clear that all times, the unity is derived from and determined by the divine nature and the human nature plays no formative role. The following statement summarizes Anselm’s own theology, and is revealing when it is understood that Anselm understands the person of the Incarnation to be divine: ‘God assumed a human nature not in such a way that the divine nature and the human nature were one and the same but in such a way that the person of God and the person of man were one and the same.’25 The unity of the two natures is maintained in the divine person, a conclusion enabled by the assimilation of the human nature. Since Anselm’s construction of the argument for the God-man did not specifically emphasize Jesus of Nazareth, it would be casuistic to argue that he explicitly separated Jesus from his Jewishness. Yet, as we have seen in the chapter on Jesus’ humanity, the very reduction of Jesus from a particular historical individual to a generalized representation of ‘man’, allows one to slide from ignoring Jesus’ Jewishness to rejecting it. Further, Anselm’s construction of ‘the Jew’ as the disbelieving Other who rejects the rational truth about Jesus, along with his conflation of their particularity into the category of infidels and pagans, allows him to draw distinctions between ‘the Jew’ and ‘the God-man’.26 Anselm identified (or invented) particular characteristics of Jews, and described the God-man without referring to any (real or imagined) Jewish characteristics, thereby assimilating Jesus’ Jewishness to a normative (Christian) generic humanity by ignoring them. The step from assimilationism to cosmopolitanism is a small one. John Calvin also upholds the unity of the Incarnation by protecting the immutability 24 25

26

Anselm, DIV, 11. Anselm, DIV, 9. Anselm argues for the divine person of the Incarnation in Cur II, 12: ‘The assumption of a human nature into the unity of a divine person will be done wisely by Supreme Wisdom.’ Jeremy Cohen notes this particular conflation. Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 177–9.

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of the divine and by promoting its monolithic agency and, like Anselm, uses the word ‘assumed’ to describe the process through which the person of Christ incorporates the human nature. While Calvin’s description of assumption does not fall within a strict process of assimilation per se, but a process that is better described as cosmopolitanism (the selective appropriation of certain attributes that does not change the appropriated subject but rejects its agency as formative), it nevertheless does not reach a full interactivity between natures. In emphasizing the unity of the one person, these attributes can be described as interchanging, but this must be done with great care. Calvin calls this exchange the ‘communicating of characteristics or properties’, where ‘the things that [Christ] carried out in his human nature are transferred improperly, although not without reason, to his divinity’.27 Calvin goes to great lengths in Books I and II to describe the ways in which Christ is divine, making it clear that he favours the divine nature within Christ over the human nature, and his use of the word ‘improperly’ to describe the transfer of human characteristics to the divine indicates the discomfort he feels that the human nature might in some way contaminate the divine nature. Indeed, Calvin seems intent on protecting the deity, or asserting its superiority, and speaks of the divine nature of Christ as hiding under the human nature. Several times, Calvin uses the phrase ‘clothed with our flesh’, speaks of the Son of God ‘concealed under the flesh’ and states that, in the eschaton, ‘Christ’s own deity will shine of itself, although as yet is covered by a veil’.28 Following a process of cosmopolitanism, Calvin does not explicitly reject Christ’s human body as such. Indeed, in describing the relationship of the two natures of Christ, Calvin argues that ‘Christ would not have called his body a temple (John 2:19) unless divinity, as distinct from the body, dwelt therein’.29 Such language of dwelling implies that the body is a shell, without a constitutive nature of its own. Calvin’s language and selective integration of the human being into the Incarnation ensures Christ’s soteriological success by emphasizing the agency of Christ’s divine nature. Consequently, pushing Calvin’s process to the extreme, his use of veiling and clothing metaphors imply that Christ is not 27 28 29

Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1960), II, xiv, 2. Calvin, Institutes, II, xiv, 3. Calvin, Institutes, II, xiv, 4.

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completely embedded in his humanity, as he is able to take off some human attributes and put others on as needed, as one does with clothing. In this selective process, Christ’s human agency and participation in the person of the Incarnation is gently assimilated. The Enlightenment, particularly Germany’s Aufklarung, drew forth theologians who more subtly engaged the process whereby the universal and transcendent divine assimilates the particular and immanent human in order to maintain a singly determined unity. For this reason, the more nuanced process of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is examined in careful detail, since it is not as immediately identifiable as assimilationism as earlier Christologies. At issue is Hegel’s definition of the ‘incarnation’ as the ‘unity of divine and human nature’, in which unity is built of a transcendence over ‘locality, nationality, condition, life-status … [where] Human beings are equal; slavery is intolerable’.30 In this unity of divine and human nature, the human and God come together as human is created to be, a unity informed by the Enlightenment value of transcendent universalism. Hegel’s emphasis on the necessity of transcendence does not immediately reject the particularity of the human in the Incarnation – he needs Christ to take on human flesh so that Christ can die and sublate that human flesh. In other words, Hegel needs the human nature of Christ in order to provide the concrete venue for demonstrating the power of the infinite, that is God, to overcome the finite, that is its concrete self. Because humans require empirically verifiable evidence of God (a principle of German Idealism), such reconciliation must happen in a single individual who embodies the divine-human unity, one who is empirically evident and ‘immediate’ in its presentation to humankind.31 Since God has conceived of God’s divine idea (of the unity of divine and human nature), God ‘has to generate the Son’ in order to make the idea an actuality and avoid remaining philosophically abstract.32 Incarnation is necessary for demonstrating the possibility of our reconciliation with (i.e. assimilation by) the divine infinity,

30

31 32

G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume 3: The Consummate Religion, (trans. and ed. Peter Hodgson; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 109. Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 110. Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 215. Emphasis in original.

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and to respond to our ‘need to love the particular universally in the concrete’.33 There is no other way to demonstrate the infinite sublating the finite, without exhibiting the finite first. All of this possibility and necessity is actualized in the ‘particular Jesus of Nazareth’, whose individuality proves ‘concrete subjectivity’. That is, ‘in order for it [this divine-human unity] to become a certainty for humanity, God had to appear in the world in the flesh [John 1.14]’.34 To exhibit finitude, a single human must exist within a historical context as a concrete, fleshly being. This is the crux of Hegel’s incorporation of history into his theology. The divine idea, to be comprehended by thought (rather than through Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’), must actualize as a physical existence and manifestation of the transcendent ideal, in a single, historically embedded person that establishes its historical participation and concrete status. So how does this actuality take place in Christ’s human nature? As a human existing in history (which Hegel tellingly describes as Christ’s nonreligious existence), ‘he is immediately a human being in all the external contingencies, in all the temporal exigencies and conditions, that this entails’.35 Christ, as a human, is finite, involved in human relationships, born (although Hegel dismisses that it is from a virgin), influenced by his surroundings (although transcending them, in the case of his religion), and dying. As the ‘God-man’, Christ exists in a spiritual manner – filled with the Spirit. When he speaks as the God-man, he ‘expresses it immediately from God, and God speaks it through him. His having this life of the Spirit in the truth, so that it is simply there without mediation, expresses itself prophetically in such a way that it is God who says it’.36 Here we see Hegel already leaning towards the perfection of the divine in Christ to the extent that the human mind as mediator is denied. While Hegel still describes this as part of the nonreligious view of Christ, his emphasis on the activity of the Spirit gives privilege to the noncorporeal and thereby rejects the human. To describe Hegel’s Christology with Chalcedonian vocabulary, it clearly emphasizes that the person of Christ is divine, and not human, though at this point still existing in history.

33 34 35 36

Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 216, 218–9. Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 313. Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 316. Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 320.

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To explain how the divine and the human exist together, Hegel contends that ‘it is the Son of Man who speaks thus, in whom this expression, this activity of what subsists in and for itself, is essentially the work of God – not as something suprahuman that appears in the shape of an external revelation, but rather as [God’s] working in a human being, so that the divine presence is essentially identical with this human being’.37 As far as unity goes, Christ ‘is the divine idea’.38 Here, Hegel moves away from Docetism, and its appearance of humanity, and attempts a true unity between divine and human by proposing joint activity, where the two cannot be distinguished from one another. God’s presence is thus (temporarily) physically manifest. Hodgson, in fact, points to the above statement as ‘Hegel’s construal of the doctrine of incarnation: … God and humanity are connected without canceling but rather strengthening human subjectivity and personality’.39 Following Hodgson’s interpretation, it would appear that Hegel is proposing an interactive and multiply-formed Christology. I disagree with Hodgson. Hegel’s ‘unity’ should in no way be misconstrued as a new interpretation of the hypostatic union that distinguishes between but does not eliminate either nature. While human subjectivity and personality may be left intact, human existence as concrete and material is not. Despite his definition of incarnation as the ‘unity of divine and human natures’, the process by which Hegel understands this union leaves no room for the ‘fully’ human, as human is understood to include the actual body, physically and temporally constrained. This is because Hegel prioritizes the spiritual over the concrete, the infinite over the finite, and ultimately, the immaterial over the material. He explicitly says that the reconciliation (made concrete in the incarnation) ‘can only come about by the separation being sublated’, by which he means that the divine takes over the human, and that ‘in the unity of divine and human nature everything that belongs to external particularities has disappeared – the finite [itself] has disappeared’.40 How the human body is exempt from such ‘external particularities’ is hard to imagine. Hegel’s divine idea presents itself

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Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 320. Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 115. Emphasis added. Peter C. Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 168. Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 211, 212.

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in the historically located Christ, ‘in all his contingency, in the whole range of temporal relationships and conditions … but there is at the same time in this sensible mode a divestment of the idea, and this has to be sublated’.41 This senseable mode, that of the historical body (although Hegel never uses that word), is bereft of the divine idea and thus must be overcome. I argue that Hegel wishes to erase the historic manifestation of the divine idea, that is the human physical, corporeal existence of Christ, in order to protect the divine idea of the unity of divine and human nature. In the sublation (aufheben) of human finitude, there is no ‘fully’ human component: only the spiritual capacity of the human is kept. This sublation takes place in the death of Christ. Stating that ‘it is precisely in [Christ’s] death that the transition into the religious sphere occurs’, Hegel is exposing his philosophical commitment to aufheben,42 which leads to the sublation of humanity by the divine. ‘Through death the human element is stripped away and the divine glory comes into view once more – death is a stripping away of the human, the negative.’43 Humanity, insofar as it represents finitude (as evidenced by physicality), is expunged. Further, in his 1831 lectures, Hegel argues: ‘For the true consciousness of spirit, the finitude of humanity has been put to death in the death of Christ. This death of the natural has in this way a universal significance: finitude and evil are altogether destroyed. Thus the world has been reconciled; by this death it has been implicitly delivered from its evil.’44 And finally, ‘death is both the extreme limit of finitude and at the same time the sublation of natural finitude, of immediate existence, the overcoming of divestment, the dissolution of limitation’.45 Hegel’s linkage of finitude, evil, death, and immediate existence (by which he means historically embedded living), leaves one doubting his commitment to corporeal human existence.

41 42

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Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 216. Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 322. Aufheben is commonly interpreted as the result of a process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. However, Michael Allen Fox convincingly presents Hegel’s use of the term in such a way that it is understood that such ‘synthesis’ is actually an incorporation of the thesis and antithesis to the degree that they are ‘implicit, but transformed’. Michael Allen Fox, The Accessible Hegel (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005), 45. Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 326. Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 323, fn. 199. Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 126.

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What occurs next is the assimilation of human finitude ‘into the highest – the highest love’.46 In the resurrection of Christ, which is most explicitly not a bodily resurrection, Christ transitions ‘into a new mode of existence, a transition from sensible to spiritual presence’.47 Once Christ has sacrificed his body, that is his human finitude, and died, the divine sublates that finitude, and Christ becomes divine spirit. This is, indeed, the ultimate goal for humankind: ‘Humans … ought to be spirit explicitly, not merely implicitly; their merely implicit potential, their natural being, must be sublated’.48 Hegel’s goal for humankind is its spiritualization, and once Christ has died, Hegel has no use for his human body, and thus no need for a bodily resurrection. Hegel relies on the human nature of Christ only in order to provide the concrete venue for demonstrating the power of the infinite to overcome the finite. Hegel’s express desire is that ‘the finite’ disappears.49 This sublimation, what I have identified as assimilation, while not itself anti-Jewish (although Hegel is), is the height of the rejection of the singular humanity of Jesus Christ.50 Hegel’s description of Judaism as a dead religion that should not exist due to its being surpassed by the revelation of the infinite in Jesus Christ and Christianity is further evidence of his belief in the finite and the particular’s inevitable progression towards and sublimation by the infinite.51 In the end, Hegel’s interpretation of the Incarnation follows the process of assimilationism, with particularly anti-Jewish results. From Athanasius to Hegel, it appears that protecting the unity by locating it in the divine nature requires an assimilation of the human. The difference of Christ’s divine and human natures is held together through the divine nature’s assimilation of the human but the aufheben of the bodily human Christ is so complete that Christ’s human nature is no longer human, but something new. Thus, there is no manner by which Christ can be argued to 46 47 48 49 50

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Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 131. Hodgson, 173. Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 202. Emphasis in original. Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 216. Peter Hodgson believes that Hegel would have been a ‘religious pluralist’ but Cyril O’Regan draws the conclusion that Hegel engaged in a ‘persistent relativization of Judaism’. Hodgson, 243. Cyril O’Regan, ‘Hegel and Anti-Judaism: Narrative and the Inner Circulation of the Kabbalah’, The Owl of Minerva 28(2) (Spring 1997), 141. For a thorough examination of Enlightenment philosophers’ and theologians’ tendencies towards anti-Judaism, see Amy Newman, ‘The Death of Judaism in German Protestant Thought from Luther to Hegel’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion LXI(3) (1993), 455–84. Hegel, The Consummate Religion, 357–74.

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have been fully human. If the presence of two natures in one person proves the uniqueness of the Incarnation, the reduction of the human nature to the divine via the process of assimilationism voids that uniqueness. The singularly determined unity assimilates and sublimates human agency, compromising the integrity of human nature, and therefore negating the participation of two natures in the one person.

Unity and multiplicity The previous Christologies did not accept a multiply-determined unity or a multiply-constituted and interactive Incarnation. They demonstrate that founding a Christology on a singularly determined unity managed by Christ’s divine nature leads to a relativization and reduction of the human nature, its significance, and its determinacy. If the problem is, as I argue, the reliance on a singularly determined unity, in which components (and subjects) are assimilated into one homogeneity, then resolution may come from positing a multiply-constituted and multiply-determined unity. Among the theologians working in polydoxy, Laurel Schneider engages in work that strives to overcome totalizing and monolithic doctrinal visions, as her critique of representational anthropology in Chapter 3 demonstrates. Schneider interprets divine incarnation through a postcolonial hermeneutic that resists universalizing and homogenizing Christologies. Her method involves the use of multiplicity to ‘disrupt’ the hegemony of those who wield the logic of the One (i.e. singular and ‘pure’ logic) as their tool for suppressing difference. Schneider’s intent is not to abandon the idea of a divine One, but to resist any claims that the route to this One is exclusively singular. She takes issue with static, unchanging, and thus singular visions of reality, God, and Christ, because they deny the mutability and uniqueness of each human existence. She builds her argument on an understanding of God that posits fluidity and change as characteristics of God, and argues that these dynamic attributes are evidenced by the multiple ways in which God is present in different, sometimes contradictory, contexts. Schneider frames this work of resistance within a ‘theology of multiplicity, grounded in an incarnational posture’ that investigates the multiplicity within the incarnation of Christ, an embodied person who is multiple in

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relationality.52 Her incarnation theology emerges from an anthropology that argues for the irreducibility of every human: ‘All the similarities between bodies can be compared, but can they be replaced by or exchanged for each other, no matter what their internal or external likeness? No.’53 This emphasis on bodies undergirds her conclusion that ‘without the multiplicity of matter, unity slips into ideology’.54 Incarnation prevents totalization because of its undeniable concreteness as a human singularity. Her vision of multiplicity thus accompanies the project of disruption begun by postcolonial theologians who seek to unseat the totalitarian goals of any singular Christology. Schneider proposes that the inner multiplicity that comprises the one God manifests in the infinite variety of particularities and contextualizations. Importantly, these contextualizations are possible only through local instantiations. Quoting Miguel de Beistegui, who proposes that ‘the ontology of the multiple can only be locally circumscribed’, Schneider proposes that multiplicity can only be explained by or explored in incarnations that are (1) historically contingent, local, and therefore highly contextual, and (2) multiply occurring.55 The necessity for localization and multiple contextualizations is based on Schneider’s concept of ‘impossible exchange’, wherein she argues that difference is different because it cannot be exchanged for anything else. As she emphasizes, ‘no thing can ever be fully exchanged for or cancel out another thing’.56 Because of this inexchangeability, one contextualization of Christ cannot be exchanged for another. The very localization that provides a new contextual image of Christ and reflects one aspect of the divine, due to its unique occurrence in an unrepeatable temporal and spatial moment, cannot stand in for another. Attempts to universalize any particular contextualization returns to a logic of the One that, according to Schneider, is incapable of representing the multiplicity of the divine. The possibilities offered by Schneider’s theology are promising. Multiplicity allows for a multiply-constituted, and even requires a multiply-determined, 52

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Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, 6. Although I have capitalized Incarnation throughout this work, Schneider does not because she does not believe the event to be exceptionally unique. Therefore, this section uses her capitalization as it reflects her thought. Schneider, 166. Schneider, 200. Schneider, 145. Quoting Miguel de Beistegui, ‘The Ontological Dispute: Badiou, Heidegger, and Deleuze’, in Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions, (ed. Gabriel Riera; Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), 49. Emphasis added. Schneider, 171.

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incarnation that does not fragment into constituent parts. Her emphasis on inexchangeability offers a way to protect the uniqueness of Jesus’ historical embodiment as a Second Temple Jew and prevents him from being assimilated into pure representationalism, as critiqued in Chapter 3. As the beginnings of a theological anthropology wherein Jesus is fully human on the basis of his unique immersion into contextually determined relationality, Schneider’s work moves us forward. However, Schneider’s theology exclusion of the doctrine that Christ is the unique Incarnation of God is problematic for many Christians. According to Schneider’s understanding of divine multiplicity, multiple local incarnations are required to convey the full multiplicity of God. Schneider responds to the obstacles presented by singularity by arguing that a single incarnation, albeit located in the Jewish Jesus, is insufficient for reflecting the multiplicity of the divine nature. Building on the argument for the inexchangeability of individuals, she argues that a single incarnation cannot represent the concerns of those who are not from that context since there is nothing in common – nothing to exchange – between historically particular localities. As a consequence, Schneider’s theology paradoxically rejects Jesus’ historical particularity in a generalization of particularity itself. The focus on contextualities in general obscures the claim for the particularity and uniqueness of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ in two ways. First, the uniqueness of the Jewish incarnation of the Son of God is overwritten as he is transposed into situations where he is (multiply) contextualized as a woman, or a Native American, or even a Catholic priest. In these cases the question arises, and Schneider herself asks but does not answer, ‘What to do with the singularity of Jesus’ body?’57 How can the uniqueness of the historically instantiated Jewish man named Jesus remain irreplaceable and inexchangeable in the particularity of his incarnation, yet not unique in the fact of his incarnation? Schneider has made the case for the necessity of both contextual images and particular uniqueness, but it still remains to be seen how these two interact.58

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Schneider, 165. While Schneider talks about a web of relationalities (similar to Mayra Rivera), she makes explicit the connection between incarnation in Jesus and incarnation in many. Schneider, 163. Although she has stated that the particularity of Jesus’ Incarnation has not been her focus, if she clarified the relationship, it would be easier to see how particularity and contextuality come together. Laurel Schneider, email to author, November 11, 2011.

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This first concern leads to the second: the very differences that protect the inexchangeability of one person for another become obstacles for relating on the basis of shared ground or commonalities. The process of multiplicity used to avoid assimilation risks becoming fragmented pluralism – unrelated groups with no interaction whatsoever. Schneider’s emphasis on contextuality does not leave room for a transcendent, and thereby universally relatable, divine nature and thus raises the question of how multiplicities can coexist without any shared commonality to hold them together or without any shared ground for mutual relationality. The lack of integration of Jesus’ divine nature into the Incarnation makes it challenging for Christians operating within a Chalcedonian framework to integrate polydox theologies. While the goal of these theologies is to incorporate the overlooked humanity of Jesus, the claims that Jesus was a Jewish human are meaningless for Christian theology without the simultaneous claim for divinity. The claim that Jesus is consubstantial with the Godhead gives the argument that he was a Jewish human its radical significance. To say that Jesus, as a human, was relationally formed by his Jewishness (as he was by the other factors of his human existence), and to claim that he was divine, is to argue that his Jewishness influenced his divinity in a way that cannot be dismissed. It is a claim that as the Son of God is Jewish, so is the Father. Attempting to propose a unity in the Incarnation that does not account for his divinity is no more successful than one that does not account for his Jewish particularity. The question of this chapter has been: how can an Incarnational unity incorporate both human and divine agencies? The risk from a Christology that emphasizes divine agency as the mechanism for unity in the Incarnation is that human agency is too often minimized, or worse, dismissed. The singularly constituted power that brings together the human and divine natures in Christ, whether it is the single hypostasis, the primacy of God in the God-man, or the sublimating infinite, jeopardizes the agency of human participation in the Incarnation. As postcolonialists in particular have pointed out, singular agency, particularly that which maintains power through totalitarian enforcement of normative homogeneity in the agentless constituent, ultimately dispenses with difference, through what I have categorized as assimilation. In the case of the Incarnation, this assimilation has resulted in the human subject of Jesus Christ – Jesus of Nazareth, the Second Temple Jew who observed Torah and

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journeyed around Galilee – being stripped of certain particularities, such as his religious Jewishness, in order to become the generic, aparticular human. Yet, the proposals for minimizing this risk have not been sufficiently nuanced. Polydox theologians, whose primary concern is not correcting supersessionist Christology but overcoming the abusive power of the ideal of the universal, propose to correct the problem by diffusing power and differentiating it so that one singular norm is never totalizing. Yet, this differentiation and diffusing of power does not actively reclaim the agency that comes with Jesus Christ’s Jewishness or the particulars of his human life. Differentiation becomes a form of fragmented pluralism that leads to a lack of interactivity between the two natures in the Incarnation. The loss of the individual Jesus Christ threatens the unity of the divine and human natures in the Incarnation by removing the specific historical particularity of the human constituent. Further, removing the divine nature from Jesus violates the traditional claim of Jesus’ uniqueness and continues to contribute to a singularly determined Incarnation, albeit singularly constituted by his humanity. At this point, there seems to be no way to negotiate the difference between divine nature and human nature without either assimilating human nature or devolving to a fragmented pluralism that isolates the divine nature, either to set it apart in perpetuity or to dispense with it entirely.

A process for uniting difference The Incarnational relationship of two natures in one person is one of particularity (contextuality) and universalism (as transcendence and transparticularity). But how are these contradicting concepts to interact? I propose that they relate through the paradox of contextual universalism, a term I introduced in Chapter 3. Now it is time to explore and develop that term more fully. In doing so, I do not begin with the traditional starting point that the universal, as transcendent, relates all particularities to itself, thereby establishing unity. Rather, I propose that we engage with the particular and contextual as the starting point that brings together other contextualities in a universally contextual, or contextually universal, unity. I suggest that we begin with the idea that particularity is the single commonality of all people – we

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are each particular – and move from there to the universal – everybody has particulars. I have chosen to develop this seemingly paradoxical contextual universalism from Toni Erskine’s work in the field of international relations theory. Erskine builds on the work of social theorists, political philosophers, and feminist ethicists to propose an embedded cosmopolitanism that recognizes the relationality of particulars, both within and outside the self. Erskine’s opening dilemma is that ‘if we maintain loyalties to both the particular and the universal, the polis and the cosmopolis, to fellow citizens and fellow human beings, it is argued that we must endure a fragmented moral experience’.59 In this fragmented experience, multiple citizenships are impossible. This argument is similarly maintained by those Christologically focused theologians who argue for a dual nature/single hypostasis and against dual hypostases; they cannot see Jesus Christ as fully human and fully divine simultaneously. For them, the only outcome for plural differences in one body is a fragmented existence. Erskine continues, ‘contrary to this formulation, if the particular bonds of social relationships may be seen as constitutive of a moral perspective without demarcating its outer limits, it is possible that neither such an antithesis or fragmentation is necessary’.60 The presupposition that multiple constituents and loyalties leads to divisive tension is contested, although not immediately resolved. As Erskine observes, ‘the strength of these particular bonds must not rest on the creation of “outsider”. However, if such a framework is to reject the transcendence of particularities, how is it to be inclusive?’61 Returning to the context of Christology, one must ask, if the divine God is transcendent by virtue of being universal and impartial, how is the particularity of Jesus’ Jewish human existence to be a formative part of the Incarnation’s divine– human relationship? Inversely, if the Incarnation is rooted in the historically contingent and lived Incarnation, how can Christ be in relationship with any and all humanly particular followers? How are citizenships in both hypostases to coexist?

59 60 61

Erskine, 39. Erskine, 39. Erskine, 39. Emphasis mine.

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Theories of assimilation and general cosmopolitanism assume that resolution comes from a universal, singular community. Yet, as Erskine notes, this notion of community carries with it the attendant problems of homogeneity, totalization, and universalization. For this reason, Erskine proposes that ‘[a] second option is to accept the strength and tenacity of particular ties, as well as the existence of separate communities, nations, and states, and to construct an ethical framework that recognizes values as constituted by, but not bounded within, these associations. I label this option “embedded cosmopolitanism” ’.62 For Erskine, this includes ‘the possibility of transnational duties without transcendence (of these particularities); in other words, inclusion without the repression of difference’.63 This is a universalism based on contextualities. (Erskine’s model of cosmopolitanism requires a ‘morally defining community’ with ‘indefinite boundaries and territorially dispersed memberships’.64 She is not, as I am not, arguing for a universal defined through impartiality or objectivity. She relies on Carol Gilligan’s critique of any moral high ground that finds its basis in a transcendence of context-free universalism as an impossibility, citing Gilligan’s observation that ‘no answer may be objectively right in the sense of being context-free’.65 In other words, a contextfree impartiality is an impossibility; there is no such thing as context-free, and thus no such thing as impartiality or a transcendent moral viewpoint. To build the case for relationality of transinclusiveness without transcendence, Erskine uses Gilligan’s ‘different voice feminism’ to delegitimize viewpoints claiming impartial transcendence, and to put forward the ‘moral agent as constituted by particular relationships’.66) Having rejected universalizing particularities masquerading as impartial transcendence, Erskine moves to the issue of the particular: the multiplyconstituted moral self. She uses feminist ethicist Carol Gilligan’s work 62 63 64

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Erskine, 40. Emphasis mine. Erskine, 41. Emphasis mine. Erskine, 153. Here we find that comparisons might be drawn between Erskine’s vision of this community and an ecclesiological vision for the Church. John Michael Murphy and Carol Gilligan, ‘Moral Development in late Adolescence and Adulthood: A Critique and Reconstruction of Kohlberg’s Theory’, Human Development 23 (1980), 83, in Erskine, 154. Erskine, 151.

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in development psychology to propose that the ‘moral self is, from the beginning, relational’.67 This is a rebuttal of Piaget’s stages of development, which argues for the a priori autonomy of the individual and independent self, with relationships that come later. For Gilligan, and thus Erskine, ‘relationships are constitutive of the self ’.68 These constitutive relationships do not rely on a ‘thin’ view of equality between and within relationships that treats everybody as equivalent and thus deserving of exactly the same treatment.69 Rather, they emerge from a ‘thick’ view that sees each relationship as particular and unique and in need of its own specialized consideration.70 To negotiate the thick relationships required by the radical difference between Christ’s human and divine natures, I bring forward Erskine’s proposal of overlapping memberships from Chapter 4. Just as I proposed that Jesus Christ was capable of engaging with multiple individuals because he shared with them the universal human characteristic of each having particulars, I propose that the human nature of Jesus is in relationality with the divine nature of Jesus by means of the capacity of both for overlapping memberships. In this relationship, contextual universalism makes room for both the particularity of Jesus’ human nature and the transparticularity (universality) of his divine nature.

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Carol Gilligan and Grant Wiggens, ‘The Origins of Morality in Early Childhood Relationship’, in Mapping the Moral Domain: Contributions of Women’s Thinking of Psychological Theory and Education, (eds. Carol Gilligan, Janie Victoria Ward, Jill McLean Taylor, and Betty Bardige; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 111–38, in Erskine, 155. Gilligan and Wiggens, in Erskine, 155. Owen J. Flanagan and Kathryn Jackson, ‘Justice, Care and Gender: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Debate Revisited’, in An Ethic of Care: Feminist and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, (ed. Mary Jeanne Larrabee; New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), 70, in Erskine, 157. As pointed out earlier, the laudable intention to treat everyone exactly the same imposes a totalizing generic identity that suppresses difference and reinforces homogeneity. Further, this has implications for theologies of religious pluralism and interfaith dialogue. The thick view of relationships, when translated to Christian-other religion relationships, means that there can be no single model of Christian-interfaith relationships. Christian–Jewish dialogue and Christian theologies of Judaism are unique in their constitution and cannot be a model for Christian–Muslim dialogue and Christian theologies of Islam. A general Christian theology of religious pluralism, such as those suggested by John Hick, Paul Knitter, Mark A. Heims, and others, leads to a kind of universalizing and homogenizing Othering of the religions with which Christianity is in dialogue that represses and reifies difference in the same way that the particularities of Jesus have been repressed and reified in Christianity. John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987). Paul F. Knitter, Introducing Theologies of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002).S. Mark Heim, Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995).

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Before refining this concept with more detail, it is prudent to examine whether this Christology has yet been developed. Accordingly, I now examine how this relationship between transcendence/particularity and unity/ separation plays out in other understandings of the unity of the two natures in the one person. Communicatio idiomatum, as developed in Martin Luther’s understanding of the Incarnation, gives us a glimpse into what a Christology of contextual universalism might look like, although his theology is not without problems.71 For Luther, the unity of two natures is so closely knit and indivisible that ‘there is a communication of attributes, so that what is attributed to one nature is attributed to the other as well, because they are one person’.72 Therefore, ‘what is done by the human nature is said also to be done by the divine nature, and vice versa. Thus the Son of God died and was buried in the dust like everyone else, and the son of Mary ascended into heaven, is seated at the right hand of the Father, etc.’73 This communication occurs within the one person of Christ, because of the unity of his two natures. Luther insists that the unity of the person of Christ is a reality that cannot be denied, and is concretely displayed in Christ’s existence on earth. In this unity of person, the two natures come together and interact. As one nature experiences something, it is communicated to the person of Christ. Christ being one person with two natures, it is thereby automatically communicated to the other nature, which exists within the one person. To deny the communication of attributes is thus to deny the one person of Christ. What Luther appears to be doing, contrary to the Alexandrian Fathers and the medieval theologians, is reversing the flow of influence from the divine to the human, established in the early church.74 By insisting so strongly on unity, Luther appears willing to let Christ’s humanity affect Christ’s divinity. He is also reacting against understandings of the two natures that would deny the unity. Thus, in what appears to be a dismissal of Augustine’s metaphor of

71 72

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Particularly given his later anti-Semitic vitriol. Martin Luther and Mitchell Tolpingrud (trans), ‘Luther’s Disputation Concerning the Divinity and Humanity of Christ’, Lutheran Quarterly 10(2) (1 June 1996): Introduction. Luther, Disputation, Introduction. For the conclusion that Luther brought together both Alexandrian and Antiochene Christologies, see Klaas Zwanepol. ‘A Human God: Some Remarks on Luther’s Christology’, Concordia Journal 30(1–2) (1 January 2004), 40–53.

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habit, Luther states that ‘nothing more heretical could be said than that human nature is the clothing of divinity … For clothing and a body do not constitute one person, as God and man constitute one person’.75 He also takes the issue with the imagery that began with Origen, of the coming together of the two natures as an iron in the fire.76 In Origen’s usage, the metaphor refers to the immersion of the human soul in the divine Word, taking on the divine heat of the Word without corrupting it by the presence of the human metal. Luther’s objection is not entirely clear, but given his previous emphases on unity, one can postulate that it is because there is no true unity between iron and fire – the metal does not affect the flame. Instead, Luther proposes multiple constituents of the one body that does not preclude multiple formativity of the one person. This multiplicity is possible because Luther never describes the humanity or creatureliness of Christ without also immediately referring to his divine nature: ‘The human nature is not to be spoken of apart from the divinity. The humanity is not a person, but a nature.’77 Luther does not engage in a singularly constituted or determined Incarnation – both natures appear to exhibit agency.78 Problematically for a Christological interaction of contextual universalism, Luther’s concept of unity rests on a base of divine assimilation of human. The distinctiveness of two natures are not maintained, despite Luther’s efforts. In Luther’s communication, human predicates of Christ are changed by the divine nature so that they apply specifically and uniquely to Christ. Thus, when applying the word ‘creature’ to a regular person, it ‘signifies a thing separated from divinity by infinite degrees’.79 A creature is something that is qualitatively different from the divine; when applied to Christ, the presence of the divine nature means that creature ‘signifies a thing inseparably joined with divinity in the same person in an ineffable way’.80

75 76 77 78 79 80

Luther, Disputation, Theses 37–8. Luther, Disputation, Thesis 43. Luther, Disputation, Argument 9. Zwanepol arrives at this conclusion separately. Zwanepol, 52. Luther, Disputation, Thesis 20. Luther, Disputation, Thesis 21.

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While Luther intends this change to preserve the unity of the two natures in Christ by enabling a communication of the divine transformation of the human attribute such that it means something new in Christ, he does not question the ways in which changing the human attribute to mean something new is, in fact, changing it from being human. By redefining the human attribute in divine terms, he is repeating the assimilationist process. While it becomes possible to describe Christ, and Christ as God, using human comparisons without compromising the divine nature, the human nature loses its distinctiveness from the divine. Further, Luther explicitly differentiates between communication of the attributes in a general way and communication in a specific way.81 Thus, it is not possible to say that a generalized attribute of man [sic], that is, he feels fear, is also true of God. It is possible, and necessary, that the specific attribute of the man Jesus, – that he felt fear in the garden of Gethsemane– is true of God as it is true of the divine nature. This is due in part to the way Luther understands the use of language and analogy, and to his argument for specificity of use when speaking of Christ the man, but it is also due to his emphasis on the intended meaning of theological statements rather than on grammatical precision. In Theses 56–63, he argues quite intently that it is the meaning of the words that are to be taken, rather than the literalness of the words themselves. Luther is clear to differentiate between communicatio idiomatum in abstracto and communicatio idiomatum within the unique and specific context of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.82 In Argument 17, Luther says that ‘that unity of the two natures in one person is the greatest possible’.83 Luther emphasizes unity over separation because emphasizing separation leads to the conclusion that either the divine nature or the human nature is stronger than the one person. This, in turn, leads to a denial of the power and existence of either nature; if the divine nature is stronger, the human nature is pushed out, and if the human nature

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Dennis Ngien, ‘Chalcedonian Christology and beyond: Luther’s Understanding of the ‘communicatio idiomatum’, Heythrop Journal 45(1) (January 2004), 54–68. Moltmann, Crucified God, 232. Emphasis added.

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is stronger, the divine nature is pushed out.84 Luther believes that prioritizing unity preserves the two natures and thus the person of Christ. Luther therefore argues that although denying predication of God and the human is correct on a philosophical level, it ultimately denies any ‘relation between the creature and the Creator, between the finite and the infinite’.85 Since this would then deny the relationship between Christ, the cross, and salvation, the Christian must argue ‘not only to establish a relation, but a union of the finite and the infinite’.86 This union, however, blurs the distinctness of the constituent natures and thus does not maintain both human and divine agencies. The ‘theandric energy’ proposed in Maximos the Confessor’s Christology offers more potential. Maximos builds his Christology on a foundation of dyothelitism, in order to preserve the human will (which is naturally good) alongside the divine will. Through ‘theandric energy’ (borrowed from PseudoDionysius), Maximos describes the relationship between two energies/natures/ wills of Christ, the the- (divine) and the -and (human), in which the human submits to the divine but still directs the actual flesh of Jesus, as ‘double [but not a new or doubled] in nature’.87 There is no singular energy to operate as the middle road of hybridity (a ‘borderland between two extremes’), nor are the differences between the divine and human energies subsumed into one – each energy (logos) directs its own nature.88 For Maximos, there is no immediate conflict between the two differences and unity. The ‘affirmation of union’ does not initially negate difference, nor does difference cause division. 84

85 86 87

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For Luther, this is a soteriological issue. If the human nature is pushed out, Christ’s salvation of humans is not accomplished, and if the divine is pushed out, the salvation of Christ is impossible. I would suggest that Luther’s emphasis on this point stems from pastoral concerns. In his context of arguing against indulgences and abuses by the pope and against the too high elevation of the priesthood over the laity in such a way that the laity was crushed, emphasizing the humanity of Christ rather than his divinity, demonstrates to the laity that Christ came for them, and not just for the priests. In that sense, Luther’s emphasis on the humanity of Christ is also based on of the rejection of an ecclesiology that equates the church with triumphalism, and the divine with the clergy. In Luther’s pastoral context, emphasizing the divine nature of Christ would distance the gap between God and the people in a way that would alienate, rather than comfort, them. Luther, Disputation, Argument 20. Luther, Disputation, Argument 20. Maximus and Andrew Louth, trans. and Introduction, Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996), Amb. 5 (1057C), Th Pol 7 (73C, 80B). David Coffey also develops a modern ‘theandric’ Christology rooted in the work of Pseudo-Dionysius. He augments this with Rahner’s anthropology to argue for an enhypostasia in which the divine Word subsists in the human nature. David Coffey, ‘The Theandric Nature of Christ’, Theological Studies 60 (1999), 405–31. Additionally, Knut Alfsvåg examines the incorporation of Pseudo-Dionysius in Luther’s Christology. Knut Alfsvåg, ‘Luther as a reader of Dionysius the Aeropagite’, Studia Theologica 65(2) (December 2011), 101–14. Maximus, Amb. 5 (1065D).

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Maximos’ concept of the unity of the two wills in Christ affirms the hypostatic union. Thus, he states that ‘the [human] nature, united without confusion to [divine] nature, is completely interpenetrated, and in no way annulled or separated from the Godhead hypostatically united to it’.89 Likewise, he writes that ‘the Godhead and the humanity are united hypostatically but neither of the natural energies is displaced by the union, nor are they unrelated to each other after the union, but they are distinguished in their conjuncture and embrace’.90 Maximos is careful to ensure that there is neither confusion nor separation of the two natures. This union exists into the resurrection, and Maximos asserts that ‘with [Christ’s] earthly body that is of the same nature and consubstantiation with ours he entered into heaven … Then, in addition to this, by passing with his soul and body, … through all the divine and intelligible ranks of heaven, he united the sensible and the intelligible’.91 For Maximos, the divine and the human are so united that they do not separate even after death. Yet, Maximos steps back from a true interactivity, developing instead what is a very sophisticated fragmented pluralism. As Thomas Cattoi notes, Maximos tempered the radical nature of his proposal by ‘associating “composition” with the mode of access to the unchanging Logos’.92 Indeed, in Ambigua 5, Maximos makes it clear that despite the union, the natures do not integrally change one another. Using Origen’s sword-in-fire metaphor, Maximos asserts that ‘neither suffers any change by the exchange with the other in union, but each remains unchanged in its own being as it acquires the property of its partner in union. So also in the mystery of the divine Incarnation’.93 Significantly, the two natures do not interact with one another in a mutually formative manner – the anthropological necessity for such a relationality is beyond that

89 90 91 92

93

Maximus, Amb. 5 (1053B). Maximus, Amb. 5 (1060A-B). Maximus, Amb. 41 (1309C). Thomas Cattoi, ‘An Evagrian ὑπὸστασιs? Leontios of Byzantium and the “composite subjectivity” of the person of Christ’, Studia Patristica LXVIII (2011), 147. Maximus, Amb. 5 (1060A).

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which Maximos envisions.94 The two natures exist together, what happens to one happens to the other, and when one acts, the other accompanies, but there is no mutually formative interaction. Ambigua 41 demonstrates most clearly that Maximos is ultimately unable to tolerate a truly both/and nature unity of the two natures that refuses all assimilationism. In this text, Maximos finds the tension caused by proximal differences to be intolerable, and resolves difference by dissolving it; the overarching uniting logos ‘exists free from any division caused by difference’.95 In Christ, the differentiation of the human sexes is put aside, the division of earth and heaven is dissolved, and the difference between human and divine is brought together in Christ. As Christ, consubstantial with humans in his human nature and with God in his divine nature, ascends into heaven, ‘he united the sensible and the intelligible and showed the convergence of the whole of creation with the One according to its most original and universal logos, which is completely undivided and at rest in itself’.96 Difference and particulars are gathered together into the undifferentiated and universal Christ/logos.97 The Logos of the Word is ‘the beginning and the end’ of all other logoi, determining them as it unites them.98 The location of both wills 94

95 96 97

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Thomas A. Watts describes Maximos’ anthropology as one of self-determination, wherein selfdetermined humans act ‘normally without external impulse’ (476). This is an anthropology based on singular constitution, the singularity being the self. The exclusion of external relations leads Maximos to exclude mutual formativity between the two wills and thus to exclude a multiply-determined and multiply-constituted logos. Thomas A. Watts, ‘Two Wills in Christ? Contemporary Objections Considered in the Light of a Critical Examination of Maximus the Confessor’s Disputation with Pyrrhus’, Westminster Theological Journal 71 (2009), 455–87. Maximus, Amb. 41, (1309B). Maximus, Amb. 41 (1309C). Emphasis added. Maximus, Amb. 41 (1309C). Ian McFarland concludes from the same passages that difference is protected in the logos but does not find problematic what I have highlighted, that differentiation is held together in ‘the most universal and generic lógoi’. Amb. 41 (1313A-B) in Ian. A. McFarland, ‘Fleshing Out Christ: Maximus the Confessor’s Christology in Anthropological Perspective’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49(4) (2005), 431. McFarland argues that ‘particulars … have meaning only in the wider context provided by a series of more generic lógoi’ without drawing attention to the homogeneity of the universal and the generic. This is a model example of fragmented pluralism, in which differences exist without interrupting the homogeneity of the unity that holds them together. McFarland, 430–1. ‘L’unité suprême des logoi est réalisée dans et par le Logos, le Verbe de Dieu Lui-Même (7, 1077C, 1081 BC; 41, 1313AB) qui est le principe et la fin de tous les logoi (7, 1077C).’ Larchet unpacks the vast diversity of Maximus’ usage of logos as it refers to everything that is not the Word, accounting for some of the confusion in whether Maximos is a true interactive pluralist or ultimately a fragmented pluralism. Larchet concludes that ‘Les logoi de tous les êtres ont en effet été déterminés ensemble par Dieu dans le Logos divin, le Verbe de Dieu …’ Maximus, Ambigua, Introduction by Jean-Claude Larchet, Forward, Translation and notes by Emmanuel Ponsoye, Commentary by Father Dumitru Staniloae (Paris, Suresnes: Les Éditions l’Arbre de Jessé, 1994), 20–1.

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and energies, and differences, in the logos of the undivided Christ prevents Maximos from building a true interactivity or from proposing a Christ with overlapping memberships in both human and divine contexts.99

Summary The process by which the Incarnation engages in contextual universalism, where the contextual particularity of Jesus as a Jewish human and the universalism of his transcendent divine nature are brought together, has not yet been demonstrated. The attempt to emphasize the unity of the Incarnation has led to a reduction in the differences between the natures, resulting in a universalism that problematically overcomes contextuality. Can balance be achieved by separating the differences of the natures? It is time to examine Christologies that preserve the difference between Christ’s human and divine natures.

99

Thomas Cattoi notes that in Amb. 10, despite the interaction of human and divine in the hypostatic union, ‘the ὑπὸστασιs of the eternal Logos is the organizing principle of the universe no less than the lynchpin of the Incarnation’. Cattoi, 146.

6

Living in the Diaspora: Overlapping Memberships and the Two Natures

Difference and isolation The unity of the one person poses a challenge to the preservation of the difference between Christ’s human and divine natures. Previous attempts at preservation have failed due to the underlying presupposition that multiple differences foster a tension that must be resolved in a tensionless unity. We now turn to approaches that emphasize the preservation of difference in the Incarnation, and evaluate whether they do so at the cost of unity. In the early church, the theotokos debates between Cyril and Nestorius exposed what was at stake when the emphasis was on unity through a Cyrillian hypostatic union or on a Nestorian prosopon that preserved the differences. Having previously reviewed Cyril, we now turn to a summary of Nestorius’ Christology to examine his process for preserving differences. Nestorius’s primary concern in the theotokos debate was that any Christology proposing unity between the human and divine natures in Christ would inevitably contaminate the divine with human characteristics. His stated theological objection to calling Mary the Mother of God was that it implied that God was a created creature, like humans, and that the particular uniqueness and immutable superiority of the divine could not then be maintained.1 His 1

It must be noted that Nestorius’s theology (Christology and Mariology in particular) was influenced by an extreme misogyny, and I have elsewhere argued that his hostility towards Mary was influenced by his hostility towards her secular patron, Empress Pulcheria. Less than one week after being consecrated, Nestorius allegedly refused to commune Pulcheria in the Holy of Holies of the Imperial Chapel, called her the ‘Mother of Satan’, and banned women from leading certain services of the church. Kenneth G. Holum, Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 154. Kate Cooper convincingly argues that Nestorius’s attack on Theotokos was motivated by his direct rejection of Pulcheria’s patronage of his church in Constantinople. Kate Cooper, ‘Contesting the Nativity: Wives, Virgins, and Pulcheria’s imitatio Mariae’, Scottish Journal of Religious Studies 19 (no. 1) (1998), 31–4.

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proposal that Mary be described only as Christotokos, and not Theotokos, was an attempt to protect God’s divinity by erecting barriers between human and divine natures. Nestorius attempts to maintain unity while preserving distinction, but is unable to accomplish the former. In Liber Heraclidis, he argues that ‘each of the natures in Christ makes use of the natural prosopon of the other nature’.2 In Nestorian usage, the prosopon is the hypostatic existence of each ousia, which is not an ontological existence but an existential one. When Nestorius argues that the divine prosopon makes use of the human prosopon in Christ and vice versa, he is still maintaining an ontological separation between human and divine ousie. There is no mutual formativity or determination of one ousia by the other. The prosopa of each nature act together, and together manifest a single will, but Nestorius argues that the determining agent is (ontologically) divine: ‘the ousia of the divinity makes use of the prosopon of the humanity’.3 The divine nature is the active agent in interactions with the human, while the human nature is passive and simply receives the advances of the divine. Nestorius’s language of ‘the taker’ and ‘the taken’, referring to the divine and the human, respectively, allows limited agency to the taken, in allowing itself to have been taken, and preserves the difference between the two natures. It does so, however, at the cost of any substantive interaction. The human prosopon remains simply a tool to be used by the divine being, allowing the Incarnation to take place within a human body, but without influencing the unity. Moving forward several centuries, in the post-Holocaust age, theologians have emphasized the ethical necessity of acknowledging Jesus’ Jewish history and rejecting supersessionist and triumphalist interpretations of the two natures. In the mid-late twentieth century, Paul van Buren attempted to preserve the distinction between divine and human by focusing on the human nature in A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality.4 Van Buren (who claims a liberation theology hermeneutic) sees two alternatives for a nonsupersessionist interpretation of the Incarnation: the first is that Jesus is entirely divine and only temporarily human, an option van Buren dismisses. The second is that 2

3 4

Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition: Vol. 1, From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451), (trans. John Bowden; London: Mowbray, 1965), 442. Nestorius, B440; N282; DrH320 in Grillmeier, 446. Van Buren, 3 vols.

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Jesus is entirely human but authorized by God (proven in the resurrection), an option van Buren endorses. Van Buren built his Christology on the current understanding of his time, which was that Second Temple Judaism, and rabbinic Judaism thereafter, tolerated neither messiahs nor messianism. From that, van Buren argued that neither Jesus nor his immediate and near-immediate followers (i.e. the disciples and Paul) would have considered Jesus to be God.5 Van Buren’s desire was to protect the Jewish humanity of Jesus: ‘It is quite misleading to talk about the divinity of Jesus. The Fourth Gospel demands an infinitely more daring move than to call Jesus a divine man. On the contrary, he is a thoroughly human, a thoroughly Jewish man.’6 Therefore, ‘no greater misunderstanding of this [Gospel] witness could be imagined than the theory that this man has been divinized’.7 Van Buren thus emphasized a separation between the Jew Jesus and the kergymatic Christ, in order to protect the Jewish humanity of Jesus.8 He argued that the Chalcedonian understanding of the Incarnation, which he categorized as an argument for the consubstantiality of Jesus with God, is problematic because it removes Jesus’ agency and overlooks the Jewish context of Jesus (which includes a relationship with God rooted in the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants). By removing from Jesus the claim to divine consubstantiality, Van Buren ruled out the mutual interaction of two natures as a means for understanding the Incarnation. His Christology follows a process that results in a fragmented pluralism model of Jesus, the human Jew, and Christ, the resurrected One, that separates the human and divine natures without holding them in unity. Van Buren’s work sits alongside that of Rosemary Radford Ruether, who also targets the divinization of Jesus as the chief cause of Christology’s supersessionism and anti-Judaism. Ruether puts emphasis on the divinization of the historical Jesus as a ‘historicizing of the eschatological event’, by which she means that later formulations of Christology retroactively interpreted the Incarnation as the coming of the kingdom.9 She argues that prior to this

5 6 7 8 9

Van Buren, Part 1, 85. Van Buren, Part 1, 224. Van Buren, Part 3, 89. See the previous chapter for the problems with describing Jesus as ‘the Jew’. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, 246

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anti-Semitic, literal interpretation of allegory, Jesus’ followers engaged with ‘a historical Jesus as a faithful Jew within the Mosaic covenant’, who did not experience bodily resurrection.10 The historical Jesus was neither the Messiah nor divine, nor did he interpret himself as such. Accordingly, Ruether’s solution is a separation of the divine and the human, and the adoption of a proleptic interpretation of the Resurrection that reinterprets the contemporaneous presence of the divine nature as a Resurrection ‘experience’.11 Ruether does not consider a multiply-constituted interpretation of Jesus, and her proposal, like van Buren’s, engages in a process of radical separation between the human Jesus and the divine nature that follows an extreme form of fragmented pluralism. Consequently, it does not achieve unity because it preserves one nature at the cost of the other. In the twenty-first century, the logic for protecting difference is presented in a unique way in the work of radical orthodoxy. Far from rejecting difference, as assimilationists do, or attempting to isolate it, as the fragmentarians do, theologians of radical orthodoxy argue that difference is a reflection of the diversity contained within and created by God. The way to speak properly of divine incarnation is to highlight the diversity of creation, not its universal homogeneity. The concern of these theologians is similar to concerns of postcolonialists who decry assimilation – the rejection of normative universals. Universalisms extending from the human condition are rejected because of (1) their cause – the totalizing turn to the subject of post-Enlightenment era, and (2) their effect – the reifying of all human difference under the normative image of violent, secular power.12 Summarized by Simon Oliver, radical orthodoxy follows the work of John Milbank, as it ‘leads to a critique of those modern forms of social thought which seek the flattening of difference and the violent

10 11 12

Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, 248–9. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, 249. Radical Orthodoxy’s argument is that, left to their own devices, humans seek and require the presence of power. Once the idea of divine power, or God, has been rejected, a power vacuum emerges, which is filled by whatever secular (i.e. non-God) body desires power. That radical orthodox theologians are against establishing humans as the universalizing mechanism (i.e. universal human values) does not mean they are against universalism in general. Their argument is that the ‘orthodox tradition of faith and reason, theology and philosophy’ is ‘the only solution’ to the secularism of modernity. It is this totalization of a single answer to which many theologians, myself included, object. Simon Oliver, ‘Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: From Participation to Late Modernity’, in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader (eds. Simon Oliver and John Milbank; New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 21 and 24.

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imposition of peace understood as nominalistic uniformity. Difference is ontologically basic within creation and the character of the harmonious good’.13 Graham Ward identifies the contemporary over-humanization of Jesus Christ as an assimilation of the divine to the human. To counter both the process and the result, he proposes to reduce the emphasis on Jesus’ human characteristics. The specific case he is responding to is the feminist concern over the historically normative gender of Jesus: ‘Modern investigations into the sexuality of Jesus, which simply continue the nineteenth-century rational search for the historical Jesus, fail to discern the nature of corporeality in Christ. For these approaches take the human to be a measure of the Christic’.14 His concern is that human categories of description, in this case sexuality and gender, have become normative, determinative, and reductionist of the divine, ‘Christic’ nature. His goal, then, is ‘to step outside of the turn to the subject and the cult of human. I wish to avoid reducing “Jesus,” “Christ” or “body” to identifiable and locatable entities’.15 Ward argues that so long as Christ’s divinity is assumed into his humanity and Christology becomes a focus only on the human, the body of Christ cannot be the agent of salvation. Ward resists the objections that an emphasis on Christ’s particular gendered human embodiment leads to the exclusion of humans who do not share that embodiment. He argues that the problem does not stem from an emphasis on particularity, but from an overemphasis on Jesus’ humanity in general.16 Ward identifies the real problem as an insufficient incorporation of the incommensurable difference between Christ’s human embodiment and his divine transcendence. While the problem may initially appear as too much separation between human and divine natures, Ward argues that the problem is actually the complete assimilation of the divine nature into the human, wherein all the agency and unity occur in the human nature, which is itself made normative for descriptions of divine characteristics. Ward proposes to reclaim the divine nature and its role in helping the human nature of Christ to transcend particularities. He attempts this with

13 14

15 16

Oliver, 11. Graham Ward. ’Bodies: The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ’ in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, (eds. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), 163. Graham Ward, ‘The Schizoid Christ’, in Oliver, 229. See the concerns on contextualizing Christ in the previous chapter.

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the argument that bodies do not hold significance in their materiality, but as signs and signifiers that perform identity.17 Accordingly, arguments for the particulars of Jesus’ corporeality, for example, his maleness, to be made normative are invalidated as normativity cannot be constructed on performativity. Using this logic, he argues that ‘the body of Jesus Christ, the body of God, is permeable, transcorporeal, transpositional. Within it all other bodies are situated and given their significance. We are all permeable, transcorporeal and transpositional. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ”’.18 Ward concludes that ‘the body of Christ is a multigendered body. Its relation to the body of the gendered Jew does not have the logic of cause and effect’.19 According to Ward, the divine nature cannot be united with Jesus’ particular human body, since human particulars are always, and only, constructed. However, if one were to place Ward’s dismissal of feminist concerns over the male body of Christ alongside concern over the Christianized body of the Jewish Jesus, his proposal becomes much more problematic. This analogy is possible because Ward refers to gender in terms of Butler’s performativity, just as one might refer to the religious identity of a believer.20 As happens to Jesus’ gender, Jesus’ Jewishness also becomes displaced in resurrection, ascension, and finally completely neutralized in its incorporation into the Church. By referring to the transcendent body as multigendered, Ward is attempting to protect the infinitely diverse and therefore universally relatable nature of Jesus’ incarnation. However, his process of assimilating historical contingency (i.e. gender) into a plurally particular multigender effectively nullifies gender altogether – ‘neither male nor female’ – along with Jesus’ Jewishness – ‘neither

17 18 19 20

Ward, ‘The Schizoid Christ’, 173. Ward, ‘The Schizoid Christ’, 176. Ward, ‘The Schizoid Christ’, 177. Ward’s interpretation of Butler is based on his reading of Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, NY: Routledge, 1990). In the later Bodies That Matter, Butler reviews her proposal of performativity in greater depth and with greater clarity, arguing that performativity cannot be reduced to a performance, in which the actor simply presents something they are not, and then leaves the stage and returns to their pre-performance life. Rather, performativity changes the actor through ‘materialization’, even as the actor changes the performance through ‘construction’. Thus, gender, and in Ward’s example the Jewish religious performativity of Jesus, is not so easily abandoned or transformed as Ward indicates. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 2, 9–10, 15, and 27–30.

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Jew nor Greek’.21 Ward’s protection of divine difference assimilates human difference and does away with unity (as equality) altogether.

Difference and hybridity (the third space is no space) Can differences be preserved without sacrificing unity? In order to challenge the historically normative status assigned to singularly derived identities, and to occupy a middle ground between elimination and exaggeration of differences, postcolonial theologians have embraced theories of hybridity for their usefulness in constructing ‘the space of postcolonial theory, an “inbetween space,” in which the boundaries between identity and difference, between cultures, nationalities, and subjects are called into question’.22 In this space, Homi Bhabha’s ‘interstitial perspective’ is employed as a hermeneutic of suspicion that derails processes of differentiation dependent upon binaries such as pure/impure, orthodox/heretical, human/divine, and self/ other.23 According to Mayra Rivera, this derailing occurs because, quoting Bhabha’s Location of Culture, ‘hybridity is “not a third term that resolves the tension between two cultures [or two religions or two ontological poles]… [It] creates a crisis” for authority based on a system of recognition’.24 21

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Jacobs argues, as does Virginia Burrus, that Ward appears overly threatened by both the feminist critique and the lack of corporeality. See Jacobs, 98–9 and Virginia Burrus, ‘Radical Orthodoxy and the Heresiological Habit: Engaging Graham Ward’s Christology’, in Interpreting the Postmodern: Responses to Radical Orthodoxy (eds. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Marion Grau; New York, NY: T&T Clark, 2006), 36–53. Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera, eds., Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2004), 3. See the following as examples of postcolonial theory’s interdisciplinary applications: literary studies – Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Donna Landry, and Gerald M. MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York, NY: Routledge, 1996), cultural studies (Homi K. Bhabha), transnational/transcultural studies – Edward W. Said, Moustafa Bayoumi, and Andrew Rubin, The Edward Said Reader (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2000), ancient Church history/early rabbinics – Daniel Boyarin and Virginia Burrus, ‘Hybridity as Subversion of Orthodoxy? Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity’, Social Compass 52 (2005): 431–41. Jacobs observes, however, that processes of hybridity extends back even to the Roman Empire, which ‘managed and controlled difference [that] resulted in a productive, yet disruptive, hybridity within the imperial self ’. Jacobs, 102. Bhabha’s definition stands in contrast to Rita Nakashima Brock’s development of interstitial integrity, where interstitial is ‘not organ tissue… but… connects the organs’, and is made of ‘connective tissues’. It is ‘distinct but inseparable’ and operates as a ‘channel’ to and from ‘things separated and different’. It holds together a unity of different parts, as a ‘living… unity, both many and one’. It is the means for mixing and improvising, constructing rather than deconstructing. Rita Nakashima Brock, ‘Cooking Without Recipes: Interstitial Integrity’, in Brock et al., 126. Bhabha, 114. (First bracketed alteration is Rivera’s.)

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Rather than supporting a system that presents two oppositional (and hierarchicalized) parties, the hybrid throws the authority of the system into doubt through its very presence. Forced to claim an identity that is either a or b, the hybrid claims for itself the identity of 5, something outside the pre-established system of the dominant power. The hybrid subject subverts power through a defiance or rejection or, in Rivera’s theological project, a spilling over of classification that allows it to slip through and around the boundaries erected by the homogeneity-aspiring power. In the process, hybridity exposes vulnerabilities and derails processes that engage in fragmented pluralism as a means for negotiating difference.25 Accordingly, hybridity holds promise for negotiations of difference in the Incarnation that do not assimilate or isolate either nature, and that considers multiple agency to be necessary for preserving difference and maintaining unity. Kwok Pui-Lan, who relies on Bhabha as well as on Stuart Hall, argues that hybridity challenges the claims to purity as the basis for authority by presenting the hybrid as an internal impurity that ‘destabilizes the frame of reference/frame of mind’ of the colonial power.26 As Kwok makes a point of noting, Bhabha’s particular use of hybrid entails the idea that ‘hybridity is not simply the mixing of two languages or the juxtaposition of two cultures, as our liberal or “pluralistic” understanding presents it, as if the two were on equal footing. Rather, hybridity in postcolonial discourse deals specifically with the colonial authority and power of representation.’27 Hybridity is the result of interactions between groups that are never equivalent, and never neutral. This interaction approaches the benchmarks of unity, equality, and full agency introduced in Chapter 5 as necessary for a fully interactive and mutually formative Christology. An example of hybridity can be found in the work of Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, who uses hybridity theory to develop a theological anthropology

25

26 27

Postcolonial theologians have tended to rely on the work of Bhabha, Spivak, and Hall. An exception to this is the hybridity theory of Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Monopoly on Salvation? A Feminist Approach to Religious Pluralism (New York, NY: Continuum, 2005). Fletcher’s theology of hybridity is derived more from Morwenna Griffiths’s Feminisms and the Self than from Bhabha or Spivak. See especially Fletcher’s ‘Chapter Four: We Are All Hybrids’. Kwok, 171. Kwok, 170.

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dependent on the understanding of Christ as mestizo,28 wherein mestizaje means historical and biological mixing, as well as cultural interactions and ‘mutual exchange’.29 Utilizing the definitions of hybridity that come from various US Hispanic and Latino/a theologians, Rodríguez begins with the work of Virgilio Elizondo, particularly his Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise. Elizondo defines mestizaje as ‘the generation of a new people from two disparate parent peoples’, where to be mestizo is ‘to have closeness to and distance from both parent cultures’.30 Rodríguez relies on Elizondo’s work because it established universal liberation through relationality with God, and not exclusionary practices. The hybrid ‘transcends its parent cultures and becomes a new humanity’, unified by the transcendence achieved in Christ.31 Rodríguez also incorporates the work of Luis G. Pedraja, Jesus Is My Uncle: Christology from a Hispanic Perspective, in which Pedraja defines mestizaje ‘as a process of dialogical communication that enables social transformation and liberations’.32 In Pedraja’s understanding, two groups are situated within a historical context in which one group dominates the other, and yet the two originating groups together marginalize the resulting hybrid. There is thus a distance between the parent cultures and the offspring hybrid that does not exist in Elizondo’s presentation. This distance, coupled with the resultant oppression, causes Pedraja, and thus Rodríguez, to incorporate a liberationist ethic of praxis into their Christologies: ‘U.S. Latino/a theologians like Luis Pedraja intentionally embrace mestizaje – rather than the more universal (also more abstract) paradigm of hybridity, because they want to make a specific criticism about the dominant understanding of cultural interaction’.33 28

29

30

31 32

33

Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, Racism and God-Talk: A Latino/a Perspective (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2008). Rodríguez’ work demonstrates both hybrid practice (his theological method) and the hybrid person (Christ as mestizo). Rodríguez, 16–7. To emphasize the distinct contextuality emerging from the US Hispanic/ Latino/a experience of colonization, Rivera and others rely on mestizaje/mulatez as a ‘critical tool for rethinking identity in/as mixture’, which ‘implies that the singularity of an individual becomes unthinkable outside a network of relations’, and that ‘subjectivity [is] formed by an affinity’ historically encountered and thus contextualized and particular. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 80. Virgilio Elizondo, Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2nd ed., revised and enlarged, 2000), 5 and 18. Rodríguez, 85. Rodríguez, 86. Luis G. Pedraja, Jesus Is My Uncle: Christology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1999). Rodríguez, 207.

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Rodríguez’ particular development of hybridity theology thus incorporates universal transcendence, liberationist praxis, and fluid identities based on interaction. His approach to Jesus becomes a ‘mestizo reinterpretation of the doctrine of the Incarnation affirms that God is incarnate here and now in our own work’.34 In his Christology, Rodríguez defends the presence of both natures with Pedraja’s statement that, in the Incarnation, ‘both humanity and divinity come together to create a new reality that includes both while preserving their differences’.35 To protect the human nature, he follows Sobrino in emphasizing the necessity for incorporating the historical context of Jesus: ‘The “scandal of particularity” demands that we take seriously every aspect of the humanity of God – his death included – for it is in the history of this particular person (a marginalized Galilean who transgressed social boundaries to bring good news to the poor and oppressed) that God is known’.36 Rodríguez proclaims that this Jesus, who acts for and with the poor and oppressed, is the Messiah, called to be politically involved, to work for the deliverance of his nation by God, and chosen and appointed by God to lead. In this role, Jesus, although influenced by a religious context that includes the Old Testament prophets and writers, ‘transforms the understanding of messiah as God’s anointed ruler (prophet, priest, king) by modeling a radically different form of leadership’.37 Jesus rejects the political expectations of institutional, national leadership, and instead chooses the path of suffering and death. It is this transformation of contextual expectations that brings Christ into the mestizo framework. His historical existence as a political supporter of the poor comes together with his current presence amongst Latino/a Christians in their own contexts of working with, for, and as the poor and oppressed, making him a hybrid. Despite the promise of preserving difference through hybridity, there is a difficult contradiction between the goals of theologians of hybridity and the contextualizing processes they use. They reject colonialism’s use of categories of purity (i.e. singularity) to enforce homogeneity, categories in which, ‘when not dismissed as aberrant, their hybridity is simply disavowed by 34 35 36 37

Rodríguez, 177. Pedraja, 83 in Rodríguez, 176. Rodríguez, 199. Rodríguez, 187.

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forcing the hybrid into recognizable categories of “outsiders” or “insiders”’.38 Notwithstanding this rejection of exclusionary categorization, the process used in hybridity theologies enables the disavowal of Jesus’ religious particularity. As a result, the claim for the body of Christ hybridity theologies take him away from his own ‘territory’ and suppress his religious part, erasing half of his body (as is done to hybrids) as he is ‘purified’ for Christianity. In hybridity theologies, Christians borrow Jesus from his colonized SecondTemple-era Jewish environment, resulting in a suppression, if not elimination, of his religious context. Consequently, Jesus is relocated out of his Jewishreligious context and into a new one.39 Such a process dislocates Jesus and disembodies him, stripping him of his particularity as a Jew and purifying him of his religious difference. Problematically, Rodríguez’s Christology utilizes a process of fragmentation when he engages in a segregated appropriation of what it means for Jesus to be Jewish. Building on Sobrino, who ‘regards the history of Jesus as basic and essential to the dogmatic assertion that Christ is the eternal Son’,40 Rodríguez argues that ‘in linking Jesus’ biological heritage to his saving work, we risk granting ethnicity soteriological status, hence the importance of recalling what is salvific about Jesus Christ is not his static essence (his Jewishness, his maleness, etc.) but his praxis (in complete obedience to God’s will)’.41 Rodríguez assigns Jesus’ Jewishness to a purely ethnic category, and then rejects it. In his attempt to transcend Jesus’ ethnic particularity (problematic in and of itself), he also transcends Jesus’ religious particularity, which is inseparably linked to his Jewishness. By rejecting Jewishness as a ‘static essence’, Rodríguez is rejecting one of the contextualities that makes Jesus who he is. Further, Rodríguez interprets Pedraja’s project in a more drastic measure, claiming that ‘keeping “Christology enmeshed in the flesh-and-blood existence of human life” requires

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Mayra Rivera, ‘God at the Crossroads: A Postcolonial Reading of Sophia’ in Keller et al., 197. Jacobs, arriving at the same conclusion after studying the relationship between the early Church’s development of orthodoxy and Christ’s circumcision, states that, ‘working through the doubleedged sign of Christ’s circumcision, orthodox Christianity subversively mirrors the hybridity of Jewish Christianity, successfully constructing, appropriating, and internalizing the (now corrected) religious truths of the Jewish “other”’. Jacobs, 118. Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads (trans. Cesar Jerez; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1978), 337. Rodríguez, 176–7. Emphasis added.

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appropriating the Galilean identity of Jesus’.42 Flesh-and-blood existence involves not just social praxis but also religious practice, and the flesh-andblood existence of the Galilean Jesus was a Jewish one, circumcised, eating kosher, attending Temple during High Holy Days. Although Rodríguez is attempting to overcome the static and potentially totalizing categories invoked in discussions of ethnicity, and that his focus is liberation’s emphasis on praxis, the process he uses fragments Jesus, and indeed separates him from one of his constitutive contexts. Despite Rodríguez’ claims that ‘by emphasizing the Incarnation, theology can… focus on the whole life of Jesus’, his appropriation of Jesus for US Hispanics separates Jesus from his Jewish context and segments his body.43 Hybridity theologies’ problematic re-inscription of the very binaries and dualisms they seek to overcome is caused by its location in the ‘in-between’ binaries and by the use of Bhabha’s ‘interstitial perspective’ and ‘Third Space’ to occupy the contested spaces between centres.44 Bhabha’s apophatic ‘neither the one nor the other’, and the Bhabhaian space of the hybrid, is a space of absence, where there is, once again, neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female.45 It cannot speak to Jesus Christ as a unity with two natures, who is both human and divine, not neither divine nor human. The interstitial and between contribute to a negation of belonging, and not to multiple membership. In the interstice, Jesus does not have overlapping memberships, he has no membership. Jesus Christ the hybrid would be neither fully human nor fully divine, given that ‘all human subjectivity is plural, contradictory, socially embedded, and mutually constitutive’, something that hybridity overlooks.46 Jesus becomes stateless, rather than holding dual citizenship.

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Pedraja, 127. Rodríguez, 201. Emphasis in original. Michelle Voss Roberts deals with this issue from the angle of comparative theology, working out the differences and similarities between Mechthild of Magdeburg and Lalle´swari of Kashmir. Michelle Voss Roberts, Dualities (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010). Michelle A. Gonzalez, ‘Who Is Americana/o? Theological Anthropology, Postcoloniality, and the Spanish-Speaking Americas’ in Keller et al., 61. Cristina Beltran, ‘Patrolling Borders: Hybrids, Hierarchies, and the Challenge of Mestizaje’, Political Research Quarterly 57 (4) (2004), 607. Cristina Beltran examines the claim that hybridity is ‘inherently… anti-essentialist’ and concludes that theories of hybridity ‘will always fall short as an alternative approach to theorizing so long as it continues to reify existing categories rather than calling our understanding of subjectivity into question’. Beltran, 607.

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While the foundational emphasis of hybridity theologians is the theological importance of the historical context of Jesus’ life, the process for establishing this foundation ignores Jesus’ religious particularity. Although the process claims to result in a hybrid/mulatto/mestizo Jesus whose status as an oppressed Jew enables him to share in the oppression universally shared by everyone in contexts of marginalization, the process of drawing him into solidarity with contemporary oppressed communities restricts him to partial membership and eliminates some of his contexts. It ignores Jesus’ membership within his religious community, and on occasion sets him up in opposition to it. It also acts on the presupposition that formation by one’s cultural context can be separated from formation by one’s religious context, privileging the contextual formation of culture over that of religion. While hybrid theologians so often claim that a mix of culture and religion is constitutive of their own contexts, and they reject attempts to segregate them as the move of a totalitarian and oppressive system, they too often repeat this segregation in their own recontextualization of Jesus. Such oversight begins in a process of fragmented pluralism, in which certain desirable elements are separated out from other undesirable elements in an attempt to divide the hybrid into its component parts in order to reconstitute it in a new ‘hybridized’ form. Recalling Chidester’s critique of the apartheid approach to categorizing religion, as mentioned in Chapter 2, hybridity becomes a new process for categorizing and separating Jesus’ similarities and differences into ‘religion’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘praxis’, a simplification intended to give the theologian control over the body of Jesus in order to hybridize it in a new way. Such control manifests as a segregation of Jesus whereby his ethnic, colonized, and/or minority status are accepted, while his religion is rejected. Hybridity theology engages in a process of fragmented pluralism because, like the homogenous Christologies it critiques, it sees difference as a tension requiring resolution. It thus proposes ‘partial’ membership in multiple groups, excluding the possibility of ‘full’ memberships that overlap. Typically, this process excludes overlapping memberships insofar as the constitutive formativity of Jesus’ Jewish context on his humanity is denied. Consequently, a Christology of multiple formativity of the one person by two natures is not reached.

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Thinking both/and In 1995, Jung Young Lee presciently critiqued hybridity for claiming the third space: I disagree with those who think that marginal people are outside of the two different worlds. They cannot have an independent existence as the third category of people. They are, in spite of their alienation from two worlds, part of them. Marginality is being at the margin that connects both worlds. That is why marginal people have no independent place of existence as such. Their transcendence is possible only in their immanence.47

Lee, in place of alienated, fragmented hybridity, proposes the concept of marginality. He describes it as in-beyond, which is a combination of being in-between two groups (neither this nor that), as third-space hybrids are typically described, and being in-both, which speaks to fuller participation in multiple groups (both this and that). In-beyond is the relational place of neither/nor and both/and. It brings together divine transcendence in the apophatic neither/nor and complete immanence in the kataphatic both/ and.48 Lee uses in-beyond as neither/nor/both/and to propose Jesus-Christ as a hyphenated existence, drawing analogies from his experience as an AsianAmerican, most of whom feel themselves fully Asian and fully American while simultaneously excluded from ‘pure’ Asian and ‘pure’ American communities. To explain the relationship of the two natures in unity, Lee proposes that ‘Jesus is the Christ, while the Christ is also Jesus’.49 The relationship between the human and the divine in Jesus is so interwoven that Lee makes the argument that Christ is fully divine as a result of being fully human, and vice versa. Using the analogy of yin-yang, where a portion of yin is within the yang, and vice versa, he describes Christ as in-both (both/and) human and divine. Christ’s divinity is present in his humanity, and his humanity

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Jung Young Lee, Marginality: The Key to Multicultural Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), 61. Lee, Marginality, 72. Lee, Marginality, 78.

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is present in his divinity.50 From this position, Jesus Christ is present as the existential expression of the Creator and as the normative existence of ‘ultimate reality’.51 As promising as Lee’s Christology appears for a Christology of multiple formativity, I have two concerns. The first is that, as Lee admits, his proposal for in-beyond is theoretical and moves towards a dissolution of difference. His Christology describes a Christ in which the ‘distinction between man (sic) and God disappears’ and in which the human and the divine become so intertwined with one another that Christ ‘is fully divine because he is fully human. He is a perfect man because he is a perfect God’.52 Lee describes difference within Christ as disappeared, ‘indistinguishable’, and ‘undifferentiated’.53 This lack of differentiation leads to a lack of, or erasure of, particularity and explains why his picture of Christ is vague. Christ, for Lee, is a kind of ‘New Adam’, generically human, with no particularities or specific context. In the in-both model, Lee struggles to describe a true both/and that is particularly present in divinity and in humanity. This lack of particularity is perhaps responsible for what I perceive as a second area of concern. In order to assert the newness and uniqueness (i.e. particularity) of Jesus, Lee resorts to a Jesus-versus-the Jews framework. In order to establish Jesus’ status as in-between (neither/nor), Lee describes Jesus as being marginalized and rejected by his own people, with a message of love that was preached in contrast to the people of Jesus’ day.54 Not only does this lead to a supersessionist Christology, but it also contradicts Lee’s own methodology. When Jesus is set against his own context and people, he remains only in-between, and never in-both. This is not to say that Lee argues that Jesus is not in-both. Insofar as Jesus is divine, he is in-both, just as God is infinitely transcendent, an example of multiple both/ands.55 Jesus is also both human and divine, with his divinity 50

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Jung Young Lee, The Theology of Change: A Christian Concept of God in an Eastern Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979), 98. Lee, Theology of Change, 100. Jung Young Lee, ‘The Perfect Realization of Change’ in Sugirtharajah, 71. Lee, Theology of Change, 70. Lee, Marginality, 79 and 84. Lee, Marginality, 72.

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‘presupposing’ his humanity, and his humanity presupposing his divinity.56 Yet the in-both of Lee’s Christology entails a transcendence of difference, where difference is eradicated, not incorporated or included. While Lee appears to recognize the tension between the yin-yang model and the transcendence of difference, a recognition evidenced by his proposal of the in-between (neither/nor) that leads to the in-beyond model, his articulation of Christ as in-beyond avoids any deep engagement with the particularities and differences of Christ’s human existence. Christ is in his human nature in a superficial way, and beyond it in his divine nature. Lee’s approach to the two natures achieves equality and unity, but not a full participation of both.

A process for differentiating unity The differences that are erased in Lee’s in-beyond are retrieved by integrating Erskine’s concept of overlapping membership. Erskine’s proposal emerges from her concern that shared commonality does not guarantee feelings of affinity or compatriot and compassionate actions and can, in fact, be used to inflict pain on one’s enemies, as witnessed in Abu Ghraib torture handbooks.57 Relying on similarities to build relationality runs the risk of reinforcing the normativity of similarities and does not allow for difference to be constitutive. Since Erskine’s concern, as part of the feminist project with which she identifies, is to foreground non-coercive inclusion, particularly the inclusion of difference, she argues for relationalities that are built not on feelings of affiliation or fondness for shared contextualities but on the particular universalities of the contexts themselves.58 Sharing in given contextualized universalities bestows ‘membership’ on the individual participating in the relevant context and generates multiple memberships as the individual participates in multiple contexts. Overlapping memberships allow ‘full’ membership in multiple communities and Jesus’ two natures to participate fully in the one person. In Chapter 3,

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Lee, Theology of Change, 99. Erskine, 215. ‘Embedded cosmopolitanism has no need of – and could not hope to elicit – a “universal moment” in order to achieve inclusion’. Erskine, 216.

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I introduced the analogy of blue and yellow gels overlapping to produce a green light. In an analogous way, the person of Jesus participates in full and overlapping memberships in the divine and human natures. (The difference between Jesus and the gels lies in participation – the gel analogy involves a static overlap that does not reflect the dynamism of overlapping membership in people.) As a human, Jesus participates in the one person in the same way that all humans participate in their own personhood: on the basis of his own particularity, which is multiply-constituted and multiply-determined by his different contexts, and by constituting and determining those contexts. This particularity is what I am calling the universal of human existence. As divine, Jesus’ participation is constituted of and determined by the divine nature’s transcendence as transparticularized (i.e. universal), transterritorial, and transtemporal, which means that there are no boundaries from which to force either inclusion or exclusion. As one person, Jesus is, to return to Lee’s terminology, both a particular human and transcendentally divine, and neither only a particular human nor only transcendentally divine, just as green is both blue and yellow, and neither only blue nor only yellow. Erskine’s overlapping full membership and different differences enable us to posit full humanity and full divinity working together in one person without fragmented or partial belonging, or without one agent taking over.

Summary Startlingly, the attempt to preserve the unity in the person of the Incarnation by arguing for the assimilation of the human to the divine stems from the same place as the argument for isolating and establishing non-interactivity between the two natures. Both arguments are rooted in a presupposition that the equal (not equivalent) interactivity between two (ontologically) different parties is not possible. The unity camp thus argues for the necessity of assimilationism, while the separation camp argues for the necessity of fragmented pluralism. As Susan Abraham puts it, Theism… seems to be overly dependent on the pole of transcendence… and thus overly inimical to the concerns of much liberation-oriented thinking concerned with culture and power. Feminist and other critical

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frameworks seem to overly emphasize the immanence pole and seem to have sacrificed transcendence, reasserting the postmodern separation between transcendence and immanence.59

At this juncture, the challenge of maintaining the unity of the one person of the Incarnation is in holding together the transcendence and immanence of Christ without either one taking over and dismissing the other. This must be managed without assimilating the one to the other, or without resorting to a fragmented pluralism or ghettoization, of the two natures, wherein transcendence and immanence exist but without any contact or influence on one of another. The question is how the universal can relate to the particular, and vice versa, and secondarily, how the particular can relate to other particulars without resorting to a homogenizing universal to keep them together. Framed by Dhamoon’s matrix of differentiation, treatments of the divine nature and treatments of the human nature demonstrate a similarity: they both attempt to manage what is different in regards to either God or Jesus. Because they are entangled in a matrix, the way in which the difference between divine and human is managed has ramifications for the ways in which Jesus’ human existence is treated differently from other individuals’ existences. A divine nature that assimilates and overruns the human nature results in a Jesus whose humanity may be representative, but whose ‘Jewishness’ (that aspect of him that is constituted by him living in a Jewish context) is ignored or rejected. The aparticular Jesus continues to ascribe to a kind of universal humanism that makes irrelevant any contribution of Jesus’ context to his life or teaching. Paradoxically, the particularity that defines him specifically as human loses its power and uniqueness when he loses the characteristic of being divine that is uniquely his. On the other hand, a Jesus whose human nature excludes the possibility of divine participation as the Christ is not capable of being in the infinitely multiple relationships through which believers can be in relationship with him. Without the context of the divine nature, without Jesus being a full member of the divine, it is not possible to argue that he is in relationship with any and every follower regardless of their own particular spatial and temporal location. Both divine and human natures are necessary, in equality, unity, and fullness. 59

Susan Abraham, ‘The Pterodactyl in the Margins: Detranscendentalizing Postcolonial Theology’ in Moore, 85.

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My proposal, then, entails both a transgression of boundaries that mark difference and the maintenance of them.60 I argue that once theologians abandon the presupposition that differences cause conflictual tension and consequently move beyond attempts to control those differences, they can embrace a new model of how the two natures exist together in a multiplyformative unity. In this new model for a relationship of difference in the Incarnation, the human nature and the divine nature exist in the overlapping memberships of the one person that ‘builds difference into the very concept of equality, breaks the traditional equation of equality with similarity, and is immune to monist distortion’.61

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Derrida and the post-structuralists would of course argue that it is impossible to transgress boundaries without maintaining them, and that the one serves to reinforce the other. Parekh, 240.

Part Four

The Transparticular Person – Passing through Chalcedon

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At Home: The Contextual Universals of the Jewish Jesus

Contextual universals I have suggested that the one person in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ is formatively constituted of the humanity of Jesus, a particular and historically located (Jewish) individual, defined as one who informs and is informed by his contextualities and co-formative relationships. The person of the Incarnation is also formatively constituted of the divinity of Jesus, defined as radically Other and transcendent, unrestricted by human limitations that include a single spatial and temporal existence. In the Incarnation, a mutually co-formative relationship of these two natures exists as the overlapping memberships of the one person in the contexts of the two natures, in which full participation and responsiveness is demonstrated by both sides. The Incarnation demonstrates one person who is multiple: fully human and fully divine. In his humanity, Jesus is constituted of his contextual relationships. That one’s reality is relationally formed by one’s particular contexts is a universal shared by every other human individual. The shared reality that humans exist in contextualities (the particular contextuality in its totality is never shared, only that there is such a thing for every individual) permits Jesus to recognize the contextualities of others. As Jesus enters into these contextualities by way of relationalities (defined as memberships), Jesus is formed by these new contexts and forms them reciprocally, co-formation being integral to human relationality and therefore existence. In his divinity, the possibility of responding in relationality to each and every contextually and particularly located individual – to relate or engage in

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membership universally, as it were – is made an actuality through the divine presence. Humans cannot relate transtemporally (although technology has possibly enabled transspatial relationalities) and thus the divine nature offers to Jesus the actuality of participating beyond his own time and space, and of being in an infinite number of uniquely constructed relationships through transparticularity.1 The unassimilable Otherness of the divine nature prevents any assimilation of Jesus by those with whom he is in relationship, and enables his participation in millions of relationships and thus millions of contexts. Together, these natures come together in the one person in a mutual formativity that requires the full agency of each nature and accommodates the characteristics of each: without the human nature, relationalities based on contextual universalisms are impossible and without the divine nature, relationality dissolves into assimilationism and cannot expand beyond the human limitations of time and space. This proposal responds to the objection that the presence of two agencies causes a tension or split in the single person, an objection that itself presupposes that unity is predicated on singularity and uniformity. Instead, I have proposed that the person of the Incarnation is constituted of a multiply-formed relationality between natures that resembles what multicultural theory calls interactive pluralism. This ongoing relationship of mutual formativity and agency is predicated on multiple and overlapping memberships in one person, and I have rooted the relationship between the particularity of Jesus’ humanity and the universality of Jesus’ divinity in ‘contextual universalism’. The person of the Incarnation is the epitome of contextual universalism, and can be described – with only a touch of postcolonial irony – as the contextual universal. As the contextual universal, the uniqueness and irreplaceability of the human nature in its individuality are protected, just as the same characteristics of the divine nature have been historically protected.

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The implicit assumption underlying this claim is that it is not possible for humans to be in a coformative relationality once they have died – a dead person cannot be formed or influenced. Such an assumption relies on a further assumption that the subject and the person of a human are so interrelated that the subject, as forming and formed by its contexts, does not exist apart from the person. When the body dies, the subject (and person) no longer exists. These assumptions therefore rule out the possibility of a post-death soul or spirit. Such a conclusion should not be interpreted as an explicit denial of the Christian confession, ‘I believe in… the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting’, an issue which is outside the scope of this work due to its reliance on one’s understanding of eschatology.

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Christ Jesus, like all humans, is entirely particular: contextually located, irreplaceable, and irreducible. For Christology, this means that recognizing and incorporating his Jewish particularity, along with his other particularities, forms the indisputable foundation for all discourse on the Incarnation. Additionally, this contextuality necessarily shapes those with whom Jesus is in relationship, affirming Jesus’ formative agency in the Incarnation. Because Jesus Christ is the contextual universal, his ability to be in a contextually based relationship without losing his own contextuality is unconstrained; because he is within the limited boundaries of the contextual universals, he is recognized as being comprised of more than a single context and thus maintains his own particularity. As the contextual universal, Christ Jesus shares the unique universals of each community in which he participates. Thus, he is able to engage in and represent, in totality and through transparticularity, any given particular context without exclusion. As universal, Jesus Christ engages in contextually based relationships that cross space and time, unlimited by the spatiotemporal constraints of human bodies. In this way, the person of Jesus is, in addition to being the contextual universal, universally contextual. Although this might appear paradoxical and mutually exclusive, such tension is negotiated by recognizing that the relationality of the particularity of human existence and the infinite transcendence of the divine nature is already constituted of multiplicity, and far from destroying, the integrity of each nature constitutes them. This necessary paradox is the overlapping memberships of the one person with two natures.2 The one person’s overlapping participation in multiple memberships – his capacity for dual citizenship – in the human and divine contexts upends the dichotomy between particularity and universality. This moves us forward to a nonsupersessionist Christology that retains the human and divine natures in interactivity. But does this Christology work? Does a Christology based on contextual universalism and overlapping 2

My claim contradicts that of Pius XII in Sempiternus Rex Christus, in which he rejects Christologies that define Christ’s human nature in the Incarnation so ‘as to make it seem something existing in its own right and not as subsisting in the Word itself ’. Pius XII, ‘Sempiternus Rex Christus’, Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 1951. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/ hf_p-xii_enc_08091951_sempiternus-rex-christus_en.html (Accessed 18 June 2013), 31. My claim proposes that the human nature exists in its own right (insofar as it is not entirely determined by the Word), and that it subsists with the Word.

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membership address the three braided concerns, introduced in the Chapter 1, of preserving Jesus’ historical existence as a Second Temple Jew, incorporating his difference as human and divine, and accounting for his ongoing relationship with contemporary Christian disciples? This chapter will explore Jesus’ attitude towards non-Jews, to which is related the question of Jesus’ relationship with the Mosaic Law. Jesus’ attitude, as a Jew, towards Gentiles throws into sharp contrast the tension between Jesus’ historical particularity as a Jew and his relationship with individuals in other contexts as made possible through his transcendence. Here, the differences between particularity/contextuality/humanity and universality/transcendence/divinity crystallize. After unfolding the complicated relationships of Jesus with Jews and Christians that developed during Jesus’ historically embedded existence, we will turn to the related issue known as Jesus’ Passion – his suffering, death, and resurrection. The tension in this issue is located in the particularity of Jesus’ historical suffering as it is claimed by contextual and liberation Christologies in the name of their own oppression. Here, again, particularity and contextuality are brought together with universality and the differences intensified. While addressing these issues, this chapter and the next follow the benchmarks for a nonsupersessionist, mutually formative Christology developed in Chapter 6: (a) an equality between the two natures that respects the difference between divinity and humanity such that they exist without one assimilating the other, (b) full participation of the human and divine natures, and (c) a unity in the one person that is mutually formative and interactive.

Jesus and non-Jews Several Gospel passages highlight Jesus’ encounter with non-Jews: the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15.21–8, repeated as the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7.24–30, and a Gentile soldier in Luke 7.1–10. The passages follow a similar narrative path. First, a healing request is made of the Jewish Jesus by a non-Jewish individual, introducing tension. The tension intensifies as Jesus initially rejects the request, either directly as in Matthew and Mark, where Jesus himself rejects the non-Jewish appeal on the basis of his focus on ‘only’ Israel

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(Matthew 15.24), or indirectly as in Luke, where Jewish intercessors intervene to plead the Gentile soldier’s case. In each case, the Gentile’s appeal is reissued, along with a justification for Jesus’ reconsideration, whereupon the tension is resolved as Jesus, reacting to the faith of the non-Jew, changes his mind about the singularity of his focus and grants the individual’s request for healing. The contrast of Jesus and the non-Jews is revealing. If Jesus is firmly located and formed by his Jewish particularity, a particularity which is characterized in part by an explicit separation from non-Jews, then the passages of his positive engagements with Gentiles imply that his missional and eschatological focus expanded from a singular focus on Jews to one that included non-Jews.3 Two resolutions to the contrast between accepted Second Temple Jewish attitude and the Gospels’ pro-Gentile texts are frequently offered: either the tension of the encounters are intensified to emphasize Jesus’ break with Jewish beliefs regarding Gentiles, or they are isolated incidents exaggerated or invented by the Gospel writers to justify later missions to the Gentiles.4 Géza Vermès, for instance, argues that Jesus’ ‘xenophobic utterances and his institution of an apostolic mission cannot both have existed as genuine’.5 E.P. Sanders takes a less conflictual approach and argues that those in the Jesus movement, though

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There is a general scholarly consensus that Second Temple Jewish identity was constructed, inter alia, on the religious separation of Jews from non-Jews. See Mordechai Aviam, ‘Distribution Maps of Archaeological Data from the Galilee: An Attempt to Establish Zones Indicative of Ethnicity and Religious Affiliation’, 115–32, and Monika Bernett, ‘Roman Imperial Cult in the Galilee: Structure, Functions, and Dynamics’, 337–56, in Religion, Ethnicity, and Identity in Ancient Galilee (eds. Jürgen Zangenberg, Harold W. Attridge, and Dale B. Martin; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007). See also Joel S. Kaminsky, ‘Israel’s Election and the Other in Biblical, Second Temple, and Rabbinic Thought’ in The ‘Other’ in Second Temple Judaism: Essays in Honor of Jon J. Collins (eds. Daniel C. Harlow, Karina Martin Hogan, Matthew Goff, and Joel S. Kaminsky ; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), Shaye Cohen’s, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), and Ruth Langer’s, ‘Jewish Understandings of the Religious Other’, Theological Studies 64 255–77. Kaminsky and Cohen argue for the fluidity of borders determining Jewish identity vis-à-vis Gentiles, but maintain that the borders existed nonetheless. This fluidity occurred because religious separation did not necessitate economic or cultural separation. For examples of economic and cultural interaction, see Douglas K. Edwards, ‘Identity and Social Location in Roman Galilean Villages’, 357–74, in Zangenberg and Joseph Geiger, ‘The Jew and the Other: Doubtful and Multiple Identities in the Roman Empire’, in Jewish Identities in Antiquity: Studies in Memory of Menahem Stern (eds. Lee I. Levine and Daniel K. Schwartz; Tübingen: Mohr Siebert, 2009). For the argument for post-resurrection, pro-Gentile justification by the Gospel writers, see W.D. Davies and E.P. Sanders, ‘Jesus from the Jewish Point of View’, The Cambridge History of Judaism, Volume 3, The Early Roman Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 618–77, and E. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1985), 219. For Jesus’ break with Jews vis-à-vis Gentiles, see Morton Smith, ‘The Gentiles in Judaism 125 BCE-66CE’, The Cambridge History of Judaism 3 (2000), 192–249. Géza Vermès, Jesus in His Jewish Context (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 21.

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not Jesus himself, ‘came to see the Gentile mission as a logical extension of itself ’, which became retroactively reflected in the Gospel portrayals of a shift in Jesus’ attitude. Sanders concludes that ‘we need not think that Jesus imparted to his disciples any view at all about the Gentiles and the kingdom’.6 Both Vermès and Sanders attempt to negotiate the tension of the texts by locating Jesus exclusively within either a pro-Gentile or pro-Jewish setting, thereby rejecting the possibility of Jesus embodying a multivalent approach to Gentile relationship with the Jewish God. An interpretation based on a Christology of the multiple formativity of multiple citizenships offers a different interpretation, namely, that Jesus was thoroughly Jewish and that he laid the foundations for his disciples’ later inclusion of the Gentiles. In his encounters with Gentiles, Jesus, as a single person constituted by overlapping memberships, incorporates into his current Jewish understanding a new attitude towards them that is facilitated by his growing human awareness of the multiple relationalities made accessible to him by the transtemporality of his transcendent divine nature. If one accepts that, through his divine nature, Jesus is able to be in a relationship with a nonJewish woman from the twenty-first century, then the contextual awareness that stems from that relationality would influence his behaviour in his historical existence two thousand years earlier. Initially rejecting the appeals of the Gentiles in the Gospel encounters, Jesus would come to realize that his actions would transtemporally become a rejection of the appeals of Gentiles thousands of years later. (I am not arguing that Jesus was explicitly aware of a kind of mental, emotional, and/or spiritual time travel. I imagine more that he had an intuitive sense of his connections to other contexts that became stronger as time passed.) In Matthew, after rejecting the Canaanite woman’s request because she was not one of the lost sheep of Israel, Jesus relented and healed her daughter. In Luke, after hearing that the Gentile soldier loved the Jewish people and built them a synagogue, Jesus set out to heal the soldier’s slave.7 Jesus displayed one attitude towards the Gentile individual, and then 6 7

Sanders, 220, 221. For examples of Gentiles ‘benefitting the Jews or being conspicuously friendly to Jews’ in order to be accepted as more closely allied with Jews than other Gentiles, see Shaye Cohen, Maccabees (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 146–7. It is possible that Jesus was influenced to broaden his singular focus for healing by his multiple transtemporal relationalities in addition to the soldier’s Jewish advocates, who explicitly emphasized his pro-Jewish behaviour as part of their appeal that his request be honoured.

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changed after conversation with them (directly or by proxy), as the result of engaging in relationality with them. My interpretation presupposes that Jesus, as a human, grew and thereby came to incorporate an increasing number of perspectives into his own worldview. While Vermès argues that the three-year span of Jesus’ ministry was too short to have allowed him to adopt new ideas, and that it is ‘no more than sensible to conclude’ that contradictory presentations of Jesus’ attitude towards Gentiles must therefore be inauthentic, his perspective lacks an understanding of human change and development.8 Jesus, in accordance with the biological universals of his human context, experienced the cellular reproduction and death that caused his body to grow, and that shaped the neural pathways of his brain, enabling cognitive development. The field of developmental cognitive neuroscience studies the ways in which the physical pathways of brains connected to cognitive awareness develop from infancy through childhood to adulthood.9 When certain pathways are absent, cognitive abilities are limited and certain conceptual understandings are physically impossible. The capacity to recognize one’s self in a mirror or to imagine someone else’s response to one’s own action is a cognitive action that cannot be undertaken before the necessary neural pathways that enable other recognition have been physically constructed.10 These pathways are constructed over a lifetime, shaped by one’s contexts. To say that, over time, Jesus grew to understand his world in new ways is not to psychologize him, but to assert that he was human. Thus, consonant with Luke 2.52, I argue that Jesus as fully human means that he grew ‘in wisdom and in stature’, that is physically (i.e. neurologically) and in self-awareness. 8

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Vermès, 21. Moltmann also argues that Jesus ‘grows’ in his relationships, but does not emphasize that this comes from his specifically human nature. Moltmann, The Way, 111. For an overview of the field, see the Journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (Elsevier Publishing); Charles A. Nelson and Monica Luciana (eds.), Handbook of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2nd edn., 2008); and Charles A. Nelson, Kathleen M. Thomas, and Michelle de Haan, Neuroscience of Cognitive Development: The Role of Experience and the Developing Brain (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2006). These abilities involve Theory of the Mind and mirror neurons. See Henry M. Wellman, ‘Developing a Theory of Mind’, in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Childhood Cognitive Development (ed. Usha Goswami Walden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2nd edn., 2011), 258–85; Melissa D. Bauman and David G. Amaral, ‘Neurodevelopment of Social Cognition’, in Nelson and Luciana, 161–86; Jennifer H. Pfeifer and Shannon J. Peake, ‘Self-Development: Integrating Cognitive, Socioemotional, and Neuroimaging Perspectives’, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 2(1) (January 2012), 55–69; Andrew N. Meltzoff and Jean Decety, ‘What Imitation Tells Us about Social Cognition: A Rapprochement between Developmental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences) 358 (2003), 491–500.

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Accordingly, I argue that Jesus became increasingly aware of the relationships he was in with the millions of non-Jewish Christians who would be his disciples following the church’s formation at Pentecost. The formative influences of the multiple relationalities of Jesus grew as his awareness of them grew. Indeed, in this way, the continuity of the person of Jesus from his life to Pentecost is more soundly established. The increasing acceptance of Gentiles does not mean that Jesus became less Jewish. This change does not require a separation from Judaism, unless one understands God’s election of the Jews as a singular and exclusive election that precludes non-Jews, without exception, from participation in God’s coming kingdom. (In such cases, the move from being elected to being exclusively elected arises from a desire to preserve the uniqueness of the community’s relationship with God, where it manifests as a singularity predicated upon exclusivity.) It is possible to emphasize the status of a chosen nation without emphasizing this status as exclusive. Such a conception requires a shift in perspective, from exclusivity within a singularly relational environment to uniqueness within a multiply-relational environment. This shift occurs through formative relationships with individuals of other communities, which Jesus developed while remaining Jewish. As Jesus’ ministry progressed, the myriad, and increasingly diverse, universals of each context in which he engaged accumulated, facilitated by his overlapping memberships. His citizenships multiplied as he participated in innumerable contexts through formative relationships with individuals. He was (and is) a member of the Jewish people, in that he believed the Jews to be a people in an enduring and intimate relationship with God, who properly offered worship at the Temple in Jerusalem, who were people of Torah and the Sinaitic covenant, and to whom he was particularly called to serve. He is (and was) also a member of the non-Jewish, Gentile Christian community of believers who also believe/d themselves to be in an enduring and intimate, albeit non-Torah-based, relationship with God. These multiple memberships are possible through transcendent relationalities across space – beyond the borders of Galilee and Judea – and time – beyond the decades within which Jesus lived, protected by divine transparticularity. They overlapped: Jesus believed in the uniqueness of the Jewish people vis-à-vis their covenant with God and he believed that non-Jews had a place in God’s kingdom. Just as his

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membership in both communities overlapped, so did his relationships with Israel and with the nations. Jesus’ multiple relationality operates through the transcendence of his divine nature as transparticularity and thereby provides continuity from Jesus’ Jewish mission to the church’s later understanding of the mission to the Gentiles. In this way, it becomes possible to understand Peter’s vision in Acts, in which he is told to minister to the Gentiles (Acts 10.1-44), as a call to engage in similar overlapping memberships and to share in the multiple relationalities of Jesus, as well as to understand the overlapping memberships of Paul, as he understood himself to belong to both Jewish and Gentile communities.11 That Jesus was able to engage in the infinite variety of contexts offered to him through his multiple relationships explains how he was both immersed in his historical context and participates in contemporary contexts. Arguments that he has superseded his Jewish particularity, or overcome or fulfilled it, because he participates in new, ‘Christian’, contexts become unreasonable and untenable.

Jesus and Torah12 The issue of Jesus and the Torah is related to that of Jesus and the Gentiles. Observance of the Mosaic Law is a flashpoint for differentiating between Jews and non-Jews, particularly given the halakic-based identity that many Jews claim.13 Thus, Jesus’ attitude towards Torah observance has been interpreted as indicative of his formation as a Jew, and hence of his attitude towards nonJews. John P. Meier goes so far as to boldly state that ‘it is Torah and Torah alone that puts flesh and bones on the spectral figure of “Jesus the Jew”. No halakic 11 12

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Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew. Usage of the terms ‘Torah’, ‘the Law’, and ‘the law’ is not consistent in the fields of either theology or biblical studies. Sanders refers to Torah as ‘the Law’, but supersessionist arguments rely heavily on the thematic opposition of ‘the Gospel and the Law’ in order to prove Christianity’s (Gospel) superiority over Judaism’s Law-based emphasis, which makes its use problematic. John Meier intentionally alternates between using ‘the Law’ and ‘the Torah’ in order to avoid giving precedence to any singular term, a practice I follow here. For a concise summary of the extensive nuances of Law/ law/nomos/Torah/torah, see Jonathan Klawans, ‘The Law’, in The Jewish Annotated New Testament: NRSV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 515–8 and John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Volume 4 Law and Love (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 10. Langer, 255.

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Jesus, no historical Jesus’.14 Following the oppositional form used in arguments about Jesus and the Gentiles, the tension has historically been summarized thus: Jesus’ advocacy for non-observance or even rejection of the Mosaic Law is a pro-Gentile move that characterizes his mission as ‘universal’, while his support for the authority of Torah is a pro-Jewish move that demonstrates his mission as ‘particular’.15 Yet, Jesus’ relationship with the Torah is not so simply described. Meier finds insufficient both the excessively simplistic alternatives above, and the widely adopted view of Sanders, who argues that Jesus observed the Mosaic Law, critiqued it, as was common for the Jews of his day, and yet ‘waived’ the requirements of the Mosaic covenant ‘for those who accepted him’.16 Meier offers a more complex proposal that, ironically, intensifies the tension of Jesus and the Law, albeit locating it in a new place: ‘The real enigma is how Jesus can at one and the same time affirm the law as the given, as the normative expression of God’s will for Israel, and yet in a few individual cases or legal areas (e.g. divorce and oaths) teach and enjoy what is contrary to the Law, simply on his own authority.’17 For Meier, and indeed for all who accept that Jesus acted from within his Jewish context, the issue is not whether Jesus is pro-Torah (as Meier notes, the Law’s ‘overall normative force is largely taken for granted in the Gospels’), but how Jesus can be both pro-Law and pro-Gentile.18 Meier argues that the moments of discontinuity between Jesus’ adherence to Torah and his abeyance of it are indications of authenticity (contrary to Vermès who argues that they indicate the opposite), but posits that ‘as one struggles with this enigma – and, indeed, with the other enigmas as well – one must remain open to the possibility that not all the pieces of the puzzle fit together’.19 Sanders attempts to fit the pieces together in a puzzle framed by Jesus’ understanding of God’s eschatological plans. According to Sanders, Jesus was ‘preparing Israel for the impending eschaton’, which had already 14 15

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Meier, A Marginal Jew, 648. For a detailed summary of historical arguments forcing Jesus into one of the two positions, as well as a summary of the recent ‘shifting sands’ in biblical scholarship that has concluded that Jesus did not ‘consciously or unconsciously, directly or dialectically’ reject the demands of Torah, see Meier, A Marginal Jew, 3, fns 5 and 9 and John P. Meier, ‘The Historical Jesus and the Historical Law: Some Problems within the Problem’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 65 (2003), 67. Sanders, 271. Meier, A Marginal Jew, 3 Meier, A Marginal Jew, 2. Meier, A Marginal Jew, 3.

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begun.20 Sanders relies on this eschatological framework to understand Jesus’ relationship with Torah – Jesus obeyed it because he lived in the time of Torah, but he foresaw its expiration because he believed that present time was coming to an end. Meier also interprets Jesus’ perspective as eschatological, but disagrees that Jesus implies an end to the authority of Torah.21 Meier, rejecting the proposal that Jesus understood Torah observance as temporally limited, argues that Jesus operated within a now-and-always framework constituted by the halakic necessity of ‘double love’ (love of God and love of neighbour) and by the command to love one’s enemies.22 The dual presentation of these commandments, the former formed by his Jewish context and the latter by his Greco-Roman context, makes Jesus’ message unique. 23 Within this framework, Jesus qualified specific laws while still adhering to Torah as a whole.24 Both Sanders’s and Meier’s eschatological approach can be brought together under my argument for Jesus’ multiple relationality across time. It is not necessary to force Jesus’ relationship with Torah into the temporal limitations that Sanders’s approach implies. Sanders’s interpretation, in which current Christian interpreters live in a non-Torah relationship with Jesus and believe that the guarantee of Torah is unnecessary for themselves, unfortunately lends itself to a ‘soft’ supersessionism, seen in Hegel and Schleiermacher, in which contemporary Judaism, as a religion based on Torah observance, is portrayed as having outlived its usefulness. Nuancing Sanders’s eschatological approach mitigates that tendency. I propose that Jesus came to understand himself as being in relationality with non-Jewish believers for whom Torah would no longer be binding and thus proposed, for them, a setting aside of Torah as normative. This is not an argument that Jesus believed that Torah would become universally irrelevant. The application of Torah was not universal in Jesus’ time, as it did not apply, in full, to non-Jews (Noachide laws notwithstanding), nor is it now. Jesus’ dual attitude towards Torah observance was not, as Sanders proposes, a ‘for now’ attitude that would be resolved in the eschaton with a ‘no longer’ approach. Rather, Jesus’ dual attitude was and is intended to be an ongoing and 20 21 22

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Davies and Sanders, 635. Meier, A Marginal Jew, 572. Meier, A Marginal Jew, 481 (including fn 8). Meier points out that the neighbour is most likely ‘a fellow Israelite’ and not one’s global neighbour. In other words, in this case, Jesus is operating from his own particular geographic context, and not from a universal one. Meier, A Marginal Jew, 651. Meier, A Marginal Jew, Chapter 36 ‘Love’, 478–648, especially 572. Meier, A Marginal Jew, 576.

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multiply-constituted attitude towards Torah of both universal observance and universal abeyance, depending on one’s context. In a Jewish context, observance was to be universal. In a non-Jewish context, abeyance was to be universal.25 Along these lines, Meier proposes that Jesus’ ‘double love’ halaka emerged from his Jewish context, while his ‘love your enemies’ commandment comes from the Stoic philosophers of his time.26 Jesus’ framework of love, as emphasized by Meier, is both evidence of and undergirded by his multiple relationalities and entry into multiple (and contradictory) contexts. My proposal extends his human relationalities beyond his historical contemporaneity. Thus, Jesus’ complex relationship with Torah demonstrates the multiplyformed and interactive nature of his Incarnation. By virtue of his transcendent divine nature, he simultaneously participates in a world beyond the boundaries of Israel, where Torah is not binding. His setting aside of Torah observance nullifies any compulsion contemporary Christians might claim today about living within Jewish covenantal obligations. By virtue of his Jewish human nature, he lives within the boundaries of Torah and the Mosaic covenant with God. His respect for Torah continues today by virtue of his transcendence both back and forth across time, and ‘the Jewishness of the living Christ is not limited to expressions of Jewish heritage in the Second Temple period’.27 Jesus’ past and present relationship with Torah encourages Christians to honour and defend their contemporary Jewish neighbours’ approaches to Torah.28 25

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This is not an argument for contextual relativity, wherein each individual’s context is different and so is his or her relationship with the Law. Such an argument is based on the presupposition of singularity, in which each individual’s context is singularly constructed. Given the relationality of all individuals, and thus of all contexts, my emphasis is on observance and abeyance, not on or. Meier, A Marginal Jew, 574. Meyer, 156. For readers unfamiliar with the state of messianism during Jesus’ time, it may be necessary here to address whether Jesus may have considered himself to be the Messiah, as that term is now understood by most Christians. Claims to messianic title (or followers’ claims that their leader was the messiah) were not unusual in Jesus’ time, nor were they consistent. The chapters by Dunn, Dahl, and Aune in The Messiah present a comprehensive overview of the understandings of Messiah during Jesus’ time. J. D. G. Dunn, ‘Messianic Ideas and Their Influence on the Jesus of History’, 365–81, N. A. Dahl, ‘Messianic Ideas and the Crucifixion of Jesus’, 382–402, D. E. Aune, ‘Christian Prophecy and the Messianic Status of Jesus’, in Charlesworth, 404–22. The Christological emphasis on Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah and Savior developed after his death, and emerged out of the early church community. If Jesus did consider himself to be the Christian Messiah, it would have been the result of his divine transtemporality and relationality with Christians who lived during a more doctrinally developed time of the church, and not the result of his participation in the Jewish faith of his time. He would then have seen himself as the Christian Messiah while understanding that he was not the Jewish Messiah, a subtle but important distinction. This suggestion returns us to the conclusions on Jesus and non-Jews, and the redemptive nature of Torah, and posits a Jesus who grew in awareness of multiple participations in diverse communities.

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Suffering and not-suffering A tension between embedded particularity and transparticularity emerges in Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection. Jürgen Moltmann argues that Jesus’ cry of forsakenness in Matthew 27.46 and Mark 15.34 drives Christians to a kenotic understanding of God, in which the Father, through the Holy Spirit, empties himself in order to be united and then temporarily separated from the Son by the experience of the Son’s suffering and abandonment on the Cross. This kenotic Christology, criticized by feminist theologians for its potential valorization of suffering, attempts to hold together the human nature and divine nature in the suffering of the one person of Jesus Christ.29 Moltmann reconstructs the participatory suffering of God in the cross through Abraham Heschel’s pathos of God theology.30 Heschel proposes that the pathos of God is an ongoing relationality that is ‘an expression of God’s will; it is a functional rather than a substantial reality,… a situation or the personal implication in his acts’.31 Through relationships with the prophets, God engaged in the contexts of God’s people and responded to their suffering. Moltmann extends Heschel’s claim that ‘divine pathos is the unity of the eternal and the temporal,… of the metaphysical and the historical’, into a Christological context, to argue that the Trinitarian Incarnation demonstrated this unity on the cross and that God co-suffers with the Son. In this respect, Moltmann’s work points to the responsive relationality of the divine nature to the human, and offers an alternative to models of Christology based on a singularly determined person. Re-engaging the language of the divine nature that Moltmann set aside in favour of ‘the Spirit’, and reinterpreting his concept in the framework of this book, develops his alternative even further. Thus, I propose that by voluntarily entering into relationship with the human nature of Jesus through the Incarnation, the divine nature of Jesus voluntarily takes up membership in a relationality that is contextualized, in part, by suffering. This is more coformative than Cyril’s proposal that the Word suffers in the human flesh of the 29

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Moltmann summarizes and responds to Dorothee Sölle’s criticism of his theology of suffering. See Moltmann, The Way, 175–7. Moltmann, Crucified God, 235 and 270. Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 2001, Perennial Classics Edition, original copyright 1962), 297.

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Incarnation.32 The suffering of the human nature of Jesus becomes a new context for the divine nature, and forms the divine nature as it exists in relationality with the human nature through the overlapping memberships of the one person. Suffering is not imposed upon the divine nature, or by extension upon the Godhead. Yet suffering becomes a ‘reality’ for the divine nature insofar as the context of another with whom one is in relationship overlaps and becomes one’s own reality. This is not the parallel suffering that Moltmann proposes, although he points towards it in his development of the ‘com-passionate God’.33 A shared reality forms those in that reality, and their reactions and interactions form one another. Thus, in the shared reality (overlapping natures) of the one person, the divine nature experiences the reality of suffering: the divine nature suffers. But what does the divine nature contribute to the one person? There must be more than a co-suffering, which Elizabeth Johnson criticizes as too passive and powerless.34 A God who suffers, and only suffers, cannot ultimately offer much help. The one actually suffering and the one compassionately suffering must be distinct: if I am stuck at the bottom of a well, I am not helped by someone who sympathizes with my plight or comes down to share the well bottom with me. I am helped by someone who gets a rope and pulls me out. When suffering, I must rely on the divine nature, who is separate and wholly Other, transcendent and strange to my context, and thus outside of the well of suffering down which I have fallen. In Christ, the divine nature does not have its own original context of suffering, but shares it in the human nature’s context. Yet the divine nature does not experience the limitations that human suffering does, of fear, pain, or a desire for the end, because the context of divine nature in and of itself does not include suffering. The unassimilable divine nature is outside of that suffering, rooted in a reality of impassibility and not-suffering. Whereas suffering takes over the individual, the unassimilable divine nature does not suffer in itself.35 It cannot be assimilated – totalized with no agency – into a context of suffering. 32 33 34 35

Cyril, 130. Moltmann, The Way, 179. Johnson, 253. Johnson specifically cites Moltmann, Crucified God, 205. Elaborating on the ways in which suffering takes over, Viktor Frankl addresses the difference between the suffering caused by the death camps and the suffering caused by a migraine: ‘To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little.’ Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (trans. Harold S. Kushner, Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 55.

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In turn, this divine reality informs the reaction of Christ’s human nature to its suffering. On the cross, the multiple contexts of (human) suffering and (divine) not-suffering overlap together in the person of the Incarnation. The person of Jesus Christ, with overlapping human and divine natures interacting, both suffers and is outside of that suffering. In this way, we see Jesus voluntarily moves towards his death, as evinced in ‘not my will but thine be done’ in Luke 22:42, and we also see his suffering on the cross. This is not an alternating series of divine/human/divine/human moments, but the overlapping, simultaneous experience of both natures together, informing and supporting each other in the one person who lived the events of the Passion. The human nature contributes a fear of suffering and a desire to avoid death, while the divine nature contributes the assurance that this death is not meaningless and that there will be new life beyond the grave. In this way, the one person of Jesus consequently remains in the garden and faces the soldiers while also remaining honest in his fear of death, freeing those who face their own demise from their own totalizing fears. Contextual Christologies that emphasize Jesus’ solidarity with those who are suffering become more firmly grounded without separating Jesus from his Jewishness. Multiple relationality means that Jesus’ suffering on the cross included the suffering experienced by individuals today, because Jesus 2,000 years ago shares/d in our context by means of the transcendent transtemporality of his divine nature. When we suffer, we know that Jesus on the cross shared in our current suffering. Here it can be said that oppressed minorities and colonized individuals suffer under violent power just as Jesus suffered on the cross under violent power. Here it can be said that the pain of loss and grief experienced by bereaved individuals is the suffering of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, contemplating his departure from his disciples. Here it can be said that sick or injured individuals suffer under physical pain, or that women suffer even the purposeful pain of pregnancy and birth, just as Jesus suffered the pain of scourging and crucifixion. Our contextual suffering is shared by Jesus because his contextual suffering brings him into the universality of suffering, via the transcendent divine nature, as it overlaps with this suffering human nature in the medium of the one person.36 36

In this way, it is also appropriate to say that our sin, as that which causes suffering through our own misuse and abuse of power, caused Jesus’ suffering and is the contextual cause of God’s suffering (insofar as God experiences this universal but contextualized human reality in the person of the Incarnation).

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Inversely, the overlapping reality of suffering and not-suffering is made accessible to us through the one person of Jesus Christ. As Christians who are in relationship with the one person, we are in relationship with both his human and his divine natures. Because relationality is co-formative, we also find space to honour those Christians whose piety includes, for instance, selfflagellation during Passion Week as they seek to draw closer to Jesus through their own voluntarily chosen suffering. Rather than dismissing their actions, along with others who voluntarily endure suffering, either self-inflicted or at the hands of others, as naive or misguided, we can respect the relationality with Jesus Christ that motivates them and acknowledge their agency in making such decisions.37 Just as the not-suffering of Jesus’ divine nature enables him to step outside the totalizing nature of the pain of his crucifixion and endure it rather than flee it, the same is offered to us, through the person of Jesus. Christians are motivated to take on suffering when the formativity of the divine nature’s context of not-suffering impels us to make this divine context a reality in our world. By the same way that our context of suffering becomes a reality for the divine nature, and thus for God, the contextual ‘reality’ of God’s not-suffering becomes a reality for us. While an individual might still feel the pain of his or her suffering, that person, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer testified, might also feel a stranger to his or her own pain in that it is no longer totalizing.38 Through our relationship with the person of Christ and his divine context of not-suffering, we can voluntarily engage in the pain of others, share their context without being subsumed by it, and take action to ease their suffering.

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Self-inflicted and voluntary are the keys to understanding this statement. Even the domestic abuse victim who chooses to stay in the relationship because he or she feels that they are bearing the burden of Christ can be offered the dignity of others respecting their agency. However, this does not justify the abuse inflicted by others, that is not chosen, and to which submission is not voluntarily. For feminist theologians’ proposals that voluntary suffering and submission need not be rejected in toto as examples of abuse, see Sara Coakley, Powers and Submissions (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002); Anna Mercedes, Power for: Feminism and Christ’s Self-Giving (Bloomsbury, NJ: T&T Clark, 2011); and Marit Trelstad, Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2006), especially Mary J.Streufert, ‘Maternal Sacrifices as a Hermeneutic of the Cross’, in Cross-Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today (ed. Marit Trelstad; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 63–75. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1959), 97.

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Death and not-death The human context for the person of the Incarnation, and thus for the divine nature, includes death. Death is the unarguably universal conclusion to human birth, and this universal became the contextual reality for the person of the Incarnation after Jesus’ crucifixion on the cross. The fact of Jesus’ death often prompts the question: did God die? Answers then attempt to respond to whether God lives, whether God can die, and whether God as wholly Other can even be understood within this framework. I respond that the divine nature of Jesus experienced the context of human death. As the divine nature shared in the context of humanity, it shared in the specific context of death, whatever that entailed for the human Jesus. It is not possible to elaborate on the details of the experience of death, and thus descriptions of what the divine nature experienced in this context cannot be drawn. However, the two natures of Jesus were not separated in death – the one person was not fragmented. If this were the case, a separation of the two natures would lead to the conclusion that the person of the Incarnation, constituted by two natures, ended or paused on Good Friday. Nor was there a Gnostic assimilation of Jesus’ human soul into heaven, leaving his body in the tomb. The interactivity of the human and divine natures continued in death, and the divine nature relationally experienced the human finality of death. Ascertaining the implications of this proposal are challenging, so far as they concern the person of Jesus. The human nature of Jesus experienced death, and so did the divine nature of Jesus, and with them, the one person. But whether death entails a cessation of existence is impossible to determine. Thus, whether the person of Jesus, constituted in part of the human nature, ceased to exist because Jesus’ human body exhaled its last breath and consequently was disengaged from formative relationality with those around him is likewise impossible to determine. If it is the case that humans cease to exist in death, then I must argue that the person of Jesus Christ experienced the cessation of existence. I admit to uncertainty: an epistemological gap interrupts this line of enquiry. However, if we work backwards from the claim that the one person of Jesus Christ continued after death, the interactive relationship in the one person

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means that the human nature of Jesus, even while dead, experienced the divine context of not-death. Moreover, leaping over the aforementioned gap, the human nature of Christ experienced the context of resurrection, a context in which the divine nature is rooted. Just as the divine nature experienced the context of death that is original to the human nature, the human nature of Jesus experiences the context of resurrection that is original to the divine.39 The human nature is not assimilated into the divine nature, which would invalidate the equality and full participation of the two natures in the one person. Instead, the human nature is formed by a multiply-contextual interactivity, in agreement with Maximos the Confessor’s proposal that the hypostatic union exists in the resurrection.40 However, Maximos did not develop formative relationalities as part of his anthropology, and so does not consider the human nature of Jesus in the resurrection as being constituted by his human relationalities. Here is where I extend beyond Maximos. The divine nature in the resurrection continues to be in formative mutuality with the human nature as they are brought together in the one person. That is, the resurrected Jesus Christ is also, as he was in his historical context, Jewish. In the way that the Incarnated person continues to engage in the historical context of his physical life prior to crucifixion because of the transcendence of his divine nature, Jesus continues to engage in the human affiliations that formed him. Just as the transcendence of the divine nature enabled the predeath Jesus to engage in the contexts of those in his future, it likewise enables the resurrected Christ to continue to engage in the contexts of those in his human past and to continue to be formed by them. This point is critical for those developing contemporary Christologies: Jesus, in his relationship with Christians today (who are overwhelmingly Gentile), continues to be formed 39

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Is this a bodily resurrection? Does Jesus’ body – that is his human nature – continue to exist after his ascension? John 20.19–29 and Luke 24.36–43 hint at the multiple realities of Jesus as he walked through walls (appeared like a ghost) and was physical and corporeal (the disciples touched him and Jesus ate). I hesitate, however, to argue that the physical body is the essence of human nature, or that without a body, Jesus is no longer human, having argued that relationality and co-formativity are what determine human nature. For those whose faith and understanding of the Incarnation is contingent upon physical and bodily resurrection, I tentatively point in the direction of Robert J. Russell’s Time in Eternity: Pannenberg, Physics, and Eschatology in Creative Mutual Interaction (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012) and to his proposal that simultaneous existence in the eschaton and the historical are possible in the realm of dual-state quantum mechanics. His use of quantum physics can possibly be adapted to argue that Jesus is both corporeal and incorporeal simultaneously. Louth, 70–2.

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by his Jewish context. Christians may not argue that Jesus is now Christian to the exclusion of him being Jewish. Supersessionist Christian theology, of the hard or soft variety, is theologically incoherent, as the resurrected Christ is in relationality with Christians of today and with his past Jewish relationalities. Contemporary Christologies may not depend upon an assimilation of Jesus wholly into their contexts in which his Jewishness is set aside or superseded in an undifferentiated homogeneity. His Jewish contextual relationalities (broadly determined by the shared universalities of one God/one Torah/one Temple) must be taken into account as not just formative of his past but also as continuing to be formative for him, and for his followers, today. Failure to do so is a misrepresentation of not only the historical Jesus but also the resurrected one. This is not an attempt to argue that Jesus is anti-Gentile, or exclusively proJewish-Christian. In the resurrection, we witness Jesus’ full awareness and acknowledgement of the multiple relationalities in which he participates, as he encourages his disciples to move beyond the borders of Israel and to witness to all people. We see the call to multiple contextualities in the prayer of Acts 2.17–2 – young and old, men and women, Jews and Gentiles shall experience God. The Jewish and Gentile relationalities that Jesus exhibited during his life, as referenced in the earlier sections, continue to be formative for him in his resurrection.

8

Living Abroad – The Overlapping Memberships of the Living Christ

Overview This book began with John Paul II’s assertion that Christian doctrines of the Incarnation must integrate Jesus’ Jewishness, and with Barbara Meyer’s lament that Jesus’ Jewishness has yet to be integrated beyond a mere qualification of his human nature. Sharing both the logic and the lament, I have therefore sought to answer the following interrelated questions: (1) Can Jesus’ Jewishness be theologically incorporated into the Incarnation without invalidating the necessity for either human or divine natures? (2) If it can, what has prevented it from being done? (3) If it can, how might this Christology be developed? To answer these questions, we examined the presuppositions undergirding attitudes towards difference in the Incarnation, and uncovered the processes used to negotiate difference. This work utilized categories developed in the study of multiculturalism, adapting them to take into account the interplay of power and agency exhibited in discussions of divine and human relations. In this manner, the logics of various Christologies were assessed on the basis of their reliance on processes of assimilationism, fragmented pluralism, cosmopolitanism, or interactive pluralism. Through this examination, it has become clear that processes of fragmented pluralism and cosmopolitanism devolved into processes of assimilationism. Christologies that posited the presence of both human and divine natures but insisted on their non-interaction (i.e. fragmented pluralism) either rejected one nature entirely or assimilated one into the other. This devolution was due to the insistence on a singular agent in the Incarnation, traditionally described as the one person.

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An observation of the insistence on singularity provided insight into the second question of what has prevented Christologies, including explicitly nonsupersessionist ones, from successfully integrating Jesus’ Jewishness without jeopardizing the presence of either nature. This study demonstrated that Christologies’ processes for negotiating the difference of the human and divine natures are built on the presupposition that coexistent differences are an undesirable source of unresolvable tension, both in the Incarnation and in humans generally. Because the tension of difference has been considered untenable in an Incarnation of the one person, Christologies have attempted to manage those differences, either by separating them completely (fragmented pluralism) or by assimilating one to the other, consequently restricting agency and power to a single party. When the assimilation of one of the two natures happens (typically of the human nature by the divine nature), Jesus’ human particularity as a Jew is overwritten. This is due to an interrelated process of assimilation that occurs in treatments of Jesus’ human nature: in order to facilitate assimilation, the particular characteristics of Jesus’ historical existence as a human are erased in order to smooth the process. While the interrelation of these assimilations has been suspected, in particular by Ruether, my use of Dhamoon’s matrix of difference has clarified the relationship and identified that the problem results from a process determined by the determination to establish singular agency. Working from these findings, a response to the third question of how a Christology that integrates Jesus’ Jewishness might be constructed was generated. I proposed a new conceptual framework for preserving and holding together difference: contextual universalism through overlapping memberships. ‘Contextual universalism’ redefines the parameters for understanding Jesus Christ’s human and divine natures and, through overlapping membership, functions to redistribute agency to multiple parties. Contextual universalism disintegrates the monopoly of power that supports processes of assimilation and replaces it with a process that is dependent upon the mutually formative participation of each party. These responses are as interrelated as the original questions: in developing this new process, this book responded to the first question. Rather than the Incarnation itself being an obstacle, as Ruether and others

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suggest, the opposite is the case. The claim that Jesus of Nazareth is also the Incarnate Word of God does not in itself deny his Jewish existence. Nothing in the presence of the divine nature requires excluding the particular religious context of this human nature. Further, overlapping membership ensures that the parameters of the Chalcedonian definition of Christ as fully human and fully divine, insofar as the definition addresses Jesus’ consubstantiality with the Father and with humans ‘with each nature being preserved and being united’, need not be rejected in order to incorporate Jesus’ Jewishness.

Jesus today – Normative and not normative In this new understanding of the relationship between the human and divine natures in the one person of Jesus Christ, Jesus’ Jewishness is an irreplaceable and constitutive part of his human nature and thus necessary for his constitution as the one person whom Christians call the Son of God. The questions now arise: what to do with the historical Jesus? Or rather, what to do with the historicity of Jesus? Given what is known about the history of Jesus, what significance can Christians derive from what he said, did, or did not say and did not do? In other words, are the universals of Jesus’ context to be universals that determine the contexts of every Christian? To begin, the motivation behind the question of the historical actions and words of Jesus is a question about the normativity of the historical Jesus for Christians today. Christian traditions and praxes have been built on the understanding that if Christians emulate Christ in every way, they too will be the bearers of the Gospel that he is, and thus deserving of the same salvific reward. The person of Christ, in his pre-resurrection appearance, becomes the norma normans for his disciples who feel themselves called to follow Christ in his role as priest. Using this argument, some Christian traditions bar women from ordination to the priesthood of Christ because they are incapable of conforming to the normative gender of Jesus the High Priest. Importantly, those who advocate for the normativity of Jesus’ gender do not always prescribe as normative other elements of Jesus’ life. Drinking water from a well instead of a faucet, abstaining from socks or underwear, and walking

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everywhere instead of driving – these conditions of life are not required. And yet for those who advocate that the universals of Christ’s context should be their own, they should be. In fact, given my argument that a human subject is multiply-constituted and multiply-determined and that to remove one of those constituencies is to violate the integrity of that human, it could be argued that if Christ’s life (as his engagement with his historical context) is to be normative and universal for his followers, Christians should be Jewish, male, drink from a well, and walk everywhere in leather sandals. In the anthropology I have developed, however, I have argued that the historical context of one person is not universally normative for another. Christ, like all humans, is irreducible and unrepeatable, uniquely constituted of his engagement with his own contexts. Each Christian is irreducible and unrepeatable, likewise uniquely constituted and engaged. Therefore, no human characteristics can be universal or normative over any other, because humans cannot be reduced to any single description from which to establish universal normativity. So how are Christians to move forward? Is there no longer a single ‘core’ of Jesus Christ to determine the life of every Christian? In an important sense, my proposal offers a negative answer to this question: there is no single core that is determinative for every Christian. Contextual universals cannot be made to serve as universal universals without destroying the very uniqueness that makes them human. However, through the divine nature, the contexts of the historical Jesus and the contexts of each individual Christian are brought together in the person of Christ and commonalities are uncovered. These commonalities become contextual universals, determining the individual life of each Christian. For some Christians, the commonality of gender in the priesthood of Christ is a universal. For other Christians, the commonality of preferential actions towards the poor is a universal. For other Christians, a liturgical theology that allows only two sacraments is a universal. Is this a descent into relativism? No. Contextual universalism allows for each Christian to find the shared commonality between his or her own context and Jesus’ context, which then becomes the universal for that believer. A framework of contextual universalism and overlapping memberships encourages the coexistence, if not interaction, of multiple Christologies, both contextual

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and historical.1 For example, Christologies that posit traditional ‘opposites’, as in the issue of the ordination of women, can coexist as the interpretative realities of multiple communities of believers. Each community – with its own contextual beliefs determining the universal characteristics for that particular community – remains within its own contextual borders, and yet shares the universality of each following Christ. A Roman Catholic community may legitimately present its argument that women are not called to the priesthood, as rightly derived from its contextually constituted understandings (either revelation, reason, or both) and thus universally applicable to that community, while a North American Lutheran community may present its argument that women are as called to ordination as men, on the same basis and with the same applicability. Although the two communities hold contradictory ‘universal’ beliefs, that they are universal within their own contextual communities is itself the commonality. Their processes of universalization and their universal application become a shared universal between them, along with the commonality of both seeking an appropriate relationship with Jesus. This understanding of Christian discipleship (and its implied ecclesiology) is predicated in overlap: Jesus Christ is not and is normative for Christians. When Christians are mindful that the Christ who exists within the church today was formed by his historical contexts, and continues to be formed by those contexts, freedom is granted to listen with the ears of faith to what Jesus says to individual Christian communities today. Christians in relationship with the humanly constituted person of Christ through the transcendence (transtemporality) of his divine nature engage with him such that at least some of the contexts that form and formed him are shared. Christians allow themselves to be formed by Christ who, in turn, is formed by Christians today, yet not every Christian or Christian community is formed in exactly the same manner.

1

Co-formativity and interactive pluralism are foundational for the ecumenical decision-making process of the Canadian Council of Churches. The CCC relies exclusively on a consensus model of agreement, called ‘Forum’, where member churches do not vote on resolutions, but discuss them until a unanimous position is reached. While this sometimes leads to decisions of nonaction, due to a lack of unanimity, even the decision of non-action must be reached unanimously. Issues that are resolved via the Forum model are communicated as CCC ‘Statements’ and represent the universal resolution of the member churches that emerges from their individual denominational contexts. ‘Statement on Forum’, Canadian Council of Churches, November 9, 2008. http://www.councilofchurches.ca/en/About_Us/statementonforum.cfm (Accessed 16 July 2013).

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This mutual formativity does not, however, free Christians to adopt approaches to understanding Jesus in his human context that negate his Jewishness, including his religious Jewishness, as this damages the contextual wholeness of Jesus as truly human. Jesus did not exclude himself from the Abrahamic or Mosaic covenants. One may argue that Jesus, as a Jew, may disagree with particular interpretations of Torah held by a Jewish majority, but communities have always included outliers, whose dissent does not invalidate their membership or negate the existence of the community. The specifics and concrete instantiations of the human life of Jesus Christ cannot be described with any certainty, given the obscurity of the past. Those particularities exist, but we will never know what they are, and we cannot predict with certainty how Jesus might argue a given issue today. The overlapping memberships of Christ dictate, however, that Jesus participates in the lives of Christians today, in their multitude of contexts, providing a certainty that Jesus is not unformed by current concerns and struggles. It is a paradox that uncertainty stems from certainty – the uncertainty of knowing what Jesus’ life was like arises out of the certainty of knowing that he nevertheless had, and as the living Christ continues to have, a particular and unique and relationally embedded life. An awareness of this overlapping paradox becomes the basis for a Christian’s living relationship with the Incarnated Christ that rejects all attempts at assimilation or co-option and engages with him in multiple contextually universal relationships.

Conclusion Moving beyond Jesus’ historical life into topics of resurrection and the living Christ particularly challenges the relationship between nonsupersessionist theology and contemporary, contextual theologies. This book was driven by questions of whether reinterpretations of Jesus Christ’s human and divine natures necessitate abandoning his relevance for and influence on contemporary, contextual Christologies or setting aside his radical uniqueness as the sole Incarnation of God. Overlapping memberships in contextual universalisms demonstrate that current developments of Christology need not exclude the particularities and contexts of Jesus’ historical existence in order to

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be contemporarily meaningful for Christians. Claiming Jesus’ solidarity with marginalized groups does not require rejecting or ignoring Jesus’ Jewishness. His particular existence as a Jewish man, while contextually specific to him, does not prevent him from entering into relationship with or from sharing in the specific contexts of non-Jewish, or even non-male, Christians. Moreover, Jesus’ Jewishness can, and ought to, be incorporated into contextual Christologies as one of the multiple indispensable and constituent contexts that shaped Jesus and the message he proclaimed. Particularity constituted and constitutes Jesus, and particular particularity constitutes and shapes the different differences engaged in the spectrum of contextual Christologies; religious context is one of those particularities. Contextual Christologies that argue for the necessity of the historical Jesus must incorporate his Jewishness, centred around ‘one God, one Temple, one Torah’, into their interpretation. All Christologies that argue for the humanity of Jesus, even those that do not explicitly identify as ‘contextual’, must be attentive to his religious context as part of that which makes him human. A Christology that does not account for the Jewishness of Jesus demonstrates a theological incoherence by denying what John Paul II has described as ‘the very truth of the Incarnation’.2 Through the framework and process of contextual universalism and overlapping membership, the Jewishness of Jesus is once more understood as constitutive of both his human and his divine natures, providing Christians with a more coherent understanding of the one whom they profess. Moreover, given the intense and frequently violent history of the relationship between Christians and Jews, it is incumbent on Christians to examine their theologies for the ways in which they minimize, reject, or attempt to eliminate difference in their encounter with Jesus. ‘The encounter with the Other is my responsibility for him’, and in the history of Christianity’s relations with the Other, it is the relationship with the Jewish Other that has deserved Christian theologies’ most responsible response, in light of Christianity’s most reprehensible passivity.3 As Levinas argues, the suffering 2

3

John Paul II, ‘Address of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to a Symposium on the Roots of AntiJudaism’. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking of the Other (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998), 104.

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of the Other who has been treated so insignificantly calls the Christian body into question, and leaves it ‘always alone in being able to answer the call, [and] irreplaceable in [the] assumption of responsibility’.4 The Jewish Jesus is that particular Other for whom Christians are particularly obligated to assume theological responsibility and by whom Christians must allow themselves to be formed. The erasure of all acknowledgement of the constitutive nature of Jesus’ particular humanity reduces his Jewishness to nothing, compromises the Christian religious identity, and contributes to the tragically complex history that Christians have pursued in encounters with the Jews.5 Christian theology must follow a more responsible path, and allow Jesus’ Jewishness to positively inform Christology.

4

5

Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 177. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (ed. by Amy Gutman; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 97.

Acknowledgements

No work is produced in isolation. This book emerges from my own overlapping memberships in multiple professional, academic, and personal communities, for which I am profoundly grateful. My initial thanks go to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, who confirmed my call to ordination, provided time for me to take long-term study leave, and funded a portion of that leave with study grants. My thanks also go to the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, my seminary alma mater and host to the Asian Theological Summer Institute, where the initial seeds of this book germinated. Without the support and wisdom of the faculty, staff, and students at the Graduate Theological Union, this book could never have been written. It emerged in its original form under the guidance of Marion Grau and the mentorship of Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, and benefitted from the critical insights of Thomas Cattoi and the moral support of Kathleen Kook. Adam Pryor, M. Jodavid Sales, Beth Ritter-Conn, and Kyle Butler were instrumental in providing feedback and encouragement. I am extremely grateful to Yasmeen Abu-Laban at the University of Alberta for supporting me as I ventured beyond the theological world into the domain of political theory, and for her openness to the possibilities of a theoretical relationship between Christology and multicultural theory. Living in a community of families whose embodied overlapping memberships reassured me that this work is more than just philosophical, I am especially indebted to Noriko Bouffard (and Kiyomi and Keiji), Sara Hinkley (and Ethan and Austin), and Maria Enquist-Newman (and Johan and Lisa), and to each of the families in ‘the courtyard’ whose friendships provided me with daily support in writing this book. Unity in difference comes to me through my family. As an ethnic JapaneseGerman, holding dual citizenship in Canada and the US, I am beholden to Takako and Walter Driedger, and to Jane and Peter Hesslein, as the unique

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roots out of which my family has grown. Finally, I could not have started, continued, or finished this work without the support of my husband Josh, and without the presence of my children, Akira and Hiro, whose living memberships in both Jewish and Christian communities are the raison d’être for my theological endeavours.

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Index

Note: Locators followed by the letter “n” refer to notes Abraham, Susan 155–6 Adversus Judaeos 5–7 agency 20, 21, 24–5, 28, 30, 33, 44, 47 in the Incarnation 36, 55–6, 77, 80, 83, 85–8, 93, 96, 108–9, 113, 115, 117, 123, 126, 132, 140, 162, 181–2 as necessary condition for human existence 21 Ahmed, Sara 98 n Ahn, Byung Mu 57 Alexander, Jeffrey 24 n, 28–9, 30 n Angus, Ian 109 Anselm of Canterbury 114–16 anthropology, theological 41, 44, 67, 70 n, 75, 124, 129–30, 146–7, 184 anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism 15 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 28 n, 29, 34–5 Arnal, William E. 65–6 assimilationism, definition of 20, 22–5 in Christology 41, 44–6, 49, 52–4, 57, 59, 64, 67, 77, 79–82, 87, 91–2, 110–12, 114–18, 122–3, 125–7, 129–33, 136, 142–6, 155–6, 162, 164, 174, 179–82, 186 Ateek, Naim Stifan 62–4 Athanasius 112–14, 122 Bannerji, Himani 21, 27 n Bantum, Brian 58–61 Barth, Karl 78, 88–93, 94, 102 Barvosa, Edwina 73 n Baumann, Zygmunt 54 Bhabha, Homi K. 96 n, 145–6, 150 Bissoondath, Neil 23 n, 26 n Boesel, Chris 7–8, 14, 44, 71 n Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 176 Boyarin, Daniel 27, 98 n, 169 n

Boys, Mary C. 5 n Brakke, David 114 Brock, Rita Nakashima 145 n Butler, Judith 67, 68, 144 Calvin, John 108, 116–18 Canadian Council of Churches 185 n Cattoi, Thomas 135, 137 n Chalcedonian definition 41, 110–15, 183 Chidester, David 27 church and Christian community 168, 169, 184–6, 187 co-formativity 21, 27, 34, 35, 68–9, 84, 92, 108, 157, 162, 164, 176, 178 Cohen, Jeremy 116 n Cohen, Shaye 166 n communicatio idiomatum 108, 111 n See also Luther, Martin Cone, James 60–1 contextual theology 56–66, 124, 127–30, 163, 175, 186. See also mestizaje contextual universalism 66–72, 127–37, 179, 182, 184, 186–7 cosmopolitanism 28–31 in theology 52, 64, 70–1, 78, 111, 116–17, 128–9, 154, 181 covenant theology 5–8. See also nonsupersessionism Crossley, James G. 52 Cyril of Alexandria 53, 79–81, 114, 139, 173 de Beistegui, Miguel 124 Dhamoon, Rita 9, 20–1, 40, 60, 68, 80, 156 matrix of difference 9–11, 81 n, 156, 182 Driedger, Leo 20 n Du Bois, W.E.B. 73 n

Index Elizondo, Virgilio 147 Ellacuría, Ignacio 94 Ellis, Marc 53 embedded cosmopolitanism. See Erskine, Toni Erskine, Toni 71, 72–4, 103, 128–30, 154 eschatology 43, 85, 170–1 fragmented pluralism 26–8 in theology 39, 78, 81, 109, 111, 115–16, 126–8, 135–6, 141–2, 146, 151–2, 155–6, 177, 181–2 Frankl, Victor 174 n Friedman, Marilyn 72–3 Galatians 3, 28, 98, 144, 150 Gilligan, Carol 129–30 Haight, Roger 46, 83–4, 86 Hall, Stuart 40, 146 Hartmann, Douglas and Joseph Gerteis 19, 23, 24, 27, 32, 79–80 Hegel, G. F. 34, 96 n, 118–22 and Judaism 122 Heschel, Abraham 173 Heschel, Susannah 15, 46 n, 53 n Hodgson, Peter C. 120 Hopkins, Dwight 61 hybridity 30 n, 70, 134, 145–54 hypostatic union, hypostasis 11, 79, 81, 110, 114, 120, 128, 135, 178 enhypostatic union and 83, 91, 93, 110, 134 n interactive pluralism 31–4. See also co-formativity, agency in theology 11, 18, 69, 77–8, 81, 83, 162, 181, 185 Jacobs, Andrew S. 53, 81 n, 114 n, 145 n, 149 n Jesus as divine 7, 10, 43, 54–5, 75, 99, 102, 116, 117 as Jewish 4–8, 11, 16, 28, 31, 40, 43, 63–5, 74, 102, 113–14, 116, 126–7, 144–5, 148, 150, 153, 156, 181–3, 188 death and resurrection 85, 142, 162 n, 164, 175–6, 177–9

209

in history 28, 35, 40–2, 49, 61, 82, 86, 99, 101, 103, 119, 125–7, 141–2, 183, 186 outside of history 45–6, 57, 64, 72, 102–3, 125, 143, 149 John Paul II 1, 181, 187 Johnson, Elizabeth 174 Judaism 53, 179 in the Second Temple period 51–2, 62–4, 165 n, 172 Kamitsuka, Margaret 40, 59–60 Kang, Namsoon 70 kenotic theology 87–8, 114, 173 kerygmatic theology. See contextual theology Kim, Jung Ha 29–30 Kwok Pui-Lan 57, 65, 146 Kymlicka, Will 31 n, 32 Langer, Ruth 16 law. See Torah Lee, Jung Young 152–3 Levinas, Emmanuel 69, 94, 187–8 Levine, Amy-Jill 74 n liberation theology 56 African-American 61 Latino/a 147–50 Palestinian 62 Logos 77, 78, 79–88, 91, 97, 102, 112, 115–16, 135–7 Luther, Martin 108, 131–4 Mackey, Eva 25, 31 n Manifold, John 71 Maximos the Confessor 134–7, 178 Meier, John P. 169 n, 170–2 messiah and messianism 172 n mestizaje 60, 147, 150. See also hybridity Meyer, Barbara 4, 156, 181 Moltmann, Jürgen 48, 86–8, 96 n, 166 n, 173–4 multiculturalism 10, 24–5, 181 multiplicity theologies of 123–4, 132 Nestorius 80 n, 110–11 neuroscience, cognitive 167 New Quest, the–50

210 nonsupersessionism 6–8, 163, 182, 186 Nostra Aetate 13–14 Ochs, Peter 11 Oliver, Simon 142–3 Ong, Aihwa 100 n, 101 Other, the as divine 78, 88–93, 94–7, 102–3, 174 as human 12, 30, 33, 40, 54, 69, 94–6, 187–8 as “unassimilable” 97–9, 102, 162 overlapping memberships 10, 73–4, 100, 102, 130, 137, 151, 154–5, 157, 163, 166, 182–3, 186–7 Parekh, Bikhu 22 n, 97, 98 n, 99, 157 particularity 9–10, 34, 48, 55, 62, 66–8, 72, 74, 98–9, 101, 107–10, 118, 125, 128–9, 143–4, 155–6, 165, 182. See also transparticularity Paul, apostle 169. See also Galatians Pawlikowski, John 55 Pedraja, Luis G. 147–8 Porter, John 22 n postcolonialism 18, 123, 145 postliberalism 12 Price, Richard 110 n radical orthodoxy 94, 142–3 Rahner, Karl 82–4 relationality 33, 69, 94–9, 109, 123–4, 154, 161–2, 168, 171, 173, 179 religious pluralism 130 n representation, challenges of 39–40, 44 Rivera, Mayra 60, 94–6, 97, 99, 102, 145–6 Rodríguez, Rubén Rosario 146–50 rooted cosmopolitanism. See interactive pluralism Ruether, Rosemary Radford 5–8, 141–3, 182 Russell, Robert J. 178 n Sanders, E.P. 165–6, 169 n, 170–2 Saperstein, Marc 15

Index Schleiermacher, Friedrich 41–2, 46, 47, 119 and Judaism 16 Schlesinger, Arthur Meier 23 Schneider, Laurel 44–5, 68, 69, 70, 123–6 Schwartz, Seth 16, 63 n Sempiternus Rex Christus 163 n Soulen, Kendall 5–8, 11 n, 14, 55–6 Spirit christologies 85, 87–8, 102 Steiner, George 17 Sugirtharajah, R. G. 56, 65 supersessionism 13–15, 52–3, 64, 77, 141–2, 153, 171, 179 Tajfel, Henri 29 Taylor, Charles 32–3, 34 n, 35, 188 n third space 90, 96, 145–6, 150, 152 Tillich, Paul 43–5, 47–9 Torah 51, 164, 168 transcendence as a characteristic of the divine 78, 88–93, 94–6, 97–8, 100–2, 103, 118, 172 of difference 70, 118, 136, 153–4 as universalism 70, 126, 144, 153, 155–6 transnationalism 100–1, 129 transparticularity 97, 101–3, 107, 127, 130, 155, 166, 168–9, 173 Trinity, the 87–8, 173 universal, universalism. See also transparticularity as a characteristic of the divine 44, 65, 96–7 particularity and 71, 72, 126 van Buren, Paul 5–8, 50–1, 54–6, 140–1 Van Loon, Hans 79, 80 Vermès, Géza 165–6, 167 Vlack, Michael 14 Ward, Graham 143–4 Williamson, Clark 5–8