Intercultural Theology: Exploring World Christianity after the Cultural Turn [1 ed.] 9783666604591, 9783525604595

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Judith Gruber

Intercultural Theology Exploring World Christianity after the Cultural Turn

Research in Contemporary Religion

Edited by Hans-Günter Heimbrock, Stefanie Knauss, Jens Kreinath Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati, Hans-Joachim Sander and Trygve Wyller In co-operation with Hanan Alexander (Haifa), Carla Danani (Macerata), Wanda Deifelt (Decorah), Siebren Miedema (Amsterdam), Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Nashville), Garbi Schmidt (Roskilde), Claire Wolfteich (Boston) Volume 25

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Judith Gruber

Intercultural Theology Exploring World Christianity after the Cultural Turn

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

This is a strongly revised translation of Judith Gruber, Theologie nach dem Cultural Turn. InterkulturalitÐt als Theologische Ressource  2013 W. Kohlhammer GmbH, Stuttgart.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISSN 2197-1145 ISBN 978-3-666-60459-1

You can find alternative editions of this book and additional material on our Website: www.v-r.de  2018, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Theaterstraße 13, D-37073 Gçttingen/ Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht LLC, Bristol, CT, U.S.A. www.v-r.de All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Typesetting by Konrad Triltsch GmbH, Ochsenfurt.

Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2. Intercultural Theology in Historical Perspective . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Missiology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Contextual Theologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Intercultural Theology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.1 The Adverbial Syntax of Intercultural Theology . . . . 2.3.2 The Other as Hermeneutical Factor: The Approach of Difference Hermeneutics in Intercultural Theology . . 2.3.3 Ecclesiological Location . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.4 The Threefold Task of Intercultural Theology: Cultural Analysis, Intercultural Hermeneutics, Theological Criteriology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.5 Criteriological Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.6 The Dynamics of Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.7 The Basic Metaphor: Interculturation . . . . . . . . .

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14 14 25 36 39

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42 44 46 47

3. Interculturality as a Theological Resource . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Christian Identity: After the Cultural Turn . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1 Turning Cultural . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2 Postcolonial Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2.1 What is Postcolonial Theory? . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2.2 Identity Construction in the In-Between . . . . . 3.1.3 The Cultural Turn in Cultural Anthropology . . . . . . . 3.1.3.1 Culture as Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.3.2 Writing Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.3.3 Culture as Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.4 Inter/Culturality after the Cultural Turn . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Intercultural Rereadings of Tradition: The Hybrid Identities of Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1 Syncretism as a Descriptive Category . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 An Example: Christian Identity – Neither Jew nor Greek?. 3.3 Christian Identity: A Radical Hermeneutics . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.1 Theology: Testimony to a Particular Event . . . . . . . . 3.3.1.1 Paul Ricoeur: The Interpretation of the Absolute in the Event . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

49 49 49 57 57 61 63 63 65 68 70 72 73 75 80 80 82

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3.3.1.2 Michel Foucault: The Radical Interpretativity of Eventualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.2 Testimony to a particular Event – Theological Ramifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.3 Michel de Certeau: Speaking of God in the Mode of Contingency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.3.1 A Theological Crisis of Representation . . . . . 3.3.3.2 The Christian Condition – Homelessness and Speechlessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.3.3 Theology: A Movement of Perpetual Departure 3.3.3.4 The Church: A Sacrament of Effacement . . . . 4. Theology after the Cultural Turn: Intercultural Theology . . . . 4.1 Theology in the Mode of Silencing Interculturality . . . . . 4.2 Theology in the Mode of Unsilencing Interculturality . . . . 4.2.1 The Normativity of Contingency . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 Interculturality as a Locus of Theology . . . . . . . . 4.3 Intercultural Theology as Radically Hermeneutical Theology

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5. The Canon as an Act of Intercultural Theology . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 A Theology of the Canon: Icon for Stability and Sacrament of God’s Abundant Presence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 The Canon after the Cultural Turn: Icon for De/stabilization . 5.3 A Theology of Canon after the Cultural Turn: Sacrament of Loss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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116 118 122 123 124 127

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Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Index of Names and Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

Acknowledgements This book has come a long way. In many ways, it is both a faithful companion and the fruit of my intercultural ventures over the past few years. It started its journey as a PhD thesis at the Department of Systematic Theology at the University of Salzburg, Austria and was completed in 2012. When the German edition was published by Kohlhammer in 2013,1 I had already made my way across the Atlantic to New Orleans. It was during my time as Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at Loyola University New Orleans that this revised English translation took its shape. Impacted by my frequent journeys between Europe and the US, it searches for a home in between cultures that differ from each other in so many minute ways, academically and otherwise. As the book is now coming to completion, I am preparing for yet another move – new challenges lie ahead in Leuven, Belgium. The ideas suggested in this book thus find their roots/routes in soils of different kinds; they were formulated along countless walks through both the mountains of Austria and the swamps of Louisiana. Journeys such as these cannot be undertaken alone – as I was sojourning through the interstices, I was offered shelter and nourishment, food for thought and academic companionship by generous friends; indeed, along the way, I have had the privilege of making myself at home in welcoming communities. Looking back, it is time to give thanks to all those who helped me on my way. First, I owe a great deal of thanks to Gregor Maria Hoff, teacher and advisor of my PhD thesis in Salzburg, whose love of language and insistence on concise thought laid a reliable foundation for my theological meanderings. He and the members of the Department of Systematic Theology at Salzburg University – Sigrid Rettenbacher, Franz Gmainer-Pranzl, Ulrich Winkler, Hans-Joachim Sander, Alois Halbmayr –provided me with my first academic home, to which I love to return for summers and sabbaticals. Upon my arrival in the US, I was also warmly received by the members of the Religious Studies Department at Loyola University New Orleans – Terri Bednarz, Adil Khan, Ed Vacek, Bob Gnuse, Cathy Wessinger, Denis Janz, Ken Keulman, Tim Cahill – whose interdisciplinary approach has offered rich resources for challenging and invigorating my theological mindset. I would like to thank Dean Maria Calzada for offering a junior leave, and Provost Marc Manganaro for awarding me with the generous funds of a Marquette Fellowship, both of which were instrumental in bringing this project to fruition. I am also deeply grateful to 1 Judith Gruber, Theologie nach dem Cultural Turn Interkulturalität als theologische Resource, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2013.

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Acknowledgements

the vibrant communities at Loyola and the neighborhoods of New Orleans, who taught me so much about beauty, resilience and a defiant joie de vivre. Henry Jansen, writer and translator, prepared the English translation of the German draft of this book. His linguistic skills, theological expertise and, most importantly, his patient persistence, have proved to be invaluable for this exercise in academic interculturality. I am grateful to the editors of Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht’s series Research in Contemporary Religion for accepting the manuscript for publication, and to Moritz Reissing and Bernhard Kirchmeier, who steered this book through its production. It is my family, though, who I know to be the one constant in my nomadic life. Thank you to my parents, Brigitte and Leonhard, my safe haven, who are still giving me both roots and wings. Thank you to my sisters, Eva and Sarah, for their companionship and friendship. Thank you, most especially, to my husband Mark who is with me always.

1. Introduction May God us keep From Single vision William Blake

Abandoning the traditional, well-traveled paths of interpretation that have been followed throughout Christian history can be a daunting undertaking for theologians. Risking all by stepping off the beaten path, they soon find themselves in a vast, untamed, and largely uncharted territory of precarious and unstable identity constellations. Decrepit border fences and thick stone walls of separation and division cut across this immense area, converging and then dividing again as they define what is self and what is other. Deep trenches crisscross the terrain and break up its homogeneous monotony. This territory beyond the familiar interpretations of church history is deeply scarred by the powerful and violent struggles over the right to determine Christian identity, but it is also marked by free trade zones between nomadizing groups. There is no broad, straight, well-maintained road cutting straight across this frontier region of Christian identity construction; there is no route that begins at a secure, clearly defined point and leads us safely past the abysses of heresy and the ravines of schism to an equally clearly defined destination on the distant, hazy horizon, while all confessional deviations from this road appear to be nothing more than dead ends or byways leading eventually back to the main road. Instead of finding ourselves on that road, we find ourselves in a bewildering warren of paths, an impenetrable, infinite web of precarious identification routes through the space of others, leading to cul-de-sacs of silenced voices, to roadblocks barring the way to heterodox areas, and to overgrown trails of forgotten traditions. Traditional hermeneutical models of church history, here portrayed by the image of a broad road, depend on an essentialist understanding of Christian identity and on teleological constructs of its historical development in the church. These models presuppose that the church’s essence is “unchangable by nature” and must “remain just as … [Christ] instituted it right at the beginning.”1 The development of its specific structures and doctrines that 1 Matthias Höhler, Das dogmatische Kriterium der Kirchengeschichte: Ein Beitrag zur Philosophie der Geschichte des Reiches Gottes auf Erden, Mainz, 1983, p. 43, quoted in Hubert Wolf: “Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Kirchengeschichte?” in: Kurt Nowak, Wolfram Kinzig, Volker Leppin et al. (eds.), Historiographie und Theologie: Kirchen- und Theologiegeschichte im Spannungsfeld von geschichtswissenschaftlicher Methode und theologischem Anspruch, Leipzig: Evang. Verl.-Anst, 2004, pp. 53–65, here p. 55. This ‘dogmatic theological’ conception remained influential until the end of the 20th century, and “there were direct lines to prominent church historians of recent decades like August Franzen (1912–1972), Hubert Jedin (1900–1980), and Erwin Iserloh (1915–1996)” (ibid., p. 56).

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Introduction

developed against the background of and in dynamic relation with Jewish and Hellenistic traditions is viewed as “the unfolding of what was implicit or embryonic from the start”2 in the church itself. In the classic metaphor for the development of doctrine, the depositum fidei was seen as an organic whole whose fruit matures over the course of history. This preset and thus static essentialist identity was thought to be clearly distinct from other entities; Christianity was seen as an idependent and isolated phenomenon “to be analysed as if fundamentally isolable and explicable in its own terms.”3 The poststructural and postcolonial deconstruction that emerged from the Cultural Turn is gouging deep potholes in this broad road of traditional interpretation built on the foundation of a modern – static, essentialist, isolable – concept of identity. These holes reveal the fundamental instability of identity: identity cannot be traced back to an unchangeable essence but is constituted only in and through discursive processes. To use the road metaphor once more: instead of finding our roots, we can only follow the complex routes of identifications through a maze of inclusions and exclusions.4 This critical rereading thus brings to light the fragility and contingency of every human witness to Christian hope: Christian identity is not simply given and static but must be renegotiated again and again. The idea of an ‘essence’ of Christianity that is explicated in the tradition in different places and times has been undermined.5 The kernel/husk model, which presupposes an unchangeable core of Christian identity in changeable cultural expressions, has become untenable. Instead, we trace the endless intertwining of constellations of Christian identity in diverse and unstable identification discourses. This precarious concept of identity calls for a ‘different’ look at the history of Christianity – and yet, it does not make the theological question of Christian 2 Judith Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 2. 3 Ibid. 4 James Clifford, Routes, Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1997. 5 Cf. Mariano Delgado, “Das Christentum der (deutschsprachigen) Theologen im 20. Jahrhundert: Wesen des Christentums, Auslegung des apostolischen Glaubensbekenntnisses, Kurzformeln des Glaubens,” in: Mariano Delgado (ed.), Das Christentum der Theologen im 20. Jahrhundert: Vom “Wesen des Christentums” zu den “Kurzformeln des Glaubens,” Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2000, pp. 9–14, here p. 9: “The explicit question of the essence of Christianity is a specifically modern concern. We encounter it as an ‘epochal leading question’ in mysticism and humanism, in the German Reformers and in pietism, in the Enlightenment, in the Romantic movement, and in late idealism (often, admittedly, with concepts like ‘Spirit,’ ‘Idea,’ or ‘principle’ of Christianity, in liberalism, and historicism, in the critique of religion, and in academic theology [among rationalists and suprarationalists, liberals, positivists, cultural and church theologians]). In German theology, in the period from Schleiermacher to the Second World War, it almost acquired the status of a classical doctrine. Michael Schmaus’ Vom Wesen des Christentums (1947) and Emanuel Hirsch’s Das Wesen des reformatorischen Christentums (1963) can be viewed as the swan song of a theological epoch that was stamped by the question of essence.”

Introduction

11

identity irrelevant, and it certainly does not mean that any formulation of that identity is simply arbitrary. Precisely because postcolonial deconstruction has undermined the clear demarcations of this identity, it remains a central theme – we still need to identify, define, witness to, and proclaim the “hope that is in us” (1 Peter 3:15), even if we have now become aware of its discursive contingency throughout the history of tradition. Rereading Christian tradition through the lens of critical theories has made us see the unavoidable plurality and hybridity of Christian identity, but that does not exempt us from having to account for the universality that the Gospel of Jesus Christ claims. A rereading of Christian tradition through the lens of critical theories retrieves its disparity and plurality – and it is here, at the end of that critical-descriptive task, that the normative-theological task only begins. The epistemological changes brought about by the Cultural Turn puts the universal claim of Christianity’s message into a precarious tension with its particular local formulations. A theological accounting of faith thus demands that we relate the normative unity of faith to its plural testimonies and consider the normativity of formulations of Christian identity in relation to their historical and cultural contingency. Theology after the Cultural Turn requires a model of universality that is based on epistemological particularity: How can we maintain the universality of the Christian message without erasing the disparate particularities of Christian identity? What does it mean to be a Christian in plural cultures? How can we define Christian identity without concealing the fluidity of its boundaries? How can we draw clear demarcations to other religious traditions if the “incursion of the other” (Levinas) plays a constitutive role in the formulation of identity and if Christian identity has, therefore, always been permeated by the other? How can we identify the culture-transcending ‘essence’ of Christianity without falling back into essentialist and substantialist thinking? This book approaches this theological task from the perspective of a nascent theological field in which these questions of the relation between Christian identity and culture(s) take center stage. This theological approach is emerging in response to a current paradigm shift in Christian selfunderstanding. In place of the Eurocentric model of ‘Christendom,’ a new understanding is beginning to take shape of Christianity as a ‘world’ movement with considerable cultural variety. Concomitant with this changing self-perception, Intercultural Theology is being developed as a new theological discipline that analyzes the inter- and transcultural character and practice of global Christianity. This book discusses this theological approach in two parts. First, it offers an analysis of the historical development of Intercultural Theology out of missiology and contextual theologies by looking at the theological problems that arise in each of these respective paradigms. Missiology was the theological discipline that originally dealt with the tensions between the unity and plurality of Christian identity, between the universality of the Gospel of the Christ event and the particularity of its mediation in

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cultures, and reflected on the intercultural processes of transformation emerging from those tensions. Via the metaphor of ‘accommodation,’ missiology viewed the precarious relation between the universality and particularity of Christian God-talk initially more as a practical problem than a theological one. Contextual theologies, however, which emerged as an anti- or postcolonial response to the missiological paradigm, began to consider the differences produced by these transformation processes as theologically relevant. These theologies take the particularity of all theologizing as their conceptual starting point and use their unavoidable contextuality in a reflective and productive way for doing theology. But how can we relate these particular formulations to the theological claim of the universality of God’s presence? It is with this question that Intercultural Theology begins: How, in light of the unavoidable contingency of its testimony, can the universality of the Christ event be described and theologically accounted for within the interpretative space of the church? The crucial systematic issues of theological interculturality are already beginning to emerge clearly from this brief historical outline. The questions at stake are the theological relation of culture(s) and the Gospel, the particularity and universality of God-talk, and the issue of unity and difference in Christian identity. Tracing the development of Intercultural Theology will allow us to discuss these questions in the theological-historical contexts in which they arose. The second part of the book offers a constructive theological approach to Intercultural Theology. It does that by bringing systematic theology into conversation with cultural studies. The goal is to outline a theological interpretation of interculturality after the Cultural Turn. To that end, we will develop two separate lines of argument that, at first glance, are distinct. The first line outlines a narrative of Christian identity after the Cultural Turn. Relying on postcolonial theories and critical cultural studies, it will bring the irrevocable interculturality of Christianity to light. In this narrative, Christian identity is described as plural, fragmented, and permeated by the other. The second line addresses the theological issues at stake. It is rooted in a theology of history and, more precisely, in incarnation theology and describes Christian identity as testimony to the historical event of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. We will draw on philosophies of the event that stress the contingency of history and thus help us to trace the unsettling theological ramifications of the central Christian belief that God became human. While Paul Ricoeur still postulates an absoluteness at the heart of this contingency, which sets the interpretation of the testimony in motion, Michel Foucault refers to the endless interpretativity of “eventualizations.” He does so in order to do justice to the radicality of the contingency of the event – the event emerges from interpretations and cannot be traced back to an absolute starting point. Contrary to Ricoeur, Foucault argues that interpretations of the event are not rooted in an absolute, interpretation-free origin. When we take the incarnation as the starting point of theology, it becomes impossible to talk

Introduction

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about God in an absolute and non-fragmented way. The incarnation witnesses to the revelation of God’s presence in the mode of contingency. We will draw on Michel de Certeau to develop such a theology in the mode of particularity; a radically hermeneutical theology will unfold the theological ramifications of Foucault’s radical hermeneutics of the event. Given the lack of an absolute place of its own and a universal, self-evident language, Christian identity is formulated in the ‘displacement’ of other places – it is always only to be found in ‘other places and other words.’ Theology, we will see, is a “movement of perpetual departure.” At this point, the two lines of argument will converge: Christian identity can be described – both after the Cultural Turn as well as in the theological narrative – as emerging from negotiations in the intercultural space and thus as a precarious phenomenon. Through this radically hermeneutical rereading of theology, the critical exposure of the interculturality of Christianity can therefore become a resource for theological epistemology. The ruptures and differences in Christian identity that are coming to light after the Cultural Turn have a theological quality to them; they make it possible to refer to the universality of God’s presence as always interpreted through culturally conditioned theologies; they can therefore be used as tools for a theology that truly and faithfully takes incarnation – and hence contingency – as the conceptual starting point of its God-talk. The final chapter develops a reading of the canon of Scriptures through this intercultural, radically hermeneutical lens. Zooming in on the Roman Catholic tradition, it traces the hermeneutical dependencies between the corpus of scriptures and the social body of the church, which mutually constitute and legitimize each other. While the canon functions as an ‘icon for stability’ for established theological interpretations, a postcolonial rereading reconceives of the canon as a sign and instrument not of stability but of the de/stabilization of meaning and identity. Read through a postcolonial lens, the canon becomes a material, tangible signifier of the negotiations of collective identity, which are pursued through on-going processes of semiosis – such a postcolonial rereading reveals that the processes of identity formation and the asymmetries of power which inform them, have inscribed themselves deeply into the text. In line with the argument developed across this book, I will argue for a ‘resourcement’ of such a critically destabilized canon for a radically hermeneutical theology, for which the corpus of scriptures becomes a sacrament of loss – a sign and instrument of God’s absent presence.

2. Intercultural Theology in Historical Perspective Over the last few decades, rereadings of the Christian tradition through the lens of critical cultural studies have done a tremendous job of revealing the cultural plurality within Christianity: they have shown how tradition has taken its shape through the exclusion of alternative theological interpretations and they have exposed a host of silenced voices underneath its orthodox master narrative. While the identity theories of the Cultural Turn have thus highlighted the intercultural nature of Christianity, the theological processing of these unsettling rereadings is still very much under construction and a work in progress. The numerous publications in recent years on this topic document ongoing explorations – we are still looking for appropriate theological languages for the plurality of Christianities and their intertwined histories. The first part of this book will map these explorations (focusing particularly on the development of Intercultural Theology in the German-speaking context) and trace the historical development of Intercultural Theology out of missiology and contextual theologies. A crucial theological question will be our guide through these historical explorations: How – as a response to which theological problems – has the interculturality of Christianity come to be considered a theological problem?

2.1 Missiology Narratives of the disciplinary history of Intercultural Theology commonly trace its formation back to missiology – a theological sub-discipline that was institutionalized around the turn of the 20th century, concomitant with a massive surge of missionary activity in the colonial world, which put missiology into a complex relation with colonialism.1 At that time, numerous missionary institutes were founded in Europe, and a vast number of ‘mission churches’ were established outside Europe.2 Thus, the new discipline of 1 Generalizing statements that either equate Christian mission and colonialism or exonerate mission from any involvement with colonial oppression do not do justice to the complexity of their relation. Instead, careful case studies in mission history are called for, cf., e. g., Dana L. Robert, (ed.). Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914 (Studies in the History of Christian Missions), Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008. 2 On historical case studies, cf. the contributions in Klaus J. Bade (ed.), Imperialismus und Kolonialmission: Kaiserliches Deutschland und koloniales Imperium (= Vol. 22), Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982.

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missiology and the historiography of missions can be seen as an attempt to respond to the theological ‘alienation’ the European churches were exposed to through their missionary activities: It is indeed remarkable that old-fashioned mission history as a literary genre began at a specific point in time, namely when western culture broke out of the territorial shell of Christendom encountering ‘the other’, and when, internally, a conflict of interpretations began to tear its spiritual topography apart.3

At that time, missiology was first and foremost conceived as a theory of practice. Missiologists studied the history and practice of the missionary activity of the church in order to support and advance this activity; they conceived of missiology as the ‘theory of the art of mission.’4 This practice, of course, took many different forms, given the many different churches doing mission in different cultural contexts. Still, there is one defining feature that characterized missionary practice across its many variants: mission was understood and practiced as the expansion of the European church.5 Joseph Schmidlin, the first professor to occupy the chair for missiology in Münster in Germany, which was established at the instigation of the German imperial government for the purpose of academic reflection on missions in the colonies, went so far as to say that mission is “the colonial edition of the whole of theology.”6 In its early period, missiology was thus practiced primarily as an applied science responding to the theological problem of the ‘alienation’ of European theology with a theory of mission praxis. It focused on a territorial understanding of mission: the goal of mission was understood as planting the (visible) church. Paradigmatically, Joseph Schmidlin described mission as “the church’s activity directed at spreading faith in God and the kingdom of God, the Christian religion, and the Catholic Church among non-Christian individuals and peoples.”7 With this focus on “evangelization activities among non-Christians,” he clearly distinguished his own view from other concepts of mission, such as that of mission as “the propagation of the Catholic faith among Christians of other denominations.” As 3 Werner Ustorf, “What’s Wrong with Mission History?” in: Volker Küster (ed.), Mission Revisited: Between Mission History and Intercultural Theology. In Honor of Pieter N. Holtrop, Berlin, Münster: Lit, 2010, pp. 3–14, here p. 9. 4 Cf. Joseph Schmidlin, “Missionswissenschaft und Missionspraxis,” in: Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft 10 (1920) 1–11, 3. 5 Two observations can serve to substantiate this claim. First, a geographical understanding of mission was predominant – mission was Christianity when practiced in non-European regions. Secondly, until the mid-20th century, the Congregatio de Propaganda Fidei was staffed exclusively by European members – it was the European church that administered and carried out mission in non-European countries. 6 Joseph Schmidlin, Einführung in die Missionswissenschaft, Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 11919, p. 10. 7 Ibid., p. 15.

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Intercultural Theology in Historical Perspective

the critical and systematic reason-based knowledge, investigation, and presentation of the spread of the Christian faith or the conversion of the pagans, both its actual practice in the present and the past as well its foundations and rules,8

missiology is reflection on missionary praxis. As “a science by missionaries for missionaries,” it develops, in a circular hermeneutical fashion, a “theory of mission.”9 Schmidlin maintains that the goal of mission is to Christianize peoples, distinguishing thereby between the conversion of the individual and such Christianization. Both aspects should, however exist in “harmonious association with each other.”10 This distinction served the “successive unfolding”11 of the goal of mission: individual conversion finds its “capstone”12 in the incorporation of the individual into the church through baptism: Internally … mission is the expansion of Christianity, and externally the social expansion of the church. Both are organic and inseparably connected to a whole: Christianization in its widest scope.13

Hence, initially, missiology tended to consider the ‘goal of mission’ the implantatio ecclesiae.14 This approach is problematic if it relies on an understanding of the church as a hierarchical, visible institution that coincides with the kingdom of God and if the proclamation of the Gospel is understood as serving the establishment of the church.15 For Schmidlin, the goal of 8 Ibid., pp. 2 f. 9 Cf. Klaus Hock, “Grenzziehung und Grenzüberschreitung: The Making of ‘Mission’ als Thema der Missionswissenschaft,” in: Arnd Bünker and Ludger Weckel (eds.), “… ihr werdet meine Zeugen sein …“: Rückfragen aus einer störrischen theologischen Disziplin, Freiburg im Breisgau, Basel, Vienna: Herder, 2005, pp. 249–59, here p. 255. 10 Joseph Schmidlin, Katholische Missionslehre im Grundriss, Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1923, p. 243. 11 Ibid., p. 244. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p. 44. 14 Ibid., p. 292: “For some decades the church has, in a rather unusual way, become the goal of mission.” The ‘planting thesis’ was advocated primarily in the missiological school in Leuven and influenced there by Pierre Charles SJ (Etudes missiologiques): “We cannot give an answer to the question of why the church any more than we can to the other question: Why the kingdom of God? The church is the final goal: it is not subordinate to anything else. Here as well, everything begins and ends with an absolute, and there is nothing more absolute than the order that the truth, which God himself is, has established. The boundaries of the visible church are always advancing further to bring this task of growth to its final end, to fill the whole world with prayer and worship – ager es mundus – to deliver the Redeemer’s whole property to him – that is the work of mission.” Cited in Ludwig Rütti, Zur Theologie der Mission: Kritische Analysen und neue Orientierungen (= Gesellschaft und Theologie Systematische Beiträge, vol. 9), Munich: Kaiser, etc., 1972, pp. 29 f. 15 Thus, the Reformed missiologist Hendrik Kraemer held that the claim “Not so much the message must be proclaimed, but the church as a keeper of infallible truth and as a hierarchical

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mission is indeed the proclamation of the Gospel, but, in line with the neoscholastic ecclesiology of his time, he nonetheless tends to equate this with the planting of the visible church.16 Here, as the “objective institution of salvation,”17 the church is the visible realization of the kingdom of God;18 the church and the kingdom of God are equated “in a kind of identification of sacrament and res.”19 Thus, when referring to “salvific community,” mission, according to Schmidlin, always and everywhere “has the church in mind … because both coincide … according to the principle extra ecclesiam nulla salus.”20 This ecclesiocentric limitation in the church planting theory was subsequently strongly criticized21 and undermined by concepts of the church that subvert the juridical-institutional restriction of the visible societas perfecta.22 Biblical reorientation to Jesus’ message about the kingdom of God helped to develop new interpretations of mission.23 Before these changes occurred, however, the plantatio ecclesiae was thought to be the means for reaching the mission goal. The establishment of the local church was thus seen as an integral moment in communicating the faith.24 This framework strengthens local churches,25 thus undermining an exclusively centralist view of the church – and it is against this background that the demand for a

16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25

institution must be planted” was essentially “true and exact.” Cited in Thomas Ohm, Machet zu Jüngern alle Völker: Theorie der Mission, Freiburg im Breisgau: Erich Wewel Verlag, 1962, p. 297. Schmidlin, Einführung in die Missionswissenschaft, pp. 21 f. “Catholic mission constantly keeps in mind that it is called beforehand by the only authoritative divine ‘mission instruction’ here to spread the Gospel to combat pagan superstition…. It is clear that the most immediate goal of mission activity is the conversion of the individual unbeliever…. But mission still has another goal that admittedly converges with the one just sketched above: according to Catholic doctrine, there is no abstract Christianity but only that Christianity that is embodied and realized in the kingdom of God on earth … in the visibly organized and hierarchically structured Roman Catholic church.” Schmidlin, Katholische Missionslehre im Grundriss, pp. 281–90. Cf. note 16 above. Siegfried Wiedenhofer, Das katholische Kirchenverständnis: Ein Lehrbuch der Ekklesiologie, Graz, Vienna, Cologne: Verl. Styria, 1992, p. 153. Schmidlin, Einführung in die Missionswissenschaft, p. 22. Cf. Rütti, Zur Theologie der Mission, pp. 25–36. Vatican II, which describes mission as instrinsic to the nature of the church, sees it as a fundamental obligation for all people of God (Ad Gentes 2). Couturier, Mission de l’Eglise: “Planting the church is not first building the actual edifice, creating a local clergy, nor even laying the foundation of Catholic worship; rather, it is to proclaim: ‘The kingdom of God is near, the kingdom of God is among you’.” Cited in Ohm, Machet zu Jüngern alle Völker, p. 299. Karl Müller, “Das Missionsziel des hl. Paulus,” in: ZMR (1957), pp. 99–100, here p. 100: “The building of the native church is, today more than ever, a necessity if the faith is to be established and rooted in the mission people.” Schmidlin (Einführung in die Missionswissenschaft, p. 144) points to the curial reorganization of 1908, which significantly limited the ability of the Propaganda Fidei both spatially and in substance.

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native clergy emerges.26 Even if theory and reality diverged for a long time on this point – initially, a local hierarchy was only very slowly established in the various mission areas where paternalistic biases lasted for a long time27 – this demand nevertheless gave rise to an awareness of cultural variety within Christian identity. The issue of culture became a problem for Protestant mission as well. The pietistic understanding of mission focused more strongly on the individual conversion of non-Christians than Roman Catholic theology did. The individualistic orientation of the revival movements brought the cultural alterity of the ‘objects of mission’ into a stronger and more positive light.28 This “incursion of the other” subsequently provoked a distinction between universal Christianity and its cultural forms of expression. Gustav Warneck, the first professor of missiology at a Protestant theological faculty, writes: Namely, this Gospel, because of its supernatural and internal character, is such that it is attractive to all national and social contexts of human nature. Because Christianity is not form and rule but spirit and love, it is able to penetrate the whole life of the individual and the community, whatever other folk, state, social, or cultural forms it may have adopted. In this context, Christianity possesses an ability to adapt universally…. Christian mission protests energetically against the conscious or unconscious alignment of Christianization and Europeanization … or even Christianization and civilization. The admission into the kingdom of heaven presupposes inner qualities and not the external forms of Europeanism in language, customs, etc.29 26 The Apostolic Letter by Benedict XV, Maximum Illud (1919), requires the promotion and establishment of a native clergy. 27 “Father Gabet in China to Rome, 1847: ‘With respect to the need for a native clergy, it is–viewed abstractly – generally accepted. But when it becomes a matter of turning it into fact, there seems to be little consensus. The reason given for this is almost always that the men in this country have such a weak understanding and are of such an unsteady character that they are not able to grasp the grandeur and dignity of the priesthood and to fulfil its duties.’” Cited in Andrzej Miotk, Das Missionsverständnis im historischen Wandel am Beispiel der Enzyklika “Maximum illud,” Philos.-Theol. Hochschule, Dissertation St. Augustin, 1999. (= Veröffentlichungen des Missionspriesterseminars St. Augustin bei Bonn 51), Nettetal: Steyler Verl., 1999, p. 112 . 28 David Bosch mentions the Herrenhuters as an example: “They identified with the indigenous peoples and lived and dressed the way they did, mostly to the utter disgust of the European colonizers.” Nonetheless, the Herrenhuters are one of the few exceptions; in most cases, the observance of cultural difference turned into “benevolent paternalism.” Cf. Bosch, Transforming Mission, pp. 291–98. 29 Gustav Warneck, Evangelische Missionslehre: Ein missionstheoretischer Versuch. 1. Abteilung. Die Gründung der Sendung, Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthas, 1892, p. 292. An oft-quoted instruction by the Propaganda Fidei from 1659 also criticized the identification of Christianization and Europeanization: “Do not make any attempt in any way to persuade those people to change their rites, customs, and ways insofar as they do not offend openly against religion and morals. For what is more absurd than to introduce France, Spain, or Italy or any other part of Europe into China? It is not that, but the faith you must bring there!” Cited in Joseph Pathrapankal, “Religiöse Erziehung im Kontext interkultureller Bildung,” in: Thomas

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Schmidlin, too, appeals to Warneck’s argument of the underlying difference between religion and culture and considers the goal of mission primarily as a ‘religious’ one. He sees the cultural aspect as a ‘secondary goal’: “at the same time the planting and furthering of culture … both the material and economic as well as the intellectual and ethical” so that “the non-Christian races and nations … wake from a thousand-year long sleep and eagerly soak in the influences of modern civilization.”30 The cultural differences, which have become inconcealable through the missionary activities of the European churches are thus countered with a hermeneutic of assimilation and subjection:31 We are internally justified in subduing the native peope to our rule only if we bring them a higher good in exchange for the loss of their freedom, if we communicate to them, as a return gift … our higher culture, our moral concepts, and our better work method. In the name of civilization, the Europeans have divided Africa to raise the black people from the state of savagery to a human existence, and they should always keep this reasoning in mind. If the subordination is not to become unjust, this reasoning entails the right of the natives to protection, education, and Christianization, a threefold right to which a threefold duty on our part corresponds.32

Schmidlin’s successor at Münster, Thomas Ohm, already distanced himself from the Eurocentrism of this intercultural hermeneutic of early missiology.33 Its air of superiority results in a subject-object schema: “Therefore, to be even clearer on the concept of mission, we have to view the subject and object of

30 31

32

33

Schreijäck (ed.), Religion im Dialog der Kulturen: Kontextuelle religiöse Bildung und interkulturelle Kompetenz, Münster: Lit, 2000, pp. 65–75, here p. 69. The question of criteria is not discussed. Schmidlin, Einführung in die Missionswissenschaft, pp. 21, 43. Johann B. Metz, “So viele Antlitze, so viele Fragen: Lateinamerika mit den Augen eines europäischen Theologen,” in: Johann B. Metz and Hans-Eckehard Bahr (eds.), Augen für die Anderen: Lateinamerika – eine theologische Erfahrung, Munich: Kindler, 1991, pp. 11–61, here pp. 60 f. “But this recognition of the others in their otherness did not serve … their acknowledgment; it was a recognition of the others in service to their predictability and outsmarting them. It was an expression of a hermeneutic of domination, but not a hermeneutic of acknowledgment that is alien to all violence, every ‘will to power’ in the recognition of the others in their otherness.” Joseph Schmidlin, “Deutsche Kolonialpolitik und katholische Heidenmission,” in: Zeitschrift für Missions-wissenschaft (1912), pp. 25–49, here p. 35. This cultural imperialistic mission ideology, which describes the ‘duty’ to ‘civilize’ non-European peoples was given classic expression by Rudyard Kipling in his famous and controversial poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” published in McClure’s Magazine 12 (Feb. 1899) Thomas Ohm, Ex contemplatione loqui: Gesammelte Aufsätze, Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1961, pp. 145 f.: “We are still not completely free of our way of seeing and our one-sidedness. We have far too high a view of ourselves and underestimate the Asians. Some still think that it is our culture that should be propagated. We still do not distinguish sufficiently between the essence of Christianity and its European dress …. And we are still working in a European way.”

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mission separately.”34 In missiological theory, European missionaries were conceived as the active ones in the missionary process: they administered the existing mission churches, they were the churches’ priests and bishops, while non-Christian peoples – as the objects of mission – were required to adapt to European culture; their conversion was equated with the acceptance of European values. They were denied any independence for a long time.35 This binary coding of the mission process into active giver and passive receiver, into Christian civilization and heathen savagery, left no room for reflection on the processes of mutual exchange and transformation in which the communication of the Gospel between two cultures occurred. The Basic Metaphor: Accommodation As Schmidlin’s work demonstrates, at the beginning of the 20th century, missiology was understood as a theory of praxis, as reflection on past missionary undertakings and as an applied science of present mission praxis. Against the background of a neo-scholastic ecclesiology, it developed a territorial understanding of mission that saw the implantatio ecclesiae as the goal of mission and was thus aimed at the geographical expansion of the visible, institutional church. Its ambivalent relationship to European colonialism during its time of institutionalization allowed it to draw on this ideology of cultural imperialism36 and to present missionization as civilization. But even if the intercultural hermeneutics at the foundation of this concept of mission tended to be paternalistic and contributed to the legitimization of oppression, the irreducible alterity of other cultures emerged as an unavoidable theme. In mission activity, the European export of Christianity encountered cultural plurality and diversity, and thus the understanding of the universality of the Gospel became problematic. Missionary border experiences, which made cultural alterity visible and tangible, clearly demonstrated the culturality of European Christianity. The confrontation with cultural plurality made it impossible to present this type of Christianity as universal and and to transmit it to other cultures without further ado. The relation between the universal Gospel and particular cultures as well as the problem of the processes of intercultural communication were thus unavoidable problems in missiology right from the start. Early missiology used the metaphor of accommodation to describe the 34 Schmidlin: Einführung in die Missionswissenschaft, p. 15. 35 Bosch, Transforming Mission, p. 5: “They [remain] under the tutelage of Western mission agencies, at least until the latter should decide to grant them a ‘certificate of maturity’, that is, until the younger churches had proved that they were fully self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating.” 36 Andrew Porter (“Missions and Cultural Imperialism,” in: Aasulv Lande [ed.], Mission in a Pluralist World, Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1996, pp. 65–80) calls for a differentiated view of the concept of cultural imperialism that does not obscure the instability and fragmented character of the ‘imperialistic’ culture and also takes the agency of the colonized into account.

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relationship between Gospel and culture. Given the alterity of other cultures, it became clear that Christianity – viewed in a neo-scholastic way as a permanent, unchanging entity – needed to be accommodated, adjusted, and adapted to these other cultures. These processes were first discussed in missiology as problems of method:37 “What was of primary importance were practical attempts to solve the problems, not fundamental considerations.”38 This approach obscured the wide-reaching theological implications of the relationship between culture and Gospel.39 Accommodation was thus understood as a one-sided process that placed the teaching activity of the subjects of mission in the foreground: the missionaries were the actors and adapted themselves to the objects of mission. Thomas Ohm already broke with the one-sidedness of this idea in a reading of Thomas Aquinas when he distinguished between accommodation, assimilation, and transformation, thus bringing the process of the reception of the Gospel and its repercussions for Christianity into view.40 Both versions of the accommodation theory, however, rely tacitly on a normative idea of the ‘essence of Christianity’ that distinguishes between essential and non-essential or accidental properties. ‘Peripheral’ matters in the area of liturgy, religious customs, or church architecture, for example, were considerered accidental and could thus be adjusted to other cultures. The essence, however, cannot be accommodated; its supernatural, supratemporal, and immutable character does not allow this. Accommodation could thus be considered a methodological problem of praxis, without any reflection on its theological and hermeneutical implications:41 37 Schmidlin formulated it very bluntly in Katholische Missionslehre im Grundriss (p. 357): “Accommodation becomes applicable, namely, in methods that mission uses to be able at all to get to the pagan people in the first place.” 38 Müller, Missionarische Anpassung als theologisches Prinzip, p. 2. 39 This pertains to German missiology. An approach that was theological in nature right from the start was developed in Spanish, French, and Belgian theology. For an overview, cf. ibid., pp. 2–62. 40 According to Ohm (“Akkommodation und Assimilation in der Heidenmission nach dem heiligen Thomas von Aquin,” in: Zeitschrift für Mission [1927], pp. 94–113), accommodation is (p. 94)“the adaptation of the subject of mission, along with all that was to be communicated to the pagan, to what was particular about the pagan.” Assimilaton is “the inclusion of the pagans’ own perceptions and values in Christian truth and value assets” (p. 94). In another step, that of transformation, what was taken over was transformed, refined, and, as it were, baptized. 41 Within the framework of neo-scholastic theology, the problem of accommodation produces a tension that occupied Schmidlin’s student, Johannes Thauren. Cf. Johannes Thauren, Die Akkommodation im Katholischen Heidenapostolat, Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1927. Thauren justified accommodation with quotes from the New Testament and the church fathers and grounded its necessity in the “legal position of the object of missions” (p. 21). Against this background, he distinguished between the external and internal unity of the church as “the treasure of the entire deposit of the faith” (p. 29): whereas the internal unity, which consists in the unitas symbolica and the unitas liturgica (p. 29), is unchangeable, the external unity, the “unity of liturgy and the formal shape of doctrine … is accidental” (p. 29). But because this external unity is “the most imposing manifestation of internal unity,” little room is left for accommodation with respect to accidental aspects. Nevertheless, for pastoral reasons, Thauren

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The traditional model of accommodation suffered from the fact that highly complicated processes in various areas of church life were solved by an extremely simple and at first also quite superficially understood schema – the schema for distinguishing between (mutable) form and (immutable) content.42

With respect to both cultural studies and theology, this schema rests on models that have since become questionable. From the point of view of cultural studies, the separation between culture and religion implied in the accommodation model is no longer tenable. The distinction between essence and accident goes contrary to the complexity of cultural sign systems that develop meaning in the difference and interdependence of their symbols.43 The identity theories that were developed by critical cultural theories point to the unstable hybridity of every formation of identity and thus undermine the idea that missionaries can simply ‘use’ accommodation as a methodological means of adapting accidental cultural aspects to an essentially static Christianity. Since the Cultural Turn, the encounter between two cultural sign systems has been considered to be a highly productive place of identification that cannot be completely controlled in the negotiations for meaning. The accommodation model, however, does not afford us a sufficiently complex understanding of this productivity of the intercultural processes of translation. Rather, accommodation is understood as a – restrictively used – method for adapting the fixed content of Christianity to separate aspects of other cultures. The focus on accommodation as a problem of praxis does not deal sufficiently with the hermeneutical, epistemological, and criteriological issues at stake in cultural encounters. The accommodation model can therefore tacitly cling to a normative understanding of culture and thus perpetuates the hegemony of European ethnocentrism even in the adaptations it makes possible. The theological presuppositions of the accommodation model find their roots in the neo-scholastic paradigm of the 19th century. The distinction between essence and accidents finds its theological foundation in its view of revelation as instruction: Christianity consisted, in that view, of a clearly delineated, unchangeable system of propositions. This ahistorical and acultural conception of Christian identity is linked to a hierarchical-juridical ecclesiology that highlights the visibility of the church as the protector of the unchangeable deposit of faith. This tendency to identify Christianity with the holds on to its possibility and necessity (p. 30) and thus views it as a problem for practical theology. 42 Fritz Kollbrunner, “Die klassische Theorie: Akkommodation,” in: Giancarlo Collet (ed.), Theologien der Dritten Welt: EATWOT als Herausforderung westlicher Theologie und Kirche, Immensee: Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft, 1990, pp. 133–41, here p. 141. 43 “The complex whole of a culture was thereby dissolved into useful and non-useful elements, as if cultures were assembled like building blocks!” Müller, Missionarische Anpassung als theologisches Prinzip, p. 57.

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Roman Catholic model of the church allows only very limited space for genuinely different formulations of Christian identity. The presuppositions of this model, both those grounded in theology and those grounded in the cultural sciences, thus lead the accommodation model into aporias. It turned out to be insufficient for addressing the theological problem of Gospel and culture(s) that arises in mission. Although early missiology began to acknowledge the cultural plurality of Christian identity and the culturality of European Christianity, as a neo-scholastic project it lacked adequate epistemological and hermeneutical perspectives to reflect systematically on the intercultural transformation processes connected with it: Unfortunately, Catholic missiology could not approach the question of accommodation with a reflexivity that could have been gained from the insights of contemporary philosophy, especially the hermeneutics of recent exegesis and the history of dogma. The neo-scholastic conceptual apparatus that remained after the crisis of modernism was unsuited for tackling the problem of a budding pluralistic world church.44

The model of accommodation demonstrates the problem of early missiology. It understood itself as academic research into Christian mission and thus considered its aim to be a reflection on cultural and religious border crossings. Yet, even though the inescapable interculturality of Christianity was its central theme, it developed a theory of the relation between culture and Gospel that proved to be insufficiently differentiated. This theoretical weakness was the result of a claim to universality by European Christianity and Western theology. This claim had extremely concrete effects on church politics and praxis: mission churches were seen as subordinate, dependent ‘offshoots’45 of their mother churches. The accommodation model hampered new processes of Christian identification in other cultural sign systems and the global church was viewed as a monolithic entity that was to have as little cultural variation as possible.46 This theological problem, which was intrinsically connected with its practical consequences, results from a similarly interdependent connection between historical and theological background discourses. The institutionalization of missiology occurred during the period of colonialism and European imperialism and found its theological background in the ahistorical, deductive system of neo-scholasticism whose ecclesiology and revelation 44 Kollbrunner, Die klassische Theorie: Akkommodation, p. 137. 45 Müller (Missionarische Anpassung als theologisches Prinzip, p. 31) refers to Eduard Loffeld who speaks “of autochthonous, native churches as offshoots of the mother church – with explicit reference to strawberry offshoots.” 46 Thauren, Die Akkommodation im Katholischen Heidenapostolat, p. 29: “This external unity or uniformity … does not belong to the essence of the church …. But it is of great significance from both an organizational and legal point of view as well as a dogmatic one: it represents the most imposing manifestation of internal unity.”

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theology were translated into a territorial view of mission and an ahistorical and acultural, essentialist concept of Christian identity. In missiology, these historical and theological patterns often found their mutual grounding and legitimization.47 While the Western claim to hegemony was religiously supported by the political instrumentalization of Christian evangelization, the mission work of the church in the 19th century cannot – because of its temporal proximity and its ambivalent relation to the colonial undertakings – be seen as detached from colonial discourse. Its initial ambivalent relation to the colonialism of its foundational period and the way this relation shaped its hermeneutics of non-European cultures and churches placed missiology under strong pressure for legitimation both within theology and in the broader field of academia. On the one hand, missiology’s role in the canon of theology remains unclear. While the call for an explicit missiology with an independent status in both Roman Catholic and Protestant theology was asserted around the turn of the century, there are still those who argue that all theological disciplines need to have an implicit missionary orientation. Karl Rahner is one of many who called for a missionary reorientation of theology: “The theology of the West today also has some incalculable catching up to do. It must … be missionary.”48 After 1945, with the start of political decolonialization and the struggle of non-European peoples and churches for independence, the pressure to justify missiology increased. This period was marked by discussions about its elimination and the search for new orientations that focused on the de-Europeanization of theology and a positive hermeneutics of religious and cultural alterity. Thus, for example, Adolf Exeler’s ‘comparative theology’ attempted to bring the differences of various culturally influenced theologies into dialogue with each other in a productive and creative way. His goal was to make them “fruitful for the large Catholic unity of theological thought.”49 Theo Sundermeier reconceptualizes missiology as xenology, i. e., “the study of the encounter of the church with those who are strangers to it.”50 The inescapable interculturality of 47 Schmidlin, Deutsche Kolonialpolitik und katholische Heidenmission, p. 39: “The state can indeed annex and incorporate those protectorates externally; the deeper goal of colonial policy, i. e., internal colonization, should help it complete the mission. While the state can enforce physical obedience through punishment and laws, it is the spiritual submissiveness and dependence of the natives that achieves this.” 48 Karl Rahner, “Die bleibende Bedeutung des II. Vatikanischen Konzils,” in: Karl Rahner (ed.), Schriften zur Theologie, vol. XIV, Zürich, Einsiedeln, Cologne: Benziger, 1980, pp. 303–18, here p. 310. 49 Adolf Exeler, “Vergleichende Theologie statt Missionswissenschaft,” in: Hans Waldenfels (ed.), “… denn ich bin bei Euch” (Mt 28, 20): Perspektiven im christlichen Missionsbewußtsein heute. Festgabe für Josef Glazik und Bernward Willeke zum 65. Geburtstag, Zürich: Benziger, 1978, pp. 199–211. 50 Theo Sundermeier, “Begegnung mit dem Fremden: Plädoyer für eine verstehende Missionswissenschaft,” in: Evangelische Theologie 50 (1990), pp. 390–400, here p. 397; Theo Sundermeier, Den Fremden verstehen: Eine praktische Hermeneutik, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und

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Christianity became the focus of all attempts at reconfiguring missiology. Instead of outlining a theory of praxis of missions, missiology came to be seen as a “fringe science,”51 engaged in “foundational research that … focuses on the analysis of the transformation of Christian discourse in the processes of crossing borders.”52

2.2 Contextual Theologies By the 1960s and 1970s, the missiological project had thus come under massive attack. The theological paradigm shifts of that time began to dismantle the neo-scholastic presuppositions of its theological framework; the paternalistic approach it took to the so-called ‘objects of mission’ and its monolithic ideal for the world church began to sit uneasily with a world shifting towards decolonization. It was in that climate that ideas for an Intercultural Theology first began to emerge. Werner Ustorf has convincingly shown that first steps towards Intercultural Theology in Europe – taken by Walter Hollenweger, Richard Friedli, and Hans Jochen Margull53 – were actually steps away from the original paradigm of missiology, nudged along by a growing discomfort with the original framework of studying mission. The project of Intercultural Theology was hedged by former missiologists who were exposed to the suspicion that missiology now had to face.54 This growing unease had to do with extensive demographic, political, and theological shifts in the world church, which, in turn, were part and parcel of a profound rearrangement of the global order in the mid-20th century, when a host of former colonies of European empires gained independence. In the

51

52 53

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Ruprecht, 1996; Theo Sundermeier and Werner Ustorf, Die Begegnung mit dem Anderen: Plädoyers für eine interkulturelle Hermeneutik (= Studien zum Verstehen fremder Religionen, vol. 2), Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verl. Haus Mohn, 1991. Dieter Becker, “Junger Wein und neue Schläuche: Theologische Wissenschaft heute und der Fachbereich. Religionen, Mission, Ökumene,” in: Dieter Becker (ed.), Es begann in Halle … Missionswissenschaft von Gustav Warneck bis heute, Erlangen: Verl. der Ev.-Luth. Mission, 1997, pp. 190–208, here p. 196. K. Hock, Grenzziehung und Grenzüberschreitung: The Making of “Mission” als Thema der Missionswissenschaft, p. 254. Walter J. Hollenweger, Erfahrungen der Leibhaftigkeit (Interkulturelle Theologie 1) 1979; Walter J. Hollenweger, Umgang mit Mythen (Interkulturelle Theologie / Walter J. Hollenweger; 2) 1982; Walter J. Hollenweger, Geist und Materie (Interkulturelle Theologie / Walter J. Hollenweger; 3) 1988; H. J. Margull, “Überseeische Christenheit: Markierungen eines Forschungsbereiches anhand der letztjährigen Literatur,” in: VF 16 (2) (1971) 2–54; H. J. Margull, “Überseeische Christenheit II: Vermutungen zu einer Tertiaterranität des Christentums,” in: VF 19 (1) (1974) 56–103. Cf. Werner Ustorf, “The Cultural Origins of ‘Intercultural Theology’,” in: Mission Studies 25 (2008) 229–251.

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wake of decolonization, discourses in the former colonies shifted: not only did independence have to be established politically, there was also a need to develop a cultural identity free from the derogatory attributions given by the colonial oppressors. Theology was also part of these anti-colonial endeavors and was believed to require decolonization as well.55 One very visible outcome of these projects of contextual theology is a strong diversification of theology – with profound theological reverberations. The many different and even conflicting interpretations of the Gospel made the unproblematic equation of European theology with universal theology questionable – in fact, it made it untenable. The discrepancies among these contextual theologies also created problems, however, and raised one major question: After the anti-colonial diversification of theology, how can the universality and unity of the church, which are two crucial and normative landmarks of the theological tradition, be sustained? This question was very concretely tackled in the EATWOT process. The Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians was founded in the 1970s as a mediating platform between non-European contextual theologies. At first, the explicit goal was to forge one unified ‘Third World Theology.’56 But this goal had to be abandoned quite rapidly – there were too many discrepancies between the various contextual theologies. What was important to Latin American theology fell short of the questions raised in Asian and African contexts – and vice versa. What emerged after a prolonged phase of discussion was an agreement to disagree.57 What binds contextual theologies together, it seems, is conflict – they are connected through an ongoing dispute about what the essence of Christianity is. The essence, itself, however, can never be pinpointed and outlined conclusively and positively. The universality of the Gospel ultimately remains elusive – it is a matter of negotiation between its many interpretations, while none of them can ever claim to be or have the one absolute Gospel. 55 Samuel Rayan, “Decolonizing Theology,” in: Virginia Fabella and R. S. Sugirtharajah, (eds.), Dictionary of Third World Theologies, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000, 65 f. 56 Cf K.C. Abraham, “Ecumenical Assoc. of Third World Theologians,” in: Geoffrey W.Bromileyand Erwin Fahlbusch (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Christianity, vol. 2, Cambridge 2001, pp. 32–34, 32: “It was commonly recognized at the Dar es Salaam meeting that theologies originating in the West and, as it were, imposed on the South do not necessarily speak relevantly to the emerging Third World consciousness. Participants were convinced of the need for a new approach, a method of doing theology that is grounded in the struggle of Third World people for freedom and justice. … They became convinced that a clear and comprehensive methodology for such theology could be developed only when theologians from Third World countries engaged in serious dialogue. In order to bring about and maintain such ongoing dialogue, EATWOT was formed.” 57 Cf. Volker Küster’s conclusion of his outline of the EATWOT process: “The original vision of formulating one theology of the Third World was thwarted by the discovery of plurality in the discussions in the first decade of EATWOT. The search for commonalities, differences, and intercultural learning opportunities was an adequate reaction.” Volker Küster, Einführung in die Interkulturelle Theologie, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011, p. 183.

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Through the EATWOT process, therefore, we can see that the irruption of plurality and otherness into theology triggers a profound epistemo-theological shift. The decolonization of theology made it necessary to acknowledge that the Gospel cannot be had independently of its cultural context. Gospel and culture have always been inextricably entangled – each interpretation of the Gospel, therefore, is contingent. The methodological shift in contextual theologies (from accommodation to contextualization and inculturation) goes hand in hand with a reconfiguration of the epistemological paradigm of theology. One of the earliest reflections on these methodological and epistemological shifts triggered by the postcolonial pluralization of theology is Robert Schreiter’s Constructing Local Theologies. Schreiter adopts a crucial terminological shift in contextual theologies, which captures their epistemotheological shift away from the neo-scholastic paradigm of early missiology. They no longer imagine the relation between Gospel and culture through the difference between the kernel of the Gospel and its accidental husks; instead, they frame this relation as text/context and emphasize that both are two equal foundations of theological reflection that interpret each other in a hermeneutical circle. Schreiter describes the reciprocal interaction and interpretation of text and and context as a “dialectic cycle”58 between Gospel, church, and culture – and it is in this cycle that local theologies are constructed.59 In an analysis of culture that Schreiter describes semiotically as a “listening” to their meaning structures,60 pressing themes, and questions of a Christian community are identified and compared to “similar experience[s] of other communities in similar contexts at other times.”61 These ‘parallels’62 in Christian tradition serve as a reservoir of symbols and meanings for formulating a new local theology in a concrete context. The inescapable asynchronies between the contexts constantly compel new formulations of Christian identity. In this dialectical process between text and context, tradition is not a closed monolithic entity but a “series of local theologies.”63 The interaction between and reciprocal interpretation of the different contexts allows us to describe tradition semiotically as a “web of meaning”64 and offers resources to rethink the universality, unity, and catholicity of the church in

58 59 60 61

Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., pp. 20 f. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 33. Schreiter thus explicitly relies on Clifford Geertz’ hermeneutical, semiotic conception of culture. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., p. 32. 64 Cf. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description,” in: Clifford Geertz (ed.), The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books, 2006, pp. 3–30, here p. 5.

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their constitutive relation to pluralistic and disparate formulations of Christian identity.65 The hermeneutical circle between culture and tradition, between text and context, remains fundamentally open here. Theology’s inescapable locality turns every Christian identity and theological reflection on it into a culturally perspectival formulation that is, on the one hand, unavoidably limited and, on the other, strives to articulate the surplus of meaning of the Christian message that transcends its particular context. This contextuality, with its associated universal claim, places all theologies under an eschatological proviso. In the hermeneutical circle, the possibilities of new contextualizations are always reexplored on the basis of an interdisciplinary analysis of the contextuality of Christian identity. Contextual theologies pay particular heed to these processes of contextualization. First, this process is characterized by the primacy of praxis. Contextual theologies understand themselves as reflections on the praxis of faith in concrete situations with the goal of assisting this praxis.66 From this perspective, the hermeneutical circle between text and context takes shape through the methodological triad of seeing-judging-acting. Developed by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn (1882–1967) in his work with the JOC (Jeunesse Ouvri re Chr tienne), this triad was taken up at the Second Vatican Council as the hermeneutical structure for the pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes.67 Liberation theology introduced it into Contextual theologies as a critical social analysis. This triad brings a strong focus on action into the hermeneutical circle of text and context, and demands a lifestyle of “solidarity with the poor and oppressed” from theologians. It calls on them to be actively engaged in the promotion of justice and the prevention of exploitation, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, racism, sexism, and all kinds of other forms of oppression, discrimination, and dehumanization.68

Second, the work of contextualization is achieved through ideology critique. Sensitive to power and oppression in processes of cultural-religious identification, Contextual theologies put both text and context under a hermeneutics of suspicion. The goal of contextualization is to express the 65 Robert J. Schreiter, Die neue Katholizität: Globalisierung und die Theologie (= Theologie interkulturell, vol. 9), Frankfurt am Main: IKO – Verl. für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 1997. 66 In the hermeneutical circle of praxis and theory, theology is a ‘function of praxis’ that comes from praxis and impacts it. Cf. Clodovis Boff, Theologie und Praxis: Die erkenntnistheoretischen Grundlagen der Theologie der Befreiung (= Gesellschaft und Theologie: Fundamentaltheologische Studien, vol. 7), Munich: Kaiser, 1986. 67 Cf. Hans-Joachim Sander, “Theologischer Kommentar zur Pastoralkonstitution über die Kirche in der Welt von heute Gaudium et spes,” in: Peter Hünermann and Guido Bausenhart (eds.), Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil, Freiburg: Herder, 2009, pp. 581–886. 68 EATWOT, Herausgefordert durch die Armen, p. 44.

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liberating moment of the Christian message in its always contextual and hence ambivalent local formulations.69 With this emancipatory attitude, Contextual theologies also strive to critique and expand Western conceptions of knowledge and theology through narrative, practical, and wisdom approaches.70 Those who do theology of this kind are not exclusively academic ‘experts’ but also the community of believers who work out what it means to be Christian in their contexts. The religiosity of the people thus becomes an important locus theologicus. The task of an emancipatory theology also includes a critique of the history of mission written by the colonial powers from the Western perspective. An ideology-critical contextualization thus also means ‘rewriting’ past identification processes “from the underside of history,”71 taking into account the agency of its subaltern subjects in nonWestern contexts and their ability to speak. In the process of contextualization, recourse is made to the ambivalent meaning structures of the cultural sign systems through which the Christian text finds its local expressions. This constitutive openness needs criteria to identify the authentic ‘text’ of Christian identity in disparate contexts. In their critiques of universalizing aproaches, contextual theologies highlight the particularity and contextuality of every formulation of identity. As theological reflections, however, they also have to critically account for the claim of universality and unity associated with the Christian message. Even if Christian identity and its theological reflection is explicitly and reflectively located in particular and changing contexts, it does not accept arbitrariness in its formulations. Rather, contextual theologies indicate criteria for unity in plural contexts and strive to keep a universal perspective open in their particular formulations of identity. The relationship between particularity and universality, between text and context, between culture and Gospel is thus the basic tension in which contextual theologies are located. They discuss the meaning of the Christian text in plural contexts and reintepret it in concrete political, historical, socioeconomic, cultural, ethnic, and religious situations. The crucial insight of contextual theologies is that the ‘text’ of the Christian message cannot be viewed independently of every context as an essentialistic entity; it is always inextricably bound to a specific local ‘web of meaning.’ Here, as Michael Bongardt points out,

69 Contextualization can thus mean both a positive and a negative reception of the context. Shoki Coe (“Contextualizing Theology,” in: Gerald Anderson and Thomas F. Stransky (eds.), Mission Trends 3: Third World Theologies, New York: Paulist Press, 1975, pp. 19–24, here p. 24) points to the critical function of the cross and resurrection as the theological justification of the dynamic of the contextualization process: “So, for us, authentic contextualization must be constantly open to the painful process of de-contextualization, for the sake of re-contextualization.” 70 Cf. the typology in Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies, pp. 80–93. 71 EATWOT, Herausgefordert durch die Armen, p. 120.

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a terminological difficulty arises that is rooted in the proximity of the theological concept of context to linguistic hermeneutics of oral and written texts. In that original context, a definitive, established text is correlated in each case to the context and the hermeneutical activity is directed at the discovery of the relations between both. Theologically, however, the question of the universally authoritative text, whose context should be taken into account, leads to error so long as a sensually tangible form of this text is sought.72

The normative ‘text’ of Christian identity, which represents its universal unity in plural contextualizations, originated from a complex process of translation and transformation between disparate contexts. Its unity is found only in the plural, and its universality is unavoidably rooted in the particular. The Basic Metaphor: Inculturation Contextual theologies aim to make their contextuality and the universal claim of the Christian message two equal starting points of theological reflection. They thus address the tension between universality and particularity, between unity and plurality, between the normativity and contingency of the Christian message. This problem is not new, rather, it can be understood as the foundational problem of Christian theology. Due to the conflictive pluralization of Christianity in the context of decolonization, however, the status questionis73 is different: the relationship of Gospel and culture(s) is not treated as a purely methodological question as it was in the basic metaphor of accommodation but as a genuinely theological problem. The concept of contextuality offers a hermeneutical category for this problem, while the concept of inculturation functions as a category of action.74 The formulation of the concept of inculturation can be found in a reflection on the pluriformity of Christianity, which can be attributed to the Belgian missiologist, J. Masson SJ. In the context of Vatican II discussions on the opening up of the church to culture, Masson spoke of “a Catholicism

72 Michael Bongardt, “Glaubenseinheit statt Einheitsglaube: Zu Anliegen und Problematik kontextueller Theologien,” in: Klaus Müller and Gerhard Larcher (eds.), Fundamentaltheologie: Fluchtlinien und gegenwärtige Herausforderungen, Regensburg: Pustet, 1998, pp. 243–60, here p. 251. Cf. also A.R. Crollius, “What Is So New about Inculturation?” in: A.R. Crolliusand Th oneste Nk ramihigo (eds.), What Is So New about Inculturation? Rome: Centre Cultures and Religions – Pontifical Gregorian University, 1984, pp. 1–18, here note 7: “Unless referring to the writing and interpretation of texts, the expressions ‘contextualism’, ‘contextuality’ and ‘contextualisation’ are metaphors which do not necessarily add to the clarity and precision of the discourse.” 73 Crollius, What Is So New about Inculturation? p. 1. 74 Hans Waldenfels, “Gottes Wort in der Fremde – Inkulturation oder Kontextualität?” in: Monika Pankoke-Schenk, Georg Evers and Ludwig Bertsch (eds.), Inkulturation und Kontextualität: Theologien im weltweiten Austausch. Festgabe für Ludwig Bertsch zum 65. Geburtstag, Frankfurt am Main: Knecht, 1994, pp. 114–23, here p. 114.

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inculturated in a polymorphous fashion,”75 referring thus to a rooting or planting of the Christian message in non-Christian cultures. The concept had its breakthrough moment at the 32nd General Meeting of the Congregation of the Society of Jesus in Rome (1974/1975). The Jesuits required “inculturation, understood as the ‘incarnation of the Gospel’ in the cultural values of the individual peoples.”76 In connection with this, the Superior General of the Jesuits, Pedro Arrupe SJ, took up the theme of inculturation and defined it against the background of Ignatian spirituality and the Jesuit principle of adaptation as the fundamental principle in the encounter between the Gospel and cultures: Inculturation is the incarnation of Christian life and of the Christian message in a particular cultural context, in such a way that this experience not only finds expression through elements proper to the culture in question (this alone would be no more than a superficial adaptation), but becomes a principle that animates, directs and unifies the culture, transforming and remaking it so as to bring about ‘a new creation.’77

Arrupes’ definition documents the rift between the accommodation and inculturation paradigms. Placing culture and the Gospel in relation to each other is no longer seen as a purely external adjustment of peripheral accidents. Rather, it is now viewed as a deep reciprocal penetration – cultures are given theological relevance because it is only in the meaning structures of cultural sign systems that the Christian message can develop its specific meaning, calling cultures to metanoia for their resistance to that message. Within the framework of this paradigm shift, the neologism ‘inculturation’ was developed simultaneously in dependence on and in demarcation from the concepts of acculturation and enculturation in cultural studies. Acculturation refers to the phenomena of contact between cultures and the concomitant cultural changes.78 Enculturation describes an individual’s ‘growing into’ a 75 Joseph Masson, “L’Eglise ouverte sur le monde,” in: Nouvelle Revue Theologique 84 (1962), pp. 1032–43, here p. 1038. 76 Michael Sievernich, “Von der Akkomodation zur Inkulturation: Missionarische Leitideen der Gesellschaft Jesu,” in: ZMR 86 (2002), pp. 260–76, here pp. 267 f. At the same time, the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences approved the closing document of its plenary assembly (Taipei, 27–4–1974), which pointed to the necessity of an inculturated church. Cf. Gaudencio B. Rosales and Catalino G.S. Arevalo (eds.), For All the Peoples of Asia: Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences. Documents form 1970–1991, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992, Art. 9: “The local church is a church incarnate in a people, a church indigenous and inculturated.” 77 Letter by the General of the Order Pedro Arrupe SJ, 14 May 1978, cited in Michael Sievernich, “Theological Trends: Jesuit Theologies of Mission,” The Way: A Review of Christian Spirituality 42 (2003), pp. 44–57, here p. 47. 78 American Social Research Council (1935): “Acculturation comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous firsthand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups.” Cited in Crollius, What Is So New about Inculturation? p. 4.

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culture and thus learning cultural competence.79 It was in contrast to those analytical concepts in cultural studies that the theological meaning of the normative concept of inculturation developed.80 In light of the fact that the message is never extracultural but always transcultural, the encounter between the Gospel and culture(s) includes moments of acculturation and enculturation: Because it is the same church, universal by vocation and mission, which puts down her roots in a variety of cultural, social and human terrains, the process of inculturation has the characteristics of an acculturative encounter between cultures. And because the establishment of a local church is also a new beginning, the process of inculturation can be compared with the enculturative experience of the individual.81

Thus, in the inculturation paradigm, complex (inter)cultural processes of communication are reflected upon from a theological perspective. Here, various models for theological justification are developed. A majority of approaches, including the Roman Catholic magisterial texts that adopt the concept,82 view inculturation as analogous to incarnation: The meanings of inculturation and incarnation are not identical, but there is a relation of analogy between both.83

But critics of this analogy between inculturation and incarnation argue that it implies a distinction between a cultureless Gospel and the different cultures in which one attempts to inculturate it.84 While the Christological tradition of the 79 J. Herkovits, Man and His Works, New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1952: “The aspects of the learning experience which mark off man from other creatures, and by means of which, initially, and in later life, he achieves competence in his culture, may be called enculturation.” Cited in Crollius, What Is So New about Inculturation? p. 5. 80 Hans Hödl, “Inkulturation: Ein Begriff im Spannungsfeld von Theologie, Religions- und Kulturwissenschaft,” in: Rupert Klieber and Martin Stowasser (eds.), Inkulturation: Historische Beispiele und theologische Reflexionen zur Flexibilität und Widerständigkeit des Christlichen, Vienna: Lit, 2006, pp. 15–38, here p. 27. On the normativity of the concept of inculturation, cf. Konrad Hilpert, “Inkulturation: Anspruch und Legitimation einer theologischen Kategorie,” in: Konrad Hilpert (ed.), Der eine Gott in vielen Kulturen: Inkulturation und christliche Gottesvorstellung, Zürich: Benziger, 1993, pp. 13–32, here p. 17. 81 Crollius, What Is So New about Inculturation? p. 13. 82 Catechesi Tradendae 53 (1979); Redemptoris Missio 52 (1995); Evangelii nuntiandi (1975). 83 Paulo Suess, “Inkulturation,” in: Ignacio Ellacur a and Jon Sobrino (ed.), Mysterium liberationis: Grundbegriffe der Theologie der Befreiung, vol. 1–2, Lucerne: Edition Exodus, 1995/ 96, pp. 1011–59, here p. 1047. 84 Metz, “Im Aufbruch zu einer kulturell polyzentrischen Weltkirche,” p. 338: “There is no Christianity that preexists culture and history, no culturally denuded, culturally naked Christianity. That is why the repeatedly insinuated parallel between inculturation and incarnation is only conditionally correct.” Cf. Aylward Shorter, Toward a Theology of Inculturation, London: Chapman, 1988, pp. 79–83.

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church does call for a less static understanding of inculturation-asincarnation – it is precisely such a dualization between the divine and the human that the Chalcedonian formulation of ‘inconfusedly and inseparably’ resists – the framework of this analogy nevertheless makes it difficult to capture a sense of mutuality in the inculturation process. The various attempts to do so see the Gospel or the church as the manager of inculturation, analogous to Christ as the agent of incarnation (Phil 2:7 f.), and cultures as the passive receptacles. The analogy with incarnation excludes any profitable contribution by these cultures to the tradition through new formulations of Christian identity in new cultural sign systems. A similar problem arises for approaches that frame inculturation ecclesiologically in the tension between catholicity and locality. Here as well, the church emerges as the subject of inculturation that accesses other cultural sign systems.85 While incarnational models thus focus on a fixed Christian identity in the inculturation process, pneumatological and creation theology models concentrate instead on cultural identity.86 Assuming that the divine revelation of salvation is germinally present in all cultures, they understand inculturation not so much as a matter of planting a message from outside in the local culture as a discovery of the presence of God within it.87 The Christian message thus has an important heuristic function. That is why this model has placed great emphasis on the transformation processes that introduce the Gospel anew in other cultural sign systems but it tends to downplay the resistance to the Gospel that demands a transformation, a metanoia, of the culture. Therefore, a concept of inculturation that highlights the mutual challenge of cultural and Christian identities and the reciprocal transformation processes that both are subject to in their contact with each other will be based on the integration of different, mutually correcting models of justification of its theological foundation. As a theological reflection on the fundamental Christian tension between particularity and universality, the inculturation paradigm paves the way for Instead of invoking the incarnation, Shorter proposes an analogy between inculturation and the ‘paschal mystery’ (pp. 83–88). Giancarlo Collet, “Theologische Begründungsmodelle von Inkulturation,” in: Fritz Frei (ed.), Inkulturation zwischen Tradition und Modernität: Kontexte – Begriffe – Modelle [Projekt der Forschungsgruppe im “RomeroHaus”], Freiburg, Switzerland:Universitätsverlag Freiburg Schweiz , 2000, pp. 337–356, here p. 342. 85 Crollius, What Is So New about Inculturation? p. 8: “The particular churches, ‘in and from which comes into being the one and only Catholic church’ (LG23), are called upon to undertake the work of inculturation, not only in view of the communion they seek to establish with the peoples among which they live, but also, in virtue of their catholicity, which means both universality and unity, in view of the enrichment of the entire Catholic church.” 86 Anton Peter, “Modelle und Kriterien von Inkulturation,” in: Frei, Inkulturation zwischen Tradition und Modernität, pp. 311–35, here p. 317. 87 Leonardo Boff, Gott kommt früher als der Missionar: Neuevangelisierung für eine Kultur des Lebens und der Freiheit, Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1991.

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more complex theological perspectives than the accommodation model does. On the one hand, its reflection on the inherent contextuality of the Gospel entails a theological appreciation of cultures. The Gospel’s necessary inclusion in cultural sign systems make cultures inevitable places of Christian God-talk. They make signs available in which the Gospel can be communicated –cultures are a locus theologicus. Furthermore, because the Christian ‘text’ has been formulated in multiple ‘contexts’ and has thereby found vastly different expressions, the inculturation paradigm also calls for a reflection on the relativity of each particular local theology. Despite this theological impulse that the metaphor of inculturation gives rise to, it remains problematic on several levels. First, its productivity immediately proves to be a limitation of its conceptual power. The broad reception of the concept has led to a wide and elusive spectrum of semantic and syntactical uses; as a result, its meaning remains vague. The plurality of subjects and objects that the concept can be combined with is symtomatic of this vagueness:88 What inculturates (itself) – the church, the Gospel, the culture? What is inculturated – the Gospel, the Christian message, the church?89 This lack of clarity reveals the difficulty of indicating criteria for Christian identity amid the plurality of cultures. The morphological structure of the word suggests one-dimensionality and stasis in the relation between Gospel and culture (the Gospel is brought into the culture – with the emphasis on the [static] noun instead of the [dynamic] verb). Against this background, one could ask if the concept can articulate, in a theologically adequate way, the irresolvable tension between the universality and particularity of Christian identity. From the perspective of cultural theory, the static one-dimensionality of the inculturation metaphor cannot capture the complexity of identity theories that have arisen in cultural studies after the Cultural Turn. The image of planting the Gospel/the church in other cultures does not provide adequate means to grasp the unceasing productivity of cultural interstices in which meanings shift and in which identity is discussed anew in discursive inclusions and exclusions. As opposed to the powerful universalizing theology of the West, contextual theologies reveal the inherent contextuality of every theological reflection and thus the necessary plurality of such reflections. Dismissing Western approaches on the basis of an ideology critique, they attempt to spell out Christian identity in other cultural contexts anew and thus bring up a fundamental theological problem: Christian identity is always and inescap88 Stefan Silber, “Typologie der Inkulturationsbegriffe: Vier Aporien. Eine Streitschrift für einen neuen Begriff in einer notwendigen Debatte,” in: Jahrbuch für Kontextuelle Theologien 5 (1997), pp. 117–36, here p. 117. 89 Cf. Crollius (What Is So New about Inculturation?), who simultaneously describes the object of inculturation as “the church” (p. 6), “Christian life and message” (p. 8), and “Christian experience” (p. 16).

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ably contextually formulated, and therefore limited, and yet it is bound to a transcultural claim – the Christian message is considered to be a universal one. Every theology thus has to account for the claim to universality in the face of its inherent contextuality – every theology is, as Gustavo Guti rrez has put it, a “discourse on a universal message.”90 Within the framework of contextual theologies, the fundamental Christian tension between universality and particularity becomes virulent: How can theology, which is inherently contextual, convey the universal claim of the Christian message that is always expressed and realizable only in particular forms? The critique by contextual theologies makes it impossible to universalize a particular theology by masking its contextuality. Any conception of an extracultural universal theology is also excluded in light of the plural culturality of theological reflection – the universal claim of the Christian message remains inescapably bound to cultural sign systems and cannot be reflected on abstractly. As opposed to such universalistic and abstract approaches, it is the disparate plurality of contextual theologies that can keep open the surplus of meaning of the Christian message. In the tension of universality and particularity, cultural alterity becomes a central category of theological reflection. The incursion of the other, which confronts each particular theology with differentformulations of Christian identity, reveals the irresolvable cultural coding of every theology and at the same time subverts any solipsistic culturalism that absolutizes one identification. Thus, the contextuality of theology reflected in it is already present in the tension between particularity and universality – “an Intercultural Theology is the indispensable correlate of contextual theologies.”91 Contextual theologies thus led to the eventual demise of early missiology and triggered the project of Intercultural Theology. They produced those alternative stories that undermine the European hegemonic narrative of the Gospel and expose its cultural contingency. But they also place clear demands on the project of Intercultural Theology, questioning whether Intercultural Theology is really intended to represent a shift toward a reflection on the irruption of plurality and otherness in theology. Because the central critical impetus of contextual theologies is the exposure of the inescapable culturality of all theological reflection, they make it impossible to conceive of Intercultural Theology as a metanarrative that mediates between the many different contextual theologies. The critique by contextual theologies does not aim at replacing one metanarrative with a new one but shows how all narratives are culturally contingent. The failure of EATWOT to outline a single, universalizable ‘Third World Theology’ thus contains an important lesson for the future project of Intercultural Theology: Intercultural Theology cannot be 90 Gustavo Guti rrez, Theologie der Befreiung (= Welt der Theologie), Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verl., 1992, p. 44. 91 Küster, Theologie im Kontext, p. 86.

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conceived as an authority that provides a hermeneutical and ethical instance of mediation between, and above, the many culturally informed theologies.

2.3 Intercultural Theology The emergence of non-European contextual theologies was a radical shock for the established theological discourse. Developed in an explicit emancipation movement from European theology, they produced differences that demonstrate the contextuality of all theology and thus exposed the blind spot of a European theology that claims universality. The project of Intercultural Theology is a response to the problem of this “incursion of the other.” The challenge of contextual theologies calls for a new format of theology. Against this background, the pioneers of intercultural theology in Europe92 – the concept was influenced by Walter Hollenweger,93 a missiologist in Birmingham, who collaborated closely with Hans Jochen Margull (Hamburg) and Richard Friedli (Fribourg) – speak of a paradigm shift.94 Previously subjected to a hermeneutics of conquest (Metz), the culturally other was now to be fruitfully integrated into the established theological discourse: Sociocultural otherness refers to theological otherness…. The masking of God’s presence even makes a privileged place of the encounter with God out of the other.95

The biographies of these theologians testify to the shock this incursion of the cultural and religious other entailed for their theological thinking96 and 92 The synopsis of the project of Intercultural Theology in this chapter focuses predominantly on its German-speaking discourse. I consider publications up to 2012, when the German manuscript of this book was finished. 93 Walter J. Hollenweger, Erfahrungen der Leibhaftigkeit (= Interkulturelle Theologie, vol. 1) 1979; Walter J. Hollenweger, Umgang mit Mythen (= Interkulturelle Theologie / Walter J. Hollenweger; 2) 1982; Walter J. Hollenweger, Geist und Materie (= Interkulturelle Theologie / Walter J. Hollenweger; 3) 1988. 94 Werner Ustorf, “The Cultural Origins of ‘Intercultural Theology’,” in: Mission Studies 25 (2008) 229–251, here p. 233. The project of Intercultural Theology is more than a new name for a missiology that has run into problems, as the declaration of the Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft für Theologie appears to imply. Cf. Mission Studies as Intercultural Theology and its Relationship to Religious Studies: Declaration of 21 September 2005. 95 Richard Friedli, Fremdheit als Heimat: Auf der Suche nach einem Kriterium für den Dialog zwischen den Religionen, Zürich: Theologischer Verl., 1974, p. 203. 96 For theological biographies, see Lynne Price, Theology Out of Place: A Theological Biography of Walter J. Hollenweger (= Supplement Series, vol. 23), London: Sheffield Academic, 2002; Hans J. Margull, Zeugnis und Dialog: Ausgewählte Schriften, mit Einführungen von Theodor Ahrens, Lothar Engel, Erhard Kamphausen, Ingo Lembke, Werner Ustorf, Wolfram Weiße und Joachim Wietzke, Ammersbek bei Hamburg: Verlag an der Lottbek Jensen, 1992.

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compelled them towards attempts at intercultural and interreligious theology. Since 1971, in the wake of a “theological repentance of the North,”97 professors of missiology in the Birmingham-Hamburg-Fribourg axis thus attempted to reflect theologically on the plurality of Christianity and to reorient theology within the paradigm of interculturality. This is the theological program behind the trilingual series Studies in the Intercultural History of Christianity, which is one of the joint projects of Hollenweger, Margull, and Friedli: Either the church is universal and catholic – and at the same time indigenous and culturally and politically involved in its environment – or it is no church at all. This dialectical statement sums up the fundamental tension running through the scholarly publications in the series ‘Studies in the Intercultural History of Christianity’. Starting with the cultural, social and political context – instead of the theological and political ideas of traditional denominational (Catholic and Protestant) church histories – the pluriformity of the Christian church and the search for its new catholicity are revealed.98

This led to the “institutionalization of the culture shock”99 a decade later, in 1985 in Frankfurt am Main, which entailed the pluralization of Christianity for European theology. With the creation of the Intercultural Theology project, its initiators Hans Kessler und Hermann P. Siller created a forum that made the encounter with other local theologies possible through guest professors and symposiums. It was in Frankfurt that Robert Schreiter developed an influential approach to intercontextual theology. Recognizing the problematic nature of catholicity, this approach developed a complex understanding of catholicity by reflecting on the universality of Christianity in its inescapable localities.100 The terminology of Intercultural Theology thus entered Anglo-American territory as well and was linked to the debates there on culture, context, and theological communication.101 Since the 1990s, the program of Intercultural Theology has intensifed, and theological reflection on the disparate globality of Christianity has found a home in institutions around the world. Setting the Course in the Second Vatican Council The Second Vatican Council took decisive theological steps, setting the course for the development of Intercultural Theology and offering a framework that equipped Catholic theology for the challenge of reflecting on the faith in the glocalized world of today. At the Council, in its self-realization as a polycultural and polycentric world church, the Roman Catholic Church positioned itself in the tension between universality and unity on the one hand 97 98 99 100 101

Ustorf, “The Cultural Origins of ‘Intercultural Theology’,” p. 243. Richard Friedli, cited in ibid., p. 236. Cf. Schreiter, Die neue Katholizität, p. 179. Ibid. Cf. Ustorf, “The Cultural Origins of ‘Intercultural Theology’,” p. 233.

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and particularity and plurality on the other. It took up the challenge of internal and external pluralization and developed a positive concept of the plurality of cultures and religions ad extra and a qualitative102 concept of catholicity ad intra. The Council viewed the many different cultural contexts as places where the Gospel is realized and acknowledged the pluriformity and contextuality of theology; the Church was invited to foster and adopt “insofar as they are good, the ability, riches and customs in which the genius of each people expresses itself” (LG 13), “Christian life will be accommodated to the genius and the dispositions of each culture” and “in each major socio-cultural area, such theological speculation should be encouraged” (AG 22). The local churches thus arising are catholic churches in the full sense of the proper apostolic dignity and sociocultural constitution (LG 26). The Council defined the identity of the Church as a tension-filled unity in this plurality. Because the Church “is bound to no particular form of human culture, nor to any political, economic or social system” (GS 42), “she can enter into communion with the various civilizations, to their enrichment and the enrichment of the Church herself” (GS 58). These unities that she constructs ad extra with cultures pluralizes the church and are obtained ad intra through a differentiated understanding of catholicity. It is precisely the plurality of local churches that “is splendid evidence of the catholicity of the undivided Church” (LG 23). With its cultural plurality, the unity of the Church, “which speaks all tongues, understands and accepts all tongues in her love, and so supersedes the divisiveness of Babel” (AG 4) increases. The one and only catholic Church exists in and through its local churches (LG 23); its unity and plurality thus stands in a direct proportional relation to its plurality and particularity. The communion ecclesiology of the Council, which views the inescapable particularity of the communally bound local churches as constitutive of the universal Church, is also developed with respect to its tension of particularity and universality in a theology of revelation. The move to a communications model of revelation, which views revelation as a relational act in which God reveals Godself in the history of humankind and finds its mediator and fullness in Christ (DV 2), locates revelation unavoidably in the tension between God and humankind, between universal significance and particular communication. In analogy with the Christological universal concretum, the Word of God is also communicated to people in scripture and tradition (DV 12) and is therefore integrated into the necessary contextualizations and pluralizations that testify in their own particular ways to the unique and universally significant revelation of God. The Council locates the identity and faith of the Church in the inescapable tension between particularity and universality, between plurality and unity,

102 Yves Congar (1972), Die Wesenseigenschaften der Kirche, cited in Michael Sievernich, “Konturen einer Interkulturellen Theologie,” in: ZKTh 110 (1988), pp. 257–83, here p. 264.

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and thus sets the stage for theological reflection on the interculturality of Christianity. Three landmarks allow us to map these beginnings of the project of Intercultural Theology in more detail. Particularly in its German context, Intercultural Theology is characterized by an ‘adverbial syntax’, a focus on the ‘other as a hermeneutical factor’ for theology, and the ecclesiological location of Intercultural Theology. Against this background, the pioneers of European Intercultural Theology have identified the three major tasks of Intercultural Theology: cultural analysis, intercultural hermeneutics, and theological criteriology.

2.3.1 The Adverbial Syntax of Intercultural Theology As a response to the problem that the development of non-European theologies entail for the Western world, the project of Intercultural Theology reflects on the theoretical basis of contextual theologies. In agreement with contextual theologies, Intercultural Theology understands contextuality as a theological paradigm.103 This paradigm is given a central place in a critical, productive way in Intercultural Theology and is placed in a tensive relation with the universality that the church professes regarding the message of salvation. In the plurality of its contexts, as opposed to a culturalist “pathos of particularity,”104 Intercultural Theology holds “to the unity of humankind, to the unity of truth and justice, and to the unity of faith.”105 This tension of unity and plurality demands a “self-limitation of every theology”106 that, in its inescapable contextuality, keeps the meaning surplus of the Christian message open. Intercultural Theology is thus “that academic theological discipline that 103 Sievernich sees a greater challenge in the paradigm of culturality than that posed by the paradigm of historicity: “The task to be carried out in intercultural dialogue should represent, for theology … a challenge as decisive as the rise of historical thinking … represented…. [Nevertheless], the current questions are different and more complex. For the process of historicization no longer concerns the historical dimension of one’s own (European) historical time and the historical contingencies of one’s own theology. Rather, it has to do with the simultaneity and encounter of several cultural historical times in the face of which faith has to justify itself and to give account of Christian hope.” Sievernich, Konturen einer Interkulturellen Theologie, p. 261. 104 Siegfried Wiedenhofer, “Theologie interkulturell und interkulturelle Kompetenz,” in: Thomas Schreijäck/Hermann P. Siller (eds.), Werkstatt Zukunft: Bildung und Theologie im Horizont eschatologisch bestimmter Wirklichkeit. Für Hermann Pius Siller, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2004, pp. 351–64, here p. 359. 105 Thomas Schreijäck, “Achtung der kontextuell-theologischen Perspektive,” in: Orientierung 69 (2005), pp. 202–06, here p. 204. 106 Hans Kessler and Hermann P. Siller, “Vorwort,” in: B n zet Bujo (ed.), Afrikanische Theologie in ihrem gesellschaftlichen Kontext, Düsseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1986, pp. 9–16, here p. 14.

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operates in the framework of a given culture, without absolutizing it.”107 Intercultural Theology thus focuses not only on the material object of theology in a new way but also outlines “theology in a new form.”108 In Frankfurt am Main, therefore, the new project was called ‘Theologie interkulturell’, which translates roughly into ‘doing theology interculturally’; the adverb is used to describe the formal object of theology – it describes how theology is done: Interculturally, i. e., as abverb, as a determination of the way we want to proceed, not as an adjectival description of an intended result.109

As will be explored in more detail in the second part of the present study, this adverbial character of Intercultural Theology does not allow Intercultural Theology to be turned into a separate discipline (contra Walter Hollenweger and others); rather, Intercultural Theology cuts across the theological disciplines, highlighting the inescapable particularity of all theology.

2.3.2 The Other as Hermeneutical Factor: The Approach of Difference Hermeneutics in Intercultural Theology The other becomes a “decisive hermeneutical factor”110 for intercultural theologizing. Its incursion into theological discourse highlights differences to other local theologies that demonstrate their respective contextuality. In the project of Intercultural Theology, these differences are used to promote the scrutinity and renewal of local theological discourses; they are thus granted theological valence.111 Differences can have a revelatory character112 because, ex negativo, they keep the meaning surplus of the Christian message open, a message that can never be exhaustively articulated in one context. They reveal what is “not understood, not realized, open, strange, eschatologically reserved”113 and thus maintain the ungraspable difference between each local theology and the universally significant message that it presents.114 Through its reflection on cultural differences between local theologies, Intercultural Theology can thus develop a theological reflection on the tension 107 Hollenweger, Erfahrungen der Leibhaftigkeit, p. 50. Hollenweger continues: “In this sense it does only what every respectable theology also does.” 108 Winkler, “Zentrum Theologie Interkulturell und Studium der Religionen an der Universität Salzburg – theologische Konzeption,” p. 63. 109 Kessler/Siller, “Vorwort,” p. 12. 110 Werner Simpfendörfer, “Thesen auf der Suche nach einer interkulturellen Theologie,” in: EPDEntwicklungspolitik (1987), pp. 31–38, here p. 33. 111 Danielle Palmyre-Florigny, Kreolische Kultur und Religion in Mauritius, Stuttgart: MatthiasGrünewald, 2009, p. 128. 112 Schreiter, Die neue Katholizität, p. 73. 113 Cf. Siller, “Überlegungen zur Methode von Theologie Interkulturell,” p. 110. 114 Cf. Ingolf U. Dalferth, “‘Was Gott ist, bestimme ich!’ Theologie im Zeitalter der ‘CafeteriaReligion’,” in: ThLZ (1996), pp. 415–530, here especially pp. 423 ff.

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between universality and particularity, without moving in the direction of a solipsistic culturalism or an absolutizing universalism.115 More often than not, the differences between local theologies are perceived as “disruptions”116 – Intercultural Theology finds its themes in conflictive disputes between culturally located Christianities. Against this background, Intercultural Theology cannot be conceived as the “program of an apparently universal theology that transcends all cultures and is thus enriched by all cultures.”117 There is “no universal ecumenical theology”118 – its “universality would consist in its irrelevance.”119

2.3.3 Ecclesiological Location As the critical reflection of a universal message in particular formulations, the project of Intercultural Theology is cast within an ecclesiological framework:120 “Intercultural Theology is a new attempt to do justice to local theologies and particular experiences of churches within the universal church.”121 Each local theology “has the task of giving account of the faith of its own local church but under the eyes of the theology and faith of other churches.”122 From the point of view of Intercultural Theology, the church can be defined as “a universal hermeneutical community, in which Christians and theologians from different lands check one another’s cultural biases.”123 This ecclesiological location underlines a hermeneutics of difference as a formative aspect of Intercultural Theology. As local reflections on particular testimonies 115 Cf. Esp n, “Toward the Construction of an Intercultural Theology of Tradition,” p. 50: “True universality, thus, is not the decontextualization of thought or concepts (as globalization and modernity might lead some to believe) but the dialogue that engages the human communities’ meaningful vehicles of meaningful interpretations of themselves and their worlds (i. e., their cultures), acknowledging each and every one of them as human and potentially relevant – thereby suggesting that there is a ‘human’ condition which, although constructed and defined in and by every particular universality, can (but by contrasting dialogue) be effectively acknowledged as possessing universally relevant elements or description.” 116 Siller, “Überlegungen zur Methode von Theologie Interkulturell,” p. 100. 117 Kessler/ Siller, “Vorwort,” p. 11. 118 Walter J. Hollenweger, “Kultur und Evangelium: Das Thema der interkulturellen Theologie,” in: Evangelische Mission 17 (1985), pp. 52–60, here p. 57. 119 Kessler/ Siller, “Vorwort,” p. 11. 120 Hollenweger’s Christological orientation of Intercultural Theology as ‘body of Christ’ theology, in which various local theologies are different but equal members and fulfill functions, has – with the body analogy as an image for the church – an ecclesiological thrust. Cf. Hollenweger, Erfahrungen der Leibhaftigkeit, p. 50. 121 Frans Wijsen, “Intercultural Theology and the Mission of the Church,” in: Exchange 30 (2001), pp. 218–28, here p. 222. 122 Wiedenhofer, “Theologie interkulturell und interkulturelle Kompetenz,” p. 356. 123 Paul Hiebert, “The Missiological Implications of an Epistemological Shift,” in: Theological Students Fellowship Bulletin (1985), pp. 12–18, here p. 16.

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to a universally relevant message, theologies can never – just like these testimonies themselves – fully contain the universality of their reference event. They only keep it open in the differences emerging between these theologies. As a mutually appreciative critique of local theologies, Intercultural theology cannot claim that they gaze on “the intercultural face of God residing in the midst of diversely constructed human cultures and religious perspectives”124 at their intersection points. Rather, their testimonies, which disturb one’s own interpretation, display the effacement of that message that is confessed in local interpretative communities.

2.3.4 The Threefold Task of Intercultural Theology: Cultural Analysis, Intercultural Hermeneutics, Theological Criteriology As reflection on the plural contextuality of the Christian faith and its theological reflection, Intercultural Theology is faced with a threefold task. First, given the constitutive nature of the context for theology, it needs to carry out cultural analyses. It researches the discursive processes that express the Gospel in the ’webs of meaning’ of a particular culture. It thus looks to cultures as loci theologici that provide the specific languages it needs to be able to formulate the Gospel in its inescapable culturality. In its analyses of cultures, Intercultural Theology can proceed reconstructively or deconstructively.125 In non-European contexts, this identification of the Christian ‘text’ is a part of the major project of the (re)construction of postcolonial identities. The search for an independent theological language is conceived as the emancipation from European theology and looks creatively and reconstructively to non-Western cultural meaning systems. The relation between culture and Gospel in Europe, on the other hand, is analyzed in a more deconstructive way. Intercultural Theology is concerned with a recontextualization of the European tradition, which cannot turn a blind eye to its entanglement in the history of the guilt of colonialism and mission. This recontextualization means, above all, a relativization – it puts an end to the dream of an alleged theological universality that was nothing else than the elevation of the particularity of the center to universality, that could and can be forced on other countries by the power of its economy, technology – even via theological libraries, publications, administrative structures.126 124 Thus, the u-topian, non-located view of Thomas G. Grenham, The Unknown God: Religious and Theological Interculturation (= Religions and Discourse, vol. 25), Oxford, New York: Peter Lang, 2005, p. 69. 125 Cf. Siller, “Überlegungen zur Methode von Theologie Interkulturell,” p. 113. 126 Enrique Dussel, Herrschaft und Befreiung: Ansatz, Stationen und Themen einer lateinamerikanischen Theologie der Befreiung, Freiburg, Schweiz: Edition Exodus, 1985, p. 129.

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For the West, this is a “painful transition,”127 a “true dying on its part, becoming conscious that there can be other legitimate conceptions of values and ways of thinking.”128 But this (painful) recontextualization also uncovered great wealth for European theology. Other traditions gained an authoritative voice within it, and this retrospective recontextualization also uncovered the silenced plurality and multifaceted character of the European tradition. The second task of Intercultural Theology is to develop critical reflections on and applications of intercultural hermeneutical and communicative processes. This requires doing theology in a “polycentric world church”:129 Intercultural Theology may be seen as a theological reflection on the encounter between/among theologies arising from different cultural settings … and/or as a theological insight that comes as a result of a dialogical encounter between (among) these two (or more) theologies.130

Intercultural Theology often bases this “fiduciary care for the functioning of the … world church”131 on a normative concept of interculturality:132 The encounter of various theologies should occur dialogically133 and be characterized by “mutuality and reciprocity.”134 Intercultural Theology is thus not a reversal of the activities of a church that acted, “as Rahner said, [as] an export company which exported a European religion and with it a European culture and civilization thought to be superior”135 and is now importing attractive 127 Metz, “Im Aufbruch zu einer kulturell polyzentrischen Weltkirche,” p. 100. 128 Virgil Elizondo, “Voraussetzungen und Kriterien für einen authentischen interkulturellen theologischen Dialog,” in: Concilium 20 (1984), pp. 18–25, here p. 24. 129 Metz, “Im Aufbruch zu einer kulturell polyzentrischen Weltkirche.” 130 Gerard Timoner, “Intercultural Theology as a Way of Doing Theology,” in: Philippiniana Sacra 41 (2006), pp. 5–45, here p. 11. 131 Kessler and Siller, “Vorwort,” p. 13. 132 Cf., for instance, Danielle Palmyre-Florigny, “Glaubenskommunikation im Kontext von Mauritius,” in: Thomas Schreijäck (ed.), Theologie interkulturell: Glaubenskommunikation in einer gewandelten Welt, Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009, pp. 45–60, here pp. 50 f. “While ‘multiculturality’ recognizes the factuality of the plurality and variety of cultures, ‘interculturality’ implies … an ethical engagement … for the communication between these different cultures. To move from the recognition of the multicultural to that of the intercultural is to move from the perception of a fixed fact to carrying out a task.” 133 Orlando Esp n (“Toward the Construction of an Intercultural Theology of Tradition”) views intercultural theological dialogue as “contrastive”: it does not serve “the enrichment” of the European tradition and thus, indirectly, its confirmation, without bringing up the differences that operate as correctives and show blank spots in that tradition. Franz Gmainer-Pranzl uses the concept of polylogue, coined by the intercultural philosopher Franz Wimmer, in a productive way for intercultural theologizing. Cf. Franz Gmainer-Pranzl, “Die Vielstimmigkeit des Logos: Überlegungen zur eigentümlichen Universalität des Christlichen,” in: Claude Ozankom and Chibueze Udeani (eds.), Theology in intercultural Design: Interdisciplinary Challenges – Positions – Perspective, Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2010, pp. 227–47, here especially pp. 244 f. 134 Timoner, “Intercultural Theology as a Way of Doing Theology,” p. 15. 135 Kessler and Siller, “Vorwort,” p. 11.

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exotica via colonial confiscation.136 Rather, Intercultural Theology is developing a hermeneutical framework that aims at a “reciprocal adoption of perspectives.”137 Thus, theology is done interculturally when theologians are able to receive a different perspective on their own tradition and when they perceive their own tradition in terms of its differences from the other. This hermeneutical approach is represented by, among others, Volker Küster. He wants to understand the strange and the other138 and to seize the intercultural learning opportunities that arise from the differences that emerge between the various contexts.139 This hermeneutical approach, however, does not pay enough attention to the fact that every attempt to understand the other also construes it; the power asymmetries, which are an intrinsic part of any knowledge of the other, are obscured. Thus, an intercultural hermeneutic that views reciprocal understanding as a central, fundamental act of Intercultural Theology will rely on the framework of a “subaltern hermeneutics.”140 Such a hermeneutics is sensitive to the asymmetrical power relationships of intercultural representations and reception processes and is aware of its own inconclusiveness: “the resistant, the irresolvable rest … the culturally other are important correctives in the understanding and interpretation”141 of processes of intercultural communication.

2.3.5 Criteriological Considerations As an explicit theological undertaking, Intercultural Theology cannot limit itself to a neutral comparison of plural Christianities but must adopt a normative perspective. The conflictive plurality of Christian identifications does not make the search for normative criteria for Christian identity obsolete. Rather, it becomes all the more urgent. At the same time, however, this disparity also shows that neither formulations of Christian identity nor their criteriology can be formulated extraculturally.142 Thus, Intercultural Theology is faced with a dilemma: on the one hand, it needs to indicate transcultural criteria for Christian identity, and, on the other, it is faced with the inescapability of its cultural location. Against this background, one of Richard Friedli’s premises of intercultural theologizing, i. e. “that there is no 136 137 138 139 140

Ibid. T. Schreijäck, “Achtung der kontextuell-theologischen Perspektive,” p. 203. Küster, Einführung in die interkulturelle Theologie, p. 118. Ibid., p. 183 and elsewhere. Felix Wilfred, “Towards a Subaltern Hermeneutics: Beyond the Contemporary Polarities in the Interpretation of Religious Traditions,” in: Jeevadhara 26 (1996), pp. 45–62. 141 Siller, “Überlegungen zur Methode von Theologie Interkulturell,” p. 106. 142 Ustorf and Frederiks, “Mission and Missionary Historiography in Intercultural Perspective: Ten Preliminary Statements,” in: Exchange 31 (2002), pp. 211–18, here p. 217: “[I]t is not possible to formulate culturally neutral criteria.”

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longer any binding and unifying normative language in the world or in the church”143 has to be reformulated in a more nuanced way. Within the Christian tradition, the canonical Scriptures and doctrines do provide a language that has become normative through the discourse of tradition. They are fixed texts that purport to have a binding theological grammar. Yet, because of their cultural and historical contingency, these texts also need to be interpreted. The binding character of these texts make the Western tradition – and before that the Hebrew and Greek cultures – the inevitable and indispensable coordinates of Christian identity.144 These texts are not random, yet their meaning is discovered only in interaction with a specific context and must be rearticulated in the various cultural sign systems. Their normative significance for the identity of Christianity is to be continually redefined in its intercultural communication and translation – and thus in processes of discursive transformation. There is a theological reason for this tension between normativity and contingency: the normative texts of the Christian tradition are attempts to articulate a universal message in a particular context. Because this message never exists extraculturally, the established texts are, first, indispensable and irreplaceable – there is no culture-free expression of the Christian text that could serve as a normative basis for gauging the validity of newly emerging formulations. Second, however, these normative and irreplaceable texts are also culturally conditioned and are thus unavoidably limited and limiting formulations of Christian identity. In every one of their definitions, the meaning surplus of the Christian message necessarily remains open – it can never be completely grasped in any single context. Every expression of Christian identity inevitably silences other meanings/interpretations. It is a crucial task of any theology to make this interpretativity visible; it can thus prevent the culturalistic annexation of one context over others and instead call for constantly new translations of Christian identity across different contexts. It is out of these inevitable communication and translation processes that Christian identity as a discursive entity arises. Intercultural Theology has to develop a theological criteriology that makes it possible to critically examine this identity. At the same time, however, the composition of normative texts and the development of criteriologies also have to be scrutinized with respect to the connection between power and knowledge in the formation of the normative criteria of Christianity. In their inevitable recourse to cultural sign systems, criteriologies are also discourses that engage in powerful inclusions and exclusions and thus require a critique of discourse that keeps the meaning surplus of the Christian message open. Invoking Michel de Certeau, the second part of this work will present a formal criterion for Christian identity based on incarnation theology. 143 Richard Friedli, “Interkulturelle Theologie,” in: Karl Müller and Theo Sundermeier (eds.), Lexikon missions-theologischer Grundbegriffe, Berlin: Reimer, 1987, pp. 181–85, here p. 181. 144 Cf. Siller, “Überlegungen zur Methode von Theologie Interkulturell,” p. 108.

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2.3.6 The Dynamics of Cultural Studies Early approaches to Intercultural Theology referred to a modern concept of culture that reflected the “general state”145 of discussion in cultural studies at that time. Culture was viewed as a static and holistic entity with a preexisting essentialist identity and clear boundaries.146 There is a specific interest that informs this reliance on this concept of culture in the development of contextual theologies and of Intercultural Theology: in the context of decolonization, contextual theologies were part of the larger project of (re)constructing postcolonial identities. At the heart of these identification processes – in clear divergence from the universalistic tendencies of Western cultures – is the stress on the particularity of every culture and a “strategic essentialism”147 that allows a postcolonial subversion of colonial ascriptions of identity. Postmodern and postcolonial theories of identity have urgently questioned the two basic tenets of the modern concept of culture – the idea that cultures are internally homogeneic and that they have clear boundaries to other cultures. Instead, they have stressed that cultural identites are always hybrid and take shape through ongoing discursive negotiations. Cultures, these critical cultural theories stress, cannot be clearly delineated from each other; they are fluid and unstable constellations in an intercultural space. More recent approaches to 145 Cf. Robert Schreiter, “Theologie Interkulturell in the Twenty-First Century,” in: Thomas Schreijäck and Hermann P. Siller (eds.), Werkstatt Zukunft: Bildung und Theologie im Horizont eschatologisch bestimmter Wirklichkeit. Für Hermann Pius Siller, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2004, pp. 365–74. 146 Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (= Guides to Theological Inquiry), Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997. Cf. also Richard Friedli’s retrospective on the occasion of the 150th volume of the series Studien zur interkulturellen Geschichte des Christentums, one of the first initiatives in Intercultural Theology: Richard Friedli, “Variations on ‘Intercultural’: Retrospectives and Prospectives,” in: Richard Friedli (ed.), Intercultural Perceptions and Prospects of World Christianity, Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2010, pp. 127–34. On p. 128 he writes: “In 1975, the three publishers of the series, bearing the title ‘Christianity’ in the singular form, continued to base their notion on a homogeneous self-concept of what they believed could be considered as being ‘Christian’.” But it is precisely Studien zur interkulturellen Geschichte des Christentums that exposes the disparity and plurality of Christian identity and its porous boundaries to other religious traditions. Cf. ibid., p. 129: “Christian identity unfolds itself concretely in multiple forms. After all, the contributions to this very volume testify to the pluralization of Christian identities.… We may raise the question of the existence of different cultures in one and the same variant of Christianity.… It is … a matter of different Christianities in the same concrete local Christian tradition that are in confrontation with each other.” Judith Gruber, “Kirche und Kultur: Eine spannungsvolle Identifizierung im Anschluss an Gaudium et spes,” in: Franz Gmainer-Pranzl and Magdalena Holztrattner (eds.), Partnerin der Menschen – Zeugin der Hoffnung: Die Kirche im Licht der Pastoralkonstitution “Gaudium et spes,” Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 2010, pp. 303–24. 147 Gayatri C. Spivak (ed.), The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, New York: Routledge 1996, p. 205.

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Intercultural Theology have taken up this complex concept of cultural identity. They originate mostly in places that offer a first-hand experience of the precarious interculturality of cultural and individual identity and include postcolonial studies and concepts of identity from cultural studies like mestizo148 and creolization149. This allows them to focus on the powerpermeated interculturality of every cultural and religious identity in theological reflection. 2.3.7 The Basic Metaphor: Interculturation The concept of interculturation was coined in missiological debates at almost the same time as the metaphor of inculturation.150 It was a response to the problems associated with the inculturation metaphor but did not become a widespread or influential concept.151 The concept of inculturation views this relation between culture and Gospel as a theological problem and therefore succeeded in introducing several new theological perspectives: cultures are viewed as unavoidable loci theologici, and thus we are able to see the inescapable contextuality of faith and theology. Nevertheless, the metaphor of inculturation suggests a static one-dimensionality in the relation between Gospel and culture that allows the Gospel to be viewed as an extracultural entity. Thus, the danger of equating it with Western culture remains and the culturalistic annexation of the universal Christian message is encouraged. In contrast, the morphological switch in the concept of interculturation reflects the theological and cultural studies reorientation that is at the heart of Intercultural Theology. The prefix ‘inter’ implies a plurality of cultures and their inextricable connections with each other. While inculturation views the relation of Gospel and culture as a linear, one-dimensional process in which the Gospel is placed in relation to a culture, interculturation highlights the mutual communication processes between cultures. Francis D’Sa speaks of involuntary concurrent osmotic interactions: Interculturation has to do to first and foremost with the perception of osmotic and symbiotic interactions between cultures and then with the observation of the changes that emerge from them. Interculturation is a phenomenon that operates covertly, without regard for human intentionality. Only later does interculturation show itself, usually if a negative interculturation occurs. The peculiar yield of interculturation 148 Virgilio P. Elizondo, “Mestizaje als ein locus theologischer Reflexion,” in: Raffll Fornet Betancourt (ed.), Glaube an der Grenze: Die US-amerikanische Latino-Theologie, Freiburg im Breisgau, Basel, Vienna: Herder, 2002, pp. 102–27; Virgilio Elizondo, The Future is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet, Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2000. 149 Florigny, “Kreolische Kultur und Religion in Mauritius.” 150 Joseph Blomjous, “Development in Mission Thinking and Practice 1959–1980: Inculturation and Interculturation,” in: African Ecclesial Review 22 (1980), pp. 393–99. 151 Wijsen, Intercultural Theology and the Mission of the Church, p. 221.

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consists precisely in the fact that it makes us mindful of what happens outside of our acting and willing. Similarly, whatever people intend in their actions, the action occurs out of its own dynamic.152

The metaphor thus takes account of the inescapable contextuality of the Gospel, which never exists extraculturally but can only be communicated between disparate cultural contexts. The translation processes between distinct cultural contexts are thus revealed to be constitutive for the expression of the Gospel across diverse contexts.153 The metaphor of interculturation, therefore, focuses on the intercultural transformation processes, and Christian identity can thus no longer be postulated as static and preset. Instead, it highlights the fact that the Christian ‘text’ can be detected – only – in communication and translation processes. The differences between cultural sign systems here prove to be highly productive places for the discursive formation of Christian identity. In the recourse to other cultural symbols in reformulations, syncretistic processes and hybridizations become inescapable parameters of Christian identifications. The concept of interculturation thus implies reciprocity154 – it shows the mutuality of the translation processes of Christian identity between cultures. Its reformulation in other cultural contexts involves a transformation of Christian identity that produces differences and thus keeps open the meaning surplus of the Christian message that can never be fully expressed in one particular context. Interculturation thus captures the tension between universality and particularity because it views the relation between the Gospel and cultures as an inconclusive process of communication between its cultural contexts. The inescapable locality of local churches is thus “de-provinicalized”155 through global exchange and communication. The unity of Christian identity – its apostolicity and catholicity – takes shape diachronically and synchronically as conflictive translations between disparate local churches. The one universal church is “a universal hermeneutical community”156 that discursively negotiates, interprets, and formulates the meaning of the universal Christian message in particular contexts. 152 Francis D’Sa, “Interkulturelle Bildung – ein Menschenrecht,” in: Bildung: Ein Menschenrecht; GLOBArt Academy 2006, Vienna: Springer, 2007, pp. 72–78, here p. 73. 153 For interculturation as a category for missionary activity, cf. Thomas G. Grenham, “Interculturation: Exploring Changing Religious, Cultural, and Faith Identities in an African Context,” in: PACIFICA (2001), pp. 191–206, here p. 191. “Evangelisation and educating in faith encompasses a mutual reciprocal partnership between religious and non-religious cultures in order that the gospel can transform them to reveal God’s vision for humankind.” 154 Younhee Kim, “Interkulturation: Der immerwährende Missionsauftrag der Kirche,” in: Richard Brosse and Hermann Schalück (eds.), Für ein Leben in Fülle: Visionen einer missionarischen Kirche. Für Hermann Schalück, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2008, pp. 223–32., here p. 224. 155 Max L. Stackhouse, Apologia: Contextualization, Globalization, and Mission in Theological Education, Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1988, p. 116. 156 Bosch, Transforming Mission, p. 457.

3. Interculturality as a Theological Resource The purpose of the second part of this book is to outline a constructive approach to the theological problems that have emerged through the shift from missiology via contextual theologies to Intercultural Theology. Through this shift, the plurality and cultural contingency of Christianity are becoming more and more visible and call for theological reflection. I will address the issues at stake for Christian theology via a twofold methodological approach: we will work at the interdisciplinary interface of a postcolonial concept of identity after the Cultural Turn and a radically hermeneutical theological approach. Both will expose the hybrid character of Christian identity. A postcolonial deconstruction of Christian identity highlights its contingency and therefore, at first sight, seems to clash with its normative theological selfunderstanding. A radically hermeneutical rereading of the Christian tradition, however, allows us to argue that this deconstruction enables an embracing of its irreducible contingency and particularity at its normative core. The problem, which emerges as a result of the postcolonial deconstruction of Christian identity, can thus be turned into a resource for a theological solution: after the Cultural Turn, theology has to be done interculturally. The differences within Christian identity, which come to light through the exposure of its interculturality, can make the cultural contingency of all theology tangible and can thus provide a tool to prevent theology from absolutizing itself.

3.1 Christian Identity: After the Cultural Turn 3.1.1 Turning Cultural As was shown in the first part of this book, Intercultural Theology emerged as a response to the rise of contextual theologies in the non-European world, which were, in turn, responses to the collapse of colonialism. The first steps taken towards Intercultural Theology were thus actually steps away from the original paradigm of missiology, nudged along by a growing discomfort with the original framework of studying mission. This growing unease had to do with massive demographic, political, and theological shifts in the world church, which, in turn, were part and parcel of a profound rearrangement of the global order in the mid-20th century, when a host of former colonies of European empires gained independence. Decolonization led to shifts in the discourses in the former colonies. The establishment of political independ-

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ence was accompanied by the struggle to develop a cultural identity free from the derogatory attributions given by the colonial oppressors. Theology was part of these anti-colonial endeavors to reinvent a non-colonial identity, because it was believed that theology was also in need of decolonization. Contextual theologies were the outcome of these decolonizing projects. These epistemological trepidations in the wake of decolonization do not just affect theology. In fact, the reconfigurations of theology can be considered part of a profound epistemological paradigm shift. The anti-colonial project of rewriting colonial history from the perspective of the colonized does not only unsettle the intricate network of colonial knowledge and power, but undermines the very pillars on which Western knowledge was built; with the end of colonialism, cultural differences can no longer be hierarchized by colonial discourse and suppressed by military power. Rather, the plurality of cultures becomes irrefutable. This, in turn, makes it impossible for the West to conceive of itself as universal. It reveals the contingency and historicity of European culture and thus undermines the master narrative of modernity about itself – the postcolonial situation triggered the emergence of postmodernism: “The West is living through an explosive situation, not only with regard to other cultural universes (such as the ‘third world’), but internally as well, as an apparently irresistible pluralization renders a unilinear view of the world and history impossible.”1 This process of fragmentation reveals the contingency and historicality of European culture. Not only does this call into question Europe’s construction of cultural identity, but cultural alterity demonstrates the cultural contingency of every construction of reality and thus exposes the limits of knowledge.2 The discovery of the plurality of cultures, which is never a “harmless exercise” (Paul Ricoeur), thus brings into question the presuppositions of European modernity. It undermines a rationality thought to be universal, a subjectivity considered to be dominant, and universally conceived teleological metanarratives. The limits of the project of modernity have thus been revealed not only through its internal fault lines but are also undermined from outside, by its colonial other. 1 Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, p. 5. 2 Various attempts at intercultural philosophy have also been made on the basis of the awareness of this problem. Cf. Andreas Cesana, “Kulturalität der Philosophie,” in: Jan Kusber and Mechthild Dreyer (eds.), Historische Kulturwissenschaften: Positionen, Praktiken und Perspektiven, Bielefeld: transcript, 2010, pp. 125–42. Cf. in German-speaking areas the following, among others: Franz M. Wimmer, Interkulturelle Philosophie: Eine Einführung (= UTB, vol. 2470), Vienna: WUV, 2004; Raffll Fornet Betancourt, Zur interkulturellen Transformation der Philosophie in Lateinamerika (= Denktraditionen im Dialog, vol. 14), Frankfurt am Main, London: IKO-Verl. für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 2002; Heinz Kimmerle, Interkulturelle Philosophie zur Einführung (= Zur Einführung, vol. 266), Hamburg: Junius, 2002; Georg Stenger, Philosophie der Interkulturalität: Erfahrung und Welten. Eine phänomenologische Studie, Freiburg: Alber, 2006; Ram A. Mall, Philosophie im Vergleich der Kulturen: Interkulturelle Philosophie – eine neue Orientierung, Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchges, 1995.

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Poststructural and postcolonial theories and methods have developed in mutual relation and break with the conditions of modern European thinking. Postmodernism and poststructuralism find their common genealogy in their critique of the Eurocentrism of modern discourse.3 Their deconstructions offer a critical perspective on the discourse of modernity and reveal the political interests of its identity constructions in genealogies. By no means, however, are they an attempt to construct a ‘new,’ neutral view beyond these critical deconstructions of modern knowledge regimes. On the contrary, in clear delineation from modernity, critical thinking after and about modernity rests on the impossibility of this neutrality, and its goal is to expose power interests in narratives of objectivity. Instead of constructing new master narratives, it reveals the inescapable intertwining of knowledge and power in discourse and reconstructs the particular histories of knowledge formation. Deconstruction, as Gayatri Spivak puts it so succinctly, is not the exposure of error. It is constantly and persistently looking into how truths are produced.4

The critical perspective of poststructural and postcolonial deconstructions exposes, in retrospect, the contingency and partiality of identity discourses and reveals silenced and forgotten narratives. Once they are recovered through a postcolonial critique and thus undermine the hegemonic claim of universality of the master narrative within a discourse, these excluded voices can become “seeds of subversion”5 – at the heart of the critique of modernity 3 Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001, p. 68: “Though structuralism and poststructuralism were taken up and developed in Europe both were indeed alien, and fundamentally anti-western in strategy. Postcolonial thought has combined the radical heritage of such theory with further ideas and perspectives from tricontinental writers, together with other writers who have emigrated from decolonized tricontinental countries to the west.” This historical narrative, which understands the incursion of the cultural other through the anticolonial (re)construction of postcolonial identities, is not undisputed in postcolonial studies. To the contrary, the close relationship between postcolonial theories and poststructuralism is seen by many critics as an unbroken relation of dependence on the colonial epistemes by postcolonial intellectuals in the diaspora. Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture (= Routledge Classics), London and New York: Routledge, 2004) gives a telling critique of this (pp. 30 f.): “Is the language of theory merely another power ploy of the culturally privileged Western lite to produce a discourse of the Other that reinforces its own power-knowledge equation?” In contrast, Simon Gikandi argues for a common genealogy for postcolonialism and poststructuralism. Cf. Simon Gikandi: “Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Discourse,” in: Neil Lazarus (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 97–119. 4 Gayatri C. Spivak, “Bonding in Difference,” in: Alfred Arteaga (ed.), An Other Tongue: Nation and Ehnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, Durham, NC, London: Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 273–85, here p. 278. 5 Judith Lieu, Neither Jew nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity (= Studies of the New Testament and Its World), London: T & T Clark, 2002, p. 208.

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there is an emancipative, and hence, normative impetus. In no way does this critical potential of poststructural and postcolonial theories lead to ‘relativism’, which would imply that its critique is indifferent, arbitrary and irrelevant. On the contrary, the deconstruction of modern essentialisms and the corresponding models of truth points to the inescapability of language. Deconstructions make texts6 indispensable because texts are seen not only as depictions of reality but as the only access to reality. They are attempts at language that create accesses to reality by resorting to the semiotic repertoire of reality. In this interdependence, texts do not simply depict reality but negotiate, form, and establish identity: “The text is both the product of and productive of distinctive identities.”7 “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte“ (There is no outside the text) –8 this rejection of a reality beyond the text does not diminish the connection of the text to reality. On the contrary, its role in the constitution of reality is taken seriously in a radical way. Precisely because the truth content of a text cannot be measured by a reality existing outside it, texts are not arbitrary and interchangeable but become indispensable coordinates in gauging reality. The discursivity of these texts – their inevitable recourse to the signs of a field of discourse that develop their meaning through new differentiations – make any claim of absoluteness untenable. Their meaning cannot be isolated or negotiated absolutely outside of their constantly shifting semiotic contexts. They are therefore contingent on and entangled in political interests. In this relativity, definitions of knowledge and identity again prompt criticism, but this critique occurs in the precarious knowledge that it, too, cannot invoke an ‘objective representation’ to gauge the validity of competing claims. Instead, it can only be formulated within the contingent webs of significance of particular discourses.9 6 This concept of text is broadly defined and is related to all medializations of language as a system of semiotic meaning. 7 Lieu, Neither Jew nor Greek? p. 53. Cf. ibid., p. 201 “Texts both shape and are shaped by the dynamic of identity.” 8 Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (= Collection “Critique”), Paris: d. de Minuit, 2002, pp. 158 f. 9 Lieven Boeve, “God, Particularity and Hermeneutics: A Critical-Constructive Theological Dialogue with Richard Kearney on Continental Philosophy’s Turn (in)to Religion,” in: Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 81 (2005), pp. 305–33, here p. 327: “The radical turn to the hermeneutics of particularity is the other side of deconstruction. Radical hermeneutics should not lead away from particularity, trying not to speak to point at irreducible otherness (transcendence, ‘God’) …. Instead, radical hermeneutics leads irreducibly to particularity, to texts and traditions and the way these function in religion and elsewhere. The ‘moment of truth’ of deconstruction then points us to the impossibility of a discourse which, beyond particularity, deals with irreducible otherness, transcendence or ‘God’. On the contrary, it refers us radically back to the very unsurpassable particularity of our narratives, including their truth claims. A ‘more’ radical hermeneutics thus …. Thinking is always already taking a distance from within an irreducible being involved, never getting really beyond it (That is the reason why theology is not only a reflection on tradition but at the same time its very continuation.) … is already crossed from the very beginning by hermeneutics…. And this leads to a different kind of discourse, theology.”

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Because the (post)structuralist and postcolonial critique of the epistemes of modernity has focused on the semioticity of knowledge, it has been termed the Linguistic Turn: Since traditional philosophy has been (so the argument goes) largely an attempt to burrow beneath language to that which language expresses, the adoption of the Linguistic Turn presupposes the substantive thesis that there is nothing to be found by such burrowing.10

As critique, it distances itself from every view of knowledge that is defined more by the faith in being able to guarantee the correctness or truth of its expressions by their correspondence with an extralinguistic ‘fact’ world than by the insight that everything is bound up with language, including scientific knowledge.11

In contrast to the idealistic essentialisms of the project of modernity, this epistemological shift emphasizes the discursive production and negotiation of knowledge in semiotic webs of meaning. The localization of meaning in particular sign systems runs counter to the modern ideal of autonomous subjectivity and objective rationality and instead directs attention to the materiality, mediality, and performance of this discourse. This ‘Cultural Turn’ unites the epistemological reconfigurations into a new paradigm12 that contains an immense potential of new research perspectives and, since the 1960s, has found its institutionalization in cultural sciences and cultural studies.13 The Cultural Turn unfolds the epistemological and theoretical consequences of the Linguistic Turn. The linguistic character of knowledge – its production in semiotic systems that generate meaning in the arbitrariness and differences of the signs from one another14 – refers to its semiotic character 10 Richard M. Rorty, “Introduction,” in: Richard M. Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. With Two Retrospective Essays, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp. 1–40, here p. 10. 11 Ute Daniel, Kompendium Kulturgeschichte: Theorien, Praxis, Schlüsselwörter (= SuhrkampTaschenbuch Wissenschaft, vol. 1523), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006, p. 10. 12 Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983–1998, London: Verso, 2000. 13 One of the foundational texts in German-speaking cultural sciences for carrying out the rejection of idealistic thinking performatively is Friedrich A. Kittler (ed.), Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften. Programme des Poststrukturalismus (= Uni-Taschenbücher, vol. 1054), Paderborn: Schöningh, 1980. The beginnings of the cultural sciences can be traced back to the 1920s (Georg Simmel, Ernst Cassirer). For a (differentiated) genealogy of the cultural sciences and cultural studies, cf. the introduction given in a list that is constantly growing in Aleida Assmann, Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft: Grundbegriffe, Themen, Fragestellungen (= Grundlagen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 27), Berlin: Schmidt, 2006, pp. 20–29. 14 Ferdinand de Saussure’s neostructuralist approach was groundbreaking for the development of semiotics. He viewed language as a system of signs whereby one can distinguish between the

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and thus implies the culturality of knowledge. The Cultural Turn thus further pushes the epistemological changes of the Linguistic Turn and translates the concept of linguistic sign into a semiotic concept of culture. As a consequence, it exposes the contextuality and locality of knowledge. As opposed tomodernity’s claim that knowledge is universal, it emphasizes instead the pluralistic particularity of the production of meaning.15 The meaning of the signs by which reality is organized is not intrinsic to those signs; rather, they only become meaningful through interpreters in concrete contexts. Cultural identity is constituted by a shared habitus in the interpretative allocation of signifier and signified and the definitions drawn discursively by such allocation.16 And, in turn, as a “field of production of meaning,”17 cultural identity is the semiotically configured access to reality.18 Cultures are the

15

16

17 18

abstract system of rules (langue) and the concrete speaking of that language (parole). A linguistic sign is composed of two dimensions: signifier and signified. Meaning is never obtained from the sign itself, but only in its systematic correlation to other signs in the linguistic system: only in the difference to other signs can meaning be found. Thus, the relationship between signfier and signified is therefore arbitrary – it is not necessary, but arises in the social process of the synthesis of signs. Meaning is not an ontological property of signs but an effect of use by the linguistic community. Language does not depict reality, but constitutes an arbitrary difference system of our (observation of) reality. It does not denote a coherent reality, but organizes, construes, and opens the one possible access to reality. This is the terminiology as found in Ferdinand de Saussure, Grundfragen der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986, pp. 76 ff. Saussure later abandoned the concept signe because it emphasized too much the binarity of signs as presented by the Neogrammarians, for example. Instead, he coined a synthetic concept of sign: s me, with both aspects of apos me (the phonetic/written aspect) and paras me (the mental aspect). Both aspects are inseparable from each other – it is only in their synthesis that they constitute the sign. Cf. Ferdinand de Saussure, Linguistik und Semiologie: Notizen aus dem Nachlaß. Texte, Briefe und Dokumente, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997, pp. 358 ff. Thus, the linguistic singular ‘Cultural Turn’ also implies an inevitable plural as a result of the orientation to cultural particularity. In connection with Bachmann-Medicks’ introductory text, Cultural Turns, this plural is also made linguistically explicit in some receptions. Here, the ‘traditional’ singular is retained – with the assumption that every reference to ‘culture’ already implies an inevitable plural. In a broadening of the linguistic concept of sign, the semiotic concept of culture views culture as a group of individuals who “develop shared conventions for the mutual allocation of signifieds and signifiers…. The use of the same conventional codes in various sign processes makes these similar to one another and thus brings constancy in the interaction between members of a culture with strongly changing messages.” Roland Posner, “Kultursemiotik,” in: Ansgar Nünning/Vera Nünning (eds.), Konzepte der Kulturwissenschaften: Theoretische Grundlagen – Ansätze – Perspektiven, Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003, pp. 39–72, here p. 43. Oliver Marchart, Cultural Studies (= UTB Kulturwissenschaft, Politikwissenschaft, vol. 2883), Konstanz: UVK Verl.-Ges., 2008, p. 219. Clifford Geertz speaks of cultural signs as “models of and models for reality”, so that the complex interaction can be included in the concept of the construction of reality: “The term ‘model’ has … two senses – an ‘of ’ sense and a ‘for’ sense.… Culture patterns have an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves. … They both express the world’s climate and shape it.” Cf. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in: Clifford

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dispositifs of knowledge that take shape through events of construction, remembrance, and appropriation. In this negotiation of meaning through processes of signification, culture has a material and a processual dimension. Every cultural sign has a material signifier and is thus concretely tangible; meanings are generated in the discursive processes of differentiation, whose shifts in meaning continue interminably and take shape as a performative process. As a process of differentiation with materially comprehensible signs, culture is “a dimension that attends to situated and embodied difference.”19 The Cultural Turn highlights the localization of knowledge in these embodied differentiations that are the access to and constitution of reality. In contrast to the modern ideal of a universal, single knowledge abstracted from concrete places, the plural particularity found in local contexts thus becomes an epistemological principle. The Cultural Turn thus ascribes to cultures an indispensable role in the generation of meaning and the constitution of reality. This, in turn, entails a reconfiguration of the concept of culture and makes two established understandings of culture untenable: first, a normative concept of culture that understands culture as “high culture“ as an elitist good,20 and second, a concept of cultures as geographical and political entities that can be distinguished from one another in terms of language, mentality, and lifestyle. Instead, the concept of culture after the Cultural Turn highlights their internal fault lines and blurred boundaries with their others. The poststructural and postcolonial deconstructions of cultural identity undermine a stable and essentialist understanding of culture and call for an ideological-critical view that examines the inevitable connection between knowledge and power in the application of the concept of culture to current identity constellations:

Geertz (ed.), The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books, 2006, pp. 87–125, here pp. 93 ff. 19 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (= Public Worlds, vol. 1), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, p. 13: “Stressing the dimensionality of culture rather than its substantiality permits our thinking of culture less as a property of individuals and groups and more as a heuristic device that we can use to talk about difference.” 20 Assmann, Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft, pp. 14 f.: “High culture implies a vertical structure and claims superiority in a double sense as a social place in society and as an esthetic judgment of artistic achievements. Both forms of superiority are united in the concept of the elite; it also involves the affirmation of discerning esthetic people over against other social strata, whereby, according to a sociological interpretation, the one can also be interpreted as a means for the other …. It was not least of all cultural studies that contributed to the dismantling of the constitutive difference of above vs below.” On the deconstruction of culture as ‘high culture,’ cf. the programmatic announcement by Stuart Hall, one of the founding fathers of cultural studies at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies: “I’m trying to return the project of cultural studies from the clean air of meaning and textuality and theory to the something nasty down below.” Cf. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” in: Lawrence Grossberg (ed.), Cultural Studies, New York, NY: Routledge, 1992, pp. 277–94, here p. 279.

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Pure cultures do not exist, neither do mixed ones, but only cultures which re-cognise and value their diverse character, and others which deny and repress it.21

This critical stimulus of the Cultural Turn has been picked up in a range of disciplines and has been developed into various methodologies and hermeneutics. These, in turn, offer resources for an analysis of the interculturality of Christianity and can thus be made fruitful for a theology after the Cultural Turn. In what follows we will explore the histories of two different disciplines in order to arrive at an understanding of cultural identity and interculturality that will be the basis for a constructive theological approach to Intercultural Theology. At the heart of Postcolonial Theory is the deconstruction of colonial ascriptions of identity, which are organized into hierarchical binarities and simultaneously construct and legitimize the violent reality of colonialism. This criticism of essentialist identities makes postcolonial theory a part of the Cultural Turn; it develops a theoretical framework rooted in the explicit reflection of a specific historical-cultural context. Hence, postcolonial theory does not conceal the contextuality of its origin but gives it a central place as an epistemological principle. In genealogies of colonial identity constructions, postcolonial studies point to the inextricable intertwining of self and other; they focus on the entanglement of self and other in hegemonic power relations and at the same time, they also trace a subversive potential for resistance. Identity constructions between cultures are thus the central theme in postcolonial theory, and hence they offer rich theoretical resources for the analysis of the interculturality of Christianity. The methodological debates in cultural anthropology and its epistemological paradigm shifts have also been highly influential in the formation of the Cultural Turn. They have made the concept of culture increasingly problematic – from ‘culture as text’ via the ‘writing culture’ to the ‘translational turn,’ the intertwining of cultural identity has become an increasingly urgent theme in cultural anthropology. This chapter traces, first, the concept of cultural identity developed in the postcolonial context, and second, the lines of development in cultural anthropology. It draws on the methodological and epistemological debates in these two theoretical frameworks to outline a concept of culture that reflects the discursivity of cultural identity in a fruitful way and can thus become the foundation of Intercultural Theology after the Cultural Turn.

21 Tzvetan Todorov, “The Coexistence of Cultures: ‘Pure Cultures Do Not Exist’,” in: Oxford Literary Review (1997), pp. 3–17. Cited in: David Punter, Postcolonial Imaginings, London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000.

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3.1.2 Postcolonial Studies 3.1.2.1 What is Postcolonial Theory? Postcolonial theory is both an epistemological and political critique of the modern colonial discourse. In fact, at its heart is the claim that modern epistemology and hegemonic politics reinforce each other in colonial discouse – postcolonial critique, then, aims at liberation from colonial oppression through the subversion of its epistemological presuppositions. This bifocal orientation can be traced through the question: ‘When was the postcolonial?’ The most apparent answer to this question is the period after the end of colonialism. This refers, for the most part, to the end of European colonialism in the middle of the 20th century. This answer, however, is seen as Eurocentric or Anglocentric because the phenomenon of colonialism cannot be limited to one historical phase.22 Childs and Williams thus assert that a major contention in post-colonial studies is that the overlapping development of the ensemble of European colonial empires – British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, Italian, German – from the sixteenth century onwards (but especially in the nineteenth), and their dismantling in the second half of the twentieth century, constitutes an unprecedented phenomenon, and one with global repercussions in the contemporary world, so that one answer to the question ‘When is the post-colonial?’ is ‘Now.’23

The Canadian critic Stephen Slemon adds a discursive perspective to the temporal aspect of this working definition: postcolonialism is a period that displays an anti-colonial perspective: Definitions of the ‘post-colonial’ of course vary widely, but for me the concept proves most useful not when it is used synonymously with a post-independence historical period in once-colonised nations, but rather when it locates a specifically anti- or post-colonial discursive purchase in culture, one which begins in the moment that colonial power inscribes itself onto the body and space of its Others and which continues as an often occulted tradition into the modern theatre of neo-colonialist international relations.24

22 On the definition of colonialism, cf. Osterhammel, Kolonialismus. Osterhammel proposes the following definition (p. 21): “Colonialism is a relation of domination by which the fundamental decisions about the lives of the colonized are affected and actually carried out by a culturally different minority of colonial masters barely willing to adapt.” 23 Childs and Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory, p. 2. 24 Stephen Slemon: “Modernism’s Last Post,” in: Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (eds.), Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991, pp. 3–17, here p. 3.

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The moment of resistance thus implies, on the one hand, that ‘post-’ (in the sense of ‘anti-’)colonial elements were already found before the end of the colonial period in colonized societies. On the other hand, however, it also implies that the postcolonial situation has not yet ended so long as there is resistance to (neo)colonial violence. Against this background, Ato Quayson describes postcolonialism as a process of resistance: [P]ostcolonialism has to be perceived as a process of postcolonializing. To understand this process, it is necessary to disentangle the term ‘postcolonial’ from its implicit dimension of chronological supersession, that aspect of its prefix which suggests that the colonial stage has been surpassed and left behind. It is important to highlight instead a notion of the term as a process of coming-into-being and of struggle against colonialism and its after-effects. In this respect the prefix would be fused with the sense invoked by ‘anti.’25

One can thus speak about postcolonialism if there is resistance to structures of colonial dominiation. This then draws such diverse contexts as Brazil and Japan, Latin America and Africa, as well as Great Britain and France into the postcolonial sphere. What has served to energize the term is the desire to perceive cognate or parallel realities within seemingly disparate contexts and to draw on a notion of the centrality of colonialism for understanding the formation of the contemporary world.26

The category of resistance means that postcolonialism is not only a historical concept but also, and much more, an epistemological one: The process of post-colonializing, then, would mean the critical process by which to relate modern-day phenomena to their explicit, implicit or even potential relations to this fraught heritage.27

‘Postcolonialism’ thus includes two dimensions – a historical one and an epistemological one – and both aspects condition each other in a tension-filled relationship. The notion of postcolonialism as a period – in which the ‘post’ takes on a temporal meaning and refers to the era after colonialism – is frequently criticized as Eurocentric, as a concept in which historical differences are ironed out and thus becomes universalistic. Nevertheless, the term does have critical potential. If decolonization is described historiographically as a decisive phase in the shift in global relations, postcolonialism presents an alternative narrative to the European view of history, one in which the phase of 25 Ato Quayson: Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, p. 9. 26 Ella Shohat, “Notes on the Postcolonial 31/32. 1992,” in: Social Text (1992), pp. 99–113, here p. 102, argues that the designation ‘postcolonial’ loses its shape and political power when it is applied in a ‘universalistic’ and homogeneous way to various contexts. 27 Ibid., p. 101.

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colonialism is given a place in a larger ‘history.’ The change in narrative perspective shifts the account away from the (Euro)center to the margins: The actual distinctive element of a ‘postcolonial’ periodization is the retrospective rewriting of modernity within the context of ‘globalization’ in its various forms and moments …. In this respect, ‘postcolonialism’ marks a decisive break with the collective historiographical master narrative that gives this global dimension, both in the liberal historical narrative and this historical sociology of Max Weber as well in the dominant traditions of Western Marxism, a subordinate role in a history that could be told in essence within the framework of the European parameters.28

As alternative narratives, the accounts of postcolonialism are not continuations of European paradigms in any way. They displace them. From the perspective of the margins, it becomes apparent that colonization and decolonization have informed colonizing societies as powerfully as they have the colonized. Colonization has deeply inscribed itself into both and has triggered a host of interlinked translations – colonialism produces an irreversible ‘double inscription.’ The binary oppositions that support the system of colonialism cannot be sustained against that background. The idea of polarities between ‘motherland/colony,’ ‘center/margin,’ and ‘here/there’ is undermined by the numerous interdependencies that come to light through postcolonial rereadings. They deconstruct colonial differences as diff rance.29 In the constantly suspended, never-ending process of the ascriptions of meaning, no fixed identitites can be assumed. Meaning is not natural and permanent but a fragmentary ‘interruption’ in the unlimited semiosis of language. The postcolonial ‘rewriting’ of history interprets colonial history in terms of the ‘double inscription’ and thus dissolves the rigid binary oppositions of the colonial narrative. Colony and motherland do not exist in complete isolation from each other, but both are affected by the consequences of colonization. Not the opposition of center and margin, but the diasporic condition of postcolonialism is the foundation of identity formation. A postcolonial critique shows that colonial identity is not statically given but construed discursively – always in dependence on its others and “through the play of diff rance and the tendencies of these fixed signifiers to float, to go ‘on the slide’.”30 Thus, the new perspectives offered by postcolonial historiography cannot be separated from an epistemological shift. In the diasporic displacement of 28 Stuart Hall, “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit,” in: Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (eds.), The Post-Colonial Question, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 242–60, here p. 232. 29 Cf. ibid., pp. 227, 235. Cf. also Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in: Jonathan Rutherford (ed.),Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990, pp. 222–37. http://sites.middlebury.edu/nydiasporaworkshop/files/2011/04/D-OA-HallStuartCulturalIdentityandDiaspora.pdf. 30 Hall, “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’?,” p. 252.

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binary oppositions, postcolonialism switches from a linear, successive logic to a deconstructivistic one.31 This paradigm shift is, in turn, a reaction to a shifting understanding of history – from the new epistemological perspective, postcolonial historiography is non-linear and peripheral. Postcolonialism attempts ‘to be both epistemic and chronological’; it is seen as superseding “both the paradigm and the chronological moment of ‘colonialism’.”32 Postcolonial deconstruction, however, does not simply discard the concepts of the colonial paradigm in a modern process of sublimation. It does not do away with Eurocentric thinking; rather, it decentralizes and displaces it and thus undermines its hegemonic position. The alternative narratives from marginal perspectives recover the silenced and forgotten narratives of the colonial discourse and can therefore become “seeds of subversion.”33 Thus, at the heart of the postcolonial critique, there is an emancipative, and hence, normative impetus. The historical recovery of local discursivities undermines the reigning discourse and its master narratives and makes hitherto subjugated knowledges, discourses, and practices visible – and, therefore, possible. Hence, when postcolonial critique is being done, hegemoniality is not suspended but subverted. It does not counter modern colonial reason with an opposite understanding of reason as purified from power relations. Instead, it questions and undermines the very epistemology on which modern-colonial politics34 is founded: the idea that there is one form of reasoning, which is absolutely true and universally valid and can operate independently of historical, social, economic, and hegemonic conditions. Because the hegemonic narratives of the colonial discourse consolidate their epistemopolitical position through concealing the historical, cultural, and economic conditions of their emergence, an exposure of their contingency undermines their sovereignty. The deabsolutizing strategy of postcolonial critique (descriptively) resurfaces excluded narratives, and, through this very act, simultaneously grants them (normatively) a right to exist because deabsolutization questions and subverts the epistemopolitical preconditions of hegemonic power. The exposure of contingency, postcolonial critique holds, can produce epistemopolitical justice.35 Yet postcolonial critique does not consider these subversive narratives as liberative per se. This would cut short the critical thrust of the exposure of the hegemoniality of all 31 Cf. ibid., p. 255. 32 Ibid., p. 253. 33 Judith Lieu, Neither Jew nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity (= Studies of the New Testament and Its World), London: T & T Clark, 2002, p. 208. 34 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 35 Cf. Shiv Visvanathan, A Carnival for Science: Essays on Science, Technology, and Development (Delhi, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Visvanathan calls for “cognitive justice” in view of the destructive impact of hegemonic Western science on developing countries and nonWestern cultures.

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narratives. It is the act of subversion, not the content of subversive narratives, that makes liberation possible. Postcolonial critique is a specific form, not a specific narrative.

3.1.2.2 Identity Construction in the In-Between In the endeavor of postcolonial studies to deconstruct modern colonial epistemopolitics, a critique of identity discourse plays a crucial role. Postcolonial rewritings expose the double inscription of the colonial discourse that undermines the essentialist binaries of the hegemonic narrative of the colonizers. It is precisely this essentialism that has been identified by postcolonial studies as a powerful tool for the foundation and legitimization of hegemonic identity politics. In his seminal study Orientalism, Edward Said argues that the representation of identity as an essentialist, holistic, clearly defined entity is neither naturally given nor politically innocent but heavily involved in the acquisition and maintenance of colonial power. His reading of Orientalism as a discourse exposes this intricate interplay of power and the creation of knowledge about the other. Colonial power does not rely on brute military force but emerges in a complex process of representing the Orient in such a way that it allows the West to rule over it.36 This multilayered colonial discourse operates on clear delineations between the West and the Orient. It represents the Orient as everything the West is not – and vice versa – by constructing a binary opposition between West vs. East and associating other, hierarchically structured binaries with it: civilized vs savage, masculine vs feminine, strong vs weak, colonizer vs colonized. Everything the West is not, is, by way of exclusion, ascribed to the Orient. In terms of identity politics, the drawing of these clear borders serves a double, intertwined and entangled, function: not only do they allow the Orient to be (re)presented in a way that perpetuates colonial power – they also, and simultaneously, create a negative foil through which only the West can identify and define itself (defining, literally, means drawing a border). Constructing the Other in clear delineations as a stable, monolithic, and hence manageable and controllable 36 Cf. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 12.3.: Orientalism is, “above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning science like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy science), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what ‘we’ do and what ‘they’ cannot do or understand as ‘we’ do).… [It] can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it, in short, Orientalism as Western style for domination, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”

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entity is constitutive for the foundation of one’s own identity. It is shaped by and shapes asymmetrical power relations. Said’s deconstruction of essentialist identity politics thus exposes the discursivity of identity: identities are not simply, naturally, essentially given but emerge from powerful definitions. It is precisely these clear boundaries produced in the discourses of identity politics that reveal the always powerfully ‘entangled’ histories of identities. Homi Bhabha develops his understanding of hybridity on the basis of these entangled histories and he pushes his point even further than Said. If, Bhabha argues, it is true that identity is not simply ‘there’ and essentially given, then it “is always marked and informed by the ambivalence of the process of emergence itself.”37 If clear boundaries are not simply given but self and other emerge from practices of delineation, then these discriminatory processes inscribe themselves deeply into each identity. If the other, created by practices of exclusion, allows the formation of the self, then the other remains, by way of exclusion, a constitutive part within the self. Each identity, then, continues to be haunted by what it has excluded as other. Differences can no longer be located between self and other, but move into the very core of each identity. Identity is not simply the static opposite of difference but remains deeply marked and marred by differentiations. It is never fully ‘there’ but always ‘informed’ by its excluded others. Bhabha’s tracing of the other within has a dramatic impact on his mapping of hybridity. It shifts from a ‘space between’ to within each identity. Exposing the hybridity within each identity undermines the clear borders and unsettles the internal homogeneity they have constructed by excluding others. It exposes an irresolvable and constitutive ambivalence at the core of each identity. For Bhabha, hybridity is not a ‘tertium’ emerging from the merging of two distinct entities; it is not “a third term that resolves the tension between two cultures … in a dialectical play of ‘recognition’.”38 Rather, he points to those ambivalences within identities that provoke clear delineations. Hybridity is not the end product but the starting point of identity negotiations. It is the “‘Third Space’, which enables other positions to emerge.”39 In exposing the fundamental instability of identity and undermining the notion of clear boundaries, however, Bhabha’s concept of hybridity does not simply do away with the idea(l) of essentially given identities or aim at an Aufhebung of the powerfully produced binaries between them. Pointing to the hybrid character of all identity does not make identity politics redundant. On the contrary, by sketching hybridity as the starting point of all identity negotiations, Bhabha conceives a much more complex relationship between 37 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (= Routledge Classics), London and New York: Routledge, 2004., 33. 38 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 162. 39 Homi K. Bhabha, “The Third Space. Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in: Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990, pp. 207–221, here p. 211).

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hybridity and the politics of essentialism. Identities are forged out of the ambivalence of hybridity. The clearer an identity’s boundaries are, the more thoroughly it has excluded its others; the more internally stable it appears, the more effectively it has eliminated its others within; the more definite its origins are, the more radically it has erased the routes of its construction; the stronger an identity appears, the more forcefully it has worked on suppressing its constitutive ambivalence. In short, the formation of identity via the politics of essentialism relies on the silencing of hybridity. 3.1.3 The Cultural Turn in Cultural Anthropology The dynamics of the Cultural Turn can be outlined along the paradigm shifts in cultural anthropology. Starting with the linguistic turn, scholars in this field processed several crises of representation in which the concept of culture became more and more problematic. 3.1.3.1 Culture as Text In the aftermath of the linguistic turn, cultural anthropology expanded the concept of linguistic sign40 – the argument was put forth that reality as a whole can be interpreted as a semiotic system.41 This, eventually, was broadened into a semiotic concept of culture.42 Not only language, but entire cultures function as sign systems that generate meaning on the basis of difference and arbitrariness. Cultures are webs of significance that can be read, understood, and interpreted like texts.43 Clifford Geertz, the most prominent proponent of 40 Analogous to de Saussure’s linguistic structuralism, Claude L vi-Strauss developed a cultural structuralism approach. Cf. Claude L vi-Strauss, Strukturale Anthropologie (= SuhrkampTaschenbuch, vol. 15), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. 41 Cf. Yuri L. Lotman of the Moscow-Tartuer School of Semiotics in his Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000, pp. 4 f.: “Just as a film director will look at the world around him/her through his/her fingers which are placed to form a frame and to ‘cut’ separate pieces from the totality of the view, so the semiotic researcher has the habit of transforming the world around him/her so as to show up the semiotic structures. Everything that King Midas touched with his golden hand turned to gold. In the same way, everything which the semiotic researcher turns his/her attention to becomes semioticized in his hands.” 42 Robert Schreiter refers to this cultural-semiotic approach for his cultural analysis against a theological background because it takes the three factors of holism, identity, and change into consideration. Cf. Robert J. Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies, Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1985, pp. 43 f. 43 Cf. the classical definition of the semiotic concept of culture as formulated by Clifford Geertz, the founder of interpretative cultural anthropology (Geertz, “Thick Description,” p. 5): “The concept of culture I espouse … is essentially a semiotic one. Believing with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those

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this semiotic concept of culture, speaks of signs as “models of and models for reality”44 – the presentations of cultural signs serve the praxis of cultural selfinterpretation. In these symbolic representations, cultural meaning is simultaneously represented and produced. Cultural anthropology, then, is a hermeneutical science that ‘reads’ and thickly describes the structures of meaning from outside45 – Clifford Geertz actually talks about the cultural anthropologist as ‘looking over the shoulders of strangers’ into their culture.46 Geertz thus suggests that anthropologists can remain outside the culture they describe. The interpretation of cultural texts, he says, does not require a participant perspective. The boundaries between one’s own and another culture should not or do not have to be removed. Yet there is still a precarious moment in Geertz’s theory of thick description. The deeper cultural anthrologists plunge into this web of significance, he observes, the clearer the relational and unstable nature of cultural identity becomes. The deeper they penetrate the web of relations and designations, the more fragile their knowledge of this culture becomes: Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes, the less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right.47

Thick descriptions thus cannot uncover the essence of culture but continue to exist in the interminable interweaving of their cultural references. With this observation, Geertz takes the necessary interminability of interpretation into account but assumes the provisional possibility of such interpretation48 on the basis of the textuality of culture. The ‘culture as text’ approach is the basis of the Cultural Turn in cultural anthropology. While emphasizing cultural meanings in semiotic processes, it allows a holistic approach to culture. From

44 45

46 47 48

webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.” Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” p. 94. Geertz “Thick Description,” p. 5: “The concept of culture I espouse … is essentially a semiotic one. Believing with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.” Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in: Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books, 2006, pp. 412–53, p. 422: “the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulder of those to whom they properly belong.” Ibid., p. 29. Lutz Ellrich has pointed to the proximity of Geertz’ cultural anthropological approach to Derrida’s deconstruction of meaning as “impossible possibility.” Cf. Lutz Ellrich, Verschriebene Fremdheit: Die Ethnographie kultureller Brüche bei Clifford Geertz und Stephen Greenblatt. Habilitation Frankfurt (Oder), 1998 (= Forschung, vol. 784), Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verl., 1999.

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its perspective, an elitist understanding of culture as high culture, as represented by Matthew Arnold,49 for example, is undermined – ‘everything becomes culture.’ The concept of culture is now refers to “a whole way of life,”50 a group of individuals who develop common conventions for the mutual ordering of significants and signifiers…. The use of the same conventional codes in different semiotic processes makes them similar to one another and thus also brings stability into the interactions of the members of a culture with greatly varying messages.51

The beginnings of the Cultural Turn were thus localized through this text metaphor in an understanding of culture, which Kathryn Tanner calls a “modern concept of culture.”52 This modern understanding sees culture as a human universal that is informed by each particular culture and in which cultures form distinct ways of life. Culture is constituted by conventions that are based on the consensus of a group into which its members are socialized. Thus, culture appears to be a holistic,53 differentiating, and context-dependent entity. Clear borders between cultures are thus established, and a dichotomy between the self and the other is constructed. Against the background of this concept of culture, anthropology aims for a non-evaluative description of cultures. 3.1.3.2 Writing Culture The WritingCculture debate of the 1980 s54 examined this notion of neutral observation and undermined the goal of a descriptive representation of other cultures. The major argument is that the representation of cultural identity in ethnographic discourse is never a neutral description but a matter of poesis,55 a construction on the basis of rhetorical means. It is conditioned in many ways – “contextually, rhetorically, institutionally, generically, politically, histori49 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1909. 50 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950, Edinburgh: Chatto and Windus, 1966, p. XVIII. 51 Thus the definition of the semiotic concept of culture in R. Posner, Kultursemiotik, p. 43. 52 Cf. Tanner, Theories of Culture, pp. 25–37. 53 This notion of a ‘cultural whole’ was already dismantled by Geertz himself: “Given the fragmentary character of our world, the view of culture – a certain culture, this culture – as a consensus on fundamental common values is hardly tenable any more. To the contrary, there are fault lines and rifts that trace the contours today of the landscape of collective identities.” Cf. Clifford Geertz and Herwig Engelmann, Welt in Stücken: Kultur und Politik am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (= Passagen forum, vol. 1995), Vienna: Passagen-Verl., 2007, p. 73. 54 James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. A School of American Research Advanced Seminar, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986. 55 James Clifford, “Partial Truths,” in: Clifford and Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture, pp. 1–26, here p. 16.

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cally”56 – and rests on “strategies of ellipsis, concealment, and partial disclosure.”57 The ethnographic representation of cultural identity thus creates “partial truths” in a twofold sense.58 On the one hand, it remains essentially incomplete and fragmented, producing “gaps as it fills them.”59 Thus, on the other hand, it is also partial and (politically) interested – the question of cultural representation is also, centrally, a question of power, both between the ethnographer and the represented culture as well as within this culture.60 The problematization of the representation of cultural identity in the Writing Culture debate undermines a holistic and self-contained understanding of culture. Representation is a process full of aymmetric power relations without any neutral external perspective. Culture is “always relational,”61 its identity construction rests on differentiation processes along porous and elastic borders. The key concepts ‘performativity’ and ‘power’ introduce movement into the metaphor of culture as text. Performativity The text metaphor frames culture as a holistic and isolated system of meaning. It emphasizes the sedimentation of meaning in texts. The interpretation of culture as text through the anthropologist implies a separation of the text and its reader. The Writing Culture debate widens this textual understanding of culture through a performative perspective. For the development of this performative understanding of culture, John Austin’s speech act theory62 has been highly influential. In some instances, speech and act converge into a speech act– speech has a performative character. Moreover, Victor Turner’s ritual research has had a formative impact on the focus on the performative in culture. The focus on the transformative power of rituals dynamizes the concept of symbol – cultural meaning is not present in textual signs but is presented in processes of symbolization. In these processes, the stage of liminality is highly productive: Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise.63 56 57 58 59 60

Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid.: “Ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial – committed and incomplete.” Ibid., p. 8. Power imbalances are also at work within a represented culture; the representation of one’s own to outsiders rests on exclusions. Cf., for example, Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? 61 Clifford, “Partial Truths,” p. 15. 62 John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955 (= Oxford Paperbacks, vol. 234), London: Oxford University Press, 1971. 63 Following Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner separates rites of passage into three phases: “all rites of transition are marked by three phases: separation, margin (or limen), and aggregation.”

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In liminal stages, the usual ascriptions of meaning are canceled; they are open for creative reversals and the deconstruction of social arrangements.64 While rituals indisputably have a function as social stabilizers, Turner also uncovers a great potential for change in the performance of cultural identity. The performative presentation and negotiation of cultural meaning is thus subject to politicization. The category of performance works against the static nature of the textual metaphor. It conceives of culture as praxis65 in which meaning is generated. Meaning is not simply present in the grand narrative of a text but is constantly reshaped and renegotiated in performances of cultural symbols. As opposed to the static nature of the textual concept of culture, organic culture [is] reconceived as inventive process or creolized ‘interculture’.… [A]mbiguity keeps the planet’s local futures uncertain and open. There is no master narrative that can reconcile the tragic and comic plots of global cultural history.66

From the perspective of performance, cultures are characterized by diachronic instability and synchronic openness. Power While largely masked in the modern concept of culture, power becomes a central category in postmodern approaches that took their shape in the Writing Culture debate. Foundational here is the work of Michel Foucault, who describes the inextricable connection between power and knowledge: [F]or nothing can exist as an element of knowledge if, on one hand, it does not conform to a set of rules and constraints … and if, on the other hand, it does not possess the effects of coercion or simply the incentives peculiar to what is scientifically validated or simply rational or simply generally accepted, etc. Conversely, nothing can function as a mechanism of power if it is not deployed according to procedures, instruments, means and objectives which can be validated in more or less coherent systems of knowledge.67

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Cf. Victor W. Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in: Victor W. Turner (ed.), The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970, pp. 93–111, here p. 94. Ibid., p. 97. The praxis character of culture is given a prominent place in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Cf. his Die feinen Unterschiede: Kritik der gesellschaftlichen Urteilskraft (= Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, vol. 658), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991, p. 280: “A translation and transformation process occurs in the habitus of the interface between structured and structuring structure in which meaning is generated.” James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 15. Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” in: Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylv re Lotringer, transl. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 1997, 2007, pp. 60 f.

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The entanglement of knowledge and power produces discourses that have the effect of generating reality and producing, representing, and legitimating identities. Cultural identity is thus not ‘innocent’ but emerges from the link between power and knowledge as a struggle for representation. The reception of Foucault’s approach within the framework of the Cultural Turn changes the concept of culture in a fundamental way. In British cultural studies68 this concept is located in the indissoluble triangle of culture – power – identity. Here, against the background of an analysis of hegemonic structures,69 culture becomes an eminently political concept.70 Given the role of power in constituting identity and reality, culture is not only “a whole way of life” but also “a whole way of struggle.”71 This focus undermines a holistic view of culture as a self-enclosed entity and reveals the hierarchies, tensions, and fault lines that are visible throughout it. Highlighting the role of power in the negotitation of cultural identity shows that cultures are never homogeneous but interested and fragmented. Given the constant struggle for representation that lies at the foundation of the formation of cultural identity, culture can be viewed as “a ground of contest in relations.”72 Culture is an arena for conflicts, a performative negotiation of identity.

3.1.3.3 Culture as Translation These mobilizations of the concept of culture in the Writing Culture debate call for a new metaphor for culture: the metaphor of text is replaced by the metaphor of translation. This metaphor appears to be more apt at highlighting the 68 British cultural studies represent one of the most influential currents of the Cultural Turn. The cornerstone for its development was laid in 1964 with the foundation of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. For a documentation of the development of cultural studies, cf. Stuart Hall (ed.), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, London, etc.: Routledge, 1992. 69 The analysis of hegemonic structures links up with that of the concept of hegemony developed by Antonio Gramsci. Cf. Antonio Gramsci, Gefängnishefte: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Hamburg: Argument-Verl, 1996. 70 On this, cf. the focus of British cultural studies: “What is specific to, unique about the perspective of cultural studies? I believe that the question of the politics of the cultural or the culture of the political comes very close to or is at the center of cultural studies.” Cf. Stuart Hall: “Cultural Studies und die Politik der Internationalisierung,” in: Stuart Hall (ed.), Cultural Studies: Ein politisches Theorieprojekt, Hamburg: Argument-Verl., 2000, pp. 137–57, here p. 141. John Fiske, Die Fabrikation des Populären: Der John Fiske-Reader, R. Winter and L. Mikos (= Cultural Studies, vol. 1), Bielefeld: transcript-Verl., 2001, p. 17: “In the concept of ‘cultural studies,’ the word ‘culture’ does not have either an esthetic or a humanistic orientation but a political one.” 71 E. P. Thompson, “Commitment in Politics,” in: Universities & Left Review (1959), pp. 50–55, here p. 52. 72 Robert J. Schreiter, The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local (= Faith and Cultures Series), Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997, p. 54.

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processual and negotiative character of cultures. Still containing the semiotic nature of cultural identification, the concept of translation expresses – more strongly than ‘text’ does – change and interaction. It highlights the diachronic instability and synchronic openness73 that are inscribed into cultural identity. It is a broad and complex concept of translation that informs this new understanding of culture; translation here is considered not solely and simply as reproduction but more as transformation. What is translated is not simply speech but speech in praxis – language translation is thus the translation of cultural processes. This insight, in turn, triggered a translational turn in cultural studies.74 It emphasizes that translation does not occur between fixed cultural entities as a reproduction of preset meanings but is a process of transformation in which various and unstable spheres of meaning are generated through processes of differentiations. Hence, cultures are not simply translated but constitute themselves in mutual translations. The translation metaphor dismantles binary codifications between cultures as fixed entities and opposes an essentialistic, holistic, and integrative understanding of culture.75 It points to the floating nature of signs and thus to the instability of cultural meanings. Cultures are always translated; their identity cannot be traced back to a permanent, essentialist basis. Instead of finding their ‘roots,’ we can only inquire about the ‘routes’76 along which momentary identity constellations have travelled to crystallize in compositions and translation. As discourses that constitute identity, translations are entangled with the indissoluble interwovenness of power and knowledge. Translations are not neutral, “never … innocent.”77 They are not reproductions but transformations of meanings and thus bound up with complex processes of selection, interpretation, and rewriting in hegemonic cultural relations. As a political discourse, translation is a powerful instrument in the struggle for 73 This dynamization of the concept of culture brings Homi Bhabha to this statement in The Location of Culture, p. 247: “Culture … is both transnational and translational.” 74 Susan Bassnett, “The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies,” in: Susan Bassnett/Andr Lefevere (eds.), Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998, pp. 123–40. 75 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 182–83: “It is the horizon of holism, towards which cultural authority aspires, that is made ambivalent in the colonial signifier. To put it succinctly, it turns the dialectical ‘between’ of culture’s disciplinary structure – between unconscious and conscious motives, between indigenous categories and conscious rationalizations, between little acts and grand traditions … into something closer to Derrida’s ‘entre’, that sows confusion between opposites and stands between the oppositions at once. The colonial signifier – neither one nor other – is, however, an act of ambivalent signification, literally splitting the difference between the binary oppositions or polarities through which we think cultural difference. It is in the enunciatory act of splitting that the colonial signifier creates its strategies of differentiation that produce an undecidability between contraries or oppositions.” 76 Cf. Clifford, Routes. 77 Roman Alvarez, and C.-A. Vidal, “Translating. A Political Act,” in: Rom n lvarez and CarmenAfrica Vidal (eds.), Translation, Power, Subversion, Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters, 1996, pp. 1–9, here p. 5.

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representation and the construction of identity. It serves the praxis of violent appropriation but also opens up room for resistance and subversion.78

3.1.4 Inter/Culturality after the Cultural Turn This short outline of the methodological and epistemological debates in postcolonial studies and the Writing Culture debate offers rich theoretical resources for the analysis of the interculturality of Christianity. The key points of these discussions can be synthetized into a concept of culture that reflects the discursivity of cultural identity in a fruitful way and can thus become the foundation of Intercultural Theology after the Cultural Turn. In line with the insights of the postcolonial and postmodern approaches discussed above, our ‘working definition’ of interculturality rests on a conception of culture that does not view cultures as self-contained units. Rather, it highlights the fact that cultural identity emerges from discursive differentiations between self and other and does not hide the conflictive and negotiative nature of these demarcations. Cultures are hybrid and therefore hetereogeneous identity constellations that are performatively constituted in discursive processes. This concept of cultural identity undermines the notion of clear, preset borders between cultures. Cultures are not pure and independent of one another but are themselves constituted in cultural contact. Identity is not the opposite of difference but is always permeated by differentiations – its excluded others have always inscribed themselves deeply into cultural identity. The duality of inside/outside, of oneself/the other is broken down. Cultural differences are not simply ‘there,’ but are produced in processes of differentiation. Cultural identity is produced performatively through the discriminatory practices of cultural identification and therefore, their excluded others remain an irrevocable part of their own identity: every culture embodies the other-in–its-self. Identity is not simply given but always fractured by what it excludes as its other: No culture is full unto itself, no culture is plainly plenitudinous, not only because there are other cultures which contradict its authority, but also because its own symbol-forming activity, its own interpellation in the process of representation, language, signification and meaning-making, always underscores the claim to an originary, holistic, organic identity.79

In any cultural identity, its other is present as the excluded, it is present as absence – an absence that remains consitutive for every cultural identity. That is why cultures are not autonomous spheres but are intertwined, bound up 78 Cf., for example, Ngugi wa Thiong , Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (= Studies in African Literature), Oxford, etc.: Currey, 2006. 79 Bhabha, “The Third Space,” p. 210.

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inseparably with one another. In short, cultural identity is always intercultural. In these undetermined, unstable, semiotic, highly productive interstices, cultural identities are always new positionings. They are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses on history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning. Hence, there is always a politics of identity, a politics of position, for which there is no absolute guarantee in an unproblematic, transcendental ‘law of origin.’80

Their essence cannot be traced but arises in the negotiation of meanings in the performance of cultural signs. Thus, identity is not an ontological but a discursive entity – in semiotic processes of inclusion and exclusion, identity is constituted in discourses that create reality in the indissoluble connection of knowledge and power. These discourses that form knowledge and thus construct identities are permeated with power relations. Power is the dominant category that lies at the foundation of every cultural identification. A discourse-critical approach to the discourse of identity thus reveals its inevitable entanglement in power relations. Whereas the representation of identity usually appears outwardly and inwardly as ‘natural’ and as based on binary codifications, its formation is a power-filled struggle for representative supremacy in the unstable web of ascriptions of cultural meanings. The hegemonic narrative in this field of floating signs succeeds only intermittently in stemming the flow of differences, in privileging specific signifiers, and thus construing a center that represents unity and identity.81 The creation of a center, however, also and at the very same time, creates marginalities; the assertion of meaning inevitably implies a silencing of other interpretations. Precisely in its representation as natural, homogeneous, and stable, identity is thus inescapably plural, fragmented, and unstable. Its formation in discursive processes of inclusion and exclusion occurs within a field of conflicting discourses of identity that compete for the power to interpret cultural signs. Here, every discourse develops its own strategies of demarcation: “each society makes its own strangers”.82 Cultural identities are thus constituted by 80 Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” p. 226. Cf. p. 222: “Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps in stead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production’, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not ouside, representation. This view problematises the very authority and authenticity to which the term ‘cultural identity’ lays claim.” 81 Cf. Hall, “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’?,” p. 252. 82 “All societies produce strangers, but each society produces its own kind of strangers, and produces them in its own inimitable way.” Cf. Zygmunt Bauman, “The Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” in: Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood (eds.), Debating Cultural Hybridity: MultiCultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism: Results from a European Workshop Convened in December 1994, University of Manchester, London: Zed Books, 2007, pp. 46–58, here p. 46.

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semiotic processes in the interstices of this field as “imagined communities”83 that rest on a narrative of continuity.84 Following Bhabha, this space of interculturality, out of which cultural identities are forged through demarcations from the other, is not a ‘third’ that develops out of two distinct entities. Rather, it constitutes “the ‘third space’, which enables other positions to emerge.”85 This third space of interculturality is not an ontological category; it does not have any spatial dimensions. Rather, the in-between space between cultures is a space of difference and a space of absence. It exists only ex negativo in cultural differentiations that create absences of the other in every cultural identity. It is embodied by the other-inoneself that is present as an excluded difference in cultural identity. It does not lie between two cultures, sublimating the differences between them and reconciling them. Rather, it is the conflictive space of mutual differentiations and demarcations that are forged in the production of cultural identity. Therefore, viewed as an epistemological category, interculturality is thus not a “third term that resolves the tension between two cultures … in a dialectical play of ‘recognition’.”86 The epistemological gain of the “in-between” space87 lies rather in the articulation of differences that reveal the silent and silenced other in identities.88

3.2 Intercultural Rereadings of Tradition: The Hybrid Identities of Christianity The complex concept of identity after the Cultural Turn calls for new narratives of the history of Christianity. After the collapse of modernity, a

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85 86 87 88

Cf. also Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, “Aspekte einer Theorie des unkommunikativen Handelns,” in: Jan Assmann and Dietrich Harth (eds.), Kultur und Konflikt, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990, pp. 11–48, here p. 27: “The rules for generating this demarcation are anchored in the deep layers of cultural semantics.” Cf. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in: Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 1–14. (first published in 1983). Cf. ibid., pp. 1, 13: “Invented tradition is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past.… The element of invention is particularly clear here, since the history which became part of the fund of knowledge or the ideology of nation, state or movement is not what has actually been preserved in popular memory, but what has been selected, written, pictured, popularized and institutionalized by those whose function it is to do so.” Bhabha, “The Third Space,” p. 212. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 162. Bhabham, The Location of Culture, p. 5 and elsewhere. Cf. Endre H rs, “Hybridität als Denk- und Auslegungsfigur,” in: Kakanien (2002), pp. 1–6.

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theology that argues on the level of the epistemological paradigm of its time can no longer appeal to models of church history that (1) rely on essentialist notions of the kernel/husk model for a hermeneutic of the development of doctrine, (2) narrate its historical development and global expansion from a teleological perspective, and (3) trace the universality of Christianity from an allegedly neutral perspective through the suppression of its contingent contexts. Postcolonial and postmodern deconstructions undermine this modern hermeneutics of the history of Christianity and call for approaches to church history that develop narratives of the history of Christianity emphasizing its diachronic and synchronic transformations. A critique of Christian identity after the Cultural Turn does not search for its essentialist, unchanging core. Rather, such a critique traces the discursive boundaries of Christian identity in concrete contexts and exposes those silenced others that have inscribed themselves deeply into Christianity through the discursive negotiation of its identity. 3.2.1 Syncretism as a Descriptive Category In addition to Bhabha’s concept of hybridity sketched above, cultural studies have developed a number of other concepts for the analysis of discursive border negotiations of identity in intertistial spaces. With nuanced shifts in meaning, terms like creolization, bricolage, m tissage, and mestizaje were coined in distinct contexts and from the perspective of various disciplines. Syncretism provides a concept from the theological tradition for such a ‘rewriting’ of church history after the Cultural Turn, which exposes the mutual dependences between Christian and other religious and cultural identities. The application of the concept of syncretism in historiographies after the Cultural Turn, however, requires some fundamental changes from its original usage in the history of religion, systematic theology, and theology of missions.89 First, a distinction is to be made between a descriptive and an evaluative application of the concept. Whereas its use in mission theology and church history has often implied a value judgment that was, moreover, mostly negative,90 a critical rewriting of Christian history draws on syncretism as a 89 For a genealogy of the concept of syncretism in the history of religion, cultural anthropology, and systematic theology, see Jonas A. Jørgensen, Jesus Imandars and Christ Bhaktas: Two Case Studies of Interreligious Hermeneutics and Identity in Global Christianity (= Studien zur interkulturellen Geschichte des Christentums, vol. 146), Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2008, pp. 35–115. 90 Thus, Luzbetak, for example, speaks of a “theologically unacceptable amalgam.” Cf. Louis J. Luzbetak, The Church and Cultures: New Perspectives in Missiological Anthropology (= American Society of Missiology Series, vol. 12), Maryknoll: Orbis, 1996, pp. 360–73. Beyerhaus’ “Gefahr des Synkretismus” (danger of syncretism) also implies a negative value judgment. Peter Beyerhaus, “Das Einheimischwerden des Evangliums und die Gefahr des

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descriptive category. Once we frame syncretism as a descriptive concept, we can use it as a theoretical framework to expose the discursivity of Christian identity, to analzye transformation processes within its tradition, and to resist the suppression of alternative formulations of identity. This critically descriptive work will expose the internal heterogeneity of the Christian tradition and only once we have done this descriptive work can we begin the evaluative, theological task of asking how concrete syncretic formulations of Christian identity relate to the normative understanding of Christian identity. Second, the complex understanding of identity after the Cultural Turn calls for a profound reconceptualization not only of its usage as a descriptive category but also of the scope of the concept itself. Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity offers important resources for such a critique. It allows us to see that understanding syncretism as the “merging of elements between two cultures or religions,”91 or as “the integration of the other and/or suspension of one’s own elements in the encounter of religions”92 reinscribes a concept of identity as a fixed, clearly defined entity. This understanding of identity, in turn, relies on powerful essentializations of contingent identity constellations: it is the hegemonic narrative within a discourse that succeeds in stabilizing and naturalizing its position through the exclusion of alternative narratives. This understanding of identity, in short, relies on the silencing of hybridity. Thus, if the concept of syncretism is used as it is in the two examples above, it insinuates a static essence of Christian identity, into which subsequent pieces of other religions and cultures are inscribed. This conceals the fact that Christian identity has always been informed by its others. It does not allow us see that Christian identity has emerged from an active engagement with other religious and cultural discourses and it hides that Christian identity has been forged through the creative appropriation of and discursive demarcation from its subsequent ‘others’.93 If, however, syncretism is reconceptualized in light of Synkretismus,” in: Thomas Schirrmacher (ed.), Kein anderer Name: Die Einzigartigkeit Jesu Christi und das Gespräch mit nichtchristlichen Religionen. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Peter Beyerhaus, Nürnberg: VTR, 1999, pp. 116–35. In the recent history of theology, the concept of syncretism was introduced in a more differentiated way. Cf. the contributions and literature indicated in Hermann P. Siller, “Synkretismus: Bestandsaufnahmen und Problemanzeigen,” in: Hermann P. Siller (ed.), Suchbewegungen: Synkretismus – kulturelle Identität und kirchliches Bekenntnis, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftl. Buchges, 1991, pp. 1–17, here pp. 10 f., and in Jørgensen, Jesus Imandars and Christ Bhaktas, pp. 68–113. 91 Robert Schreiter, “Syncretism in North America and Europe: The Re-enchantment of the West,” in: Chakana (2004), pp. 7–24, here p. 7. 92 Ulrich Berner, “Synkretismus – Begegnung der Religionen,” in: Joachim G. Piepke (ed.), Kultur und Religion in der Begegnung mit dem Fremden, Nettetal: Steyler Verl., 2007, pp. 47–76, here p. 49. 93 The strategy of suppression can be found in a very succinct way in Kraemer: “Christianity by nature is unsyncretistic.” Cf. Hendrik Kraemer, Religion and the Christian Faith, London: Lutterworth Press, 2003, p. 402.

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the concept of hybridity, this static understanding of Christian identity is undermined. Instead, it can show that Christian identity is the product of discriminatory practices and reveal the syncretistic processes of demarcation through which Christian tradition has taken its shape and which have inscribed plurality and heterogeneity into its identity. Christian identity, in other words, has always been located in intercultural space. The “splitting of the difference between the self and the other,” to which Bhabha refers, reveals the differences within Christian identity that, after the Cultural Turn, can no longer be sublimated into an ‘extralocal,’ universal ‘essence.’ A descriptive application of the concept of syncretism does not interpret the various Christian identifications as different forms of an ideal essence of Christianity, fractured through contact with other cultures and religions. Rather, this concept exposes the particularity of Christian identifications that attempt to convey the universal message of the Gospel in specific contexts. The negotiations of the meaning of Christianity are located in concrete contexts, and these discursive entanglements produce a plurality of Christianities.94 Thus, this interculturality of Christianity can not be conceptualized and defined sub specie aeternitate; rather, it is detailed genealogical studies in concrete contexts that expose the syncretistic intertwinings of Christian identification processes and, after the Cultural Turn, promote a ‘rewriting’ of church history. 3.2.2 An Example: Christian Identity – Neither Jew nor Greek? With a critical analysis of ‘Christian,’ ‘Jewish,’ and ‘Hellenistic’ texts95 of the first and second centuries after Christ, Judith Lieu shows how the construction of Christian identity was intertwined with the wider field of identity discourses of the time. She exposes this irreducible interculturality of Christianity based on the argument that texts (and, hence, discursive practices) do not straightforwardly reflect reality but negotiate, form, and establish identity: “The text is both the product of and productive of distinctive identities.”96 In 94 Francois Vouga, Geschichte des frühen Christentums, Tübingen: Francke, 1994, p. 13. 95 The fact that these texts originated in the field of the identity discourses of that time in apologetic identification and polemical differentiation via a negotiation of cultural signs regarding meaning, makes a straightforward and clearly defined ascription difficult. Cf. Judith Lieu, “The Forging of Christian Identity and the Letter to Diognetus,” in: Judith Lieu (ed.), Neither Jew nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity, London: T & T Clark, 2002, pp. 171–89, here p. 45: “Because many of these texts survived only within the Christian tradition, and because clearly distinguishing markers, such as reference to Christ, sometimes appear to belong only to a redactional level, such texts embody the dislocation of any a priori exclusive classification, Jewish or Christian.” 96 Ibid., p. 53. Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (= Sather Classical Lectures, vol. 55), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991, p. 21: “[I]f ever there was a case of the construction of reality through text, such a

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discursive processes, the meaning of the confession “I am a Christian”97 is negotiated within the contemporary discursive fields through the critical inclusion and polemical reinterpretation of existing cultural signs. Crucial criteria for the acceptance of an ascription of identity are its retrospective and prospective openness – such an ascription must guarantee both the connection with the tradition as well as the generativity of new identifications.98 Grounded and reenacted in narratives, Lieu argues, this continuity allows for the perception of discursive identity constellation as “experienced essence.”99 On the other hand, she also shows that a discourse-critical analysis reveals the inevitable provisional character100 and the internally fragmented plurality101 of this identity and traces its construction through inclusions and exclusions in the interstices underneath this ‘experienced essence’: Christian rhetoric of identity, even when making universalist claims, is articulated in the terms also used in Graeco-Roman ethnography and identity formulation. In this, as in many other areas, early Christianity needs to be seen as implicated in, as well as contributing to, the dynamics of the world in which it was situated. We should look for continuities as well as for discontinuities between Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian efforts to construct and to maintain an identity for themselves, in interaction with their past as well as with each other.102

These strategies of Christian identity construction in and through texts become tangible in Lieu’s reading of the Letter to Diognetus, an early text of unknown authorship and date.103 Intertextual comparison of its vocabulary and textual characteristics show that it is an apologetic work. Even if we do not know the exact place of its composition, the text can thus be placed in a specific context that structures its negotiation of meaning: its intention lies in the construction of Christian identity in such a way that it appears to be

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case is provided by early Christianity.” Cited in Lieu, “The Forging of Christian Identity and the Letter to Diognetus,” p. 8. Lieu contextualizes the confession of Christian identity in the martyrdom of Polycarp. Cf. ibid., p. 1: “In about the middle of the second century CE, Polycarp, bishop of the church of Smyrna, seals his own death warrant by acknowledging that he is a Christian.” Ibid., p. 299: it requires “mechanisms for managing change and claiming continuity, even, or especially, when these may be differently interpreted by different individuals who still recognize one another as belonging” that “make possible ever new ways of self-understanding within an imagined community” (ibid., p. 14.). Ibid., p. 311: “That essence is only accessible, and to that extent only real, in so far as it is experienced but also communicated as a continuity.” Ibid., p. 97: “What has remained a constant in different settings is the continual engagement with the need to trace a thread from the past to experienced realities of the present, both through coherence and through rupture, resulting in stories that are never stable, and never closed.” Ibid., p. 88: “[F]rom the very beginning we are experiencing multiple constructions of identity through texts, and not just one expression of single prior given identity.” Ibid., pp. 20 f. Ibid.

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compatible with the majority society. To that end, the text implicitly reflects the construction of identity through differentiations and introduces them in a pointed way. Possible differences between Christians and non-Christians are addressed and at the same time negated. Thus, for example, the author emphasizes the loyalty of Christians to the religious laws of the state: “They obey the ordained laws, and in their own lives surpass the laws.”104 The difference sketched here in a positive sense is evened out, as Lieu shows: “Yet any practical content to this is surprisingly thin and hardly able to create an alternative community …. it says little that would shock contemporary moralists: ‘They marry as do all, they have children, but they do not expose their offspring. They provide a shared table, but not a shared bed’ (5.7).”105 Lieu further comments: If identity-formation is a process of differentiation, the social identity of the Christians here appears remarkable opaque…. [I]t implies symbiosis and invisibility, not differentiation. This is surely deliberate…. Social separation is not a Christian characteristic.106

This is the case, at least, in the Christian identity constructed in the Letter to Diognetus. For this construction, the text employs, ex silentio, another difference. Although, in contrast to other apologetic works, it remains silent on the Jewish heritage of Christianity, it does implicitly perform a demarcation between Jewish and Christian identity by identifying Christianity with the majority society: When the author says that Christians are not distinguished by land, language or customs, we may wonder whether there is an implied apologetic contrast with the Jews, who, notoriously, were, at least in popular polemic, so distinguished.107

The text negotiates this unexpressed difference via a shift in meaning in the concept pokite_a. Jewish literature from the Second Temple period used this term to forge an explicitly national, ethnic identity. Its use in the Letter to Diognetus, on the other hand, implied a complete relativization of any local loyalty or identity: “They inhabit their own native lands, but as sojourners; they share everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners” (5.5).108

104 105 106 107 108

Cited in ibid., p. 181. Ibid., pp. 181 f. Ibid., pp. 182 f. Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., p. 179. “The language of sojourning and foreignness is already well established in the first century in a variety of New Testament contexts …; it is, of course, rooted in the Jewish tradition … a tradition ignored by this author.”

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The text thus retrieves a sign available in the semiotic repertoire of its specific context – pokite_a – and defines Christian identity by renegotiating its interpretation and thus by ascribing a new horizon of meaning to this sign. Nevertheless, even if the text evens out the differences with the majority society and its difference from Jewish identity is only brought into play implicitly, it still has to rely on difference to delineate Christian identity. The Letter to Diognetus distinguishes between Christians as a new c]mor on the one hand and the ‘world’ on the other. We can see the persistence of a binary model in the forging of identity construction. Early Christian texts employed the concept c]mor in an ambivalent way. In the Diognetus letter the term invokes a difference on two fronts: Here the Christians represent a new c]mor … in contrast to the Greeks and the Jews. In other writers … it may be translated ‘race’ and is explicitly prefixed ‘third’, contrasted with Jews and Greeks.109

In opposition to this exclusive application, Paul developed c]mor as an inclusive category that sublimates the differences between Jews and Greeks in a new \mvqypor. His writings testify to the internal heterogeneity and fragility of this Christian identity construction: What we see in the Pauline communities is a spectrum of ethos, even to the point of potential conflict, between those whose background was Jewish and those who were Gentile, or between those who favoured affirmation of or continuity with the majority society, and those who rejected it.110

In contrast, the Christian c]mor of the Letter to Diognetus is identified in opposition to the ‘world.’ Ironically, a subversion of a binary identity construction serves to establish a new binary code: its definition as the new ‘third race’ serves to differentiate Christian from Jewish and Greek identity. Again, a binary identity politics is at work here. The Letter to Diognetus manifests this difference between Christians and Jewish/Greek identity is through the problem of idolatry: Christians share in the errors of neither Greeks nor Jews. In practice for Diognetus this can be limited to the nature and worship of God: “they do not reckon the gods soconsidered by the Greeks, neither do they observe the superstition of the Jews (1).”111

Lieu’s discourse analysis shows that this identity marker is in a close and complex relation to Jewish identity constructions – the condemnation of idolatry is used in Jewish-Hellenistic texts as the criterion for Jewish identity. Again, the appropriation of this sign in Christian identity construction leads to transformations of its meaning. While Jewish literature describes the 109 Ibid., pp. 183 f. 110 Ibid., p. 185. 111 Ibid., p. 187.

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avoidance of idolatry as a potential virtue of all people, in Christian literature it became an exclusive self-definition – even if “in practice, however, Christian avoidance of involvement in idolatry differed from Jewish by being less marked.”112 These distinctions between ‘Christians’ and the ’world’ run counter to the discursive efforts of the text, whose major interest is to blur the boundaries to the majority society. This can be explained by the context of persecution: “While a binary opposition may be endemic to all identity-formation, it is particularly attractive in a context of persecution.”113 This binary opposition between ‘Christians’ and the ‘world’ also has its roots in the Jewish eschatological contrast between ‘this world’ and ‘the world to come’; the opposition to the world is appropriated and developed as a “fundamental organizing point for Christian self-identity.”114 It abstracts the precarious experiences of difference from the situations of concrete persecution and instead becomes “a universalized and impersonalized opposition.”115 In this openness and ambiguity ‘the world’ becomes a productive sign of new identifications in the processes of demarcation. New differences can be inscribed into this sign that construe Christian identity as an alternative identity, for, as Celsus already remarked in an almost discourse-critical view: “If all men could be Christians, the Christians would no longer want them.”116 Judith Lieu’s reading of the Letter to Diognetus shows in an exemplary way how the signs of the Christian tradition are not actually originally Christian. Instead, the Christian tradition found its expression through the displacement of signs from other traditions. A detailed historical analysis would reveal equally influential relationships to alien texts for all declarations made in the ecclesial tradition. Such an analysis shows how the church’s declarations were forged through the appropriation of and delineation from other texts and traditions. Due to its dependence on others, the bounderies with what lies outside of the Christian tradition cannot be anything but blurred, and this tradition cannot display anything but immense internal heterogeneity. It has, in other words, always been intercultural.

112 Ibid., p. 188. 113 Ibid.: “The interplay between persecution and identity for both Jews and Christian is not unexpected, and the development of ‘citizenship’ language in this context has already been noted above. Similarly, it is also in the literature associated with the persecution and ensuing revolt under the maccabees in the early second century BCE that Hellenistic Jewish literature develops the language of ‘race’ as well as the term ‘Judaism’. ‘Christianity’ ‘Christianismos’ and ‘Christian’ also seem first to seed and flower in that context.” 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 Cited in ibid., p. 189.

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3.3 Christian Identity: A Radical Hermeneutics 3.3.1 Theology: Testimony to a Particular Event A critical rereading of the ecclesial tradition after the Cultural Turn traces how the significance of the Christian message is continually being renegotiated in local contexts, always in response to specific questions, and it shows how these contextualizations give rise to a range of divergent Christianities. A descriptive look at the history of Christianity therefore creates a problem for a theological approach to Christian identity. Theologically – and thus in the language game of faith – Christian identity is called to mediate God’s universal offer of salvation made flesh in Jesus Christ: The Christian faith stands and falls with the universality it claims for Jesus Christ. That he is the Lord of the world corresponds to the universality of the concept of God and the view of creation as well as the orientation of salvation history towards a common goal, as expressed in the many panta expressions in the New Testament. But the universality of Jesus Christ also consists in his having been sacrificed for all and being there for all. As there is no favouritism for persons before God, so all are one in Jesus Christ, they are all in the same situation and all share in the same nature. This is, so to say, the Magna Carta of the love of Christ. Here a reality has entered into the world and can in no way be made anything more than an ideal.117

The testimony of the Christian faith, therefore, is a language game that ascribes universal significance to a particular historical-cultural event. For these processes of interpretation, the Christian testimony relies on existing webs of significance from ‘other’ religious and cultural traditions that provide it with a reservoir of signs to give expression to its founding event. Thus, for example, the sign ‘Lord of the world’ was originally developed in the Hebrew theological discourse of creation and salvation history and, in that context, was used to articulate a universal perspective. It was used as one of the signs to make sense of (in other words, to ascribe meaning to) the Christ event and so became a crucial Christological metaphor. The language game of Christian testimony is thus dependent on ‘other’ theological discourses. At the same time, the reappropriation of these other signs leads to shifts in their meaning – the discursively shaped reality is transformed.Jesus Christ is the Lord of the World – the universal perspective developed in the Hebrew revelation discourse is now intimately connected to this particular and contingent person, as well as the church which is to (re)present its Lord in the world until he comes again. From very early on, the ‘marks of the church’ have helped spell out ecclesiologically the universal claim made for the Gospel of Christ. 117 Gerhard Ebeling, Dogmatik des christlichen Glaubens III: Der Glaube an Gott den Vollender der Welt, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1979, p. 383.

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Through its catholicity, apostolicity, and unity, the church mediates God’s offer of salvation made flesh in Jesus Christ. A critical rereading of ecclesial tradition creates a profound problem for the theological discourse of the universality of the Gospel mediated by the church: it exposes the contingency of its normative claims, it includes plurality in its unity, and it locates its catholic and apostolic character in specific places. In short, it places the universal claim made for the Gospel in great tension with its particular formulations. Therefore, the epistemological transformation of the Cultural Turn entails a major theological problem. The question now is how a – theologically indispensable – universal claim can be maintained for the Christian faith in Jesus the Christ in the face of the unavoidable particularity of its formulations. The theological question of universality, which introduces a normative perspective on Christian identity discourses, changes the language game. As a reflection on faith, theology not only describes and critiques the process of Christian identity construction in its various contexts. It also takes the language game in which these identifications are formulated into consideration in its analyses: Christian identity is negotiated in the mode of confession. Each of the various Christianities claims to witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ in whom God’s offer of salvation to all people becomes a reality.118 There is a soteriological focus at the heart of the theological negotiations of Christian identity. Because they are testimonies, these theological interpretations are not arbitrary but must be evaluated in terms of their authenticity. At the same time, however, the testimony is always interpretation. There is, therefore, an inescapable hermeneutical rupture between the Christ event and its mediation through the church. Neither the Christian faith nor its theological reflection is claimed to be universal; this pertains only to God’s offer of salvation, which is revealed and mediated to all people in Jesus Christ. In the mode of testimony, the universal claim confessed for the Christ event is not simply something that can be applied to the various Christianities as such. This genre, rather, entails a permanent denial of any claim to universality for any Christianity that does not have access to unmediated, unbroken, untranslated Christian God-talk. It was Paul Ricoeur in particular who outlined this peculiar hermeneutical dynamics of testimony as the Christian language game. In the next section we will first outline his argument in more detail and then accentuate it through a Foucauldian critique. On the basis of these rereadings of the testimony as the formative

118 Richard Schaeffler distinguishes between the genres of confession and testimony through reference to the difference between inside and outside the faith community. Cf. his Religion und kritisches Bewußtsein, Freiburg: Alber, 1973, p. 143: “The confession … acquires the character of a testimony insofar it is spoken not only in the circle of the worshipers of the Holy but is also stated in front of other hearers.”

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Christian language game, we will develop a post-hermeneutical understanding of theology. 3.3.1.1 Paul Ricoeur: The Interpretation of the Absolute in the Event In his theological-philosophical development of the concept of testimony, Paul Ricoeur emphasizes the interpretative character that is inscribed in that genre. Central to his concept of testimony is its connection to a concrete, historical event. What distinguishes testimony from other genres in the narration of this event is the impossibility of separating the witness from his or her testimony; the witness vouches for the testimony she gives with her own person: The witness … is precisely not arbitrary …. It is not possible for another to witness in his place (or even to be replaced by a non-personal medium), he is necessarily implied as a person in the testimony…. The witness [is] involved as person with respect to both the content and the credibility of the testimony.119

This involvement120 of the witness in her testimony makes it impossible to dissect the testimony into a descriptive report on the historical event and an accompanying confession on its significance – instead, in the testimony, report and confession are inextricably merged together. There is no clear and distinct line between the report of the event and the confession of faith. In a testimony, “the event and its meaning immediately coincide.”121 But it is precisely this moment of immediacy that implies irreducible mediation: The first witnesses of the Gospel confess the significance of Christ directly on the Jesus event: “You are the Christ.” There is no separation between the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith. This unity is written: Jesus-Christ.122 119 Veronika Hoffmann, Vermittelte Offenbarung, Ostfildern, Münster (Westphalia): MatthiasGrünewald-Verl., p. 223. 120 Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Testimony,” in: Paul Ricœur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980, http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.as p?title=1941&C=1773. 121 Paul Ricoeur, “Towards a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” in: Paul Ricœur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980, http://www.religion-online.org/ showchapter.asp?title=1941&C=1772. 122 Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Testimony.” V. Hoffmann‘s reading of Ricoeur is not, in my opinion, consistent enough with respect to the unavoidabiliy of mediation in the genre of testimony. The use of the word “immediately” to describe the appearance and disappearance of the unity of the event in Ricoeur’s original text (translated by her) shifts to an “instantly” (sogleich instead of zugleich) and thus implies an unbroken moment of immediacy that the process of interpretation must first be connected to. Cf. her Vermittelte Offenbarung, p. 226: “In the original unity of meaning and event in the manifestation of the absolute lies, as Ricoeur has demonstrated, a moment of immediacy…. But this immediacy crashes instantly…. This immediacy, which appears and instantly dissipates again, is reflected, however, in the testimony…. But this unity also disintegrates almost

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Any statement about Jesus Christ is always already a theological interpretation of a historical event. An interpretation – here via the Christ title – of the historical event has inscribed itself into the confession: A split is sketched, a split which is not the ruin of testimony but an endless mediation on the divided immediacy.123

The immediacy of report and confession in the testimony, which leaves no distance between the event and its meaning, already contains an interpretation and, therefore, entails an irreducible hermeneutical rupture. The unity of the event and its meaning, which characterizes the testimony, implies an inevitable elusiveness: But this moment of fusion of event and meaning fades away. Its appearance is immediately its disappearance.124

In the search for a language for the event, this interpretation – Ricoeur employes the French term signification and refers to Charles S. Peirce’s concept of semiosis – uses the cultural-religious semiotic reservoir available to the witnesses. At the same time, however, it interrupts the established usages of these signs and introduces new horizons of meaning: in Jesus Christ, the Crucified is the Messiah, and the Messiah is the Crucified – indeed a “scandal” for the established Hebrew meaning of the sign ‘Messiah’ (cf. 1 Cor 1:23. cf. Dtn 21:23). The inseparability of report and confession makes the testimony a “decidedly contextual genre” that prevents “all too easy distinctions between eternal truths and their temporal expression”125 but stimulates, instead, new context-specific interpretations.126 The ongoing interpretations in testimonies are not arbitrary, however – this is another crucial implication of the genre of testimony. Testimonies count as truthful statements in court and are part of a decision-making process that serves the discovery of truth. At the same time, a testimony is not indisputable: “it testifies without having the power to prove or enforce what is being testified to…. An objection is always possible.”127 The confession is thus positioned in a

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immediately, and here lies the beginning of the infinite mediation that is achieved via the interpretation…. For Jesus Christ, the New Testament supreme title constitutes the first such interpretation” (italics mine). Here she overlooks the fact that the name of Christ is already a supreme title and the first – and most influential – interpretation of the historical event. Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Testimony.” Ibid; italics mine. Hoffmann, Vermittelte Offenbarung, p. 223. Guido Bausenhart calls this interpretativity of the process of testimony “regenerative reception.” Cf. Guido Bausenhart, Einführung in die Theologie: Genese und Geltung theologischer Aussagen, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2010, p. 91. Hoffmann, Vermittelte Offenbarung, pp. 224 f. Cf. Also Schaeffler, Religion und kritisches Bewußtsein, p. 144: “No doubt … the witness is not spared the experience of having an audience that rejects the testimony. Many condemn it as a

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tension between testimony and denial and cannot extricate itself from the “conflict of interpretations.”128 The testimony is thus hermeneutical: The concept of testimony … is hermeneutical in a double sense. In the first sense it offers to interpretation a content to be interpreted. In the second sense it calls for an interpretation.129

Interpretation occurs in a twofold way: first, it requires an interpretation as a mediation of the broken immediacy (Ricoeur’s second sense). But at the same time, in Ricoeur’s view, the event offers a content to be interpreted. With this proposition, he interrupts the endless semiosis of interpretations of the event, which he has described as constitutive of the testimony – he introduces a moment of the ‘immediacy of the absolute’ within the historical event, which only sets the chain of interpretation into motion. There is, he claims, an absolute origin that gives rise to interpretation: In testimony there is an immediacy of the absolute without which there would be nothing to interpret. This immediacy functions as origin, as initium, on this side of which we can go no further. Beginning there, interpretation will be the endless mediation of this immediacy. But without it interpretation will forever be only an interpretation of interpretation.130

For Ricoeur, the intertwining of report and confession, which implies inevitable mediation, occurs only after the event. While the testimony is always an interpretation that mediates the absolute immediacy of the event in the mode of withdrawal and effacement,131 a moment of immediate meaning is present in the event itself. For Ricoeur, this immediacy lies in the “quasiempirical”132 character of the testimony that refers to the “exteriority”133 of the event. The event has “historic density”: no meaning can be testified to without testifying that something has happened that indicates this meaning:

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‘lie’ with no connection to reality, while others as talk of a meaningless marginal reality that cannot influence the decisions they have to make.” Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, transl. Peter McCormick, ed. Don Ihde, Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 1974. Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Testimony.” If the testimony also requires new interpretations, then it is not only purely hermeneutical but also constructive. Ibid. Ibid.: “This is the shortcut of meaning and event which gives something to interpretation and which demands to be interpreted. How? In that this fusion signifies also a tension, the event is both apparent and hidden: hidden to the extent that it is apparent. The appearances of the living Christ are also the empty tomb.” Ibid. Stefan Orth, Das verwundete Cogito und die Offenbarung: Von Paul Ricoeur und Jean Nabert zu einem Modell fundamentaler Theologie (= Vol. 162), Freiburg im Breisgau, Münster (Westphalia): Herder, 1999, p. 368.

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There is therefore no witness of the absolute who is not a witness of historic signs, no confessor of absolute meaning who is not a narrator of the acts of deliverance.134

Yet Ricoeur can postulate the immediacy of the absolute in these historical acts of liberation only by way of interpreting them. A postulate is derived from interpretations – it cannot place the historical event outside the process of historiographical interpretations. The postulation of the manifestation of the absolute within the event thus cannot escape the irreducible “conflict of interpretations” and, hence, an infinite deferral of meaning. But in trying to locate the absolute within the event, Ricoeur interrupts the chain of interpretations and thereby undermines the very contingency that constitutes history. Therefore, in reflecting on his initial question (how can absoluteness be ascribed to contingent events),135 Ricoeur is not consistent enough and his hermeneutical approach136 is not radical enough.137 In the end, this approach remains in the “unbridgeable abyss”138 – in the ugly ditch produced by the opposition between the particularity of history and the universality of revelation. The hermeneutical elusiveness in God-talk is located only after the event. Before the chain of interpretation begins, however, Ricoeur argues, its meaning is present in the event. In Ricoeur’s approach, the historical event thus loses its contingent character: The absolute shows itself. In this shortcut of the absolute and its presence is constituted an experience of the absolute.139

What conclusions can we draw from Ricoeur’s approach for the testimony as a theological genre? First, it highlights the interpretativity of Christian God-talk. Theology takes its shape as an interminable process of semiosis. As testimony, it has no direct access to what it refers to but only becomes meaningful via other signs that function as interpreters. It does not exist in a binary relation of signs and their references but is directed to other discourses in a triadic constellation in which the significance of signs is negotiated discursively. Its meaning is not fixed but can only be talked about, and thus made real, in relation to other signs that are available in a concrete place: 134 Ibid. 135 Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Testimony”: “[D]o we have the right to invest a moment of history with an absolute character?” 136 Ibid.: “I would like to try to show that such a philosophy can only be a hermeneutics, that is, a philosophy of interpretation.” 137 Orth, Das verwundete Cogito und die Offenbarung, p. 370: “The significance of this thesis is that Ricoeur’s concept of testimony is understood as a bulwark against every radical conception of hermeneutics [Paul Ricoeur: “A Response,” in: Biblical Research (1979–1980), pp. 70–80, here p. 78.]. Both the reduction of a historical event to an allegedly brute fact and the interpretation of the historical fact as a pure linguistic act are rejected by Ricoeur. On the basis of this exteriority in the testimony Ricoeur indicates this concept also as a ‘gift from the religious to philosophy’.” 138 Ibid. 139 Ibid.

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If interpretation is possible, it is because it is always possible, by means of this gap, to mediate the relation of meaning and event by another meaning which plays the role of interpretation with regard to their very relation. Charles Sanders Peirce has furnished in this respect the model of this triadic relation. Every relation between a sign and an object, he says, can be explained by means of a sign which plays the role of interpretant with regard to their relation. An open chain of interpretants is thus created by this primary relation between sign and object.140

Ricoeur therefore does stress the interpretativity of history and historiography. Within the event itself, however, he postulates a moment of absoluteness. He locates the event, which gives rise to the testimony and thus sets this theological semiosis into motion, outside the process of interpretation and invests it with an absolute meaning detached from its context. It thus loses its contingent character.

3.3.1.2 Michel Foucault: The Radical Interpretativity of Eventualization While Ricoeur postulates an inherent meaning in history in which an event coincides with its significance in the manifestation of the absolute, Michel Foucault coins the term ‘eventualization’ (‘event-making’) to point out that it is already an interpretative process to perceive a specific constellation as an event.141 The event is not determined but emerges as a singularity out of discursive processes: 140 Ibid. 141 M. Foucault, “What is Critique?” in” Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylv re Lotringer, transl. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 1997, 2007, p. 59. http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Foucault-Critique.pdf. It is on this point that Elke Dauk also makes her critical distinction between Ricoeur and Foucault: “The fundamental relation [in Ricoeur’s hermeneutical scheme] is the relational structure that establishes and at the same time satisfies the need for interpretation…. It establishes the non-available via the nevertheless unified truth, the game of absence and presence, concealment and openness, and also explains away, at least virtually, its appropriation through working distance and difference. But, as is apparent, this relation grounds the hermeneutical truth in a way that is diametrically opposed to Foucault’s genealogy. Ricoeur, namely, legitimates an existing structure of domination through a founding myth. While Foucault’s analyses of power seek to understand what makes the subjectifying power mechanisms so successful, Ricoeur reinforces them with an identification myth. This is why it is only apparently a paradox that such different approaches like those of Foucault and Ricoeur both hold to the same relational structure as the basis of hermeneutical knowledge. It is a foundation for one and a matter of critique for the other. For Ricoeur, it represents the transition from existential ontology to the ethics of obligation that reconciles ontology with an ethics of redemption. Conversely, for Foucault, the relational structure is the end of a critical ontology and its corresponding heroic ethics that does not surrender to any obligation.” Cf. Elke Dauk, Denken als Ethos und Methode (= Vol. 5), Berlin: Reimer, 1989, pp. 141 f.

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the indivisibility of knowledge and power in the context of interactions and multiple strategies induce both singularities, fixed according to their conditions of acceptability, and a field of possibles, of openings, indecisions, reversals and possible dislocations which make them fragile, temporary, and which turn these effects into events, nothing more, nothing less than events.142

Events emerge from interpretations – they are not situated outside the hermeneutical process in order to give rise to interpretations. Rather, to perceive a historical constellation as an event is already an interpretative act. The event does not exist apart from its interpretations. Hence, its meaning is always marked by a hermeneutical rupture; it is broken, absent, and effaced in its interpretations. There is, in other words, no absolute meaning present in historical events. The hermeneutical rupture is not located only after the event (as Ricoeur suggested), but it marks and mars the event itself. The appearance of the event is tied to a suspension of its meaning caused by the very interpretations which bring it into being. The event, then, remains ambiguous: it does not coincide with a single given, preconceived sense, but emerges in different significations – in the negotiations of its meaning and significance. The event thus emerges out of discursive practices according to certain conditions of acceptability while at the same time undermining and questioning these conditions, making them “fragile and temporary,”143 and revealing their contingency. As a place of absolute contingency,144 the event 142 Foucault, “What is Critique?” p. 66. Cf. p. 59: “What I understand by the procedure of eventialization, whilst historians cry out in grief, would be the following: first, one takes groups of elements where, in a totally empirical and temporary way, connections between mechanisms of coercion and contents of knowledge can be identified. Mechanisms of different types of coercion, maybe also legislative elements, rules, material set-ups, authoritative phenomena, etc. One would be also consider the contents of knowledge in terms of their diversity and heterogeneity, view them in the context of the effects of power they generate inasmuch as they are validated by their belonging to a system of knowledge. We are therefore not attempting to find out what is true or false, founded or unfounded, real or illusory, scientific or ideological, legitimate or abusive. What we are trying to find out is what the links, what are the connections that can be identified between mechanisms of coercion and elements of knowledge, what is the interplay of relay and support developed between them, such that a given element of knowledge takes on the effects of power in a given system where it is allocated to a true, probable, uncertain or false element, such that a procedure of coercion acquires the very form and justifications of a rational, calculated, technically efficient element, etc.” 143 Cf. also Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, die Genealogie, die Historie,” in: Michel Foucault (ed.), Von der Subversion des Wissens, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verl., 2000, pp. 69–90, here p. 80: “Event does not refer to a decision, a treaty, a reign or a battle, but a change in the balance of power, the overthrow of a power, the conversion of a language and its use against those who have spoken it until then, the undermining, the poisoning of a rule by itself, the disguised appearance of another rule.” 144 Cf. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Interviews and other Writings 1972–1977, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, p. 114 (in response to a question posed by Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino): “We need, then, to locate the notion of discontinuity in its proper context. And perhaps there is another concept which is both more difficult and more central to your thought, the concept of an event. For in relation to the event a whole generation was long

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can never be definitively expressed in language but breaks through established ascriptions of meaning and stimulates conflicting interpretations through its disruptive nature.

3.3.2 Testimony to a particular Event – Theological Ramifications Theology, we said above, is the language game of testimony that ascribes universal relevance to a particular historical event. Incarnation, understood as the event of God’s self-revelation in history, is the normative basis of this language game – it rests on the belief that God revealed Godself in history, that God fully and truly became human in Jesus the Christ. Within the ‘web of significance’ of the Christian faith, God and human, the universal and the particular, are hence not thought to be mutually exclusive but constitutive of each other. This correlation informs the Christian testimony in a very specific way. When theology truly and completely exposes itself to the parameters of its normative founding event, it takes an enormous theological risk: confessing the incarnation as God’s self-revelation in a historical event implies a suspension of knowledge of God and God’s revelation. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the testimony and its accentuation through a Foucauldian critique of the concept of event can help us trace and unfold this theological risk. Ricoeur, we saw, does stress the interpretativity of history and historiography; this allows him to highlight the hermeneutical character of the Christian testimony: theology is always a (pluriform) interpretation of its founding event. Within the event itself, however, Ricoeur postulates a moment of absoluteness and it is at this point that his approach falls short of the normative core of the Christian testimony. In the end, his approach cannot consistently conceive of revelation as a historical, and therefore radically contingent, event. It makes God immune against historical particularity; it does not expose God to real, actual contingency. Translated into incarnation theology, it is the attempt to understand God’s incarnation in Jesus the Christ trapped in an impasse, in that following the works of ethnologists, some of them great ethnologists, a dichotomy was established between structures (the thinkable) and the event considered as the site of the irrational, the un-thinkable, that which doesn’t and cannot enter into the mechanism and play of analysis, at least in the form which this took in structuralism. In a recent discussion published in the journal ‘L’Homme’, three eminent anthropologists posed this question once again about the concept of event, and said: the event is what always escapes our rational grasp, thedomain of ‘absolute contingency’; we are thinkers who analyse structures, history is no concern of ours, what could we be expected to have to say about it, and so forth. This opposition then between event and structure is the site and the product of a certain anthropology. I would say this has had devastating effects among historians who have finally reached the point of trying to dismiss the event and the ‘evenementiel’ as an inferior order of history dealing with trivial facts, chance occurrences and so on.”

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not as a human being but like a human being – it implies an understanding that God did not really become human but only appeared to be human. This interpretation of the incarnation was excluded from Catholic tradition as the heresy of Docetism. To avoid this theological pitfall, we have to fully take into account the contingency of the historical event. This brings us to Michel Foucault – it is precisely at this point that his concept of the event takes a different turn. In contrast to Ricoeur’s approach, Foucault’s understanding of the event does not interrupt the interpretatvity of history/historiography but traces it right into the event itself. Interpretation is at the very root (radix) of the emergence of events – a full appreciation of the contingency of the event, therefore, calls for a radical hermeneutics. For theology, this entails that if the historical event of incarnation is not to be dismissed as the foundation of the Christian testimony, we have to conceive of God’s revelation in a historical event as a process of interpretation. Historical-cultural events are places of contingency; they emerge from discursive processes of interpretation. The hermeneutical rupture informs not only the testimonies but penetrates the event itself. Historical events do not present us with meaning that will subsequently become fragmented by the interpretations of testimony. Rather, the event itself emerges only from its interpretations; it is constituted in its meanings. The event does not offer any place of presence but refers in its meanings to the presence of meaning in the mode of hermeneutical brokenness – as an interpretative elusiveness. As a historical event, revelation is thus an act of interpretation145 that does not simply provide Christian God-talk with the presence of God; the revelation of God’s presence emerges from the hermeneutical rupture that constitutes the event of God’s revelation. As a historical event, God’s self-revelation is tied inseparably to its effacement. This hermeneutical brokenness of revelation, however, is not a lack that undermines the experience of the presence of God. This hermeneutical rupture does not run between the revelation of God and its particular interpretations; rather, revelation happens in its interpretations as effacement. When God is present in history, events happen that do not reveal unbroken presence but maintain presence as absence.146 This hermeneutical effacement in the event of revelation undermines the opposition of presence and absence. They do not exclude each other but condition each other – God is present in the mode of effacement. The Christian tradition refers to this tension in 145 Gregor M. Hoff, Offenbarungen Gottes? Eine theologische Problemgeschichte, Regensburg: Pustet, 2007, p. 126. 146 Israel’s rejection of Jesus as the Messiah must be kept alive here as a permanent question in the Christian witness to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. For theological arguments on the interpretativity – and thus elusiveness – of revelation, cf. ibid., pp. 130–39.

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confessing the Deus Revelatus as the Deus Absconditus:147 “That God becomes all the more present as the Absent One is the basic structure of revelation in the world.”148 The hermeneutical rupture that constitutes revelatory events, therefore, does not do away with the possibility of Christian God-talk. Rather, it is the condition for a theology that testifies to a God who reveals Godself in history. It makes it possible to speak about the presence of God in the mode of absence, as Lieven Boeve states: Because of the Word (Logos), the word is both kataphasis and apophasis, or more precisely, kataphasis conditioned by apophasis. Precisely this combination opens, what we could call, a third way in which the Word (Logos) is referred to, no longer in either kataphatic affirmation or apophatic negation, but in ‘de-negation’ or (in French) ‘de-nomination,’ which overcomes both the affirmation (predication) and negation (suspension of predication).… In other words, theology … does not involve a metaphysics of presence, nor of absence, but of present absence, revealed in the tension between the word and the Word (Logos). In the word, the Word (Logos) is present by its withdrawal (what Pseudo-Denis referred to as ‘hyper-ousia’).149

If this elusiveness is not a lack but rather the condition of revelation as historical events, then there is no “unbridgeable chasm,”150 no separation, between the revelation of God and its interpretations. Rather, these testimonies, as particular interpretations of this event, open up the only possible, never unbroken, access to this event – the revelation of God occurs in a hermeneutically broken way in the mode of contingency. The hermeneutical withdrawal in the discourse of revelation thus does not undermine theology but conditions it. Boeve states again: apophasis is not doing away with kataphasis, but is intrinsically at work in it.151

It was a long and hard struggle for the church to find a language adequate for expressing the radical contingency of God’s self-revelation in the human Jesus and, throughout its tradition, it has succumbed to the temptation to conceal the unsettling theological consequences which its normative founding event entails and which deprives it of a non-problematic understanding of the presence of God. In the Roman Catholic tradition, the pre-Vatican II church is 147 Cf. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on Psalm 18 (Psalm 17 in Thomas’ version): “Vere, tu es Deus Absconditus,” Super Psalmo 17, n. 11. 148 Eberhard Jüngel, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt: Zur Begründung der Theologie des Gekreuzigten im Streit zwischen Theismus und Atheismus, Tübingen: Mohr, 1977, p. 478. 149 Lieven Boeve, “Christus Postmodernus: An Attempt at Apophatic Christology,” in: Terrence Merrigan and Jacques Haers (eds.), The Myriad Christ: Plurality and the Quest for Unity in Contemporary Christology, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2000, pp. 577–93, here p. 592. 150 Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Testimony.” 151 Lieven Boeve, “Negative Theology and Theological Hermeneutics: The Particularity of Naming God,” in: Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 3 (2006), pp. 1–13, here p. 9.

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a case in point – it relied on a theological framework that divided history and revelation into ontologically and epistemologically separate spheres: Until Vatican II, it was a position viewed by the Holy Office as right and also fervently imposed to keep dogma pure from history…. Almost ideologically [the opinion arose] that they were like fire and water…. The antimodernist strategy to resist this relativization of the truth of faith [by reference to its historicity], consisted in asserting a transcultural and non-historial character of all dogmas and determining in advance an explanation for presenting it that applied to all equally.152

The ecclesial construction of Christian identity and the corresponding theology of revelation here follow a politics of binarization that introduces a mutually exclusive difference between dogma and history, church and world, faith and reason, nature and supernature, transcendence and immanence. The universality of the church was placed over against the particularity of the world, the supernatural character of revelation over against the natural character of reason. Binarizations in the process of the formation of identity accompany hierarchizations. Differentiations always imply evaluations.153 The antimodernist conception of theology, church and revelation as non-historical and supernatural was based on the premise that history, the world, reason, and nature were secondary, inferior, and dangerous. In a mutually reinforcing process of pejoration and exclusion in the formation of church identity, preconciliar theology conceived of particularity and contingency as a theological deficit in two ways. First, particularity is excluded from this identity as theologically deficient; universality can only be conceived here as an abstraction from particularity. Second, this exclusion of particularity produces a deficit within theology. It is the ‘other’ of this identity politics that it cannot face and on which it, nevertheless, inescapably depends for its identity construction. In the attempt to define its identity without including its contingency, the pre-conciliar church continued to be confronted with historical and cultural particularity as its disturbing and silenced other – a deficit that haunts and threatens to undermine its ecclesiological construction. Concealing the contingency of its testimony might have enabled the preconciliar church to gloss over the radical interpretativity of its theology, which, 152 Sander, Theologischer Kommentar zur Pastoralkonstitution über die Kirche in der Welt von heute Gaudium et spes, pp. 693, 780. Cf. ibid.[which page precisely?]: “The proposal, that dogma has defeated history, with the declaration of the infallibility of the pope at the First Vatican Council … which was attributed to Cardinal Manning wihout verifying this by a quote – is characteristic for the question of power in this problem. Thus, in 1870 Manning had explained in a pastoral letter to his clergy that it was a ‘Protesant principle’ to appeal to history over against the Magisterium.” 153 Bhabha refers in the (post)colonial context to the fear of – and desire for – what was contrued as inferior. Cf. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 110. For this ambivalent relation, cf. also Young, Colonial Desire.

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in turn, allowed it to conceive of God’s revelation as a deposit at its disposal. It paid for this authority (and hence, power) over God’s presence, however, with the increasing incommunicability of its testimony. A theology that suppresses its interpretativity ultimately becomes unable to convey its faith to the world. It was precisely this theological shortcoming that eventually led John XXIII to call for an aggiornamento and to convene the Second Vatican Council,154 which, to an extent, retrieved the interpretativity of testimony as formative and normative for the language game of theology (cf. the hermeneutics of the signs of the times in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church Gaudium et Spes). Preparations for this paradigm shift had been made, in the face of massive resistance and under magisterial repression, in nouvelle th ologie. In this retrieval, a renewed focus on incarnation as the normative founding event became the guiding force for overcoming the theological cul-de-sacs of the preconciliar church. It was primarily Marie-Dominique Ch nu who argued that the ‘principle of the incarnation’ does not allow Christian theology to understand dogma and history, nature and grace, faith and reason as mutually exclusive entities. Rather, when reflecting on the historical Christ event as the revelation of God’s history, it has to take into account the place in which the revelation occurs. Particularity is not a deficit in the revelation of universality but its very condition: If the human being truly recognizes God, he [sic] thus knows him in a human way. No more than grace is external to nature is faith a knowledge superimposed superficially on top of reason. It lives within it. And it is not polluted by this incarnation of it, no more than the Logos is diminished by becoming flesh. The twofold theandric mystery, the mystery of Christ, in which the divine and the human are one: one single person in whom faith implants me, the eternal Son of God who appeared in history, the Christ of faith in the Christ of history. It is the intersection point of all history. Theology cannot hope … to find … its goal outside history ….. It is undeniably a holy history, but this holiness cannot remove it from this context that constitutes the stuff and principle of human history; otherwise, it will no longer be an incarnation; because if the human words are damaged structurally by the violence of this coming word of God, they would become incomprehensible and would no longer reveal that Word of God to the human being.155 154 Cf. also Marie Dominique Ch nu, looking back on the council (Volk Gottes in der Welt, p. 67): “This process brings difficulties and dangers with it. The signs of the time are questions posed to the church and therefore place its presence in the world in question. The past is a good teacher for us on this point, not only in a pleasant way, if we see that those Christians, our elder brothers, were insensitive to the signs of God in the consciousness of people and in the course of history. It is precisely in respect to this that the aggiornamento has its place.” 155 Marie-Dominique Ch nu (ed.), Le Saulchoir, p. 125. In his attempt to account theologically for the historicity of revelation and the inevitability of human speech in the communication of the divine word, Ch nu here reveals the challenge of the event to the language he sees as no longer adequate. The event does not fit seamlessly into the given discourse but shatters language – it does ‘violence’ to language. Prefabricated as-

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By reclaiming incarnation as the formative and normative principle of Christian God-talk, Chenu – and the postconciliar church – retrieved the theological thrust of the Christological dogmas that, on closer observation, focus precisely on the hermeneutical rupture engrained in the event of the incarnation and that we have recovered above through a Foucauldian critique of the event. This thrust of the Christological doctrine becomes observable in a historiographical detail: the 19th and 20th century Leben-Jesu-Forschung tackled the relationship between Christology and its foundational event in four ‘waves’. Drawing on several different methodological and theological paradigms, it tried to discover the ‘historical’ Jesus ‘behind’ Christological interpretations; yet, all these attempts had to arrive at the same conclusion. It was already formulated by Albert Schweitzer in his review of the ‘first quest’: The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Savior. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that, despite all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let Him go. He returned to His own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position.156

The conclusion Schweitzer had to draw is that it is historically impossible to find Jesus apart from the Christological formulations of the church. This corresponds with the insight of a Foucauldian concept of the event. As a historical event, Jesus, his life, death and resurrection are always enmeshed in interpretations; as events, they cannot occur without a hermeneutical rupture. This historiographical result is mirrored in New Testament accounts of the unsettling experience of the Risen Christ, whose real presence is suspended in absence. Jesus Christ is confessed to be the “image of the invisible God” criptions of meaning had lost their meaning in the face of the disruptive nature of the event, in the struggle for language about the event it inevitably, in its reliance on the linguistic signs of a context, comes down to shifts in meaning and new linguistic forms. In line with C.S. Peirce, Hans-Joachim Sander describes this “making sayable out of the unsaid” as abduction. Cf. Hans-Joachim Sander, Einführung in die Gotteslehre, Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchges. 2006, pp. 27 f.: “At its beginning is an unavoidable moment of speechlessness and/or inability to act. A crack appears, and a difference between the sayable, not yet sayable, and the unsayable appears. Abductions are used with this difference…. As long as the new language is not yet found, there are are signs available that one already has. But these signs stand in the framework of a difference from the solution of the problem; consequently, they cannot be used simply in the same way as one is used to.” 156 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, transl. W. Montgomery, A. & C. Black, Ltd. 1910, p. 400. http://www. earlychristianwritings.com/schweitzer/.

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(Col 1.15) – anyone who has seen him has seen the Father (John 14.9). He gives God a real and actual presence in history, but this presence of God in Jesus Christ cannot be conceived without a hermeneutical rupture; it is tied inextricably to its suspension. This was the experience of Mary Magdalene, who could not hold on to Jesus (John 20.17); this was the experience of the disciples on their way to Emmaus, who, once they recognized Jesus, could no longer see him (Luke 24.31); this was even the experience of Thomas who would have been blessed had he believed without seeing (John 20.29). As the historical event of God’s self-revelation, Jesus Christ embodies God’s relevation in effacement, as an absence. The ecclesial witness to this presence-as-absence of God’s revelation takes shape in interpretations of historical events and can, therefore, not be expressed without its own hermeneutical rupture; it calls for an apophatically informed theological language that checks and corrects any (non-)problematically affirmative God-talk, and indeed, the Christological dogma of Chalcedon does offer the normative formulation for such a ‘suspended’ theology. The formula “inconfusedly, inseparably’ defines the relation of divine and human nature in Jesus Christ and in the very way it formulates this relationship; it shows the effacement inscribed into the relation of transcendence and immanence. By relying on negations, it does not resolve the tension of absoluteness and contingency in God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ into a positive, tangible synthesis. Rather, these negations articulate the aporias – the impasses and suspensions – that any human communication of God is intrinsically intertwined with and that are constitutive of theology. Gregor M. Hoff outlines this linguistic-epistemological strategy of the Chalcedonian formulation: Linguistically, ‘inconfusedly, inseparably’ are not antonymous signs; there is a subtle shift in the semantic distance between them. What we translate as God’s incarnation happens in this difference (which is not resolved anymore by any other sign): the dynamic and hence historical encounter of transcendence and immanence. The latter has to be thought of as an aspect of God’s self-definition. Yet, this is exactly what we cannot think through in all its implications. Chalcedon states that by expressing the unsayable. The dominating attributes are set within the paradigm of negative theology: four times, a ‘in’ stresses the necessity of doing theology despite its impossibility. This epistemological aporia is the figure of speech for a mystagogical transformation that teaches us to talk about and pray to God in ways different from the ones already established and expected. An aporia contains a revolutionary element; it calls for motion, for redoing, for rethinking – again and again. This gives it an eschatological character of unrest and ‘un-resignation’. Epistemologically, it is metanoia.157 157 Gregor M. Hoff, “Wer ist Christus? Das Symbolon von Chalkedon als Grammatik des Glaubens,” in: Gregor M. Hoff (ed.), Stichproben: Theologische Inversionen: Salzburger Aufsätze, Innsbruck, Vienna: Tyrolia 2010, pp. 187–200, here p. 197.

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The Christological dogma of Chalcedon thus unfolds the theological implications of the Christian testimony of God’s self-revelation in a historical event. It makes explicit the linguistic and epistemological ways by which Christians can give witness to their belief in incarnation: if the theological language game of testimony really is to take into account the radical contingency of the historical event to which it bears witness, it has to deal with the inescapable interpretativity that permeates the event itself. It cannot interrupt the process of interpretation through the postulation of absolute meaning within history. Rather, it has to reveal the inevitable hermeneutical rupture, which is inscribed into the events of God’s revelation, and include it in a productive, fruitful way in theology. Dieter Mersch has outlined such an approach, which does not eliminate the hermeneutical rupture by establishing absolute meaning, as ‘posthermeneutics.’ Following Foucault’s critique, which traces the interpretativity of events right to their very roots, we could also refer to it as ‘radical hermeneutics’. It highlights a chronic ‘withdrawing,’ of something ‘unjustifiable’ or unavailable that is constantly heard and mingles in the ‘event,’ in what is being encountered, that … influences the textures of meaning, stubbornly and insubordinately, and occupies its structures as it disrupts and thwarts them. In the context of ‘posthermeneutics,’ then, we are dealing with ‘caesuras’ or ‘interventions’ that, from the outset, do not fit into the semiotic or the symbolic or the medial aspects that consequently pass through the strategies or writings of cultural practice and crack and fracture the distinctions that ‘make differences’ or leave scars behind in them. Again and again, the perception arises that ‘something’ is revealed that bursts open the orders of significance to reveal, as it were, an other in its ‘cavity.’ If, therefore, there is an exteriority or alterity … then it is so in the sense of such violations, such injuries, fractures, or gaps that leave traces without these having led to ‘something,’ ‘having said’ something certain or were decipherable ‘as such’ but do guide one’s view to a certain principial negativity that prevails even in cultures.158

In order to do justice to the radical contingency of its founding event, theology has to be performed as radical hermeneutics. It is not on a (vain) quest for the presence of absolute meaning but is the ongoing process of the interpretation of a particular event. It puts forth these interpretations by drawing on other religious and cultural webs of significance and by shifting the established meaning of their signs and symbols (The Crucified is the Messiah; the Messiah is the Crucified). The Christian language game thus takes shape through violations of established meaning – and by revealing these fractures, gaps, and scars, Christian testimony can make visible the irreducible hermeneutical rupture that constitutes its founding event. It can give witness to the constant 158 Dieter Mersch, Posthermeneutik (= Volume 26), Berlin: Akademische-Verlag, 2010, p. 15. Lieven Boeve takes up such a “radical hermeneutics” approach to theology. Cf., for example, Boeve, Negative Theology and Theological Hermeneutics.

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deferral of its meaning and can proclaim God’s presence as an absence. At the very same time, these fractures, gaps, scars, and violations in the Christian language game interrupt the established webs of significance in which its testimony finds its expressions. They make them ‘fragile and temporary’ and thus unsettle its established hegemonic narratives. For Foucault, it is such shifts in meaning that produce events. When, in other words, theological language reveals its radical interpretativity, it can lead to the emergence of new events. When it is performed by way of a radical hermeneutics, theology is a continuing process of eventualizations.159 This radically hermeneutical approach to theology has profound ecclesiological reverberations. First, by framing theology as an ongoing process of eventualizations – above, Gregor Hoff has referred to this theological dynamics as metanoia, and in the next section, we will see that Michel de Certeau also maps theology as conversion – the Christological formula of Chalcedon declares that, ultimately, the church cannot completely contain God’s self-revelation. What it has at its disposal is solely the presence of an absence. Founded on this suspension, the church is constituted in interpretations of its foundational event – interpretations that render this event simultaneously present and absent. The ecclesial interpretations of the incarnation are a continuation of the irresolvable tension of manifestation and suspension in God’s revelation. In Lumen Gentium, its Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, the Second Vatican Council made these ecclesial tensions and their Christological foundation explicit – and has thus drawn the ecclesiological conclusions from its retrieval of incarnation as the normative foundation of theology: “By no weak analogy … to the mystery of the incarnate Word,” the church is both hierarchical society and mystical body, visible assembly and spiritual community, earthly and heavenly, holy and always in need of being purified (cf. LG 8). But we can push this point even further: not only are the ecclesial interpretations of the incarnation a continuation of the irresolvable tension of manifestation and suspension in God’s revelation. They have, in fact, always already been inseparable from God’s revelation. Revelation and church depend on each other in a mutual hermeneutical relation. When we translate an incarnational theology of revelation into ecclesiology, we arrive at a circle of interpretation in which revelation and church constitute each other. Just as the church depends on revelation for its existence, so revelation cannot be conceived independently from the witness of the church. Because its 159 This, in turn, implies that theology facilitates an ongoing line of revelatory events – as a historical event, incarnation cannot be anything but incarnatio continua. As a process of eventualization, theology produces events of God’s presence as absence. There is thus a soteriological dimension to theology as interpretative process of eventualization. Cf. Judith Gruber, “Revealing Subversions: Theology as Critical Theory,” in: Anthony Godzieba and Bradford Hinze (eds.), Beyond Dogmatism and Innocence. Hermeneutics, Critique, and Catholic Theology, Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2017, pp. 179–202.

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foundational event is contingent and is conceivable exclusively in its interpretations, the church as the interpretational community of this event becomes indispensable. In its interpretative witness, the significance of the event is manifested – it is made present, it is revealed. Hence, the contingency of the Jesus Christ event initially strengthens the theological position of the church – it is the space of interpretation that manifests the significance of this event. To state it quite strongly, the church is the revelation of the Christ event. It is the actual and real body of Christ in the world. At the same time, however, as a space emerging from plural and contingent interpretations, the church becomes a problematic entity. Processes of interpretation do not produce unambiguity, interpretations create ambivalence: as the interpretative manifestation of a contingent event, the church finds itself to be an ambiguous space, marred by differences and blurred borders with its others. If the church is to be found where the God of Jesus Christ is present as an interpretation, then these ecclesial places are founded on irresolvably ambivalent grounds – an ambivalence that fractures the ecclesial representation of the foundational event. Again, there is a tension of presence and absence, of manifestation and effacement. This ambivalence becomes tangible in the disparities between different ecclesial interpretations. The conflictive plurality of Catholic tradition reveals that none of its interpretations offers an absolute representation of its foundational event; rather, they all refer to it from their particular places and, hence, they refer to it with a hermeneutical rupture, in a suspended mode. Its incarnational foundation entails a genuinely theological crisis of representation for the church: as Certeau puts it, The church is “a sign of … what … it lacks.”160 3.3.3 Michel de Certeau: Speaking of God in the Mode of Contingency Above, we started to map preliminary landmarks of a theological approach that takes incarnation as its founding event radically seriously and thus employs a radically hermeneutical approach. This section will draw on Michel de Certeau to give further substance to such a radically hermeneutical framework for theology; we will focus especially on epistemo-theological and ecclesiological aspects and, in turn, will use these to develop an Intercultural Theology after the Cultural Turn. 3.3.3.1 A Theological Crisis of Representation Certeau’s theological oeuvre is a response to the postmodern and postcolonial critique of modernity. As we saw above, at the heart of this critique is a ‘crisis 160 Certeau, GlaubensSchwachheit, p. 180.

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of representation’: language is no longer considered to (re)present reality but to negotiate and construct reality. This epistemological shift undermines the very foundations of the established theological discourse: The ‘crisis of representation’ inevitably threatens theology, which speaks of a God who claims to be present. Representation thus becomes a key principle that theological reflection cannot avoid. The ‘crisis of representation’ is also the crisis of theology, insofar as its traditional metaphysics of presence is disappearing.161

Certeau’s work can thus be read as the theological continuation of Michel Foucault’s critique of modernity. He shares Foucault’s methodological presuppositions and highlights the contingency of historical knowledge, the power interests of discourse, and the absence of an absolute origin. Yet, [Certeau] did not limit himself only to the diagnosis of this crisis. Wherever mysticism was at the center of research, it concerned an attempt to go beyond the aporias of this loss of representation and to initiate a response to the crisis that would go further.162

Unlike Foucault, Certeau does not only look at the destructive thrust of the critique of modernity but works to reclaim the ‘crisis of representation’ as the foundation of theology.163 161 Bogner, Gebrochene Gegenwart, p. 16. 162 Ibid., pp. 17 f. 163 Hardt (Genealogie der Genade, pp. 194, 196) shows that it is precisely in this productive, creative access to the brokenness of theological speech as a form of knowledge that Cearteau’s theological continuation of Foucault can be situated: “For Certeau, the exposure of the limited validity of scientific expressions is the decisive criterion of its suitability. The admission of being a ‘theoretical fiction’ must be demanded of every scientific assertion so that the possibility of otherness is not concealed. Nevertheless, such a fiction has permanent epistemological value. Thus, a suspension between construction and deconstruction is reached that makes it possible to think the epistemological status of Foucault’s genealogies and to reject his nihilism at the same time. Above all, that is, in view of the faith knowledge of Christianity, a decisive distinction…. Certeau shares Foucault’s view in principle that doctrines must be related to the practices at their foundation – they are theoretical fictions as well – but, for him, historical relativity does not exclude the theoretical value of assertions. The praxis that constitutes dogmas is not a coincidental game of discourse events nor a pure will to power but is grounded in Jesus Christ in whom God acts in history. The praxis of following Jesus constitutes the discourse of theology. It is the source, goals, and essential description of theological discourse. Theology can thus be understood as a life form that possesses a function in the totality of discipleship practices as a methodologically responsible accountability via the praxis of discipleship. It raises the Christian fiction in a relatively suitable way to the signs of the time with the goal of making discipleship possible and believable once more. With that, the concrete assertions are always involved in the power/knowledge complex of a time that gives them their characteristic contemporary form. Nevertheless, all theological statements refer to the Christ event as their authorization. The decisive theological argument against the methodological nihilism of genealogy consists in that discipleship refers to Jesus Christ as the event that opens up room for action in the field of power. The Christ event permits and authorizes practices in his name – in short, discipleship.”

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“La Rupture Instauratrice ou le Christianisme dans la Culture Contemporaine” (1971)164 is a crucial text of his Foucauldian rereading of theology and his theological rereading of Foucault. Here, Certeau reframes the theological significance of the Jesus Christ event within the critical framework of radical hermeneutics. Foucault’s concept of ‘eventualization’ clearly informs the crucial argument of this essay: as a historical event, the Jesus Christ event is radically contingent and therefore remains inevitably elusive while permitting continually new interpretations. Unsurprisingly, this logic of the event comes into view from its particular interpretations. Its ‘essence’ can only be grasped via its interpretations: The early documents of the Christ event give us in writing only the reverse side of what is essential. They all speak of an event which they efface by substituting different consequences for it. But they manifest the nature of this event by virtue of the fact that they refer to it as that which ‘permits’ new possibilites. The event is ‘historical’ not because of its preservation outside time owing to a knowledge of it that supposedly has remained intact, but because of its introduction into time with various discoveries about it for which it ‘makes room.’165

The event cannot be objectively known …. [It] does not allow itself … to be reduced to an object of knowledge…. [It] eludes every ‘objective’ definition. It dissipates and dissolves in a variety of readings. It remains elusive as an object – precisely, however, because it authorizes all these interpretations.166

Certeau uses New Testament images to capture this inevitable interpretativity of the historical event that produces plural “findings-inventions” (German: (Er-)Findungen), such as the empty tomb, or the ascension of the resurrected. The event is characterized by ‘making room’ – it creates plural spaces for interpretations that “[do] not [replicate] the Gospel … but [are] not possible without it.”167 This inevitable interpretativity of ‘making room’ has a revelatory character that unfolds in the indispensable dialectic of manifestation and effacement: Through this gesture of making room for the plurality of church institutions and for the invisibility of the Spirit – i. e., for the letters and the meaning of the communication – room is found in which authorization entails death in every 164 German translation: Michel de Certeau, “Der gründende Bruch,” in: Michel de Certeau (ed.), GlaubensSchwachheit, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2009, pp. 173–87. An abbreviated English version of this essay was published as “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” in: Graham Ward (ed.), The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007, pp. 142–155. 165 Certeau: “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” p. 144. 166 Certeau, “Der gründende Bruch,” p. 175. 167 Ibid.

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case. From now on the trail of spiritual truth in personal life, in pedagogical transmission, in social organization lies in the real relation between the termination of a singularity and what is enabled by that singularity: a revelation disseminated in the plurality of ‘common life’ …. Here [the truth mediated in the Jesus-Christ event] disappears in that which it authorizes.168 Thus the event is lost precisely in what it authorizes. It somehow dies to its own historical specificity, but this happens in the very discoveries which it provokes.169

The mutual inevitability of manifestation and disappearance, of revelation and concealment, of authorization and effacement, of creating space and making room grounds a relation between a singularity that ceases to exist by authorizing those [spaces], and its plurality that manifests its meaning by being differentiated.170

This real relation between the expiring singularity and the revelation spread out in plural interpretations has an incarnational character. It is incarnatio continua: Jesus … has disappeared (‘been validated’) into his church in a living way. The death of Jesus becomes the condition for the new Church to arise and for new languages to develop. The true relation of Jesus to the Father (who gives him authority) and to the Church (which he ‘permits’) is verified (i. e., manifested) by his dis death. The Jesus event is extended (verified) in the manner of a disappearance in the differences which that event renders possible.171

The event is inseparably linked to the spaces of interpretation that constitute the church. The particularity of the event inevitably leads to plural ecclesiastical testimonies. Because its foundational event is radically contingent and only accessible through interpretations, the church is, inevitably, the place of interpretation – the meaning of the event becomes manifest, revealed, in the church’s interpretative testimonies. At the same time, none of the interpretations is identical to the event;172 they are “the reports of the event, but not its reality.”173 Interpretation and event do not merge into each other; they exist ‘inconfusedly’ with each other. The inseparability of event and interpretation implies effacement: The founder disappears; it is impossible to grasp and ‘detain’ him to the degree that he takes shape and meaning in a plurality of ‘Christian’ experiences and acts. We can not observe anything outside of a plurality of practices and discourses that neither 168 169 170 171 172 173

Certeau, “Der gründende Bruch,” pp. 180, 176. Certeau: “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” p. 145. Certeau, “Der gründende Bruch,” p. 178. Certeau: “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” p. 146. Cf. Certeau, “Der gründende Bruch,” p. 175. Ibid., p. 176.

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conserve nor replicate …. An … immediately given ‘essential’ is missing. On the contrary, a kenosis of presence gives rise to a plural and communitarian scripture.174

The real relation of the church to its foundational event has the form of a rupture, a withdrawal, a loss: The reference to ‘origin’ is process of absence. Our relation to the origin is in the function of its increasing absence. The beginning is more and more hidden by the multiple creations which reveal its significance.175

It occurs in the incarnational mode of ‘inconfusedly’ and ‘inseparably’ in which particular interpretations are the only possible and never unbroken access to the event. The revelatory creation of space of the Christ event, which is what grounds the church in the first place, implies its concealment in fragmented interpretations. The historicality of the Christ event, which Certeau takes seriously in a radical way in his theological appropriation of Foucault, makes the church strong as an interpretative space that manifests and (re)presents the significance of this event for particular places. At the same time, however, its indispensability for the manifestation of revelation creates a problem for the church: processes of interpretation do not produce unequivocalness but ambivalences. If the church is to be a faithful witness to the radical contingency of its founding event, it can only acknowledge its internal heterogeneity. As testimony to the event of God’s self-revelation in history, the church is permeated by differences and without clearly definable boundaries: In all its shapes the relation of the ‘beginning’ to its ‘validation’ has nothing other than a plural form…. A whole series of places, works, and historical constellations already testify to that. The validation does not bear the characteristic of a unique signature as such – no more today than yesterday. The validation consists of spaces that are open to discussion and to praxis. We could speak of a syntax of these spaces because they are connected.176

Ultimately, ambivalence and indefinability are thus inscribed into the ecclesial representations of incarnation, an ambivalence that makes the representation of the foundational event a precarious activity. This ambivalence becomes tangible through the differences that emerge between the various interpretations that constitute the church. The disparate plurality of interpretations reveals that none of them yields “a comprehensive representation”177 of the event but is related to it in a hermeneutically ruptured way – in the mode of effacement. Because of this irreducible ambivalence, “every ‘primordial’ 174 175 176 177

Ibid., pp. 177 f. Certeau, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” pp. 146 f. Certeau “Der gründende Bruch,” pp. 177 f. Ibid., p. 175.

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mirror object that is isolated via knowledge dissipates.”178 The interpretations of the event cause the disappearance of its originator; its manifestations are indebted to the death of their author179 and incarnation thus leads the church into a genuine theological crisis of representation. It makes the church “a sign of … what … it lacks.”180 3.3.3.2 The Christian Condition – Homelessness and Speechlessness Certeau’s answer to the question he posed in “How is Christianity thinkable Today?” is this: to think Christianity today (i. e., after the Cultural Turn), we have to do so via a crisis of representation. For him, this crisis is constitutive of (a critical approach to) modernity, and he tackles it also in a number of his other, less explicitly theological works. From these, we will be able to draw on resources that allow the church to address its constitutive deficit by way of a radically hermeneutical theology. For Certeau, the crisis of representation is the result of a history of loss, and he analyzes in more detail two particular eras in this history. First, in The Mystic Fable, he explores the massive ruptures that mark the beginning of the modern age.181 In the Middle Ages, he argues, Christianity and its religious language supplied the epistemological and moral frames of reference that served the organization of society. It allowed for a unified experience of reality that relied on Christian signs. This unity, however, collapsed after the Middle Ages: 178 Ibid., p. 177. 179 Certeau, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” p. 145: “The Christian language begins with the disappearance of its ‘author.’ That is to say that Jesus effaces himself to give faithful witness to the Father who authorizes him, and to ‘give rise’ to different but faithful communities, which he makes possible.” Certeau’s speaking of Jesus as the absent originator of Christianity is a continuation of Foucault’s concept of the author. Cf. Michel Foucault, “Was ist ein Autor?” in: Michel Foucault (ed.), Schriften in vier Bänden: Dits et crits: Bd. 1: 1954–1969, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001, pp. 1003–41. 180 Cf. Certeau “Der gründende Bruch,” pp. 180181 Cf. M. de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Centuries, transl. Michael B. Smith, Religion and Postmodernism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 18: “The history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries presents an incredible proliferation of these divisions in the field of religious expression. Heresy abounded. Three main rifts may serve as points of reference: one … that separated the urban ‘clerics’ from the rural masses, and thereby separated intellectual or theological practices from those of the common folk; another, in the sixteenth century, splitting the Catholic world along the age-old line of North against South, and creating the thousand and one varieties of opposition between the Reformed churches and the Tridentine Reform; and last, one that shattered the unity of the universe into an ‘old’ and a ‘new’ world and brought into play, at one moment, the spatial privilege of the American ‘savage’ in relation to aging Christendom, and, at another moment, the temporal privilege of the Western present, productive enough to change, little by little, the tradition into a bygone ‘past’.”

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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a rift between religion and morals was produced – and then declared – which made their distinction effective and their subsequent connection indeed quite problematic. The rift changed the experience and the conceptions that Western societies had of them. For the system that made beliefs the frame of reference for practices, a social ethic was substituted, formulating an order of social practices and relativizing religious beliefs as an ‘object’ to be put to use.182

For Certeau, this rupture became tangible in the transition from ‘heresy’ to ‘schism,’ and he uses spatial categories to describe the difference between them. While medieveal heresies created an ‘other’ within a collective space, the schisms of the 17th century led to a fragmentation of space: [T]he schism replaces heresy, which has become impossible. ‘Heresy’ may be said to exist when a majority position has the power of naming in its own discourse a dissident formation and of excluding it as marginal. An authority serves as a frame of reference to the very group that breaks away from it or that it rejects. The ‘schism,’ on the contrary, presupposes two positions, neither of which can impose on the other the law of its reason or of its force.183

With this denominational fragmentation within Christianity, Christian speech as a frame of reference for a unified, universal world order underwent a decisive loss of plausibility and legitimation; it had to clear the field and became a particular and disparate entity within a larger social field. The integrative function it had was now fulfilled by a political order: churches are divided …. Memberships in different churches, now opposing one another, are being relativized. They become signs of contingent, local, and partial determinations. It becomes necessary and possible to find a legality of a different order. A new system of axioms on thought and action moves initially into a third position, between the adversary churches of Catholic and Protestant denomination. It is from there that it begins to define the very ground which is uncovered beneath the fragmentation of beliefs.184

Christian speech is displaced in the rifts of modernity; it loses its role as ‘a language event in which the world is explained as a sacramental place of the divine word of a theological logic’185 and thus also suffers the loss of its selflegitimation. Instead, it is now used to give legitimation to the new orders that arose in this rift and finds its external legitimation in this instrumentalization: 182 Michel de Certeau, “The Formality of Practices: From Religious Systems to the Ethics of the Enlightenment (the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries),” in: Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1988, pp. 147–205, here p. 148; italics his; cited in Hardt, Genealogie der Gnade, pp. 128, 126. 183 Certeau, Mystic Fable, pp. 18–19; italics his. 184 Certeau, “The Formality of Practices,” pp. 149, 180. 185 Hardt, Genealogie der Gnade, p. 128.

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It has become a ‘marginal entity’ that is still tolerated as an aid for enforcement and is even desired but no longer permitted in the concepts of public reason in its own sense. For the reason of the Enlightenment, according to Certeau, religion in the strict sense has become inconceivable. This new role allows it to appear as the ‘remnant’ of modernity.186

Beyond this ‘instrumentalization’187 in political discourse, religious speech retains its quality only by the creation of utopian “refuges”188 located outside of or on the margin of the newly established orders. They take the shape of ‘folklore’ or ’politicization’: On the one hand, Christian groups could withdraw from the world to perform their traditions, rites, and celebrations in internal piety, which can be viewed from the outside as outdated folklore. On the other hand … religious factions could provoke politics with deviating practices, whereby they could obey the logic of the new formality of practices. They establish a certain gesture of difference that is by far more important than the content of their statements.189

We will see below that, for Certeau, authentic Christian language is performed through the second mode – as a practice of difference. Much more widespread, though, is the first mode and in its self-chosen ‘exile,’190 religious speech becomes absolute, detached, displaced, and thus loses its representativity.191 The loss of the (self-)evident nature of the Christian frame of reference goes hand in hand with the loss of its own place from which it was possible to speak effectively. Christianity is reduced to silence.192 186 Bogner, Gebrochene Gegenwart, p. 104. Certeau (Mystic Fable, p. 25) describes this situation of upheaval for believers of this period as the “humiliation of the Christian tradition. Within that tattered Christendom they experienced a fundamental defection, that of the institutions of meaning. They lived the decomposition of a cosmos and were exiled from it. They were driven out of their country by a history that degraded them. Super flumina Babylonis: a theme repeated indefinitely. They were filled with a mourning unmitigated by the rapture of new ambitions. A referential permanence was lacking. With the institution, that opaque reserve for believing and making others believe, their tacit assurances sank beneath them. They sought a firm footing, but in the end the Scriptures appeared as ‘corrupt’ as the churches. They were equally deteriorated by time. They obscured the spoken Word, the presence of which they were to have prolonged. To be sure, they still marked the spot, but in the form of ‘ruins’ ….” 187 Certeau, “The Formality of Practices,” pp. 180, 172. 188 Certeau, Mystic Fable, pp. 17–21. 189 Certeau, “The Formality of Practices,” p. 168. Cf. Hardt, Genealogie der Gnade, p. 129: 190 Certeau, “The Formality of Practices,” p. 180. 191 Bogner, Gebrochene Gegenwart, p. 99: “In this way a good part of religion can be characterized as the ‘counterpoint’ of the new civilization, as a voice that indeed speaks but whose speech is lost in emptiness, without a political-cultural echo …. Religion becomes a voice without purpose, whose existence is registered by the mainstream as superstition.” 192 “Reduction to Silence”; cf. Certeau, “The Formality of Practices,” p. 179. See also p. 180. “What is experienced in faith can no longer be said in a language that is

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A similar loss of speech or a language, Certeau argues, can be diagnosed for the present time. Christian speech serves as a reservoir of signs that are retained and recycled by the various social discourses. In the media, for instance, they are ascribed a function in the self-reflection of society when they “embody questions without answers.”193 The humanities again take hold of religious signs as “the products and elements of social, psychological, and historical organizations.”194 Religious signs are not understood as speech sui generis but as the object of scientific explanations, whereby “it is less and less possible to make a distinction between religious and other phenomena.”195 This diffusiveness results from the appropriation of signs designated as ‘Christian’ in social discourse, which takes them from the language game of testimony and thus strips them of their revelatory character.196 This stands opposed to its “evangelical”197 use within the church today, which produces an absolute place “elsewhere”198 and is perceived from the outside as “spectacle,”199 as “world theater.”200 Here, Christian signs have become a “‘legend’ … ‘that must be read’ (legendum) … i. e., a closed, binding history and a history that is no longer believed.”201 As a “legend … from elsewhere,”202 Christian signs lose their location in social discourse and thus their power of representation:

193 194 195 196

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198 199 200 201 202

hereafter focused on a defensive operation and transformed into the verbal ramparts of a silent citadel.” Certeau, “Der gründende Bruch,” p. 158. Ibid., p. 161. Ibid., p. 163. Cf. ibid., pp. 160 f.: “The humanities … treat [religious manifestations] as products. Certainly for theologians religious speech is also a product, but it is one of a faith insight conditioned by culture, society, and history, etc. In principle, the theologian announces something ‘essential’ that grounds reality and infuses history; with a complete ensemble of ‘signs’ – sacraments, institutions, and dogmas – he reveals an act of God or of the Spirit of the God of Jesus, even if he does so mysteriously, But, in the field of the sciences, which gave rise to a non-religious type of society, the Christian signs were robbed of their privileged position above other sociocultural phenomena. They were no longer given special treatment as true expressions of someone who revealed himself in them.” Cf. ibid., p. 156: “I use the term ‘evangelical’ from a cultural or philosophical perspective for the conception that presupposes a truth that has come to light through declaration that has ciruculated, thus a message ‘proclaimed’ via communication. The ‘report’ of today, (like the ‘good news’) is henceforth judged according to its agreement with the ‘reality,’ that it more or less lets emerge. There was thus a ‘truth,’ defined alternatively by the ‘objectivity’ of the facts or by the lived experience, either known or in agreement with the signs for its dissemination, a truth that was also somewhere the possession of a group or a certain view. An ‘imprecise’ impression would violate the truth as much as its owners would.” Ibid., p. 85. Ibid. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., p. 111. Certeau refers to Mt. 15:6: “Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition.” Ibid., p. 84.

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It is not so that these sentences are false, but they are meaningless because every such affirmation remains within its own discourse.203

As at the beginning of modernity, Christian speech today, again, is confronted with a mutually conditioned speechlessness and placelessness. Both as socially instrumentalized and as ecclesiastically “preserved,”204 it is utopian – it is not rooted in particular webs of significance – and, as such, is “useful and empty of meaning.”205 Its power of representation is in crisis because from this point on it no longer deals with Christan speech. Its special place is shattered. The act is no longer the criterion for the word. All that is left of religion are only ‘floating’ meanings, available for each demand, suitable a priori for desires that are dissociated from social practice or excluded from it.206

For Certeau, God-talk at present is thus fragmented; its place and its language are destroyed. It finds itself in the “ruins”207 of a unified frame of reference supplied by Christian signs. After the rifts of the modern era and the present, it no longer has its own self-evident place out of which it can give its signs meaning. The cosmos is no longer a readable sign that refers to a creator and makes the creator present. The “recalcitrant facts”208 of history, however, raise the question as to whether this placelessness of Christian speech became a challenge only at the end of the Middle Ages or if it is not rather a fundamental problem of theology. Certeau characterizes the Middle Ages as a unified, non-fragmented universe for the production of meaning, which, in turn, gives him a background against which he can profile the modern ruptures all the more clearly.209 A critical perspective, however, reveals that the medieval cosmos – like every discourse – is also marked by rifts, differences, plurality, and power interests. Certeau 203 204 205 206 207 208 209

Ibid., p. 166. Cf. Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 87. Certeau, Mystic Fable, p. 25. Certeau, GlaubensSchwachheit, p. 106. On this, cf. also Hardt, Genealogie der Gnade, p. 151: “The first problem … is the hypothesis of the rift at the beginning of the modern era. The difficulty arises from the implied opposition of the modern period and the Middle Ages in which a single cultural unity of state, society, and Christianity is postulated…. For Certeau, the Middle Ages [becomes] an idealized period in which all people could recognize in the cosmos an analogy of the divine order…. [This] covers up both the first Western schism with the Eastern church as well as the … points of friction between secular and ecclesiastical power. The cultural dominance of Christianity furthermore implied that it had not yet reached its authentic form. Here, with his rift hypothesis, Certeau uses [Foucault’s] archeological logic … but this also makes all criticism for this model relevant for the rift hypothesis as well. In accordance with Foucault’s later developments on the genealogical analysis of power relations, the Christianity of the Middle Ages could be analyzed as a dispositif. That provided the chance to investigate a plurality of defining what is Christian by the concepts of strategies and tactics. In a positive sense, the rift can be reformulated as a cultural swing to a secular dispositif.”

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himself presents this critical view that undermines every theological discourse of unity: The history of the church … today allows us to relativize the absolutism that rests on one single, solitary function and to shatter the positivism that believes it can enclose God within a single objectivation or eliminate God by ‘forgetting’ the plurality of God’s other witnesses…. The historical account as such does not claim any necessity. For it, the multitude of authorities is nothing more than fact, but a fact on which the reductionistic ways of seeing crash and break. Whereas the doctrinal or social simplisms make do with forgetting other experiences or rejecting their respective relation to the society and time of their birth, sociohistorical research relativizes an imperialism that is pure shortsightedness. It makes clear that there are or were other realities. It fights against the forgotten, which is also the suppressed or excommunicated. It therefore does not tolerate the often unconscious naive ‘idolatry’ that makes one organization among others the center of the world and the place of truth. It takes on authoritarianism and if it is rigorous enough, it kills it. Not that it denied the intrinsic value of some particular ideological and institutional system as such. But it denies it the right to view itself as the only one; it discredits the arrogance of an intellectual and social monopoly; it brings to the surface the indiscrete and, ultimately,frightening questioning of human and Christian experiences that have been silenced by the (self-)assertion of a certain group. From [this] point of view, is there anything else in history other than (successive or coexisting) particular formations?210

By recovering these “recalcitrant facts” of (church) history, Certeau himself complicates – and critiques – his historiographical construction of the Middle Ages as a unified sign cosmos. Underneath the master narrative of a homogenous medieval cosmos, we must assume a host of silenced stories and buried traditions that fragment its universal vision. A critical rereading of history thus forces us to see that the crisis of representation did not only appear with the collapse of the medieval cosmos as a sacramental sign of a divine world order but was already inscribed in this cosmos. The universal speaking subject was not only effaced from the prose of the world211 in the pluralization of the modern period – he has always only been heard in the particular voices of disparate places. In its historicality, Christian speech never had its own, non-fragmented, self-evident place but always had to rely on other places to negotiate the meaning of its floating signs: Christian speech occurs in interpretative processes in which its author withdraws from sight. The mutually dependent speechlessness and placelessness, which Certeau diagnosed as a result of the rupture, is thus much more basic to Christianity. The lack of its own place and its own language is the result of the inescapable 210 Certeau, GlaubensSchwachheit, pp. 106 f. 211 Certeau (ed.), The Writing of History, p. 263.

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theological crisis of representation that can speak of the presence of God only in terms of God’s withdrawal and elusiveness: This ‘lack’ is not something missing that needs to be obtained but a limitation by which every witness can openly confess their relation to the “author” of faith, his internal law (which requires a death in order to become a place for others) and the nature of his connection to the unexpected or unknown spaces, which God opens up elsewhere and in different ways.212

3.3.3.3 Theology: A Movement of Perpetual Departure The question Certeau poses in response to the crisis of representation is thus not only a question that emerged with the beginning of the modern era. Rather, it is fundamental to every theology: How do we generate a language of believers?213

This is Certeau’s answer: the lack of its own place in which it would be selfevident continues to interrupt the language of believers and, again and again, refers it to other, foreign places and their speech: The impossibility for the church to create [its own] place from which it [can speak] gives rise to a difficult and limited, namely, historical task that replaces the function of a ‘universal’ language.214

Certeau develops this answer to his own question from a particular place: he analyzes the mystical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries as a response to the crisis of God-talk after the Middle Ages. In The Mythic Fable he often refers to these mystics as the displaced: a “topography” of mysticism can, he says, be found mostly in regions “that were going into a socioeconomic recession, were disfavored by change, pushed aside by progress, or financially ruined by the wars” (21–22). Also, many mystics came from aristocratic families who were “disinherited by history” (24) and, by the end of the Middle Ages, were forced to experience the dwindling of their power. Moreover, the “social figures that dominate their discourse, those of the madman, the child, the illiterate” also testify to marginalization: “It is as if, in our own day, the eponymous heroes of knowledge were the fallen members of our society – old people, immigrants, or the ‘village idiot’” (24). This social dislocation of the mystics goes hand in hand with the ‘speechlessness’ of the Christian tradition after the rupture of the medieval cosmos. After it lost its role as a unifying frame of reference and became a marginal entity in the new, politically organized world order – Certeau speaks of the “humiliation of the Christian 212 Certeau, GlaubensSchwachheit, p. 180; italics mine. 213 Ibid., p. 216. 214 Ibid., p. 221.

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tradition” (25) – it was left with two modes in which Christian signs were used: they were either politically instrumentalized in social discourse or absolutized in ecclesial ‘folklore.’ Yet neither of these modes of speaking was able to represent the mystical certainty of the presence of the word of God215 in a meaningful way – hence, the mystics, who, in Certeau’s narrative are also the displaced, had to find a new mode of speaking of God. Mystical language thus emerged from existentially experienced placelessness and speechlessness. For Certeau, this language can be described not in terms of its content but only in terms of its form – it is a specific modus loquendi.216 It consists of “operations that combine historical relationships with speech practices.” In view of its loss of place, which has silenced Christian God-talk, mystics create a place in speech through their speech praxis: The mystical movements proceeded precisely on the idea of creating new places of expression (‘contemplation,’ ‘ecclesolae,’ holy settlements, ‘orders,’ monasteries), where the social space would be restored – to be re-formed – which is the condition for speaking. But they already had another theoretical, namely linguistic space at their disposal whose relevance increased in the 16th century because it replaced the declining or crumbling reality by inventing/finding [German: (Er-)finden)] a fundamental language.217

As a modus loquendi, a ‘mani re de parler,’ mysticism creates a space for speech not by developing its own language but by using and “disturbing”218 available languages and thus establishing a difference within a single discourse: Such experience of possession (divine possession, in the case of mysticism) has no language of its own, but it is marked (as a ‘wound,’ the mystics say) in theological discourse; it inscribes itself, through the labor it effects, inside the discourse which it received from another religious tradition. A (mystical) transgression of the law of (religious) language is written into this very language by a style of practice – by a modus loquendi. … Within an established discourse a practice of elocution and a

215 This is one certainty that is inescapably permeated by ambivalences, as Certeau demonstrates in his analysis of the foreword to Science exp rimentale by Jean-Joseph Surin (1663). Cf. ibid., pp. 301, 304: “In all cases the original event was also ambivalent …. Doubtless, for the mystical text the audience … is the actual face of God the lonely oratio seeks and presupposes. Because God will be there for those who pray and ‘attentively regard’ the discourse directed to him. Prayer banks on the expectation of others. And it is not even certain of that.” 216 Ibid., p. 184 and elsewhere. 217 Ibid., pp. 199 f. 218 Michel de Certeau, “Discourse Disturbed: The Sorcerer’s Speech,” in: Certeau, The Writing of History, pp. 244–68. In the Table of Contents in this work, this essay is called “Language Altered: The Sorcerer’s Speech.”

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treatment of language trace an alterity that cannot yet be identified with another discourse.219

Through the lack of its own place, mystical speech occurs in a specific form, a speech act that Certeau compares with the work of translation: A language of the ‘other’ was generated by the vast labor of these alterations. Mystic speech was fundamentally ‘translational.’ It crossed the lines. It created a whole by unceasing operations upon foreign words…. These translators ‘lose their own language in foreign countries.’ They have none but that of the other…. The translator … was an operator of differentiation. Like the ethnologist, [they] presented a foreign region, even though [they] did so to give an adaptation of it by allowing it to disturb [their] own native language. [They] produced otherness, but within a field that didn’t belong to them/him any more than that other language did, a field in which [they] had no right of authorship. [They] produced, but without any place of [their] own, in that no-man’s-land, on that meeting of the waters where the waves of language roll back upon themselves…. [T]he production of otherness…. In any case, mystics’ manners of speaking are the product of that drifting operativity that has no domain proper.220

With this establishment of a difference within given speech, mystical speech praxis becomes defined throughout the period by the introduction of an unspoken dimension into a received text. A ‘je ne sais pas quoi’ is speaking, but this ‘je ne sais pas quoi’ of the other is introduced and spoken in a doctrinal system by altering the discourse of theological knowledge, not by construing another discourse.221

Mystical speech praxis thus is proactive in addressing the theological crisis of representation, in which the effacement of its author is manifest in the mutual lack of its own theological space and its self-evident speech. It does not conceal this lack as a condition of its God-talk, and thus absolutize the conditions of its speech. Instead, the mystical modus loquendi makes this lack tangible in its speech praxis by the visible displacement of other languages. The lack of a given place hence does not situate this God-talk in a utopia but leads it to heterotopias.222 The theological crisis of representation can be represented in 219 Ibid., p. 250. In The Mystic Fable Certeau analyzes this mystical modus loquendi in a number of individual studies. 220 Certeau, Mystic Fable, pp. 118 f. 221 Certeau, “Discourse Disturbed,” p. 249. 222 In distinction from utopias, from places that do not really exist, Michel Foucault (“Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” transl. Jay Miskowiec, http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/ foucault1.pdf. pp. 3–4) describes heterotopias as “real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites … in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously representeted, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them … heterotopias.”

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other places and through the establishment of an alterity in their speech. This is how a Christian ‘language of believers’ can be created. This language made out of [their] I the representation of what was lacking – a representation that found the place of that which it did not replace.223

Christian language needs a particular place that it transgresses by speech practices. As a praxis of transgression, it is a ‘border activity’ that is never simply given but emerges when it interrupts and displaces other languages: It cannot be reduced to a fact that just needs to be confirmed. It arises out of an act of differentiation that fixes a place and at the same time its beyond, a ‘now’ and a ‘later,’ a ‘here’ and an ‘elsewhere.’… In Christian experience … [borders] are [constituted] by an operation that ensures the transition from particularity to going beyond it, from a ‘there’ to an ‘elsewhere,’ even, if preferred, from one stage to another. It requires a place where a departure can be made, and the start is only possible if it has a place from which it can begin: both elements – place and departure – are relative to each other.224

Theology is done by dislocating particular places through speech praxis.225 It is dislocation and disarticulation. It is thus defined by its form. Without having its own place for its representation, “Christian particularity [can] be indicated … only … by an incision in the rationale for acting or in social formations.”226 It is only accessible in a certain style, a certain praxis, a speech act of difference and alterity that Certeau calls metanoia,227 conversion,228 excess.229 This formal praxis is biblical: By that … movement alone it conforms to the way in which the entire Christian faith is articulated in the conversion of the Old Testament into the New Testament. The praxis of Jesus (which has its fulfillment in the silence of his death) is the point of articulation between these two languages of Old and New Testament. It is, between the two halves of the Bible, the opening of an action. What is that? Jesus does not cease to hold to the uniqueness of the Jewish institution, when he creates the beginning of 223 Certeau, Mystic Fable, p. 119. 224 Certeau, GlaubensSchwachheit, p. 181. 225 Similarly, in his reading of Paul, Slavoy Zˇizˇek also sees the grammar of Christianity not as the invention of a new language but as breaches of the contexts of meaning of an existing one: “So yes, one should read Paul from within the Jewish tradition— since precisely such a reading brings home the true radicality of his break, the way he undermined the Jewish tradition from within…. Paul did not simply pass from the Jewish position to another position; he did something with, within, and to the Jewish position itself ….” Cf. Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press, p. 10. http:// sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20100918/20100918011512114.pdf. 226 Certeau, GlaubensSchwachheit, p. 224. 227 Ibid., p. 230. 228 Ibid., p. 183. 229 Ibid., p. 227.

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another meaning for it. His act is a ‘distance’ with respect to the old law; it brings about a displacement which gives birth to a new law. A new practice of the ‘letter’ of the old law opens up that letter to a spirit from which another scripture (another ‘letter’) is now set forth. Globally, this New Testament Scripture does not mean a replacing of the former truth by a new one. Jesus does not replace one religion by another. It is always the same religion. But a new practice changes the nature of the relationships of that religion with its institutions, laws, or texts. This type of conversion inaugurated by the act of Jesus is to be continued indefinitely, to be reproduced, with respect to the same (Jewish) institutions or to others. The essential thing here is not a new content, new institutions, or new Scriptures, but the conversion of relationships with respect to each institution.230

Jesus grounds the praxis of transgression of a particular place as the Christian style. Discipleship thus takes place as metanoia.231 It is formal in nature and cannot be set down in a definitive and conclusive way with respect to content: Two formal aspects [characterize] this Christian intervention in praxis: on the one hand, it operates in the limited space society provides and causes the borders to move; on the other hand, like previously, it now needs to provide a ‘ reception history of the Gospel,’ i. e., a relation between the tradition of the Gospel and an actual acting. This is a praxis. Not a ‘faith’ without ‘works.’ Nevertheless, there is no longer anything that establishes the objective content of both requirements…. The call to ‘discipleship’ and the possibility of ‘change’ maintain a formal relation for whose truth there is no concrete expression.232

This definition of a ‘language of believers’ as a practice of transgression complicates theological criteriology. When discipleship is conceived of as metanoia, there can be no final and absolute criterion for its content. Every contenxual definition is an interpretation that, as discourse, “defines places,”233 and thus forms places that, in turn, have to remain open for their transgression, precisely in order to be faithful to Christian identity. Given its reliance on other places and their displacement, the church can give only a formal criterion for an adequate representation of its founding event in its tradition. For Certeau, this criterion can be found precisely in the “dialectic of particularity and its transgression”234 – tradition’s simultaneous dependence on and appropriation of other, particular places. Theology is, and has to be, a “movement of perpetual departure.”235 This formal criterion is a necessary criterion, not a sufficient one – or, to put it into even stronger, slightly paradoxical, terms: it is a necessarily insufficient criterion. It cannot establish 230 231 232 233 234 235

Certeau: “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” pp. 153 f. Certeau, GlaubensSchwachheit, p. 230. Ibid., p. 231. Cf. ibid., p. 181. Ibid., p. 186. Certeau, Mystic Fable, p. 299.

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unambiguity but unavoidably produces ambivalence236 – an ambivalence that arises from the contingency and interpretativity of its fundamental event and is therefore a stringent result of a theology that is consistently grounded in the event of incarnation. This criterion can only – negatively – rule out instances of inadequate God-talk,237 but it cannot – positively – define it in a comprehensive way. With this criterion, theology turns into a ‘work in the negative’238 and – literally – into “symbolic language”:239 a language that the other lacks. By embracing this formal criterion, theology discloses its dependence on other places and can thus represent the crisis of representation. When theology shows that it takes its shape through the displacement of other particular places and the disarticulation of their language, it can then make God present as the Absent One:240 It can then (re)present God – reveal God – in the mode of effacement.

3.3.3.4 The Church: A Sacrament of Effacement With this criterion for Christian God-talk, Certeau lays the foundation for an ecclesiology that allows the church to become “a sign of … what … it lacks.”241 By framing theology as a dislocating and disarticulating speech practice, his formal criterion imagines the church as a space of interpretation whose “members have the same relation to each other that they have to [the Jesus 236 Certeau, GlaubensSchwachheit, pp. 183 f.: “Whether this ‘conversion’ is carried out today in religious life, in political life, in a profession or in academics is not important if one assumes that it cannot be limited to one of these sectors and that it needs to be relative to the current places of the culture. In determining the important and decisive places, which indeed befits a revolution, the risk and clairvoyance of the Christian do not figure in any differently than that of any other. But whatever form it takes – Christian praxis maintains at one time the reality of a decisiveness and the necessity of a transgression.” 237 For Certeau, these theologies that are “not compatible with the faith” are “reductionist exclusions” that must be “excommunicated.” Cf. ibid., p. 185, n. 37. 238 Ibid., p. 212. 239 Ibid., p. 185. 240 Ibid., p. 213: “At bottom, this ‘distance’ (which the Letter to Diognetus calls ‘strangeness’ toward every closed society) to the established order … by the kind of excesses and openness. It is pure effort…. Whereas the other is always a deadly threat to us, the believer also expects life from that in an arousal of irrationality. Room is given to the neighbor, this means vacating a place – more or less dying – and to live. That is not passivity, with no struggle to give others room …. This task of hospitality toward the other is precisely the form of Christian speech. It arises only partly; it remains relative to the particular place that one ‘occupies.’ It is never concluded. It is lost, happily drowned in the vast expanse of human history. It disappears like Jesus into the crowd. The part that Christians play in this task thus sharpens the particularity of the role they play in the world. Their contribution remains limited, as has been the case until now. But it is precisely in that limitedness that they can be recognized. If they refuse to concede the place of truth, they can thus confess their faith that we dare to call God.” 241 Ibid., p. 180.

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Christ event].”242 As a displacement of other places, theology produces a plural particularity within the church that is, theoretically and practically, the social articulation of every confession of faith. This law defines the congregation through the differentiation of the members who are necessary for each other but never reduced to each other. It places every congregation, every discourse, and every period in a relationship of need to others. Even more: a clear differentiation … is the necessary means for admitting what they lack and precisely through that confessing the faith.243

When it does not conceal that it is a visibly fragmented event of interpretation in particular places, the church can repeat the manifesting-and-effacing dynamic of its foundational event. Thus, if the church makes the particularity of each of its many speech forms visible, it can become a sacrament of God’s presence-as-absence. In a communitarian practice and with a plurality of authorities,244 the church is the sign and instrument of the theological crisis of representation. The organization of [its] authorities has … as its purpose and meaning to make possible and recognizable that and how the signs refer in the name of the relation to the only true authority.245 The limitation has an authorizing function. It plays a differentiating role in every synchronic space and in diachronic unfolding, a role that … incessantly renews the lack of the other.246

This communitarian plurality of its God-talk is not to be thought of as a sum to be added up; instead, the differences between them can function to reveal the “lack of the other.” Hence, in order to become the sacrament of God’s presence-as-absence, inner-ecclesial plurality cannot function according to the logic of ‘the one or the other’ [that] situates the ‘truth’ as one of two contrary terms.… It is not the logic of ‘the one and the other’ [that] pretends to overcome the differences … to reconcile all the former positions within a new and particular truth. It is the logic of neither-nor that provides a third hypothesis over against a given and its opposite but without determining them. This allows a reference to an absent third.247

Certeau’s radically hermeneutical approach to theology thus differs in a fundamental and crucial way from a well-established theological model that 242 243 244 245 246 247

Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., p. 179. Ibid., p. 178. Ibid., p. 105; italics mine. Ibid., p. 179. Certeau: “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” pp. 154, 184.

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addresses inner-ecclesial plurality through the logic of ‘both/and.’ In Certeau’s ‘neither/nor’ logic, the plural ecclesial testimonies do not constitute the church as the “place of truth”248 that makes the meaning of its foundational event present; they do not merge into an unbroken “epistemological catholicity.”249 Instead, in revealing that their testimonies are particular displacements of other places of which neither one nor the other is “the whole, the middle, or the only one,”250, the church keeps open an empty space in between the particular instances of its God-talk. It thus reveals its foundational event in the mode of effacement: Thus, the initial event also becomes an interdictum. Not because it was untouchable and taboo. Rather, the founder disappears, it is impossible to grasp and ‘detain’ him to the degree that he takes shape and meaning in a plurality of ‘Christian’ experiences and acts…. The event is thus an interdictum in the sense that it is the form of that interrelation that is depicted by the open network of expressions that could not exist without it. In this … expression – ‘not …without’ we have the most restrained but also strongest formulation of the relation between the plurality of Christian speech and the ‘interdictum’ that this plurality characterizes. It is, if preferred, the negative exterior of a truth that is expressed objectively in the mode of absence.251

248 For Wolfgang Beinert, the church is the place and “house of truth” because its “various witnesses … are necessarily associated with each other.” Wolfgang Beinert, Vom Finden und Verkünden der Wahrheit in der Kirche: Beiträge zur theologischen Erkenntnislehre, Freiburg: Herder, 1993, p. 49. Characteristically, Beinert discusses only the loci theologici proprii and conceals its loci alieni. 249 For Max Seckler, epistemological catholicity takes shape as the sum of plural instances of testimony that represent catholic truth in interaction. Cf. Max Seckler, “Die ekklesiologische Bedeutung des Systems der loci theologici. Erkenntnistheoretische Katholizität und strukturale Weisheit,” in: Max Seckler (ed.), Die schiefen Wände des Lehrhauses: Katholizität als Herausforderung, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1988, pp. 79–104, here p. 102 f.: “It belongs to the notion of loci that they at least potentially and tentatively represent the whole, but they do so … in contingent … ways…. They do so, however, as part of a comprehensive event of passing on, by which they are carried and which they help to carry…. If one of the loci wants to monopolize its testimony, a specific totality would no longer be available but … the totalitarian absolutism of a single locus theologicus. The idea of epistemological catholicity has its origin here. It says that faith knowledge and the testimony of faith not only have their institutional subjects and instances, with their specific and perspectival wholeness, but that the whole of the veritas catholica as veritas catholica is only realized in the interplay of these wholenesses. For a theological epistemology that builds on the principle of an irreducible pluralism of carriers of testimony … therefore, the veritas catholica is indeed not represented in the loci but in a larger, more comprehensive, ‘more catholic’ way in the framework of interaction between these witnesses.” 250 Certeau, GlaubensSchwachheit, p. 178. 251 Ibid., p. 177.

4. Theology after the Cultural Turn: Intercultural Theology The previous chapter developed two separate lines of argument. First, we argued that postcolonial and other critical theories expose a host of silenced stories underneath the hegemonic master narrative of the Christian tradition, which has a tendency to favor unity and homogeneity. Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity was used to show that Christian identity has been and is being forged in a continuous process of differentiation from those who are excluded as other. Therefore, we said, Christian identity cannot be traced back to one absolute and non-problematic origin from which it organically unfolded. Instead, other religious and cultural identites have – by way of their exclusion – inscribed themselves deeply into Christianity; Christianity, in other words, has always been intercultural. This deconstructive critique of Christian tradition after the Cultural Turn seems, at first, to stand in stark contrast to a theologial narrative of Christian identity. It exposes the contingency of its normative statements, traces its universal claim back to its particular formulations and locates its catholicity and apostolicity in concrete contexts. A second line of argument, however, served to undermine this theological objection to a rereading of the Christian tradition after the Cultural Turn. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur, Michel Foucault, and Michel de Certeau, we argued that incarnation as the foundational event of Christian theology calls for a radically hermeneutical approach. This radical hermeneutics resists the temptation to conceal the constitutive contingency at the heart of the Christian belief that God became truly and completely human. It does not cut short the interpretative processes of Christian testimony by positing the ‘manifestation of the absolute’ in a historical event. Instead, it shows that, as a historical event, revelation is radically contingent and thus irreducibly tied to the interpretative processes of the church. There is a (radically) hermeneutical circle between the testimony of the church and the manifestations of God’s presence in history. In this mutual dependence of church and revelation, ecclesial testimonies replace their foundational event – they erase it by representing it, and represent it by erasing it. A theology that takes its incarnational foundation radically seriously is therefore faced with a theological crisis of representation. Revelation does not provide the church with an absolute origin from which it could develop an organic line of tradition but manifests God’s presence-asabsence. In view of this constitutive effacement, the church can do nothing else than depend on other discourses to find resources for its theology. It has developed a speech praxis that draws on ‘foreign’ languages and establishes a

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difference in them in order to give witness to God’s presence-as-absence. These others, therefore, have irrevocably inscribed themselves into the formation of Christian tradition and continue to produce a plurality of ecclesial testimonies. This inner-ecclesial plurality has profound theological significance – if it functions by the logic of ‘neither/nor,’ it can become a sacrament of the church’s foundational loss; the church, then, truly represents God’s self-effacing manifestation in revelation – it is a sign and instrument of what it lacks. It is at this point that the two lines of argument converge. It is not only the epistemological reconfigurations of the Cultural Turn that reveal excluded others and conflictive plurality within the Christian tradition and expose the contingency of its formation. It is also at the very heart of the theological tradition to recognize the particularity and contingency of Christian God-talk and the intercultural transformation processes in which it takes its shape. The belief in God’s incarnation in Jesus the Christ inescapably ties theology to the ambivalence of a historical event. A truly incarnational theology, therefore, can do nothing else than reflect the hermeneutical rupture of its language game in which the meaning of its foundational event remains irrevocably effaced in the interpretative testimonies that are forged in many different contexts. The theological narrative also tells of the inescapable interculturality of Christianity. In terms of identity politics, of course, this radically hermeneutical approach poses an enormous risk. When the church lives up to the ambiguity and contingency of its normative founding event, it can only produce internal heterogeneity and blurred borders to other identities. The formal criterion of an incarnational theology, which calls for theology to be a ‘movement of perpetual departure’, thus jeopardizes two fundamental interests of all identity politics: in general, identity narratives strive to construct stable homogeneity within and clear-cut borders to others. As postcolonial studies in particular have shown, this twofold goal is achieved through powerful inclusions and exclusions that forge an unambivalent narrative out of a host of conflicting and competing stories within a discourse. Against this backdrop, the church has to negotiate a challenging tension: it has to construct a functioning ecclesial identity that does not, however, betray its normative ambivalence. This theological challenge can be met in two ways. One option for Christian theology is to conceal its constitutive contingency and ambivalence. By hiding the radical interpretativity of the theological language game, it can reduce the heterogeneity of Christian identity and produce an unambiguous identity. Such a straightforward, unnuanced construction of Christian identity falls short, however, of the formal criterion of incarnational theology – it cuts short the “movement of perpetual departure” and thus runs the risk of pretending to have God’s presence at its disposal and of taking the place of what it set out to represent. A theology that does not make its own contingency visible does not point to the presence of God via God’s absence but reduces God’s presence to

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its specific, particular, and limited God-talk. Moreover, such an identity construction cannot respond productively to the deconstruction of Christian tradition after the Cultural Turn. It cannot integrate its critique constructively in its theological narrative but can only oppose it in a binary logic of true/false. Such a default rendering of a non-theological approach as false, however, undercuts the self-understanding of theology as a mediation between the normative statements of tradition with the epistemological paradigm of its respective time (cf. 1Petr. 3.15). The other option for the church is to truly make the radical contingency of its founding event the starting point of its theology. We then have to to construct a theology that makes its radical interpretativity visible in the very ways it speaks about God, so that it does not substitute God’s absent presence with its contingent representations but can become a sign and a sacrament of what it lacks. Theology, in other words, can be done in the mode of either silencing or ‘unsilencing’ its constitutive interculturality. This chapter will investigate in a little more detail both of these options. Ultimately, the goal is to outline interculturality as an epistemological resource for a radically hermeneutical theology. The deconstructions of Christian tradition after the Cultural Turn, which have exposed its contingency and plurality, will be understood as genuinely theological tools that allow the church to become a sign and instrument of what it lacks.

4.1 Theology in the Mode of Silencing Interculturality As Gregor M. Hoff shows in his analysis of the development of ecclesiological identity in the early church,1 Christian tradition tended to overprivilege the requirements of stable identity politics. The desire for clear boundaries, internal homogeneity, and an absolute origin has thus often been placed above the theological imperative that calls the church to reveal the radical contingency of Christian identity. The church, Hoff suggests, has tackled its constitutive task of testifying to a universal message in particular formulations within the framework of an ‘identity paradigm.’ He develops this argument by first showing that there were both theological and sociological factors that furthered the normativization and ‘codification’ of theology. In negotiating the normative parameters of Christian identity, Hoff then argues, the emerging church(es) opted for an ‘identity paradigm’ that reduces the complexities of theological interpretativity in favor of political certainty. Ecclesial identity was forged by concealing the internal differences that are necessarily produced in the theological language game of testimony. 1 Cf. Gregor M. Hoff, Die prekäre Identität des Christlichen: Die Herausforderung postmodernen Differenzdenkens für eine theologische Hermeneutik, Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001, pp. 232–75.

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In the codification of Christian identity, the sociological need to define the boundaries of Christian identity and the theological necessity of internal systematization were closely intertwined and have mutually reinforced each other. Hoff first addresses a major theological reason that pushed a normative definition of Christian identity: theology, we saw, is done in the language game of testimony – and testimonies have two defining characteristics that make evaluation a decisive component of this language game. First, as we saw in Ricoeur’s approach, testimonies imply the personal involvement of the person who testifies and therefore emerge in particular situations and specific contexts. There is thus not one single Christian witness but a (conflictive) plurality of testimonies that, in turn, call for an evaluation of their validity. Second, despite their contextuality and ‘personality’, testimonies are never arbitrary but are made with the claim that they are true – again, this makes them subject to evaluation. The need to establish evaluative procedures and normative criteria for assessing theological language requires, in turn, the theoretical penetration of Christian identity and encourages the genesis of a theological system. There are also sociological factors that furthered the codification of Christian identity in the early churches. The context of persecution, the ongoing processes of delineation from ‘Jewish’ identity, and pronounced missionary activity help explain their desire for an unmistakable identity. Both resistance and expansion required a tangible identity – tendencies towards dissolution can be combatted with clear boundaries and internal stability. The mutual reinforcement of these sociological and theological factors fostered the codification of Christian identity and the construction of its normativity. Hoff summarizes: This process can be understood as a hermeneutical circle in which the various elements mutually reinforce each other and both materially and formally advance to continually higher degrees of precision…. The chosen identity paradigm was, as it were, both imposed from outside and implied in the logic of faith convictions. Precisely because Christianity hazarded a public presence, it exposed itself to criticism and had to find concise concepts that were convincing both internally and externally.2

In forging the normative parameters of authentic Christian identity, the church opted for an ‘identity paradigm’ that privileges the demands of identity politics over the theological challenges that result from the belief in incarnation. The interest in safeguarding Christian identity, both internally and externally, has thus led to a tendency to conceal the hermeneutical rupture of Christian identity. A ‘strong’ and unambivalent construction of Christian identity was produced by reducing inner-ecclesial heterogeneity. The early church achieved this reduction by establishing the binarity of orthodoxy/ 2 Ibid., p. 243.

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heresy,3 which served to forge clear boundaries from the theologically irreducible ambivalences of Christian God-talk: To keep Christianity viable, tendencies had to be rejected that … were seen by the deciding representatives and functionaries as irreconcilable with the teaching that had been handed down.… This was achieved through a ‘logic of identity.’ Differences were eliminated – often without considering the share in truth which each excluded tradition might have contained …. There was a distinct tendency to assure the church’s identity, also at the high price of lost Christianities in the church as a whole.4

In its construction of ecclesial normativity, the church has thus followed a strategy of identity politics for which Homi Bhabha, in a very different context, has pointedly coined the formula “Hybridity is heresy”.5 this strategy does not only follow the demands of identity politics by forging an unambivalent identity through the production of ‘others’ in powerful processes of inclusion and exclusion. Beyond that, it also declares hybridity itself to be heresy, i. e. it excludes these differentiating procedures that have allowed ecclesial identity to emerge from its master narrative of identity. In other words, by constructing Christian normativity within an ‘identity paradigm,’ the church conceals the heterogeneity and ambivalence out of which an unmistakable identity is forged. It masks the discursive processes of its construction and instead declares internal homogeneity, clear boundaries and an absolute origin to be the formal norm of ecclesial identity. This ‘strong’ narrative of ecclesial identity can be essentialized and naturalized by extinguishing the theological displacements of the church and by concealing the hybrid nature of Christianity. Thus, by silencing the constitutive interculturality of Christianity, a clearly definable identity can be constructed. It fulfills the requirements of identity politics for internal coherence and external demarcation better than narratives of Christian identity that do not conceal their foundational displacement and inconclusiveness. But it runs the risk of falling short of the rules of the radically hermeneutical language game that the belief in incarnation prescribes for the theology of the church – with dire theological consequences. A theology that does not make its radical interpretativity visible is in danger of concealing the fact that it can represent God’s presence only as absence. A theology that is not done in a “movement of perpetual departure” substitutes its particular and limited God-talk for the effacing manifestations of God’s revelation in history. Instead of (re)placing its founding event in a mutual dynamic of manifestation and erasure, it replaces it with the absolutization of one particular testimony. Instead of representing

3 Cf. Robert Royalty, The Origin of Heresy: A History of Discourse in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity, New York: Routledge, 2013. 4 Hoff, Die prekäre Identität des Christlichen, pp. 239 f. 5 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 322.

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God as the absent one, it becomes, as Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera put it, an idolatry of itself: [I]dentity is formed as [it] negotiates a sense of belonging to some groups and being distanced from others. Where this fosters closing off a separate identity … it creates the delusion of an identity detached from all that it excludes. We may call such a delusion the idolatry of identity. This is the point at which the difference of identity separates and hardens into an essential sameness. Such separation renders an identity in some qualitative sense independent of the rest of creation. But this is to deny its own creatureliness – theologically, the ultimate idolatry.6

Ultimately, when the church buys an unmistakable identity at the cost of silencing its constitutive ambivalence, it loses its revelatory power. As an idolatry of itself, it can no longer facilitate manifestations of God’s presenceas-absence because theologies that function according to the laws of the ‘identity paradigm’ confine places and keep them protected against transgression.7 Their God-talk then has a declarative, rather than a performative character: it describes the ‘status quo’ but does not effect a displacement of this fixed place through which its structures of meaning become ‘fragile and temporary.’ In other words, these theologies are no longer ‘eventualizations’ of God’s absent presence, they have lost the revelatory quality of theology in the radically hermeneutical circle of ecclesial testimony revelation. A church that privileges clear boundaries instead of displacements and internal homogeneity instead of hybrid interculturality, thus loses its sacramentality – it can no longer be a sign and instrument of God’s (absent) presence.

6 Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner and Mayra Rivera, “Alien/Nation, Liberation and the Postcolonial Underground,” in: Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner and Mayra Rivera (eds.), Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire, St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2004, pp 1–19, here p. 12. 7 Cf. Certeau, GlaubensSchwachheit, p. 217: “But what comes of this language if the body with which it is connected [particularity] dissipates? This dissipation cannot leave the language unscathed. A first sign: it obscures either place of its production or the change that turns this place into an imaginary object. It hides the other that allows it to function at all.” Mark L. Taylor, in The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011, summarizes those theologies that do not do justice to the criterion of the displacement of other (and their own) places as “Theology with a capital T.” These are theologies that continue the deadly logic of their place (or conceal their status as ‘other words/places’ in general). In doing so, they conceal the discursivity of the binarity of orthodoxy/heterodoxy; they perpetuate binary logic and its potential deadliness instead of functioning as deconstructive transgressions. For Taylor, a large part of the established tradition of Christian God-talk does not meet the criterion of displacement. But he does not deny that tradition entirely. Cf. ibid., p. 13: it is “capable of harbouring the theological” and thus has at its disposal a speech of undermining transgression, the eventualization of transimmanence.

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4.2 Theology in the Mode of Unsilencing Interculturality In the interests of a clearly definable and defendable identity, then, the profound and constitutive heterogeneity of the Christian tradition has all too often been hidden from the orthodox master narratives of the church. By silencing the hybrid interculturality of Christianity, the church can forge a strong identity. It will, however, be faced with profound theological shortcomings. When ecclesial identity narratives overemphasize clear boundaries and internal homogeneity, they conceal the radical contingency of any ‘talk of God’ (in both the genetivus subjectivus, which is the God-talk of revelation, and the genetivus objectivus, which is the God-talk of theology) and thus ultimately betray their belief in incarnation as the historical event of God becoming human. Unsilencing the interculturality of Christianity, then, can serve to correct these theological shortcomings. Because silenced interculturality is at the core of the ‘identity paradigm’, its unsilencing poses an extreme threat to its constructions of an essentialized, naturalized ‘strong’ identity. Silencing interculturality produces an essential and stable difference between self and other, while unsilencing interculturality exposes the powerful exclusions that have forged this boundary from the ambivalence of identity negotiations. It traces practices of differentiations instead of essential differences. It undermines the strong borders between self and other and thereby uncovers those others within who have been excluded from the orthodox representation of ecclesial identity. It makes those alternative narratives visible that have been excluded in the forging of orthodox identity. By revealing the fundamental instability in each identity, the critical activity of unsilencing interculturality works towards the subversive deconstruction of ‘strong’ identity politics. It is a radical critique of the ‘identity paradigm’ that has been so influential in the formation of ecclesial tradition. At first glance, then, the unsilencing of interculturality poses a danger, even a threat, to established narratives of ecclesial identity. Precisely by revealing the contingency of ecclesial tradition, however, unconcealed interculturality can become an instrument for a radically hermeneutical theology. By exposing those others who, by way of their exclusion, have written themselves deeply into the formation of the Christian tradition, unsilenced interculturality can show how theology is being performed in a “movement of perpetual departure”. This makes it possible to trace the displacements in which Christian tradition has taken shape, and thus, ultimately, points us to the manifestation of a loss (of God’s presence) at its origin. We will outline unsilenced interculturality as a tool of a radically hermeneutical theology in two steps. First, we will address the question of how the unsilencing of interculturality, which is also crucially the unsilencing of the contingency of Christian tradition, relates to the normative texts of this tradition. Then we will map in more detail interculturality as a locus theologicus – how does the

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unsilencing of interculturality inform theology in such a way that it can represent God’s presence-as-absence? How, in other words, does unsilenced interculturality become a resource for a genuinely incarnational, radically hermeneutical theology? 4.2.1 The Normativity of Contingency The unsilencing of the interculturality of Christian tradition is, crucially, also the exposure of the contingency of its normative texts: it undermines the clear boundaries and internal homogeneity that have been established in the interest of a ‘strong’ identity and instead reveals a host of conflictive narratives out of which the normative delineations of ecclesial identity have been forged in powerful processes of inclusion and exclusion. Unsilencing interculturality, in other words, denaturalizes and de-essentializes the normative texts of ecclesial tradition and reveals the contingent histories of their formation. By no means, however, does this exposure of contingency make Christian identity arbitrary or call for the abandonment of a claim for normativity in the theological language game. On the contrary, the epistemological reconfiguration of the Cultural Turn, which makes possible the unsilencing of interculturality, stress the inescapability of material signs (and hence texts) in the negotiations of identity. The definition of Christian identity cannot be negotiated in terms of idealistic abstractions but proceeds via the production of texts that embody the delineations between ecclesial identity and those it defines as its others. A critical rereading of the Christian tradition after the Cultural Turn thus does not lead to a disregard of its normative texts, on the contrary, it puts a spotlight on them as crystallization points in the ongoing discursive negotation of ecclesial identity. Normativized texts are privileged sites for scrutinizing the contingent histories in the forging of tradition through powerful inclusions and exclusions, and a deconstructive unsilencing of their interculturality shows how these normative declarations of the church were forged in appropriation of and delineation from other texts and traditions – it shows them to be displacements of other loci. It is at this point that the contingency of the normativized texts of tradition gains theological quality. For an incarnational theology, the contingency of normativity is not a shortcoming that can possibly be rectified; rather, it is a result of the radical hermeneutics of the theological language game that is performed in an ongoing “movement of perpetual departure.” From this perspective, the contingently normativized texts are those testimonies that are forged from the displacement of foreign loci and that also have to remain open for their own displacement. Because Christian testimony is radically hermeneutical, it inevitably produces an embodied and material rhizome of particular testimonies. But they can only be contingent, inconclusive, and open to their own transgression. For a theology that takes incarnation

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radically seriously, theology is incarnatio continua – precisely because incarnation does not provide the manifestation of the absolute, it produces a corpus of texts for (re)presenting it (by erasing it). The disclosure of their contingency does not make these normativized texts arbitrary; on the contrary, only this exposure allows them to be faithful to their normative founding event. When ecclesial theology embraces the contingency of its normative texts, these normatively contingent texts can become an affirmative theology that reveals the effacing manifestation of God’s presence that resists any absolute definiton. A radically hermeneutical reading of the normative texts of the Christian tradition can show that they themselves highlight this constitutive inconclusiveness of a genuinely incarnational theology. Above, for example, we have seen how the christological formula of Chalcedon does not give a once-and-for-all definition of the exact relation of divinity and humanity in Jesus the Christ but delineates a framework within which adequate christologies can be formulated.8 One task of a radically hermeneutical theology, then, is also to recover the hermeneutical ruptures visibly inscribed into the normative texts of the ecclesial tradition that have all too often been overlooked.

4.2.2 Interculturality as a Locus of Theology Unsilenced interculturality thus becomes a resource that allows theology to resist the temptations of a ‘strong’ identity politics. It is a tool that prevents the delination of an unmistakable ecclesial identity at the cost of the normative ambivalence that theology owes to its foundation in incarnation. The conflictive plurality of Christianity, which has been exposed through a critical rereading of Christian tradition after the Cultural Turn and which at first sight seemed to clash with the normative self-understanding of Christianity, thus becomes a constructive orientation of theology. The breaks, fissures, and ambiguities within Christianity, unburied by this critique, gain theological quality. If they are not repressed and concealed but unsilenced, they expose the contingency of Christian tradition and thus map an epistemological ground for a radically hermeneutical and hence genuinely incarnational theology. With Homi Bhabha, we have described interculturality not as an independent, self-sufficient space that lies tangibly between cultures; it is not a ‘third’ that emerges from two distinct entities. Rather, it is developed in the process of cultural differentiations as a ‘space of absence.’ It emerges from the discriminatory practices of cultural identifications in which the excluded other has irrevocably inscribed itself into an identity in the very process of 8 Cf. Gregor M. Hoff, “Wer ist Christus? Das Symbolon von Chalkedon als Grammatik des Glaubens,” in: Gregor M. Hoff (ed.), Stichproben: Theologische Inversionen. Salzburger Aufsätze, Innsbruck, Vienna: Tyrolia, 2010, pp. 187–200, here p. 197.

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demarcation – every cultural expression remains haunted by its excluded others; it is not simply given but fragmented by what is present as an absence. Bhabha says: No culture is full unto itself, no culture is plainly plenitudinous, not only because there are other cultures which contradict its authority, but also because its own symbol-forming activity, its own interpellation in the process of representation, language, signification and meaning-making, always underscores the claim to an originary, holistic, organic identity.9

Interculturality is thus the space of differences that is graspable only ex negativo. It is the space out of which cultural identitities are forged in discursive processes of demarcations and delineations: It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew.10

Certeau describes the ‘in-between’ in a similar way: In-between or inter refers to an instance which does not have a place and which we have to characterize as an ‘within of two’ … it is, hence, a reference to an absent Third. Could it be that the term therefore has connotations of a privation and an interdiction?11

Unsilenced, non-concealed interculturality as an epistemological category is thus not a “third term that resolves the tension between two cultures … in a dialectical play of ‘recognition’.”12 The epistemological resource of the ‘inbetween’13 lies rather in the articulation of differences that disclose the the silent and silenced other in identities. Cultural differences thus become an indispensable resource for a theology that does not conceal the hermeneutical rupture at its very foundation. If the differences that, for theological reasons, are irrevocably inscribed in Christian identity are not concealed, they can expose the silent and silenced other in the particular instances of ecclesial tradition. The articulation of difference can then reveal the foundational particularity and plurality of Christian identities. This makes it possible to see that Christian identity has emerged from the 9 Homi K. Bhabha, “The Third Space. Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in: Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990, pp. 207–221, here p.” p. 209. 10 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (= Routledge Classics), London and New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 55. 11 Michel de Certeau, “Der gründende Bruch,” in: Michel de Certeau (ed.), GlaubensSchwachheit, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2009, pp. 173–87 p. 186, n. 38. 12 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 162. 13 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 5, passim.

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displacements of other places and is therefore inevitably inconclusive and fragmented. Unsilenced interculturality, therefore, undermines the universalization of a particular formulation and resists the cultural absolutization and idolization of Christian identity, by which one particular testimony claims for itself the universality that is testified to belong solely to the Christ event. The articulation of differences discloses the irrevocable particularity and plurality of Christian testimonies and thus provides a language for performing the “movement of perpetual departure.” The differences that it exposes thus make interculturality the space where the radically hermeneutical circle of ecclesial theology and revelation occurs. Cultural differences become indispensable for a radically hermeneutical theology. If the differences inscribed into Christianity are not concealed but articulated, they can point to the unsaid and excluded in each of its identifications and thus make visible the radical interpretativity of theology. But how can we use differences for a radically hermeneutcial theology? It is tempting to fall back on a ‘both/and’ approach to inner-ecclesial diversity which aims for an overcoming, an Aufhebung of differences and, as Certeau put it, a “reconciliation of all the former positions within a new and particular truth.”14 This ‘both/and’ logic, however, proves to be inadequate since it undercuts the complexity of both a normatively theological and a deconstructive critical approach to inner-ecclesial differences: from a critical perspective after the Cultural Turn, we cannot understand interculturality as a space mapped as e pluribus unum. Rather than resolving differences, the space in between emerges out of differentiations. From a theological perspective, a ‘both/and’ logic can conceive of differences between particular testimonies only in terms of a lack to be overcome by sublating the differences into one universal image of God; it strives to reveal “the intercultural face of God residing in the midst of diversely constructed human cultures and religious perspectives”15 but thereby dismisses the fundamental hermeneutical rupture that is at the heart of theology. Instead of such an – ultimately – reductionist logic of ‘both/and,’ Certeau has suggested a logic of ‘neither/nor’ in which the differences between ecclesial instances can refer to a deeper absence. This is the logic of a radically hermeneutical theology. It highlights the differences between Christianities in order to show that none of them is an unbroken representation of the (absent) presence of God. It draws on inner-ecclesial differences to articulate the constitutive loss at the heart of the church’s tradition. The exposure of this unbridgeable interpretative distance from the origin does not entail arbitrariness but rather displays a critical moment that testifies to the irreducible inconclusiveness of theology. It thus resists the 14 Cf. Michel de Certeau, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” in: Graham Ward (ed.), The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007, pp. 142–155, here p. 154. 15 Cf. Thomas G. Grenham, “Interculturation: Exploring Changing Religious, Cultural, and Faith Identities in an African Context,” in: PACIFICA (2001), pp. 191–206, here,” p. 69.

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petrification of one particular testimony and is instead a call for ongoing theological metanoia, for conversion, for a “movement of perpetual departure”– and the articulation of the hope for God to finally come. In his reading of Certeau, Joachim Valentin points to this critical impetus of a radically hermeneutical theology that uses a ‘neither/nor’ approach to ecclesial differences to represent God’s presence-as-absence and therefore resists the utopian desire for a realized unity or universality of ecclesial theology. Such a unified church is … never immediately accessible. It is much more determined by painfully experienced fragmentation …. Nevertheless, the longing for a counterfactually anticipated idea of unity is essentially regulative and cannot simply be abandoned…. Where it is expressed as lost, unity and universality develop a critical, indeed political, energy that impels one to not simply accept what exists but to want to criticize and improve what is insufficient …. Under modern conditions, religion can be understood only as deficient and must be content with provisionalities. But, at the same time, it is called to point to an original/eschatological completion in a social discourse by registering the distinction between transcendence and immanence, a completion that can only be experienced in a fragmented or imaginative way under earthly conditions.16

4.3 Intercultural Theology as Radically Hermeneutical Theology A radically hermeneutical, and thus genuinely incarnational theology, then, is a theology that unsilences the constitutive interculturality of Christianity through the articulation of inner-ecclesial differences. By framing these differences in the logic of ‘neither/nor’, it can use them to (re)present God’s presence as absence and thus be an authentic sacrament of God’s selfrevelation in incarnation. This interdisciplinary approach adds signficant complexity to existing reflections on Intercultural Theology. Rereading the theological history of Christianity within the critical framework of cultural theories exposes a host of disparate and conflictive Christianities underneath its dominant master narrative. Moreover, it no longer allows recourse to essentialist concepts of ecclesial identity that previous theological approaches have used to mitigate this unsettling cultural plurality of Christianity. What conclusions can we draw from these critical theological explorations of Christianity after the Cultural Turn for the practice of Intercultural Theology? 16 Joachim Valentin, “Singularität versus Universalität? Von falschen Alternativen in Kulturwissenschaft und Theologie,” in: Andreas Nehring and Joachim Valentin (eds.), Religious Turns – Turning religions: Veränderte kulturelle Diskurse – neue religiöse Wissensformen, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2008, pp. 106–19, p. 119.

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How do they inform the epistemology and methodology of this newly emerging theological field of reflection? First, if Intercultural Theology is really intended to be a reflection on the irreducible interculturality of the Christian tradition, it cannot operate on the notion that interculturality is an ontological space in between cultures. Homi Bhabha has shown that such a notion of interculturality depends on the idea of clear boundaries between cultures, which are thought to merge to form a ‘Third.’ The notion of clear boundaries, in turn, depends on the silencing of the constitutive ambivalence and conflictive plurality within identities. The clearer an identity’s boundaries are, the more thoroughly it excludes its others; the more internally stable it appears, the more effectively it has eliminated its others within; the more definite its origins are, the more radically it has erased the routes of its construction. In short, the formation of clear boundaries via the politics of essentialism relies on the silencing of interculturality within. It moves interculturality within identities to a space between them – ‘strong’ identity politics silence internal differences by creating an Other. The establishment of clear boundaries to others rids an identity of its ambiguities and constructs internal homogeneity. It removes the other within, it mutes divergent voices and makes internal conflicts invisible. What remains is one dominant representation of identity, relying on powerful exclusions of others within. Interculturality can then, as an afterthought, as it were, be supposed to emerge when these essentialized identities meet and merge. Through the strategies of the ‘identity paradigm,’ interculturality is turned into the endpoint, rather than the starting point of identity negotiations. This point cannot be stressed enough: only when the ‘strong’ identity politics of silencing interculturality are at work can interculturality be understood as a space in between cultures. When interculturality is conceived as a space in between, the ambivalence that lies at the heart of each identity has successfully been externalized, the hegemonic narrative has successfully been naturalized and universalized, and alternative narratives have successfully been silenced. The conception of interculturality as a ‘space in between’ ultimately rests on the silencing of the irreducible interculturality within identity. If Intercultural Theology is not intended to partake in this silencing, it has to approach interculturality as an epistemological locus – as a criticalconstructive perspective that critiques ‘strong’ identity discourses and the silencing of their irreducible ambiguity. In other words, interculturality cannot be approached in terms of subject matter – there is no ontological intercultural space. Interculturality can only be thought of as offering a specific form, namely a critical-constructive perspective on identity discourses. Secondly, what this implies is that Intercultural Theology cannot be conceived as an independent discipline that studies a clearly defined object of research. It cannot be understood as a discipline that is intended to describe

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and analyze phenomena of interculturality that emerge when cultures and religions meet. Rather, Intercultural Theology must be framed as a criticalconstructive perspective that exposes and unsilences the interculturality of all identity discourses, not as a material discipline but as a formal perspective. Consequently, Intercultural Theology cannot be outsourced, and thus marginalized, into a specific discipline. Instead, all theological studies approaches have to expose themselves to the interculturality, and hence contingency and ambiguity, of their objects of study. If this is concealed – if theological reflection is not done in an ‘intercultural’ way, it perpetuates the powerful exclusions of the ‘identity paradigm.’ But once an intercultural perspective is at work, it exposes the instability and hegemoniality in all discourses of ecclesial identity. Intercultural Theology, in short, performs the unsilencing of interculturality within Christianity. The unsilencing of interculturality as the constitutive task of Intercultural Theology suggests a twofold methodical procedure: by means of an interplay of a hermeneutics of suspicion and a hermeneutics of retrieval, Intercultural Theology has the capacity to become a critical-constructive perspective that exposes the essentialization of the master narratives of tradition through the unsilencing of alternative narratives. Intercultural Theology will be suspicious of narratives that claim universality, essential truth and validity for themselves, and it will uncover and retrieve alternative stories that expose the contingent establishment of such master narratives. A short discussion of three examples allows us to get a glimpse of such a critical-constructive intercultural perspective at work – they use the twofold approach of suspicion and retrieval for the study of religious and cultural discourses. First, Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation,17 a volume edited by Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider, does not explicitly have ‘Intercultural Theology’ in its title, nor does it cover any (or many) of those topics usually expected in this field of theological reflection; it is not a study of ‘diversity’ that results from the globalization of our age. In other words, it does not consider polydoxy as the endpoint of diversification in the Christian tradition. Instead, the editors want to facilitiate an “approach that no longer needs to hide the internal fissures and complexities that riddle every Christian text or that wound and bless every theological legacy.”18 Rather than speaking to a diversification of theology through a newly discovered cultural plurality, Keller and Schneider want to show that “‘Christianity’ was never really One to begin with … it has always already been polydox.”19 This narrative, of course, exists in stark contrast to the established ecclesial tradition, which has always tended to favor a uniform, homogeneous and seemingly unmistakable 17 Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider (eds.), Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation, New York: Routledge, 2011. 18 Keller and Schneider, Polydoxy, p. 1. 19 Ibid. p. 2.

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narrative of Christian identity. The contributions to the volume succeed in showing that this narrative of orthodoxy is actually a hegemonic narrative that has been established through the exclusion of other, alternatives narratives of Christian identity. Interestingly, this exploration of polydoxy is a multiauthored volume rather than a monograph – it takes many voices to break open the uniformity of orthodoxy, and so the volume traces the many excluded strands of the Christian tradition at places and times as diverse as the infancy stories of the gospels,20 Augustine’s Confessions,21 Whitehead’s process philosophy,22 and a Zulu kraal.23 And, interestingly, the editors trace the theological motivation for these explorations of polydoxy back to the emergence of contextual theologies – it is the postcolonial pluralization of theology that gives rise to a theological method which proceeds interculturally: These theologies began to arise like waves when major social crises of the midtwentieh century solicited responsive echoes in biblical prophetic movements. The one God of the Christendom that took up the Roman pattern and built empires on the labor of slaves, had, through centuries, provoked many rounds of exodus. The U.S. civil rights movement and the birth of Black theology along with Latin American liberation theology churned up new Christian discourses of exodus. And soon the international women’s movement, followed by gay, lesbian, and other queer movements, deepend challenges to the God of orthodoxy.24

These alternative theologies started to question the narrative of a uniform orthodoxy and exposed its cultural contingency and hegemonic power. This volume shows that a retrieval of other, alternative theologies triggers a hermeneutics of suspicion towards the master narrative of the Christian tradition. This sensitivity of the polydoxy of Christianity and other religious traditions also calls for a reconfiguration of interreligious studies. Here, too, retrieval and suspicion become important tools for leaving behind the ‘identity paradigm’ and its ‘strong’ identity politics in the study of religions and interreligiosity. An example here is Michelle Voss Roberts’ monograph Dualities: A Theology of Difference.25 In this comparative theological study, 20 Laurel Schneider, “Crib Notes from Bethelehm,” in: Keller and Schneider (eds.), Polydoxy, pp. 19–35. 21 Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Undone by Each Other: Interrupted Sovereignty in Augustine’s Confessions,” in: Keller and Schneider (eds.), Polydoxy, pp. 105–25. 22 Brianne Donaldson, “‘They will know we are process thinkers by our …’: Finding the Ecological Ethic of Whitehead through the Lens of Jainism and Ecofeminist Care,” in: Keller and Schneider (eds.), Polydoxy, pp. 203–16. 23 Marion Grau, “Signs Taken for Polydoxy in a Zulu Kraal: Creative Friction Manifested in Missionary-Native Discourse,” in: Keller and Schneider (eds.), Polydoxy, pp. 217–37. 24 Keller and Schneider, Polydoxy, p. 5. 25 Michelle Voss Roberts, Dualities: A Theology of Difference, Louisville: John Knox Press, 2010.

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Voss Roberts reads and compares Hindu and Christian texts to develop a complex understanding of duality as it shapes contemporary epistemologies and politics. As representatives for the Hindu and Christian tradition she deliberately chooses two marginalized theologians – she calls them “outsiders within”: Mechthild of Magdeburg and Lalleswari of Kashmir are two female theologians who are not conventionally considered representative voices in and of their respective traditions. Voss Roberts’ choice of sources for her comparative project complicates a common and well-established understanding of Comparative Theology as creating a hybrid space of interreligiosity in between essentially different religious traditions. Her reading does not so much show unexpected parallels and similarities between the texts she has chosen. Her comparative project does not create an interreligious/ intercultural space in between Christianity and Hinduism but rather shows that established notions of so-called ‘Western’ traditions as dualist and rational and those of so-called ‘Eastern’ traditions as mystic and non-dualist do not quite fit. She argues that ‘Eastern’ traditions can be conceived as fundamentally mystic and non-dualist only if mystic and non-dualist voices have been excluded from the Western tradition; in turn, so-called ‘Western’ traditions can be conceived as rationalist and dualist only if rationalist and dualist voices have been excluded from the Eastern tradition. Pushing this point even further, she argues that a description of the East as mystic/nondualist serves the exclusion of these narratives from the Western tradition. In retrieving these silenced voices in both traditions, Voss Roberts shows that the differences between East and West, between Hinduism and Christianity are not essentially and naturally given but constructed in the establishment of the master narrative of the Western tradition. Again, a retrieval of excluded voices raises suspicions of the dominant voices in a tradition and exposes them as an essentialization and universalization of the established hegemonic narrative. While Voss Roberts’ book is an example of a hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval in practice, Hugh Nicholson’s Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry develops a theoretical framework for this critical-constructive approach. Drawing on Carl Schmitt and Chantal Mouffe, he arrives at a similiar argument as I have developed above: religious discourses shape their identity in oppostion to Others. There is no essence to religious identities – instead, as Nicholson puts it, the hegemonic, the political “goes all the way down.… The entirety of religious discourse and practice … would appear to be implicated … in relations of religious rivalry.”26 He shows that there is a twofold strategy at play in the formation of religious identity: first, there is its creation in opposition to others, and then there is the process of naturalization, a process through which the contingent and political production of this identity is concealed. Nicholson uses this theory of identity 26 Hugh Nicholson, Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 36.

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politics as a backdrop for a critical reading of the history of comparative theology and related disciplines. He shows that the study of religions has by no means been a disinterested, neutral, objective endeavor. On the contrary, he exposes a clear political agenda in the history of comparative theology that has tried to combat the potential for violence in and between religious traditions that has resulted from the political character of their formation. The study of religions has attempted to neutralize this potential for violence through a depolitizing strategy. It has tried to find a religious essence, or an essential religion, that exists prior to the political strategies of differentiation between religious traditions. Nicholson shows, however, that this depolitizing strategy in search of an essence only privileged the hegemonic narrative of the Christian tradition and naturalized it into an essential religion. All others were excluded from this universalized essence – rather than softening the violent and exclusivist relation between religious traditions, Comparative Theology and related disciplines have perpetuated and enhanced it. As a counterstrategy, Nicholson suggests not depolitizing but de-essentializing religious traditions. Rather than concealing the political and hegemonic character that lies at the heart of all religious identity, the study of religions should expose and highlight these strategies of exclusion that were operative in the construction of these traditions. This, he argues, opens up possibilities for less violent and more friendly interactions and relations. Again, a hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval is at work in Nicholson’s study of the history of the study of religions – a critique and suspicion of the hegemonic narrative retrieves its contingent formation. This last example reveals that the methods of Intercultural Theology must also be approached with a hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval. Do our ways of studying religions perpetuate hegemonic strategies of essentialization and universalization, or do they facilitate counter-hegemonic strategies of suspicion and retrieval? Do they lead to the silencing or the unsilencing of interculturality?

5. The Canon as an Act of Intercultural Theology The purpose of this chapter is to offer a rereading of the canon as an act of intercultural theology. It does not intend to trace the complex historical trajectories of the canonical processes in the Christian churches (an endeavor that would go well beyond its scope).1 Instead, it raises the question of the theological status of the canon: Can we, and if so how, attribute theological significance to the canon in its entirety, in its final form? Following the outline of intercultural theology I have developed over the course of this book, this chapter argues that we can read the canon as an exemplary practice of intercultural theology by pursuing a twofold line of argument. It shows that a critical rereading after the Cultural Turn reveals the canon to be both the product and producer of conflictive plurality within the Christian tradition, and, in turn, it asks how the exposure of this conflictive plurality (i. e. interculturality) within tradition can be understood as a resource for a truly incarnational and thus radically hermeneutical theology. The purpose of this chapter, in other words, is to offer a theological reinterpretation of the canon as a sign and instrument of God’s absent presence – it aims to read it as a sacrament of the loss which lays at the foundation of the Christian tradition.

5.1 A Theology of the Canon: Icon for Stability and Sacrament of God’s Abundant Presence As we will see, to describe the biblical canon as the product and producer of interculturality is to understand it as a crystallization of the ongoing, controversial negotiations of Christian identity. When we read it as a product and producer of interculturality, it becomes a material document of the struggle for interpretive sovereignty over ecclesial tradition. The canon, then, is, in short, a tangible symbol of the conflictive plurality within Christianity. Such a focus on open-ended contestation as its decisive characteristic does not take center stage in the established theological narratives of the canon; they focus on – to use a succinct definition of the German Old Testament scholar 1 For an overview of the volume and scope of recent literature in the field, cf. the select bibliography in Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders (eds.), The Canon Debate, reprint, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publ., 2002, 599–624.; cf. also Jean-Marie Auwers and Henk J. de Jonge (eds.), The Biblical Canons, Leuven, Hadleigh: Peeters; BRAD, 2003; Harry Y. Gamble, The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning, Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1985.

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Thomas Hieke – “the idea of a confined and divinely legitimated textual inventory as the foundation of a community of believers.”2 With different theological emphases in the Catholic and the Protestant traditions, theological readings of the canon frame it as a concept with pivotal importance for the alignment of revelation theology (‘divine legitimization’) and ecclesiology (‘community of believers’). The Vatican II’s dogmatic constitution on divine revelation, Dei Verbum, offers a prominent (and normatively promulgated) rendering of this theological interpretation of the canon. It introduces the theological concept of canon by unfolding a mutual dependence between scripture and ecclesial tradition as the defining mark of the Catholic reading of the canon: the church recognizes the scriptures as its foundation “since, as inspired by God and committed once and for all to writing, they impart the word of God Himself without change” (DV 21). At the same time, it is “[t]hrough [her] tradition, [that] the Church’s full canon of the sacred books is known, and the sacred writings themselves are more profoundly understood and unceasingly made active in her” (DV 8). Accordingly, “there exists a close connection and communication between sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture.… Sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God, committed to the Church” (DV 9 f.). Even though the conciliar text does not itself refer to it at all, the text rests on a century-long divisive controversy on the relation between scripture and tradition, and, in line with Catholic tradition, DV 8 affirms their interdependence in contrast to the notion of a linear progression from the biblical canon to ecclesial tradition (without, however, confirming an understanding of scripture and tradition as two separate sources). In the theological master narrative of the Catholic Church, the formation of the canon is integrally woven into the process of ecclesial tradition, understood as an unbroken, reliable line of ‘re-presenting’ the gift of God’s presence originally given through God’s self-revelation in Jesus the Christ. The risen body of Christ takes place in the ecclesial body of Christ; the ecclesial body, in turn, shapes and is shaped by a corpus of scriptures, which together, in mutual control and support, manifest the fullness of God’s presence as revealed in the body of Christ. Through its selection of scriptures and the closure of the canon, the church ensures that it possesses the normative guideline for its faithful tradition of God’s self-revelation. This narrative thus conceives of a mutual dependence between corporeal instances that vouch for each other‘s faithfulness and authenticity in their task of theological representation. By outlining a circular structure between scripture and tradition, DV interrupts the unilinear, two-dimensional relation of canon and community and brings interpretation as a crucial third factor into play. Insisting on their mutual dependence implies the acknowledgement that the canon is not simply 2 Thomas Hieke, “Neue Horizonte. Biblische Auslegung als Weg zu ungewöhnlichen Perspektiven,” Zeitschrift für Neues Testamen 12 (2003), 65–76, here p. 65.

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given as the “foundation of a community of believers” (cf. Hiecke’s definition); instead, it concedes that it takes the hermeneutical work of the community to confirm a body of scriptures as constitutive of its identity. DV thus adds a crucial aspect to Hiecke’s broad theological definition of the canon and recognizes interpretation as the connective tissue between a canon and its community, between a community and its canon. An acknowledgement of this hermeneutical circle3 has further ramifications: it introduces a historical dimension into the relation between canon and community. Instead of equating them in a static relation, it conceives of a dynamic interplay between canon, community, and interpretation. Terje Stordalen has coined the term “canonical ecology”4 to capture these interrelations and hermeneutical dependence in the mutual constitution of canon and community, which form a flexible system open to change and adaptation. To conceive of a mutual dependence between canon and ecclesial community, in other words, is to reckon with the possibility of the historical transformation of ecclesial tradition. And indeed, DV 8 draws this incisive theological conclusion when it holds that “the writings themselves are more profoundly understood” throughout tradition; by framing ecclesial tradition as the progressive unfolding of revealed truth as represented in the scriptures (cf. DV 11), this passage takes into account the historical contingency and finiteness of historically particular embodiments of the church and its articles of faith. It thus takes a theological stance that itself represents a significant departure from preconciliar positions and, hence, was one of the most contested passages of Vatican II. Yet, while the established theological narrative here does acknowledge the historicity of ecclesial tradition, it is prone to do so only to a certain degree; as we have seen in previous chapters, the unsilencing of historical contingency undermines the desire for a ‘strong’ identity and is therefore only very hesitantly embraced – the master narrative of the church all too often finds it 3 Clodovis Boff (Theology and Praxis: Epistemological Foundations, Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1987) highlights this circular relationship between Scripture and tradition in their production and reception, and therefore argues for the hermeneutical inadequacy of the axiom norma normans non normata (p. 140): “Scripture appears as a model interpretation, and thus as an interpreting interpretation, a norma normans ut normata. The hermeneutic circle works from the inside out, in the sense that this hermeneutic paradigm grows richer as such through the interpretations that it permits. Its ‘letter’, in its very unchangeability, is in some sense further determined by the significations that it has itself engendered. This is the very meaning of tradition. We see, then, that the ‘circle’ is inescapable. It reappears at every turn in the hermeneutic process. The concept of scripture as a norma non normata, then must be transcended” (Cf. also Ormond Rush, The Eyes of Faith: The Sense of the Faithful and the Church’s Reception of Revelation, Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009, pp. 179 f. 4 Cf. Terje Stordalen, “Canon and Canonical Commentary: Comparative Perspectives on Canonical Systems,” in: ed. Terje Stordalen (ed.), The Formative Past and the Formation of the Future: Collective Remembering and Identity Formation, (= Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning: Serie B, skrifter 153), Oslo: Novus Press, 2015, pp. 133–60.

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hard to subject itself to radical contingency, and instead strives to locate its roots in an absolute origin outside itself. To do so, its strategy has been to conceive of the definitive, complete, and final self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ as an autonomous source, independent of its ecclesial tradition. On the basis of this source, then, the church can imagine itself to develop in a unilinear, unbroken line, through which it hands down the gift of God’s freely given presence without blemish or corruption. If the church thus locates its belief in revelation outside its interpretative tradition, it does not conceive of the hermeneutical circle between canon and community to be infinite, selfcontained or ungrounded but interrupts their mutual dependence through the positing of an external source. A sharp caesura is then introduced into the theological narrative of the hermeneutical interdependence of scripture and ecclesial tradition. So when Dei Verbum highlights the historicity of ecclesial tradition, how far does it really go in acknowledging the contingent character of the theology of the church? Does it take its interpretativity radically seriously, or does it ground its hermeneutical dependence in an external source? Let us have a closer look. DV 13 serves as the summative theological cornerstone of this chapter; it draws an analogy between incarnation and scripturalization and thus simultaneously stresses the revelatory quality of the scriptures and highlights their contingent character; in fact, the analogy with incarnation inscribes the historical particularity of the canon with theological quality: In Sacred Scripture, therefore, while the truth and holiness of God always remains intact, the marvellous ‘condescension’ of eternal wisdom is clearly shown, ‘that we may learn … how far He has gone in adapting His language with thoughtful concern for our weak human nature.’ For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the word of the eternal Father, when He took to Himself the flesh of human weakness, was in every way made like men. (DV 13)

DV 12 already laid out the practical consequences of this theological account of the canon for the use of scripture in the church: “since God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men [sic] in human fashion,” the church as its interpreter does not have the “divinely revealed realities … contained … in Sacred Scripture” (DV 11) immediately at its disposal but has to “search out the intention of the writers” through an ongoing process of discernment. DV 12 explicitly recognizes the importance of historical critical exegesis for this process, which highlights the historical and cultural particularity of the canonical scriptures, but it also points out that the individual results of critical research have to be read in light of the overall theological message of the canon. DV 12 thus frames ecclesial tradition as hermeneutical work whose goal is to realize and manifest the revelatory quality of the canon through the course of history. DV 11 then, at the beginning of this chapter, is the crucial number which discusses the foundation of this revelatory process of ecclesial

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interpretation. It declares that the hermeneutical circle between scripture and tradition finds its origin in divine revelation: “God [is the] author“ of the “divinely revealed realities … presented in Sacred Scripture,” “for the sake of salvation,” through the “inspiration of the Holy Spirit” (DV 11). DV 11 clearly marks this declaration of God as the author of the scriptures as a statement of the faith of the church and thus ties it into the ecclesial process of interpretation (“For holy mother Church … holds that the books of both the Old and New Testaments … have God as their author…”; italics mine). Moreover, it also identifies the human writers of the biblical texts as their “true authors” and thus further accentuates the inseparability of divine revelation from the contingencies of the ecclesial traditioning process (without conflating them). DV 11, ultimately, does not disentangle divine word from human words – it does not bring the hermeneutical circle of ecclesial tradition to a halt by casting revelation as its external source and, therefore, does not owe itself to the silencing of the radical contingency of the church. And yet we can find traces in Dei Verbum of a theology that refuses to expose itself to radical contingency. These traces are the result of the complex and conflictive history of the text: on the one hand, the final draft was strongly influenced by the conciliar project of historicizing ecclesial tradition as envisioned by the majority of the council fathers, who over the course of the council, realized in a more and more profound way the unsettling consequences of this endeavor. On the other hand, however, the text was not fully able to emancipate itself from the preconciliarily established textual and conceptual patterns of ‘strong’ ecclesial identity politics. As Knut Wenzel summarizes: The incident of the ‘non-rejection’ of a draft that had actually found disapproval from a majority of the council fathers … led to the final draft still being shaped by the basic inventory of a revelation theology which could not do justice to the state of the discussion reached by the end of the council.5

As a result, we can unearth currents within the established theological narrative that still operate on the assumption of a truncated hermeneutical circle and, consequently, of its limited contingency by conceiving of revelation as its external source, disentangled from ecclesial tradition. One such indicator in Dei Verbum is the teleological framing of tradition as gradual unfolding of revealed truth; DV 8 is a succinct example: And so the apostolic preaching, which is expressed in a special way in the inspired books, was to be preserved by an unending succession of preachers until the end of time.… This tradition which comes from the Apostles develops [proficit = makes progress] in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. (5) For there is a growth in the 5 Knut Wenzel, Das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil: Eine Einführung, Überarb., aktualisierte und ergänzte Neuausg, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2014, p. 176.

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understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down…. [T]he Church constantly moves forward toward the fullness of divine truth until the words of God reach their complete fulfilment in her…. [A]nd thus God, who spoke of old, uninterruptedly converses with the bride of His beloved Son. (DV 8; italics mine)

Images of fullness, unbrokenness and completion mark this theological account of ecclesial tradition. Because the earthly church is a historically contingent reality, the fullness of divine presence is available only in a limited way right now, but it knows itself to be rooted in fullness and oriented towards fullness. The understanding of ecclesial tradition as ‘growth’ and ‘progress’ goes hand in hand with a theology of abundant divine presence and relies on the idea of an absolute origin. Let me outline these theological ties in more detail. If the church conceives of revelation as the origin of its tradition as external to its hermeneutical work, it imagines a hiatus between the event of God’s revelation and its witness of this event. Revelation takes place, and only then does the interpretative work of the church begin, which produces contingent representations of the “divinely revealed realities.” There is a moment of unconditional presence, which the church then strives to represent “more and more profoundly” (cf. DV 8) through its historically conditioned witness. The idea of revelation as an absolute foundation, independent of the tradition of the church, thus grounds and stabilizes ecclesial interpretation and renders it as the continuous unfolding of an already given meaning. The interpretative task of the church is then to discover the presence of God as already/all readily available. The location of revelation as an external source thus goes hand in hand with a theology of abundant presence. In other words, the narrative of God’s abundant presence relies on the discontinuance of the hermeneutical circle of tradition and, hence, on the abortion of the radical contingency of the church; it has to introduce an interruption into its hermeneutical circle in order to uphold the narrative of its unbroken representation of God’s self-revelation. Within this teleological narrative of tradition as the progressive unfolding of an already given fullness, the completion of revelation in Jesus the Christ corresponds to the closure of the canon, as Knut Wenzel shows in his commentary on Dei Verbum: Insofar as tradition is a process of active adoption and dissemination, we can, as the council does, talk about a progress in the tradition of faith without questioning the inviolacy of the traditioned. The progress or change takes place in growing understanding, in study, in contemplation, in proclamation – in short: in the acts of adoption and dissemination, but not in the contents proper of revelation (DV 8). The completion of revelation finds its materialization in the – also completed – canon of scriptures.6 6 Ibid., p. 168; italics mine.

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The criteria, then, which have served both to determine the canonicity of the scriptures and for to define the church,7 have one crucial function: they are intended to connect the tradition of the church with its external origin and hence, to guarantee the continued completeness, integrity and inviolability of God’s presence (and hence, salvation) through ecclesial tradition. The idea of diachronic and synchronic consensus and cohesion is a crucial warrant of the soteriological effectiveness of the church and its canon, understood as the unbroken ‘re-presentation’ of divine presence (cf. DV 7). A theological approach to the canon thus ultimately centers on its soteriological function in salvation history as mediated by the church, and within the established narrative, this soteriological function is warranted by canonical cohesion and continuity. While Dei Verbum itself does not address the historical and ecclesial variability of the canon or issues of inner-canonical discrepancies, this narrative typically does register the plurality within the boundaries of the canon, as it becomes palpable in the quadruple structure of the gospels, in the duality of the testaments, and in the polyphony of theological currents that run through the scriptures. It reads this innercanonical plurality, however, as geared towards – and subordinated to – unity and continuity.8 It interprets it as evidence and indication, not of a constitutive loss but of God’s abundantly available presence, of which there is too much for the church to grasp pre-eschatologically. The idea of a closed canon (and, in their mutual reinforcement, a unilinear ecclesial tradition), marked by continuity and cohesion in form and content, therefore, is closely connected to a theology of abundant presence and the location of revelation as an external source, which are, in turn, indicators of the discontinuance of the hermeneutical circle of tradition and hence of a 7 For this parallelization of criteria for canonicity and ecclesiality, cf. Hartmut Rosenau, Vom Warten – Grundriss einer sapientialen Dogmatik: Neue Zugänge zur Gotteslehre, Christologie und Eschatologie (= Lehr- und Studienbücher zur Theologie 8), Münster: Lit, 2012, pp. 125 f. For a study of the criteria for canonicity cf. Karl-Heinz Ohlig, Die theologische Begründung des neutestamentlichen Kanons in der alten Kirche (= Kommentare und Beitrage zum alten und neuen Testament), Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1972. 8 For a discussion, cf. Raymond E. Brown and Raymond Collins, “Canonicity,” in: New Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E. Murphy, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990, pp. 1034–54, here pp. 1052–54.: “The Reformation raised acutely the question of degrees of canonicity. … This question has become more acute as we have recognized that there are dissimilar outlooks and differing theologies in the books of the Scripture.… The thesis that there was a uniform and harmonious development of theological understanding from the time of Pentecost to the end of the apostolic era is not supported by the NT critically read. But then the question arises: If there are two divergent views in the NT, which one is to be considered authoritative? Within the canon of Scripture and in particular within the NT, what is the canon or rule of what we are to believe? … For some the problem is even more acute since they press divergencies … whereas a Catholic understanding of the inspiration of Scripture would seem to preclude contradictions.… [Hermeneutical constructs which offer a theological metanarrative of unity and cohesion are] the canon within the canon or ‘the center of the NT’.”

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theology that does not acknowledge its radical contingence. As Terje Stordalen argues from a religious studies perspective, such a closed or ‘strong’ canon marked by continuity and cohesion is of iconic value to a community that highlights its uninterrupted and uncorrupted tradition. It is significant – it is indicator and tool, sign and instrument – for the establishment of an absolute, ‘safe’ foundation of tradition. It is, sociologically, an “icon for stability”9 for the ecclesial community and, theologically, a sacrament of God’s abundant presence that the church has to unfold more and more fully.

5.2 The Canon after the Cultural Turn: Icon for De/stabilization The Cultural Turn has also triggered a heightened interest in questions of canonicity: its focus on the cultural semiotics of knowledge production has fostered investigations into the canon as a sign of cultural identity.10 From different disciplinary perspectives, ranging from literary criticism to religious studies, the strong hermeneutical interdependencies between canon and collective identity have thus been brought to the fore.11 Such a focus on the semiotic interdependence between canon and collective identity has shifted attention to the crucial role of reception for an understanding of the canon after the Cultural Turn: 9 Stordalen, “Canon and Canonical Commentary,” p. 135. 10 Influential contributions have been made by T. S. Eliot, What is a Classic? An Address delivered before the Virgil Society on the 16th of October 1944, New York: Haskell House, 1974; Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change, The T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures 1973, New York: The Viking Press, 1975; Charles Altieri, Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990; Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (= Bloomsbury Academic Collections: English Literary Criticism), New York: Bloomsbury, 1991; John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1993; Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, New York: Riverhead Books, 1994; Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995; Henry Louis Gates, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars, New York, etc.: Oxford University Press, 1997. 11 As indicated above, Terje Stordalen has coined the term “canonical ecology” to account for these interrelations; it informs his definition of canon, which draws on approaches to the canon from the perspective of humanist and social sciences: “A canon is an identifiable collection of texts, artefacts, rules, habits, etc., which an identifiable group of people professes to express superb values and so to symbolize their social formation, [and which] is embedded in an ecology of canonical institutions, media, commentary, usage, etc.“ Terje Stordalen, Deconstructing Canonical Ecologies: Manuscript for the Fifth Annual Workshop of the Study of Religion as an Analytical Discipline, Atlanta, GA: Georgia State University, 2015, p. 3.

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Reception and use contribute genuinely to defining the nature of a given canon. This point is completely missed when focusing only on the canonical collection and its content – as is the convention, for instance, in biblical studies. We should rather say, therefore, that a canon is a canonical body as received and used.12

Crucially, this concentration on the hermeneutical interconnectedness between a canon and its community also presupposes that canonicity is no longer understood as an intrinsic characteristic of the elements of the canon but rather as a result of the cultural practice of meaning-making.13 Canonicity, then, is reframed as a performance of collective identity: Canonicity is not a function of particular characteristics of the canonical collection, such as its quality, high age, closure, ability to produce commentaries, and so forth. Rather, canonicity is a product of human activity: scripture is something that the canonical community does.14

As the product and producer of collective identity, the canon’s crucial role in the ongoing practice of identification is to “limit”15 and “control”16 the canonical community’s collective definitions of cultural meaning and identity. Hermann von Lips poignantly summarizes these crucial insights for an approach to the canon from the perspective of cultural studies: Generally, it has been recognized that processes of the canonization of literature are always bound to a specific community. It is through their use and acceptance within a community, that scriptures gain canonical status for this community. For the community … the canon thus relieves [social] pressure: ‘In a community which lives in close connection to past events, and which continuously re-appropriates these 12 Ibid. 13 For a concise discussion of this shift, and the issues at stake, cf. Andrew Bennet and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 4th ed., London, New York, NY: Routledge, 2014, pp. 44–53. 14 Jorunn Økland and Terje Stordalen, “Canon / Canonicity / Canonization,” in: Jorunn Økland and Terje Stordalen (eds.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Gender Studies, Oxford Biblical Studies Online, accessed 20 January 2017, http://www.oxfordbiblicalstudies.com/ar ticle/opr/t453/e3. For this crucial insight, Stordalen and Økland reference W.C. Smith: “A key point in our apprehension of canonicity was formulated by Wilfred Cantwell Smith.… According to Wilfred Smith, canonicity does not reside in the canonical corpus as such, but in what a given community does to that corpus.” Cf. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach, Fortress Press ex libris publ., Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005 [orig. 1993], p. 18. Cf. also pp. 236–38. 15 Cf. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon,” in: Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (= Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism), 6th ed., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 36–52. Smith argues that religious traditions define and limit their identity through a fixed set of elements – in the case of literate cultures, these are texts – and the concomitant process of transcending these elements through the rulegoverned exegetical enterprise. Comparative Religion should thus focus on a study of this process of limitation and extrication, of canon formation and exegesis. 16 George Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning: Canon as Semiotic Mechanism, Princeton, NJ: Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, 2003.

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events in new interpretations in order to integrate them into its self-understanding, questions of criteria, normativity and unconditionality will arise; [it has to develop] an interpretation of the past which does not necessarily homogenize the past but still limits it to a spectrum of possible interpretations and thus makes it manageable’ (Schröter 10 [17]). At the same time, the consolidation of a canon supports the community in finding its identity. Canonization ‘thus has a limiting and … stabilizing function vis- -vis competing claims, as well as a positive function which turns a community’s tradition into its constitutive foundation’ (Schröter 10).18

A central function of the canon in the practice of cultural identity is thus its service in the mediation between continuity and change; the canon warrants stability through history. Within the “canonical ecology,” this is achieved through canonical commentary, as Stordalen outlines it: The [canonical] text depends upon the continued reading tradition of a canonical community. … A canon is never simply that body of text, artworks, procedures, or practices that is commonly recognised as superb. The de facto canon is not limited to the canonical or holy text, although this is precisely what the canonical communities themselves would profess…. Canonical traditions develop authorised ways of reading, applying, changing and forgetting their classics. Authorised ways of reading, codified in authoritative commentary, may become part of the canonical body [such as the Talmud], or may find other channels and media. … Even in cases where the commentary does not make it formally into the holy text, changes will continuously occur in the commonly assumed sense of the canon – changes that most readers of the canon are not aware of. And this camouflaging of change is the very point of canonical commentary: it lends a sense of durability to the canon while allowing it to resonate with the changing sentiments of time.19

Through the ongoing shifts in the interpretation of the canon in the changing contexts of its use, the canon can retain its meaning for the canonical community while attaining an aura of unchangeability. In the ongoing negotiations of collective identity, in the shifting practices of cultural identity, the canon can thus become an “icon for stability”; it can be “used to symbolize social cohesion.”20 It becomes a tangible, material signifier – indicator and tool, sign and instrument21 – of unity and continuity. 17 Von Lip cites Jens Schröter, “Religionsgeschichte des Urchristentums statt Theologie des Neuen Testaments? Begründungsprobleme in der neutestamentlichen Wissenschaft,” Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 16 (1991). 18 Herrmann von Lips, “Was bedeutet uns der Kanon? Neuere Diskussion zur theologischen Bedeutung des Kanons,” Verkündigung und Forschung 51 (2006), 4. 19 Stordalen, “Canon and Canonical Commentary” pp. 156 f. 20 Stordalen, Deconstructing Canonical Ecologies, p. 3. 21 Cf. Delwin Brown, Boundaries of our Habitations: Tradition and Theological Construction (= SUNY Series in Religious Studies), Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1994, p. 184: “To indicate both sides of this dynamic, I usually speak of playing or negotiating with/in canon.” For an exploration of the semiotics of material objects as agents, cf. Bruno Latour, “The Berlin

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Yet, to read and practice the canon as a tangible sign of stability by no means implies that canons actually are stable and fixed corpora of a definite list of texts. While for literary canons, this claim of closure is not necessarily raised in the first place, it is also difficult to maintain for the canons of religious traditions, specifically the Christian canon. In fact, from a historical perspective, the instability of the Christian canon has come more and more to the fore over the past few decades, as Hermann von Lips highlights: [In 1970], E. Käsemann opened the introduction to his edited volume The New Testament as Kanon (Göttingen 1970) with these sentences: ‘We have an excellent understanding of the formation and history of the New Testament canon. Its theological relevance, however, is more contentious than ever.’ While for Käsemann at least one aspect of the canon debate, namely its formation, appeared to be beyond dispute, today, we have to acknowledge that the discussion is in full swing for both [the theological and the historical] aspects.”22

Here, two short cues must suffice in order to indicate the difficulties at stake in determining the Christian canon as a definite and stable text. First, the stability of the canon proves to be a problematic assumption from the perspective of New Testament textual criticism. Surveying developments in the field, Jennifer Knust sums up its disciplinary history: Thanks to the easy availability of printed Christian Bibles, many … miss the centuries of controversy that surround the text of the New Testament, … [that point] to an underlying awareness of the difficulties presented by the survival of so many different texts, as well as to fundamental disagreements about how these differences should be handled. Over the course of the last two centuries, two major positions have emerged: on the one hand, there are those who assert that the New Testament books were dangerously corrupted during the process of transmission; on the other hand, there are those who claim that the true text has largely been preserved from the time of the apostles until today, even as they acknowledge that multiple versions have survived. For the first group, the solution to the dizzying array of surviving versions of the Greek New Testament lies in the careful application of human logic to the complex textual issues at hand. To the second group – defenders of a Majority of Byzantine Text – such an approach places too much confidence in human ingenuity and needlessly overturns several centuries of careful preservation of the New Testament Text.23 Key or How to Do Things with Words,” in: Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. Paul Graves-Brown, New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 10–22; see p. 18 f: “The Berlin key, the door, and the concierge are engaged in a bitter struggle for control and access … the social relations between inhabitants are mediated by the key and the lock. From being a simple tool, the steel key assumes all the dignity of a mediator, a social actor, an agent, an active being.” 22 Lips, “Was bedeutet uns der Kanon?” p. 42. 23 Jennifer Knust, “In Pursuit of a Singular Text: New Testament Criticism and the Desire for the True Original,” Religion Compass 2 (2008), 181.

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While highlighting these differences, Knust points to a shared premise of the divergent approaches within New Testament textual criticism: “Although deeply divided over issues of methodology, these scholars have shared a common goal: the production of a printed New Testament text that is as close to the pure, [original] text as possible.”24 This search, she holds, is informed by “what could be called textual desire, a desire for a transcendent text capable of serving as stable ground upon which accurate, faithful interpretation may be based.”25 This desire is fuelled by “the fantasy that there is a transcendent text, which stands apart from any particular physical manifestations of that text.”26 Recent methodological shifts in textual criticism to the materiality of the biblical texts, however, have begun to challenge and frustrate the dream of (textually approaching) a transcendent canon: The materiality of text – or better, texts – pushes back against any wish that the Bible can be fixed, its content settled, and its meaning(s) clarified. Pulled into human history, the codex, the papyrus, and the manuscript are momentary projections of an ever-changing now, whether at the moment of production, deposit in a garbage heap or in a monastery library, transfer as a gift from one dignitary to another, theft of ‘discovery’ by a farmer or a manuscript hunter, or photographed for digitization and re-circulation as an artefact of the ‘digital humanities’.27

Once we put a focus on the materiality of the manuscripts, the work of interpretation cannot be ceded to a purportedly finalized and restored, fixed text – and it cannot be grounded in the absolute foundation of an original text, as Knust shows with reference to the work of David C. Parker:28 Following a survey of a number of unstable Gospel passages, Parker offered the following provocative observation: denying the notion that there is a true or transcendent text that stands apart from particular texts, he argues that Gospel texts do not exist apart from the manuscripts that preserve them. In Parker’s view, there simply is no single original to be found; since manuscripts ‘are the tradition,’ there is no ‘greater reality behind what we have’ and, therefore, ‘there is no authoritative text’ beyond the manuscripts which we may follow without further thought.29

Second, to write the history of the canon as the consolidation of a stable text also raises issues in terms of textual hermeneutics. George Aichele puts it succinctly: “We cannot identify the moment or the process by which the canon 24 25 26 27

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 180. Jennifer Knust, There is No Bible/There is a Bible: Thinking about the Materiality of Text, Atlanta, GA: Georgia State University, 2015, https://www.academia.edu/12159204/Canon_and_the_ Analytical_Study_of_Religion_-_SORAAAD_2015. 28 David C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 29 Knust, “In Pursuit of a Singular Text,” p. 186.

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comes into existence unless we already know what the canon is.”30 David Brakke argues that such a hermeneutical circle has profoundly shaped the historiography of the Christian canon and produced a teleological narrative of its formation which still dominates the field: “Historians continue to tell a story with a single plot line, leading to the seemingly inevitable t]kor of the closed canon of the New Testament. That is, the question remains, how did the Christians get from having no sacred scripture of their own making, to producing a large number of new texts, to seeing many of these as scriptures, to selecting 27 of them to form the canon of the New Testament? In answering this question, a series of representative figures and texts are placed on a single trajectory.”31 In contrast, Brakke argues that, historically, we cannot necessarily draw a direct line from Christians citing early Christian literature as authoritative in the second century to Christians creating closed canon lists in the fourth century. … We should not imagine that religious groups always move chronologically from openness to fixity in their use of scriptural collections.32

In support of his argument, Brakke describes a variety of scriptural practices in which early Christian communities engaged.33 Not all of them were geared towards the consolidation of an authoritative collection of scriptures, not all had the formation of a stable canon as their goal. He concludes: “We need a new narrative that does tell the story of how the New Testament canon came to be, but does so without conforming all of our evidence to that particular thread of the story of early Christian scriptures.”34 Such a “de-center[ing of] the closed canon within our narrative”35 ultimately destabilizes the boundaries of the canon and its relations to the canonical community: It makes clear that the classic passages and lists that scholars traditionally gather and study in their reconstructions of a linear progress toward the eventual new Testament canon do not in fact describe or pertain to the same thing. They are not points along a trajectory toward the t]kor of Athanasius’ list. … Such a history [of scriptural practices] would not minimize the importance of the New Testament canon, but it would undermine its centrality before the fourth century and its ultimate inevitability. It would indeed describe a discursive fight, or rather, several discursive 30 Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning, p. 10. 31 David Brakke, “Scriptural Practices in Early Christianity: Towards a New History of the New Testament Canon,” in: Jörg Ulrich, Anders-Christian Jacobsen, and David Brakke (eds.), Invention, Rewriting, Usurpation: Discursive Fights over Religious Rraditions in Antiquity, (= Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity 11), Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2012, pp. 263–80, here p. 265. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., pp. 271–78. As examples of this range of scriptural practices, Brakke discusses “Study and Contemplation“ (pp. 271–73), “Revelation and Continued Inspiration“ (pp. 273–75), “Communal Worship and Edification“ (pp. 276–78). 34 Ibid., p. 267. 35 Ibid., p. 279.

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fights over what should count as ‘the Christian tradition’ … It would emphasize the immense creativity and diversity of the ways in which early Christians used texts to shape themselves and their communities.36

These problems of textual criticism and the de-centering rereadings of canon history do not just disturb and unsettle the existent Christian canon as it is in current use today to serve as an icon for stability for the canonical community. By highlighting (contemporary) practices of selectivity both in the composition of the canon and the historiography of canon formation, and by pointing to the lack of an origin(al), we can point to profound conceptual issues that are at stake in tracing the mutual relations between canon and collective identity and that lead us to the very definition of canon: canons come into existence as a selection of some texts over others. Canons, therefore, are defined as phenomena of exclusion and by processes of exclusion. The canon creates, authorizes and stabilizes collective meaning and identity by creating excluded others and the hermeneutical interdependence between canon and community within a canonical ‘ecological system’ tends to naturalize and eclipse these exclusions.37 Colby Dickinson succinctly describes this twofold process of inclusion and exclusion at the heart of the formation of the canon as an icon for stability for the canonical community: The canonical form creates a system of meaning wherein those excluded from the canonical measure reside within a certain context of ‘meaninglessness’ … Within this ‘matrix of intelligibility’, the marginalized are generally seen as being neither intelligible nor recognizable as such. They are considered ‘without representation’ in the canonical culture (religious, national, etc.) which excludes them, or which appears to found itself upon their exclusion.38

36 Ibid., pp, 278, 280. 37 Cf. Gamble, The New Testament Canon, p. 75: “[T]he formation of the canon served to obscure its own history and to relativize the historical and particular character of the texts which belong to it.… [T]heir historically secondary context becomes their hermeneutically primary context.” Christoph Böttigheimer expresses surprise at the lack of historiographical documentation of the process of canonization: “The formation of the biblical canon can be reconstructed only in retrospective … because, oddly, hardly any sources on the process itself can be found.” Christoph Böttigheimer., Die eine Bibel und die vielen Kirchen: Die Heilige Schrift im ökumenischen Verständnis, Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder, 2016, p. 107, . This lack of sources, however, is less surprising once we view the process of canon formation through the lens of postcolonial studies, which reframes canonization as the production of meaning and identity through an asymmetrical process of inclusion and exclusion. 38 Colby Dickinson, “Canons and Canonicity: Late Modern Reflections on Cultural and Religious Canonical Texts,” Annali di storia dell’esegesi 30 (2013), pp. 369–392, p. 376. Dickinson does not make an explicit reference to Jacques Ranci re, who also argues that the production of social meaning and identity relies on “le partage du sensible esth tique et politique”, which produces the “part de sans-part” as a constitutive but excluded element of a social system. Cf. Jacques Ranci re, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, repr., London, New York: Continuum, 2011.

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For Dickinson, this relegation of excluded others into a “context of meaninglessness” is “an issue of social justice as much as of cultural understanding”39 – as the product and producer of exclusion, the canon can do nothing else but bear marks of epistemopolitical violence.40 It has been the strategy of some canons’ ‘others’ to protest canonical violence by calling for a more inclusive revision of the canon or for the establishment of a counter-canon, consisting of those which the canonical text has relegated to its context of meaninglessness.41 These approaches have done crucial analytical work to expose the canon as an instrument of epistemopolitical power geared towards the preservation of hegemonic structures in canonical communities. As the product and producer of cultural meaning and identity, the canon is bound to reinscribe existing asymmetries of representation in canonical communities; as an icon for stability, it petrifies a community’s established structures in its distribution of authority and resources; as a symbol of social cohesion, it naturalizes the exclusions through which it has forged the collective identity of the canonical community. Revisionist or counter-canonical approaches, however, areinsufficient for an interruption of the violent potential of the canon as an instrument of epistemopolitical power. In fact, by advocating for canonical inclusion, they still operate on and thus perpetuate the presupposition that canons are fixed and stable systems of representation of and in which they demand a fair share. They do not, therefore, offer a “fundamental challenge of the canon as canon…. They do not call the notion of the canon itself [as an icon for stability] into question,”42 as Lillian Robinson has put it. Ultimately, by calling for the inclusion of the canon’s excluded others, they reinscribe the stabilizing logic of the canon. It is my crucial argument that more than a rearrangement of established structures of representation is at stake in the critique of the canon as a hegemonic sign and instrument of epistemopolitical power. Once we highlight that the canon becomes an icon for stability and cohesion through powerful processes of inclusion and exclusion, we begin to see that canons cannot but produce “a concurrent extracanonical shadow,”43 to use Petra Bahr’s succinct expression. As she points out, this simultaneity of inclusion and exclusion in the delineation of the canon weaves a deferral of meaning into its text: “The canon, then, is not first of all a reaction to heresy. First it indirectly produces 39 Dickinson, “Canons and Canonicity,” p. 376. 40 Colby Dickinson, “The ‘Violence’ of the Canon. Revisiting Contemporary Notions of the Canonical,” Horizons, 40 (2013), pp. 1–27. 41 Lillian Robinson, “Treason our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon,” in: Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (eds.), Critical Theory since 1965, 5th ed., Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986, pp. 572–82. 42 Ibid., pp. 86–87. 43 Petra Bahr, “Canon/Canonization,” in: Kocku von Stuckrad (ed.), The Brill Dictionary of Religion, vol. 1, , rev. ed., Boston, MA: Brill, 2006, pp. 250–52, here p. 252.

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the heresy, by erecting a criterion of deviation (itself). Only then does it become the norm of repudiation.”44 This deferral of meaning is irretrievable; the excluded other remains a constant challenge to the canon’s claim of totality and exclusivity. Its very definition as and by a process of selection sets the canon up for failure. A postcolonial perspective in particular, with its focus on the constitutive character of processes of inclusion and exclusion in the epistemopolitical production of meaning and identity, is helpful in exposing this auto-deconstructivist thrust of the canonical text, as Jon Berquist has shown. He argues that [c]anons obscure other literature through their constant and already self-falsifying claim to be the only text…. Canon may attempt to delineate itself as text, but in the act of doing so it fails; it is a text of self-contradictory assertion. Although it strives to be determinate, fixed, foundational, and stable, its existence as text denies this; … Its act of constituting itself begins its process of self-destabilization.45

As an icon forged to signify stability and cohesion, the canon can then do nothing else but also display tangible traces of its constitutive instability. The corpus of scriptures carries the wounds and scars of its conception: the interpreter proceeds to the heart of the text and finds its inherent brokenness, a brokenheartedness and a heartfelt resistance familiar to postcolonial theorists. The canonical text is not a unified whole; it is not a body of literature at all. Instead, it is an assemblage held together only by the imperialist power that first created it.[46] Although it is targeted against the colonies with an intention to subdue, this can(n)on cannot fire; it is powerless to conquer because of the weakness of its seams resulting from its mode of creation.47

Berquist’s postcolonial rereading thus points to an ultimate disruption at the heart of the canon’s thrust towards unity and continuity. He is careful, though, not to simply recast the canon as an ‘icon for instability,’ which would make it redundant in its crucial function for the representation of the canonical community and, therefore, easy to dispose of. Yet, again, more is at stake in the critique of canon. Auto-deconstruction does not imply self-liquidation. Instead, Berquist points to the “vast ambiguity”48 of the canon and remaps it as 44 Ibid. 45 Jon Berquist, “Postcolonialism and Imperial Motives for Canonization,” Semeia 75 (1996), p. 22. 46 Examining the early stages of the formation of the canon of the Hebrew Bible under the Persian Empire, Berquist puts forth the argument that the canon is a product of colonization, authorized and brought into being to serve an imperialist ideology. Yet, at the same time, it was produced by the social group of colonial administrators and canonizers and is thus troublingly wedged between empire and colony. A similar argument for the colonial, imperial context of the formation of the New Testament canon is made by David Laird Dungan in Constantine’s Bible: Politics and the Making of the New Testament, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007. 47 Berquist, “Postcolonialism and Imperial Motives for Canonization,” p. 28. 48 Cf. ibid., p. 31.

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“a site of contest and conflict, … inscribed with multiple layers of ideologically invested interpretation”.49 A postcolonial reading of the canon highlights the ambiguities inscribed into the canonical text. It shines a spotlight on the ‘extracanonical shadow’ of the canon’s excluded others, traces the exclusions through which it takes shape, and exposes the ‘wounds’ of its formation. By revealing the powerful processes of meaning-making and identity negotiations in and through the canon, it captures both its thrust to define unity and stability and its simultaneous failure to do so. A postcolonial rereading thus reconceives of the canon as a sign and instrument not of stability but of the stabilization of meaning and identity. Even more to the point, in order to capture the simultaneousness of stabilization and destabilization at the heart of the canon, we should refer to it as an icon for de/stabilization. Read through a postcolonial lens, the canon becomes a material, tangible signifier of the negotiations of collective identity, which are pursued through ongoing processes of semiosis – such a postcolonial rereading reveals that the processes of identity formation and the asymmetries of power thatinform them have inscribed themselves deeply into the text. A postcolonial reconception of the canon thus shifts it from its central position of and for Christian identity to the margins of its boundaries, and unsettles Christian identity along the way. It undermines an understanding of the canon, which places the corpus of scriptures at the heart of the Christian community, where it is imagined to serve a crucial function in representing and warranting its stable tradition and social cohesion. Instead, a postcolonial approach rereads it as a sign and tool for the de/stabilization of Christian identity and thus conceives of it as a liminal phenomenon serving the definition and contestation of/at/in the boundaries of the canonical community. Through a postcolonial rereading, the canon thus becomes an icon for the interculturality of Christianity as outlined in the previous chapters of this book: it can be read as a material document of the inclusions and exclusions through which Christian identity was forged under asymmetrical relations of power. In a postcolonial reading, the canon becomes a tangible articulation of the differences that reveal the silent and silenced ‘others within’ Christian identity. As an icon for de/stabilization, the corpus of scriptures embodies the hybrid space from which the definitions of Christianity were forged through processes of differentiation. Yet, the canon is not an intercultural text per se. As I have argued in previous chapters, the deconstructive force of interculturality is not ontological but epistemological. It manifests itself as a specific way of reading, namely as a radical hermeneutics, which unsilences the constitutive contingency and formative ambiguity at the heart of all identity constructions. In line with this argument, Berquist, too, highlights that the postcolonial is an “attitude located in the interpreter rather than within the text itself.”50 The 49 Ibid., pp. 31–3331.33. 50 Ibid., p. 27.

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canon, therefore, is “neither colonizing nor decolonizing in any essentialist, ontological sense”51 but open to both a stabilizing-hegemonic and a destabilizing-subversive reading. A stabilizing reading of the canon makes it an icon of stability and cohesion for its canonical community by silencing the auto-deconstructive forces inscribed into the canonical text by its very formation. A destabilizing rereading of the canon as an icon for interculturality, on the other hand, does not question its iconic value for the canonical community, but it does emphasize that we can read and practice the canon as an icon for stability and cohesion only if we conceal the constitutive disruption at the very heart of the canonical text, and if we eclipse the deferral of meaning that allows for its constitution in the first place. In contrast, when we read the canon as an icon of de/stabilization, it can point us to the constitutive deferral of meaning that lies at the heart of its conception.

5.3 A Theology of Canon after the Cultural Turn: Sacrament of Loss What implications does this critique of the canon after the Cultural Turn have for its theological status? We saw above that, from a theological perspective, an understanding of canon, church and revelation are tightly interrelated. A theological approach to the canon not only highlights the strong hermeneutical relations between canon and community; this relation is also understood to have theological, or more precisely, revelatory significance. In a theological reading of the canon, the hermeneutical interdependence between canon and community is extended to a three-pole relation between canon, church and revelation. In the established theological narrative, the closed canon serves as an icon for stability and cohesion for the ecclesial tradition and thus warrants its soteriological effectiveness in the representation of God’s abundantly available presence. In other words, the established theological status of the canon as the sacrament of God’s abundant presence depends on reading the canon as an icon for stability. How does a postcolonial rereading of the canon as an icon for de/stabilization affect this theological interdependence? In what ways can a theological approach to the canon react to its destabilization after the Cultural Turn? Let me sketch four possible trajectories. First, there are approaches that register the canon’s historical contingency but hold on to a reading of the canon as an icon for stability and imbue its perceived cohesion and continuity with theological significance. Two prominent examples are ‘Biblical Theology’ and the ‘Canonical Approach.’52 51 Ibid., p. 31. 52 The Canonical Approach finds its basis in the premise that historical-critical methods are “theologically unsatisfactory” (John Barton, Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study, 1st ed., Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997, p. 79.). For Brevard Childs,

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Both respond to the ‘fracturing’ of the canonical text through historical critical methods with the argument that its theological import is to be found in its finalized form, or by searching for a ‘canon within the canon’ or a ‘center of Scripture’. Such a theologically stabilizing approach to the canon, however, has dire theological consequences. It is a theological interpretation of the canon that stops short of reflecting its interpretativity and thus relies on an interruption of the hermeneutical interdependence of canon, canonical community, and revelation. It mis-takes and re-places its reading of the canon for the canon’s absolute meaning, imagined to be warranted by an absolute foundation, i. e. revelation. Theologically speaking, it easily falls prey to idolatry. Berquist puts it succinctly: [T]he canon can maintain the impression of a unified whole with a single ideology (or a center, or a single ‘biblical’ or ‘canonical’ theology) only by the continuing application of powerful imperializing ideologies. In order for canonical unity to remain, the interpreter must perceive that the canon has a ‘subject’ which then organizes canonical meaning / theology / ideology around itself. The subject of the canon displaces the actual canon.53

Feminist theologians have developed critical readings of the canon that display a high sensitivity to the mechanisms of exclusion that were operative in the formation of the canon and that have since fuelled the patriarchal oppression of women. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza writes: [T]he historical selection of some writings as canonical and the exclusion of others has co-opted, silenced or marginalized those voices and visions that were not this approach represents an entirely new departure, replacing the entire historical-critical method: “I am now convinced that the relation between the historical critical study of the Bible and its theological use as religious literature within a community of faith and practice needs to be completely rethought” (Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979, p. 15). He therefore also rejects the term canonical criticism: “It implies that the concern with canon is viewed as another historical-critical technique which can take its place alongside of source criticism, form criticism, rhetorical criticism, and the like. I do not envision the approach to canon in this light. Rather, the issue at stake in canon turns on establishing a stance from which the Bible is to be read as Sacred Scripture” (Brevard S. Childs, “The Canonical Shape of the Prophetic Literature,” Interpretation 32 (1978), p. 53). Accordingly, he argues that the canon “not only serves to establish the outer boundaries of authoritative Scripture” but “forms a prism through which light from the different aspects of the Christian life is refracted” (Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible, 1st ed., Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993, p. 672). De Jonge gives a historical overview of how the historical-critical method has put the theological status of the canon under pressure. Cf. Henk J. de Jonge, “The New Testament Canon,” in Auwers and de Jonge, The Biblical Canons (see note 52). 53 Berquist, “Postcolonialism and Imperial Motives for Canonization,” p. 28. Berquist continues: “I would consider these statements to be offensive accusation of many biblical scholars and their work, if I was able to imagine any of us approaching the text without this imperializing approach, if any of us were void of metanarratives. I realize that I myself am constructing a metanarrative in competition with other imperializing ones.”

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acceptable to the dominant group which became identified as ‘orthodox.’ Thereby the canonization of texts has denied women the sacred authority of the word.54

She outlines a range of strategies deployed by feminist theologians in response to the exclusion of women from the canon. Some of these aim to expose the inherent instability of the canon that results from the patriarchal conditions of its formation; their goal is, in other words, to read the canon as an icon for stabilization by “search[ing the scriptures] for the ‘sacred coin’ of lost liberating traditions and their never realized possibilities.”55 Other critical methods, on the other hand, are geared towards transgressing the established canonical boundaries: A multi-voiced feminist hermeneutics cannot accept the exclusivist religious boundaries that are set … by the process of canonization …. [A] critical feminist theology of liberation has to be canonically transgressive and therefore eschew a biblical self-limitation…. [I]t cannot limit itself to biblical canonical writings, accept the authority claims of androcentric scriptures and traditions, or exclusively focus on the teachings of the Bible…. Consequently, a critical feminist hermeneutics does not privilege the written word but seeks to value wo/men’s traditions which are often for the most part oral.56

A feminist critique of the canon thus pivots on the exposure of canonical violence through which the canon has taken shape. Insofar as it is pursued as a push for decanonization, however, it cannot, in the end, extricate itself from the logic of stabilization of the canon that conceals rather than reveals the canon’s ultimate failure to define unambivalent meaning and identity, as Stordalen and Økland argue: This kind of discourse is in danger of confirming the assumption that the power and legitimacy of a canon is a function of qualities inherent within a canonical collection. It draws attention away from those cultural spaces where the power of the canon is manufactured and from the groups dominating those spaces. In particular, it conceals the agency of the canonical community and of the institutions and individuals in charge of curating the canon.57 54 Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, “Introduction: Women’s Sacred Scriptures,” Concilium (1998), pp. 1–4, here p. 1. 55 Ibid., p. 2. Cf. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (ed.), Searching the Scriptures, New York: Crossroad, 1997. 56 Schüssler-Fiorenza, “Introduction,” pp. 2 f. 57 Økland and Stordalen, “Canon / Canonicity / Canonization.” They continue: “A truly critical analysis of any canon would, therefore, start by investigating conditions for producing canonicity: the specific mechanisms by which a canonical group ensures that its canonical body continuously retains a privileged status. To achieve such an analysis, it would be necessary to develop a deeper understanding of typical elements of canonical ecology, i. e. the interplay and interdependence of various agents, cultural products, and conditions that cooperate in producing and reproducing a given canon and its social and political discourse.”

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Hence, when a feminist theological critique of the patriarchal canon is pursued in terms of its replacement, it exposes the established canon as an icon for stabilization of patriarchal oppression but still holds on to the stabilizing logic of the canon itself. Such a theological reading of the canon as an icon for stability, I have argued above, goes hand in hand with an interruption of the hermeneutical interdependence between canon, community and revelation. It relies on an absolutization of revelation as an external source for the mutual warranting of stability and cohesion between a canon and its community, and through this interruption, the canon and its community can become the sign and instrument of God’s abundant presence. And indeed, because feminist theological transgressions of the canon rely on an understanding of canon as an icon for stability, they can conceive of God’s presence as a liberating force as already/all readily available, now in the counter-canon, which “reclaims the power of women’s memories, words, traditions and texts as enduring heritage and sustaining bread in the struggles for liberation and transformation.”58 A postmodern reading of the canon, in contrast, explicitly zooms in on the textual instabilities within the canon. George Aichele presents such an approach. “Interested in canonical process, not as a historical series of developments, but as a semiotic and ideological mechanism,”59 he builds his argument on the presupposition, informed by postmodern semiotics, that canonicity, and therefore the theological status of the canonical texts, is not a characteristic of the texts themselves but the product and producer of practices of reception within the canonical community. He writes: [P]ostmodern semiotics holds that the meaning of any text lies, not in the text as such, but rather in the intertextual operations of reading. Meaning is what readers produce using the semiotic machines at their disposal…. every text, canonical or not, is better characterized not by a surplus but rather by the absence of meaning, an absence that must be forcibly filled from beyond the text.60

The canon, Aichele argues, is one such semiotic mechanism that produces meaning – it is “restricted and explicit intertext”61 and, therefore, “an explicit form of ideology”62 that “legitimizes certain understanding of the bible and Schüssler-Fiorenza, “Introduction. Women’s Sacred Scriptures,” p. 1. Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning, p. 8. Ibid., p. 2. George Aichele, “Canon, Ideology, and the Emergence of an Imperial Church,” in: Einar Thomassen (ed.), Canon and Canonicity: The Formation and Use of Scripture, 1st ed., Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2010, pp. 45–66, here p. 44. 62 Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning, 17. 16. Aichele describes ideology as follows: “Ideology controls the texts that you select, the ways that you read them, and the reality that you perceive…. Like all ideologies, the canon does not reflect some external, objective reality more or less well, but rather it creates reality, or better, it provides a filter or lens through individuals and communities perceive reality.” 58 59 60 61

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delegitimizes others…. The purpose of the canon is both to identify the extent of the authoritative texts and to limit the range of appropriate meanings that may be ascribed to them.”63 It is, therefore, “an exercise of power, the power to control the meaning of the scriptures.”64 As “an institution that … controls the reading of … diverse and ambiguous books,”65 the canon addresses a community’s “desire for identity, for power, and for meaning.”66 Aichele’s postmodern reading of the canon thus understands the canon as a sign and instrument for the stabilization of meaning, identity and power, and is particularly interested in instances where the canon’s control of meaning breaks down. After all, “all actual canons, including the Bible, inevitably fail to satisfy this desire for meaning. Canonical control fails because of ‘unlimited semiosis’, in other words, because signifying systems always exceed any possible level of control.”67 Thus, while the canon does have very powerful effects on how its components are read … [it is] a symptom of … a desire that can never be fulfilled by any physical text. … The desire for canon is the desire for a text that interprets itself…. [But] no text or group of texts can interpret itself…. The canon arises from the desire to end the ceaseless demand for a meaningful written text by completing the uncompletable story…. [It is] the desire for a complete and unambiguous message, a desire that can never be fulfilled by any physical text.68

As Richard Walsh states, Aichele’s postmodern understanding of the canon as an ideological machine for the stabilization of meaning has led him to clarif[y] a choice between two, rival hermeneutics: (1) the use of words to fill in blanks (in texts; between ourselves and reality) with ideology or meaning or (2) the use of words to structure emptiness and to refer to holes … to point to the fictional quality of our stories, ideologies, and myths.69

Aichele opts for the second choice; once he has exposed the stabilizing force of the canon, he proceeds to perform destabilizing readings of the canonical texts that interrupt the controlling power of the canon.70 This strategy is based on a sharp distinction between irrevocably unstable texts and the ideological stability of the canon: “It is necessary to distinguish the canon machine as an entirety from the texts that are its parts. The biblical canon is intertextual, but it is also metatextual.”71 Therefore, a “counter-reading, or ‘reading against the 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Aichele, “Canon, Ideology, and the Emergence of an Imperial Church,” p. 47. Ibid. Ibid. Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning, p. 2. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 24. 16. Richard Walsh, “Imagine there’s no Canon,” The Bible and Critical Theory 6 (2010), pp. 39.2. Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning, pp. 107–93. Ibid., p. 10.

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grain’, involves a violent transfer or inversion of context, liberating the text form one owner’s ideology and claiming it for another ideology. … We return once more to the separation of text from ideology.”72 Aichele’s goal, then, is to ‘snatch’ the biblical texts from the control of the canon: As I have become more aware of Christianity’s claim to ownership of the biblical texts, I have wanted to dispute that claim, to ‘steal’ the texts and allow them to sink or float on their own in the secular cultural currents of our times, just like any noncanonical text does.73

Walsh summarizes Aichele’s approach thus: We imagine there is no canon or read that way, following Aichele, by reading biblical texts fantastically. The fantastic is Aichele’s shorthand, following Tzvetan Todorov, for textual undecidability; for a reader’s hesitation about metaphysical questions of identity, textual realism, and neat separations of fact and fiction. … The fantastic, then, is a monkey wrench in the canonical/ideological machine. It leads us away from the ideological/institutional limit of a text to its material stuff (hfflle¯)…. To strive deliberately for the fantastic, we must liberate a text from the institutional certainties and controls like the canon; or, more positively, we must concentrate on the hfflle¯ (the stuff) of a text; upon a text’s inevitable distance from ideology and meaning. As insiders always know what a text means because of and within their institution’s discourse-systems, such fantastic readings are necessarily those of outsiders, thieves, or heretics – Aichele uses all these terms – or, more simply, those of counter-readers.74

Aichele’s postmodern critique thus does ‘fantastic’ work to expose the canon as an instrument of stabilization of meaning, identity and power; for Aichele, the destabilization of the canon, however, takes place outside or from beyond canonical boundaries, and as a destruction of canonical boundaries. Unlike Berquist’s postcolonial rereading of the canon, Aichele does not hold to the simultaneity of stabilization and destabilization at the heart of the canon.75 72 73 74 75

George Aichele, Jesus Framed, Biblical Limits, London, New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 157. Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning, pp. 11 f. Walsh, “Imagine there’s no Canon,” pp. 39.1 f. This disjunction in Aichele’s approach between the stabilizing forces of the canon and extracanonical instability / destabilization becomes palpable in the comparison he draws between pre-canonical Christianity and the “postmodern world, [in which] the canon machine grinds to a halt” (Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning, p. 102.): “In postmodernism as in early Christianity, there is a ‘pure and random play’ of texts … about which there is no consensus, no community of taste” (ibid., p. 103). Just as “heresy is chronologically prior to orthodoxy” (ibid., p. 99.), so textual instability is prior to the stabilizing control of the canon – outside the canon, there is ‘original’ hermeneutical instability; the canon is (an attempt at) total(alitarian) control, interrupted only by the ambiguity of the canonical texts, not by any conceived instability of the canon itself. Further, because Aichele conceives of canon solely as a hegemonic instrument, he can neither accommodate subversive forces within the canon nor take seriously the fact that any (also pre- and extracanonical) interpretation is marked and informed by asymmetries of power rather than simply a ‘pure and random play’ of texts.

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Rather, he sees the canon solely as a hegemonic instrument that imposes nonambivalence, cohesion, and continuity onto disparate and ambiguous texts, while resistance to and subversion of the hegemonic control of canon come from outside. Through a counter-canonical reading of the texts whose irresolvable ambiguity can never be fully brought under control by the canon, in a move that strikingly resembles the exclusionary logic of the canon as an icon for stability, Aichele’s postmodern critique of the canon relegates ambiguity and alternative readings to the realm of the extracanonical. Ultimately, then, Aichele’s exposure of the canon as an instrument of stabilization clings to an understanding of the canon as an icon for stability that obscures the self-destabilizing forces at the very conception of the canon itself. And again, the theological relevance of the canon depends on its reading as an icon for stability – “continu[ing] to regard [him]self as a theologian, albeit a postecclesiastical theologian,”76 Aichele discovers the life-giving, creative signs of divine presence outside the stability of the canon. it is the alternative interpretations of the extracanonical community of counterreaders that “create living space by negotiation and exploiting difference, not by acquiescing to the deadly sameness of an imperial (political, ecclesiastical, or academic) system.” While “the canon helps turn [ambivalent, unstable] parables into the [monolithic] secret of the kingdom – that is, the realm controlled by the [totalitarian] god of Christianity,”77 a destabilization of the canon from (those) outside “open[s] up … new spaces for thought and life.”78 In sum, albeit very different in methodological approach and theological/ ecclesiological orientation, these three theologies of the canon rely on the same hermeneutical strategy: they all register the historical contingency of the canon, which makes it an icon for stabilization rather than stability. In outlining the theological status of the canon, however, all three depend on an understanding of the canon as an icon for stability. This is particularly clear for the canonical approach that explicitly locates the theological relevance of the canon in its finalized form, but it is also true for feminist and postmodern theological rereadings; their critique of the canon as a hegemonic sign and instrument of stabilization, too, ultimately succumbs to a master narrative of canonical stability. only that allows them to locate the representation of God’s presence outside the established canon, in the feminist counter-canon or the extra-canonical/post-ecclesiastical community of postmodern counter-readers. In other words, even these critical rereadings of the canon as an icon for epistemopolitical stabilization resort to a reading of the canon as an icon for stability for charting its theological status. Their theological reading of the canon does not approach the canon as an icon for interculturality but depends 76 Ibid., p. 12. 77 George Aichele and Richard G. Walsh (eds.), Those Outside: Noncanonical Readings of Canonical Gospels, London: T & T Clark, 2006, p. xiii. 78 Ibid., p. xiv.

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on a silencing of the auto-deconstructive forces at the heart of the canonical text. A theological reading of the canon that unsilences the interculturality at its heart takes a different approach. The crucial question is this: Can we, and, if so, how, attribute theological significance to the Christian canon once we have begun to read it as an icon for de/stabilization? Once the constitutive deferral of meaning at its heart has been exposed? Once its interculturality has thus come to the fore? Once it can be subjected to a theological master narrative of unity and stability only with utmost hermeneutical effort, which I have termed the “silencing of interculturality” in this book? Once the theological master narrative of unity and stability has lost its status as the sole hermeneutical lens for reading the canon and ecclesial tradition to their deconstructive rereadings after the Cultural Turn, the relationship between the historically contingent development of canon and tradition and their normative theological interpretation is in need of recalibration. Such an unsilencing of the interculturality of the canon entails a great theological risk: while the established theological approaches to the canon require a powerful hermeneutical effort in order to silence the auto-deconstructive forces at the heart of the canonical text, the unsilencing of these forces calls for profound theological reorientations. The approaches to the canon discussed above ultimately refrain from such a theological reinterpretation. Once the canon is no longer subjectable to the established theological narrative of unity and stability that buttresses a revelation theology of God’s abundant presence, it is cast aside, no longer being considered an adequate theological resource. As we have seen above, however, these calls for a transgression of the canon do not ultimately extricate themselves from a reading of the canon as an icon for stability, and thus ultimately fall short in developing a theological response to the deconstruction of the canon after the Cultural Turn. A theological reading of the canon as an icon for interculturality, in contrast, seeks to locate the theological relevance of the canon ‘in its finalized form’ without subordinating its auto-deconstructive forces to a master narrative of stability. It aims to resist a concealment of the simultaneity of stabilization and destabilization at the heart of the canon and instead strives to imbue it with theological meaning. A theological reading of the canon as an icon for interculturality, in other words, takes the historical contingency of the canon as a starting point for conceptualizing its theological status. Colby Dickinson develops such an approach, starting from the observation that “perhaps the issue that divides theological thought today [is this]: how is one to suture the field of biblical studies today with theology’s more systematic and ethical elements?”79 Dickinson confronts this issue head-on, arguing that canons are “contaminated from the start by their contingency – though whether they or those canonical subjects formed by them recognize such contamination is another 79 Dickinson, “Canons and Canonicity,” p. 387.

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issue, and one whose significance I seek to further address.”80 More specifically, and in line with the reading of the canon as an icon for de/ stabilization I have developed above, Dickinson holds that the canonical is a contingent “site of power … upon which, and with which, cultural negotiations take place.”81 The canon “becomes a sign of stability … by creating heresy at the same time as it gives birth to itself, an odd proposition, but one which could be said to guarantee the canon’s autonomy in a certain sense.”82 The canon thus “introduces a fundamental division into culture, one which in effect could be said to generate a system of cultural significations and thereby create the apparently ‘non-canonical’ or marginalized elements upon its fringes.”83 Canonization, therefore, is an irreducibly powerful and violent act – “the canonical form in effect does promote a certain violence of introducing a fundamental division enacted by a monotheistic worldview, though not one that can simply be replaced or discarded.”84 Drawing on the writings of Sigmund Freud, Jan Assmann and Ren Girard, Dickinson argues that the violence of its contingent history has inscribed itself irrevocably onto the canonical text: According to Assmann, the revealing of the centrality of the canonical form to western religious and political identity has been a project of the ‘unthought’ which need not arise from beneath the surface of the text, as Freud himself sought to indicate through his depiction of the ‘unconscious’ of a text. This is the case for Assmann because texts dealing with historical representations … actually reveal their truth on the surface. As he elaborates: ‘… The truth can be found in the texts themselves. They speak of memory, remembrance, forgetting, and the repressed, of trauma and guilt. In order to uncover this network of meanings we have no need to practice the hermeneutics of distrust; nor need we read these texts against the grain. We need only listen to them attentively’.85

With Girard, Dickinson therefore calls for “a fuller and deepened hermeneutic, which combines fundamental insights from [both Freud and Assmann] – that is, … which seeks what is repressed by reading what is already on the surface of the canonical text … as a key for understanding the … violences, latent within the processes of canonicity.”86

80 81 82 83 84

Ibid., p. 370. Ibid., p. 381. Ibid., p. 376. Dickinson, “The ‘Violence’ of the Canon,” p. 16. Ibid., pp. 16. 14 f. Dickinson develops this argument in critical response to approaches whose critique of the violent exclusions performed by the canon lead to a call for its abrogation or supersession with canons free from violence. 85 Ibid., p. 13. Dickinson quotes Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies (= Cultural Memory in the Present), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006, pp. 51 f. 86 Dickinson, “The ‘Violence’ of the Canon,” p. 19.

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It is Dickinson’s central argument that this “radical hermeneutics”87 that “unveil[s] the unconscious of a text at the level of its readability”88 has profound theological significance. He holds that an exposure of traces of violence within the canonical text has revelatory quality: [T]he stories of marginalization and repression will have already been present in the stories of the canonical text as stories which themselves reveal the violences of repression. In this fashion, revelation becomes structurally bound to the canonical form itself and as such truly becomes an ongoing well-spring of justice found in canonical scriptural forms.89

A repression of canonical violence within the canon, and of its contingent formation through a history of exclusion, in contrast, turns out to make a claim for transcendent authority in such a way that its representation of revelation amounts, in fact, to idolatry: For the canonical form, transcendence is achieved through its immanentization, through its becoming-immanent only to itself. … When a canon need only refer to itself in order to legitimate its … authority, it has effectively transcended its historical framework through its own immanent economic activity. Its focal point is now its transcendent, univocal, exclusivist tendency, and it seeks therefore to efface (or repress) its immanent, historical, contingent, inclusive and pluralistic origins.90

For Dickinson, then, an exposure of and to the contingent and violent history of (theological) knowledge production, as it becomes tangible in the canon, can become a resource for a re-conceptualization of theology after the Cultural Turn: Making [these contingencies] as transparent as possible allows us to reduce (though perhaps not eliminate) the violence caused by the subject formation and to expose the violent origins … as they intend to turn the necessary processes of creating … distinctions into a totalitarian practice (akin to forms of fundamentalism). If, then, the failures of representation are the only genuine way to present anything, it is by turning to those canonical forms that admit of their own failures, that side with the victims and oppressed of history, and that denounce other more violent canonical forms, that we might begin to reconceive the tasks that lie at the heart of our most basic philosophical and theological gestures in the present moment.91 87 Colby Dickinson, Between the Canon and the Messiah: The Structure of Faith in Contemporary Continental Thought, Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 117–211. 88 Dickinson, “The ‘Violence’ of the Canon,” p. 26. 89 Ibid., p. 3. 90 Dickinson, “Canons and Canonicity,” p. 387. Dickinson continues: “this process of achieving transcendence through a complete immanentization of a text makes its vulnerability to history so severe.” 91 Dickinson, Between the Canon and the Messiah, pp. 204 f.

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Hence, by reading the exposure of the counter-canonical shadow at the heart at the canon as a transformative thrust towards justice, Dickinson attributes theological significance to the canon in its finalized form – the canon as an icon for de/stabilization becomes a locus theologicus. As indicated above, this rereading of the canon necessitates profound theological reorientations. In Dickinson’s theological reading, the canon is, indeed, still conceived as a “materialization of revelation”92 but only insofar as it serves to represent its excluded others; revelation takes place where and when the canon comes into view as a representation of a contingent and violent history of identity negotiations. With Dickinson, we can thus tie revelation to a radical hermeneutics that interrupts the hegemonic logic of the canon as an icon for stability and creates a “division of division itself.”93 Such an understanding of revelation as a radical critique of strong identity politics implies that revelation remains structurally bound to strong identity politics; it is supplement rather than origin. Reframing revelation as radical critique thus undermines the conception of causative and temporal linearity between revelation, canon and canonical community on which strong theological identity politics bases itself: an understanding of revelation as radical critique interrupts the interruption of the hermeneutical circle through which established theological approaches conceive of revelation as an external foundation for the interpretative work of the church. Instead, it brings the hermeneutical interdependence between canon, canonical community and revelation theologically to the fore. In a theological rereading of the canon as an icon for de/stabilization, revelation does not present itself for representation in the canon but becomes present through the radically hermeneutical work of the canonical community. In the canon as an icon for de/stabilization, then, the church is not presented with revelation per se, but with the radically hermeneutical task to read the canon as a re-representation of revelation: There is … an ethical dimension unveiled – or revealed – within the nature of the canonical form … which elicits our theological response as communities of a (sacred) canon. In this sense, the canonical form must not be harnessed to justify dominant oppressive cultures, unjust hierarchical form, or other totalitarian powers, though it undoubtedly can be utilized to do so. It must be seen as a guarantor of the voices of the marginalized throughout history if it is to express itself as a site of truth, expose the falsity of a violence-oriented society or become a site of revelation.94

Revelation, then, is never simply present in the canon but is always yet to come through an interruption within the canon. As the ‘re-presentation’ of the extra92 Cf. Wenzel, Das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil, p. 168. 93 Dickinson, Between the Canon and the Messiah, 203 and passim. Ibid., p. 31: with reference to Giorgio Agamben. 94 Dickinson, “The ‘Violence’ of the Canon,” p. 26.

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canonical shadow, revelation presents itself as an absence within the canon, an absence that has the potential to preserve the marginalized figure at its core through its fidelity to a sense of messianic justice that is always increasingly on the rise, always to-come, forever opening itself to the voices of the marginalized within who do not threaten to undo the canon so much as to offer a possibility of ‘less violence’ being done in the canon’s signification of cultural subjects.95

Crucial to this theological rereading of the canon as an icon for de/ stabilization is Dickinson’s argument that the canonical form is open to both a hegemonic-stabilizing reading that silences the ‘other within,’ and a radically hermeneutical subversive-destabilizing reading that exposes the canon’s contingent and violent history of formation through exclusion. It is, hence, a radical hermeneutics of the canon which makes it a site of revelation, not an intrinsic characteristic of the text itself. In fact, as Dickinson has pointed out, the canon can also be read in such a way that it prevents the re-presentation of revelation. He therefore differentiates between a “truthful” and a “falsified” canonical form,96 and by thus viewing the difference between these two approaches to canonical hermeneutics through an evaluative lens, it can become the normative foundation for his reformulation of theology as indicated above. It is thus a specific “use”97 of the canon that makes it theologically significant – the text itself remains profoundly ambiguous and never becomes “safe.”98 At its heart, after all, is a simultaneity of stabilization 95 Ibid. 96 Falsified canonical forms produce “a governance closer to mechanisms of totalitarian control, and promoting a movement toward sameness that eradicates all textual diversity (its exclusive tendency).” Truthful canonical forms remain “antihegemonic” in their general outlook and include diversity as inherent to their basic character (its inclusive tendency). Dickinson, “Canons and Canonicity,” p. 381. 97 E. g., ibid., p. 371: “What such analysis points us toward is the inherently fractured identity that canonical forms produce and that can function culturally in at least two significant and contrasting ways…: the more or less exclusive tendencies of canons.” There is still a conceptual ambiguity running through Dickinson’s approach, which threatens to undermine his radically hermeneutical theological relecture of the canon. This ambiguity surfaces when a line is drawn not between two distinct canonical hermeneutics, but between canonical texts: there are, Dickinson argues, “some canons [that] welcome their non-canonical counterparts within the same archive (or particular tradition) while others support an institution that would suppress, distort or discard them” (Dickinson, “The ‘Violence’ of the Canon,” p. 3). Or again, there are “those canons which seek to conceal the violence they perform – and thus multiply its effects (and aftereffects) – or those which seek to disclose their proximity to it – and thereby offer an ever increasing sense of justice a chance to flourish instead“ (ibid., p. 4). 98 Cf. Marion Grau, Of Divine Economy: Refinancing Redemption, New York: T & T Clark International, 2004, p. 164. A recent volume of Quaestiones Disputatae brings together readings of the canon by New Testament scholars, which, according to the editors, present “the canon as the reflection of a theology that not only allows for the existence of differing positions next to each other but even

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and destabilization, which irretrievably defers its meaning. Reading the canon as an icon for de/stabilization thus profoundly impacts its theological status: it still remains a sign and instrument for the ‘re-presentation’ of revelation. In established theological approaches, this has implied an understanding of the canon as sacrament of God’s abundant presence, given to be preserved in the canon and through the canonical community. In contrast, when we understand it as an icon for de/stabilization, the canon “must be read as the figural swerve that radically defers origin,”99 as Bill Readings has put it. The deferral of meaning at the heart of the canon translates theologically into an understanding of revelation as supplementary rather than original. The corpus of scriptures, then, embodies God’s presence as an absence. When we read the canon as an icon for de/stabilization, we have to learn to understand it theologically as a sacrament of irretrievable loss.

5.4 Conclusions By way of conclusion, the rereading of the canon in this chapter encapsulates the argument I have been developing through the course of this book. It unfolds the book’s epistemological and methodological approach to Intercultural Theology by following its twofold line of argument. First, it has outlined an understanding of the canon after the Cultural Turn. If we view the canon through the lens of postcolonial theories, we can read it as documentation and a tool of identity negotiations that forge identity through powerful processes of inclusions and exclusions and thereby produce a profound ambiguity at the heart of each identity construction – from a postcolonial perspective, the canon can be understood as an embodiment of hybridity, as an icon for interculturality as defined in chapter 3. This reconceptualized understanding of the canon has then been brought to bear on a theological understanding of the canon. As we have seen, established theological approaches to the canon have to rely on a silencing of the interculturality that lies at the heart of the canon. Only this hermeneutical effort of concealing the hybridity of Christian identity, materialized in the canon, allows them to understand the canon and ecclesial tradition as the preservation of God’s abundant presence. An unsilencing of the interculturality of the canon, on the other hand, triggers profound theological reconfigurations that deprive theology of revelation as an absolute foundation an open documentation of theological controversy.” Martin Ebner, Gerd Haefner and Konrad Huber, “Vorwort,” in: Martin Ebner, Gerd Haefner and Konrad Huber (eds.), Kontroverse Stimmen im Kanon (= Quaestiones disputatae 279), Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2016, p. 7. 99 Bill Reading, “Canon and On: From Concept to Figure,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57 (1989), p. 169.

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and instead highlight the radically hermeneutical circle between revelation and ecclesial tradition. This theological rereading of the canon after the Cultural Turn thus allows us to summarily point to central aspects of the approach to Intercultural Theology as I have developed it in this book. It is crucial here to see that I do not understand Intercultural Theology as a new theological discipline that focuses on recently emerging processes of globalization and pluralization within World Christianity. Instead, I suggest framing Intercultural Theology as a destabilizing rereading of the Christian tradition whose goal it is to pave the way for new theological epistemologies that bridge the gulf between critical readings of Christian tradition after the Cultural Turn and established patterns of its theological interpretation. Introducing the canon of scriptures as an example of Intercultural Theology, therefore, should by no means suggest that church and theology have already fully implemented the method of Intercultural Theology. Instead, it demonstrates how profoundly unsettling Intercultural Theology can be for established theological approaches, if we resist the temptation to ‘pacify’ its critical input by outsourcing it into a (marginal) new theological discipline, and instead apply it to theology’s core. Such a ‘disciplining’ of Intercultural Theology would ultimately fall short of the original vision of its founders who clearly saw that the irruption of culturally different Christianities unsettles the established theological paradigm.100 With Marcella Althaus, we can argue that such an endeavor would complement ‘traditional’ theology rather than disrupt its epistemological framework.101 This compartmentalization would effectively conceal the contingent perspectives of all other theological disciplines taught and researched in the European academe and would thus become a powerful aid to their universalization. Reflecting on her experiences as a student in the Netherlands, Wietske de Jong-Kumru has pointed to this dynamic: [T]he theological curriculum [and] the library … [were] so designed that we learned all about biblical studies, systematic theology and practical theology first, before we also examined intercultural, interreligious, and feminist perspectives. As if the prior were not a ‘perspective’.… This separation of dominant and alternative voices disturbed me. How could so-called contextual theologies ever truly make a difference, if their marginal role in the curriculum only confirmed their lesser status? … Underlying the separation of Western theology from other perspectives was a colonial mindset that had a complex history and a continuing legacy.102 100 Werner Ustorf, “The Cultural Origins of ‘Intercultural Theology’,” Mission Studies 25 (2008), p. 237. 101 Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics, London, New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 6. 102 Wietske de Jong, Postcolonial Feminist Theology: Enacting Cultural, Religious, Gender and Sexual Differences in Theological Reflection 16, Berlin, Münster, Vienna, Zürich, London: Lit Verlag, 2013, pp. xi–ii.

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There is a powerful relation between the institutional disciplining of Intercultural Theology, its simultaneous epistemological marginalization, and the regeneration of established power/knowledge-regimes in the Christian tradition. In short, understanding Intercultural Theology as an independent discipline can ultimately reinforce the hegemonic systems of thought of the established theological discourse. If, however, we pursue Intercultural Theology as a radical critique of Christian tradition, as indicated above in the theological rereading of the canon after the Cultural Turn, we aim to expose these power differentials in the production of theological knowledge. The scope of intercultural theologizing will thus change. With Robert Heaney we can argue that within such a radically hermeneutical paradigm, theological reflection between culturally different Christianities no longer aims for a panopticon of the polycentric formations of global Christianity.103 Instead, it manifests itself through a destabilizing effect: “For example, when reading theology written by African scholars, theologians will not so much ‘adopt’ that subject position but will rather begin to understand such theology … as a means to a more critical appreciation of their own tradition and/or method.” As we have seen, such a critical re-reading has profoundly unsettling effects – it does not ‘only’ critique the hegemonic patterns of Eurocentric theology but also affects the epistemological foundations of the Christian faith. A theological reflection that follows through with a power analysis of the Christian tradition discovers an ambivalence at its very core – forged in an uneven struggle between hegemonic and subversive narratives, its “texts remain complicated … and can never become ‘safe’.”104 “The challenge is,” as Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider put it, “how to understand [this constitutive contingency] theologically.”105 It is by means of such a radically hermeneutical interrogation of the whole Christian tradition that Intercultural Theology can live up to its original intention of reflecting on the cultural particularity of any theology. If we resist the temptation to outsource Intercultural Theology into an independent discipline and instead perform it as a critical rereading across the theological canon, we can engage in a theological reflection that takes account of the cultural contingency of all theology, exposed through the cultural plurality within Christianity. 103 For an example of such an approach to Intercultural Theology as a ‘meta-discipline’ that catalogues analyses and evaluates contextual theologies, cf. Henning Wrogemann, Lehrbuch Interkulturelle Theology / Missionswissenschaft, 3 vols., Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2012–2015. Cf. my critique in: Judith Gruber, “Intercultural Theology as a (Post)colonial Project? Reflections from Central Europe,” Interreligious Studies and Intercultural Theology 1 (2017), pp. 105–11. 104 Grau, Of Divine Economy, p. 164. 105 Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider, “Introduction,” in Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation, eds. Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, New York: Routledge, 2011, pp. 1–15, here p. 6.

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Index of Names and Subjects

Absence 70, 72, 86, 89 f., 93 f., 96–98, 101, 114–117, 120 f., 123–127, 153, 161 f. Accommodation 12, 20–23, 27, 30 f., 34 Acculturation 31 f. Alterity 18, 20 f., 24, 35, 50, 95, 110 f. Ambivalence 62 f., 97, 101, 109, 113, 117, 120–122, 124, 128, 156, 164 Bhabha, Homi 51, 62, 69 f., 72–75, 91, 116, 120, 124 f., 128 Binary 20, 59–61, 69, 71, 78 f., 85, 118, 121 Border 9, 20, 23, 25, 61 f., 65 f., 70, 73, 97, 111 f., 117, 122 Canon 13, 24, 61, 133–136, 138–164 Catholicity 27, 33, 37 f., 48, 68, 81, 115 f. Chenu, Dominique 93 Christendom 11, 15, 102, 104, 130 Church 9 f., 12–17, 19–27, 30–34, 37–39, 41, 43, 45, 47–49, 73, 75 f., 79–81, 90–93, 96 f., 99–108, 112–123, 126 f., 133–140, 150, 153 f., 160, 163 Clifford, James 10, 65–67, 69 Colonialism 14, 20, 23 f., 42, 49 f., 56–60 Conflict 15, 26, 68, 78, 84 f., 128, 149 Contextuality / contextual 11 f., 14, 25–30, 34–36, 38–40, 42, 46–50, 54, 56, 83, 119, 130, 163 f. Contextual Theology 26 Contingency 10–13, 30, 35, 45, 49–51, 60, 81, 85, 87–91, 94 f., 97 f., 101, 113, 116–118, 122–124, 129 f., 135–138, 149 f., 156 f., 164 Crisis 23, 97 f., 102, 106–108, 110, 113 f., 116, 140 Criterion / criteriology 39, 42, 44 f., 78, 98, 106, 112 f., 117, 121, 148

Critique 10, 28 f., 34 f., 42, 45, 51–53, 57, 59–61, 67, 73 f., 81, 86–88, 93, 95–98, 107, 116, 118, 122, 124, 128, 132, 147 f., 150, 152 f., 155 f., 158, 160, 164 Cultural anthropology 56, 63 f., 73 Cultural studies 12, 14, 22, 31 f., 34, 46 f., 53–55, 68 f., 73, 141 Cultural Turn 7, 10–14, 22, 34, 49, 53–56, 63–65, 68, 70, 72–75, 80 f., 97, 102, 116–118, 123 f., 126 f., 133, 140, 150, 157, 159, 162–164 Culture 7, 11 f., 15, 18–24, 27–34, 37 f., 40–43, 45–48, 50 f., 54–57, 59 f., 62–75, 91, 95, 99, 105, 110, 113, 120, 124–126, 128 f., 140 f., 143, 146, 158, 160 Decolonization 25–27, 30, 46, 49 f., 58 f. Deconstruction 10 f., 49, 51 f., 55 f., 60, 62, 64, 67, 73, 98, 118, 122, 148, 157 Dickinson, Colby 146 f., 157–161 Difference 12 f., 18 f., 22, 24, 26 f., 36, 40–44, 48–51, 53–55, 58 f., 62 f., 69–72, 75, 77–79, 81, 86, 91, 93–95, 97, 100 f., 103 f., 106, 109–111, 114, 117 f., 120–122, 125–128, 130 f., 143 f., 149, 156, 161, 163 Differentiation 52, 55, 62, 66, 69 f., 72, 75, 77, 91, 110 f., 114, 116, 122, 124, 126, 132, 149 Discipline 11, 14, 24, 39 f., 56, 73, 128 f., 132, 140, 163 f. Discourse 10, 23–26, 30, 35 f., 40, 42, 45, 49–53, 57, 60–62, 65, 68 f., 71, 74–76, 78–81, 85, 90, 92, 98, 100, 103–110, 112, 114, 116 f., 120, 127–131, 136, 152, 155, 164 Displacement 13, 59, 79, 110, 112–115, 120–123, 126

194

Index of Names and Subjects

EATWOT 22, 26–29, 35 Ecclesiology 17, 20, 22 f., 38, 96, 113, 134 Effacement 42, 84, 89, 94, 97, 99–101, 110, 113, 115 f. Epistemology / epistemological 11, 13, 22 f., 27, 41, 50, 53–60, 70, 72 f., 81, 94 f., 98, 102, 115, 117 f., 123–125, 128, 135, 149, 162–164 Epistemopolitics / epistemopolitical 60 f., 147 f., 156 Essence / essential 9–11, 19, 21–23, 26, 59, 64, 71, 74–76, 98 f., 101, 105, 112, 121 f., 129, 131 f. Europe 7, 14, 18, 25, 36, 42, 50 f., 74, 164 Event 11–13, 42, 55, 80–90, 92–103, 109, 112–118, 120, 122, 124, 126, 138, 141 f. Eventualization 12, 86, 96, 99, 121 Exclusion 10, 14, 34, 45, 61 f., 66, 71, 74, 76, 91, 113, 116 f., 120, 122 f., 128–132, 146–149, 151 f., 158 f., 161 f. Foucault, Michel 12 f., 67 f., 86 f., 89, 95 f., 98 f., 101 f., 106, 110, 116 Friedli, Richard 25, 36 f., 44–46 Geertz, Clifford 27, 54 f., 63–65 Gospel 11 f., 16–18, 20 f., 23, 26 f., 29–35, 38, 42, 47 f., 75, 80–82, 99, 112, 130, 139, 144, 156 Hermeneutics 20, 23 f., 28, 30, 36, 39–42, 44, 52, 56, 73, 82–85, 88, 90, 92, 95 f., 129–132, 144, 152, 154, 158, 161 Hoff, Gregor 7, 89, 94, 96, 118–120, 124 Hollenweger, Walter 25, 36 f., 40 f. Homogeneity 62, 116–118, 120–123, 128 Hybridity 11, 22, 62 f., 71, 73–75, 116, 120, 162 Identity 9–14, 18, 22–24, 26–30, 33–35, 38, 44–52, 54–56, 59, 61–81, 91, 112, 116–133, 135, 137, 140–142, 146–149, 152, 154 f., 158, 160–162 Incarnation 12 f., 31–33, 45, 88 f., 92–97, 101 f., 113, 116 f., 119 f., 122–124, 127, 136 Inculturation 27, 30–34, 47

Interculturality / intercultural 7 f., 12–14, 19 f., 22–24, 26, 37, 39 f., 42–50, 56, 70–72, 75, 79, 116–118, 120–129, 131–133, 149 f., 156 f., 162–164 Intercultural Theology 11 f., 14 f., 25, 35–37, 39–47, 49, 56, 70, 97, 116, 127–129, 132 f., 162–164 Interculturation 42, 47 f., 126 Interpretation 9 f., 12–15, 17, 26 f., 30, 41 f., 44 f., 55, 64, 66, 69, 71, 78, 80–90, 93–97, 99–102, 112–114, 134 f., 137 f., 142, 144, 149, 151, 155–157, 163 Interpretativity 12, 45, 83, 85 f., 88 f., 91 f., 95 f., 99, 113, 117 f., 120, 126, 136, 151 Irruption 27, 35, 163 Jesus Christ 11 f., 80 f., 83, 89, 93 f., 97–99, 114, 136 Lieu, Judith 10, 51 f., 60, 75–79 Loss 13, 19, 98, 101–105, 109, 117, 122, 126, 133, 139, 150, 162 Margull, Jochen 25, 36 f. Missiology 11 f., 14–16, 18–21, 23–25, 27, 35–37, 49, 73 Mission 14–21, 23–25, 29, 31 f., 36, 41 f., 44 f., 47–49, 73, 163 Narrative 12–14, 29, 35, 50–52, 58–61, 67, 71–74, 76, 96, 107, 109, 116–118, 120, 122 f., 127–139, 145, 150, 156 f., 164 Negotiation 13, 22, 26, 46, 53, 55, 62, 67 f., 71, 73, 75 f., 81, 87, 122 f., 128, 133, 142, 149, 156, 158, 160, 162 Normativity 11, 30, 32, 45, 119 f., 123, 142 Ohm, Thomas 17, 19, 21 Orient / Orientalism 61 Other 7, 9–13, 15 f., 18–24, 27 f., 31–48, 50–52, 54–59, 61–67, 69–82, 84–91, 94–97, 100–105, 107–126, 128–135, 137 f., 142 f., 146–152, 154, 156 f., 159–163 Particularity 11–13, 29 f., 33–35, 38–42, 46, 48 f., 52, 54 f., 75, 81, 85, 88, 90–92,

Index of Names and Subjects 100, 111–114, 117, 121, 125 f., 136, 164 Plurality 11, 14, 20, 23, 26 f., 30, 34 f., 37–39, 43 f., 46 f., 49 f., 75 f., 81, 90, 97, 99–101, 106 f., 114 f., 117–119, 124–129, 133, 139, 164 Postcolonial Studies 47, 51, 56 f., 61, 70, 117, 146 Postmodern 46, 53, 67, 70, 73, 97, 99, 118, 126, 153–156 Power 13, 19, 28 f., 34, 42, 44 f., 47, 50 f., 55–58, 60–62, 66–69, 71, 83, 86 f., 91 f., 98, 103, 105 f., 108, 121, 130, 147–149, 152–155, 158, 160, 164 Presence 12 f., 33, 36, 85 f., 89 f., 92–98, 101, 104, 108 f., 114, 116–124, 126 f., 133 f., 136, 138–140, 150, 153, 156 f., 162 Radical Hermeneutics 13, 52, 80, 89, 95 f., 99, 116, 123, 149, 159–161 Representation 44, 52, 61, 63–66, 68, 70 f., 97 f., 101 f., 105–108, 110–114, 116, 118, 122, 125 f., 128, 134, 138, 146–148, 150, 156, 158–160 Revelation 12 f., 22 f., 33, 38, 80, 82, 85, 88–92, 94–97, 100 f., 116 f., 120–122, 126 f., 134–139, 145, 150 f., 153, 157, 159–163 Ricoeur, Paul 12, 50, 81–90, 116, 119 Rupture 13, 76, 81, 83, 87, 89 f., 93–95, 97, 99, 101–103, 106–108, 117, 119, 124–126 Sacrament 13, 17, 105, 113 f., 117 f., 127, 133, 140, 150, 162 Said, Edward 43, 61 f., 88, 95, 103 f., 116, 158 Schmidlin, Josef 15–17, 19–21, 24 Schreiter, Robert 27–29, 37, 40, 46, 63, 68, 74

195

Schweitzer, Albert 93 Second Vatican Council 28, 37, 92, 96 Semiotics 53, 63, 140, 142, 153 Silencing/silenced 9, 14, 43, 51, 60, 63, 71–74, 91, 107, 109, 116, 118, 120–122, 125, 128, 131 f., 137, 149–151, 157, 162 Spivak, Gayatri 46, 51, 66 Stordalen, Terje 135, 140–142, 152 Subversion 46, 51, 57, 60 f., 69 f., 78, 87, 96, 156 Testimony 12, 80–86, 88–92, 95 f., 101, 105, 115 f., 118–121, 123, 126 f. Third Space 62, 70, 72, 125 Tradition 9–11, 13 f., 26–28, 32 f., 38, 41–46, 49, 52, 57, 59, 69, 72–77, 79–81, 89 f., 97, 102, 104 f., 107–109, 111 f., 116–118, 120–126, 128–144, 146, 149 f., 152 f., 157, 161–164 Transcultural 11, 32, 35, 44, 91 Translation 7 f., 10, 22, 30, 45, 48, 59, 67–69, 99, 110 Unity 11 f., 21, 23 f., 26 f., 29 f., 33, 37–39, 48, 71, 81–83, 90, 102, 106 f., 116, 125, 127, 139, 142, 148 f., 151, 157 Universality 11–13, 20, 23, 26 f., 29 f., 33–39, 41 f., 48, 51, 73, 80 f., 85, 91 f., 126 f., 129 Ustorf, Werner 15, 25, 36 f., 44, 163 Violence 19, 58, 92, 132, 147, 152, 158–161 Warneck, Gustav 18 f., 25 Western 15, 20, 23 f., 29, 34, 39, 42, 45–47, 50 f., 59–61, 102 f., 106, 131, 140, 158, 163