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Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference
Christian Faith, Imperialistic Discourse, and Abraham
chris boesel
RISKING PROCLAMATION, RESPECTING DIFFERENCE
Christian Faith, Imperialistic Discourse, and Abraham
Copyright © 2008 Chris Boesel. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
A Division of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
isbn 13: 978-1-55635-523-3
eisbn 13: 978-1-4982-7032-8
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Boesel, Chris.
Risking proclamation, respecting difference : Christian faith, imperialistic discourse, and Abraham / by Chris Boesel.
xx + 286 p. ; 23 cm.
Includes bibliography and index.
isbn 13: 978-1-55635-523-3
1. Judaism (Christian theology)—History of doctrines—20th century. 2. Reuther, Rosemary Radford. 3. Barth, Karl, 1886–1968—Contributions in theology of Judaism. I. Title.
bt93 .b62 2008
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
This book is dedicated to my folks, Don and Nan Boesel.
If I have any sound instincts at all, either theological or ethical, it is because of them. If I don’t, it’s my own damn fault.
“No subsuming Jews, Tom!”
—Father Smith in Walker Percy’s Thanatos Syndrome
preface
Setting (Not to Say, Justifying) the Argument in Auto-Biographical Context
I open the introductory chapters of this book by saying that I have been convicted by certain contemporary theologians’ prophetic call to self-examination and repentance with regard to the Church’s material history of mistreatment of its Jewish neighbors and with regard to its theological tradition’s complicity in that mistreatment. I then point out that I am less convinced by many of their constructive proposals for theological reformation. This book is my own “labor of thought” in attempting to address the issue of theological reformation in response to self-examination and repentance with regard to the Church’s past and present relation to the Jewish neighbor.
But this does not quite tell the whole story of the genesis of the book and its argument. I was not always unconvinced by said contemporary constructive proposals for theological reformation, or, as I say in the early pages of the first chapter, for making Christian faith safe for both the Jewish neighbor and the neighbor generally speaking. Quite the contrary; I spent a good number of years thoroughly convinced by and so appropriating these theological proposals as my own, or at least their basic assumptions and concepts employed with regard to faith, theology, religion, and the ethical. It was only in inhabiting these assumptions and employing these conceptions over time, while continuing to labor toward an articulation of my own theological position, that I gradually became unconvinced of their adequacy. Like wearing out a good pair of sneakers, they ceased to hold up over time and continued scrutiny.
When I say I am unconvinced by certain constructive theological proposals treated in this book, then, I am not rejecting them outright and at face value as unacceptable on the basis of some gate-keeping yardstick for theological orthodoxy. Rather, I am pushing beyond—blowing through the bottom of, as a friend of mine likes to put it—the limits of certain assumptions, conceptions and rhetorical moves, having experienced the exhaustion of their promising and compelling possibilities from the inside-out, as it were.
I became more and more dissatisfied with the ability of these assumptions to account for the complexity of the reality I was attempting to analyze and constructively address—e.g., the reality of the Church’s faith in relation to the ethical, the contested multiplicity of the reality of the Jewish neighbor, the relation of the Jewish neighbor to their neighbors and to the neighbor generally speaking, the limitations of the ethical in relation to the concept of imperialistic discourse, etc. In the face of this multilayered complexity, I kept running into points of ethically problematic self-contradiction, where the ethical promise and intention of contemporary theological remedies of Christian faith for the sake of the Jewish neighbor were undermined by certain assumptions in which they were rooted. This is a particularly dicey problem given that those assumptions themselves are driven by an ethical desire in relation to the historical experience (centuries’ worth) of interreligious conflict emerging from concrete religious particularity and difference. But this anticipates the argument of the book. What I want to do here, at the risk of appearing self-indulgent, is to share briefly a few highlights of the journey (simultaneously historical and theological) along which I encountered these deepening levels of complexity. It is a journey that, eventually and unexpectedly—and disconcertingly, for that matter—exhausted the promise of the theological remedy for Christian faith that I had appropriated; a remedy that prescribes “leaving room” for the self-understanding and self-definition of the “religious other.”
Having been raised in a conservative, evangelical missionary community, encountering the theology of Karl Barth in my college years opened the door to a more “liberal,” or at least more expansive, understanding of the depth and breadth of God’s grace, an understanding that I was aching for and readily embraced. “Liberal,” here, is of course meant in the relative sense (ergo, the inverted commas); to the American evangelicalism that raised me, Barth was seen as the “liberal” menace, and anything theologically left of Barth was simply beyond the pale. In seminary, however, I was blessed to encounter a full array of contemporary liberation and contextual theologies—Black, Latin American, womanist, feminist, queer, Holocaust, and the emerging postmodern discourse on religion—all of which entailed serious critiques of Barth as part and parcel of the oppressive white, Eurocentric patri- or kyri-archal structures that violently denigrate and marginalize the voices and experience of people of color, women, Jews, LGBTs, and, more generally, particularity, difference, and “the other.” I found—and still find—these voices and their critiques compelling and personally convicting. I began to read Barth, along with the Christian theological tradition as a whole, through my robust appropriation of their critical lenses.
Through seminary and into my PhD work, it was the encounter with Holocaust Studies and, more particularly, with theological interpretations of the Holocaust as a radical rupture of historical faith, both Christian and Jewish, that most captured my imagination and energy. If Christian theology could not respond responsibly and unflinchingly to this challenge, the game was up. I focused my energy on post-Holocaust theology. I worked toward an ethically viable, and so radically constructive, transformation of Christian faith and theology in response to the authoritative voice—and silenced voices—of Jewish suffering, both throughout the history of Christendom and from out of the black hole of the Holocaust itself.
The first shock to the system that alerted me to the fact that I might not have a full grasp of all the angles involved in the Church’s theological and ethical relation to the Jewish neighbor came at an international conference on European Studies, held in The Netherlands, in a session on the philosophical and theological dimensions and consequences of the Holocaust. I presented a paper critiquing the ethical viability of Barth’s Christian theological assumptions. My critique was based on and in agreement with Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim’s critique of Barth in light of the Holocaust as unique and incomprehensible rupture of historical