3 zeros in on the various dimensions of Abrahamic interpretive imperialism entailed in Barth’s assertion that Christian theology listen only to the “One Voice” of God’s revelation in and election of the one Jew, Jesus Christ, over against all voices of human self-understanding and self-definition. We take a moment there to wonder at the fact that Barth actually seems to think this is good news, indeed, the best news, and for all. Chapter 4 traces out the ways in which the very affirmation of Abraham in Barth’s understanding of Jesus Christ as Good News for all determines his interpretation and representation of Jews and Judaism in a certain imperialistic fashion, with troubling echoes of traditional anti-Judaism and supersessionism. While it will become clear how Barth can be taken (mistakenly, I will eventually argue) as a paradigm of the sectarian-particular in relation to the Jewish neighbor, the ground will be laid for an understanding of his theological assumptions as constituting a form of interpretive imperialism distinguishable from the sectarian-particular: the interpretive imperialism of the particular-elsewhere.
Chapter 5 turns to Ruether’s critique of the theological assumptions key to Barth’s understanding of Christian faith, especially with regard to the doctrinal cluster of revelation, election, and Christology, and how it determines Christian understanding of Jews and Judaism as imperialistic discourse. I show how, doctrinally, her remedy for the sake of the Jewish neighbor disassembles this doctrinal cluster. She eliminates election from the theological lexicon, revisioning revelation as indigenous symbolic expression and Christology in terms of paradigm and prolepsis. Philosophically, this disassembling constitutes a realignment of the particularity of Christian faith in what is assumed to be a more appropriate—that is, relativized—relation to the universal. Ultimately, I argue that Ruether’s remedy is governed by the assumption that the Good News of Jesus Christ can only be good if it is not, in fact, news. In chapter 6 I tease out what I suggest are certain modern assumptions grounding her work, and show how these assumptions entail a (albeit, less obvious) dynamic of interpretive imperialism—the interpretive imperialism of the universal-elsewhere. This interpretive imperialism would seem to undermine her remedy of Christian faith by which she attempts to “make room” for the self-understanding and self-definition of the Jewish neighbor. The theological claim central to this remedy affirms that all religions and religious discourses as such have salvifically efficacious access to the Ultimate and the Universal; but where must one be located to catch a glimpse of the universal vista that allows one to make such a claim? I conclude my reading of Ruether in chapter 7, where I show how the modern assumptions of the universal-elsewhere cast their own specific shadow over the children of Abraham, a shadow with its own forms of anti-Judaism and supersessionism.
Over the course of the analysis, then, Ruether appears to represent a remedy that may itself participate in the problem in a different key. Might this open up the possibility of giving Barth a second look? Might Barth represent the traditional problem in a very particular way, a way that also entails resources for a remedy, or at least resources that significantly nuance the imperialistic dynamic of his theological rendering of the discourse of Christian faith? In other words, might the particular-elsewhere be distinguishable from the sectarian-particular?
Finding ourselves in the predicament of having to distinguish between two apparently imperialistic theological discourses, Part IV suggests some possible criteria for doing that work of discernment and distinction. These criteria, in turn, are seen to open the possibility of a reconsideration of Barth’s theological assumptions. The criteria introduced in Part IV are the philosophical discourses of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. Both of these thinkers, in distinct but related ways, offer contemporary, postmodern analyses of what they characterize as the imperialistic dynamics of the philosophical, cultural, and theological discourses of the modern West. These analyses have greatly influenced current thinking and discussion across many disciplines. The breadth and depth of this impact result, at least in part, from the significant ways in which their analyses seem to resonate with Said’s description of imperialistic discourse and with what has become known as post-colonial analysis more generally.
Chapter 8, then, gives a reading of Derrida and Levinas, focusing on various themes that fold together to constitute their critique of the imperialistic dynamic of modern discourse. The analyses of radical finitude by Derrida and Levinas demonstrate the extent to which the vista of the universal-elsewhere, appeals to which are endemic to the modern philosophical and ethical instinct, is a structural impossibility; the universal-elsewhere always devolves to a discourse that belongs to someone (or some community) in particular. This renders Ruether’s remedy vulnerable to the postmodern critique of the universal-elsewhere as a higher, more rarified form of the imperialistic violence of the sectarian-particular.
What would an alternative discourse look like? It is in this connection that the postmoderns often cite forms of speech rooted in the problematic finitude of particularity and provisionality—testimony, witness, prayer, address—as examples of counter-discourses of resistance to the totalizing, imperialistic logics of modernity. In chapter 9 I return to Barth, drawing out the specific ways in which the kind of speech Barth understands to be distinctive to the Church—as grounded in the theological assumptions analyzed earlier, together with their distinctive form of interpretive imperialism—bears a striking resemblance to these counter-discourses of resistance. And this is the still-point of my argument: it is the ethically problematic character of Barth’s understanding of Christian faith, e.g., Christian faith’s uncompromising particularity, its refusal to be subsumed within the ethical understood as a higher, comprehending standpoint, that may constitute its very ethical possibilities in relation to the Jewish neighbor (and also to the Greek) within the context of contemporary critiques of imperialistic discourse.
The argument of the book constitutes what Barth would call an ad hoc, or secondary apologetic for the ethical resources of an evangelical Christian faith in relation to the Jewish neighbor, as well as to the neighbor of the Jewish neighbor. The strict theological determinations by which the speech of such a faith is governed marks that speech with specific characteristics that can be distinguished ethically from other forms and modes of discourse. However, this ethical possibility relies on theological assumptions that cannot themselves be grounded upon or justified by the ethical as such, that is, as a self-grounding, human project and possibility. This, in as much as these theological assumptions point to free divine activity as the ground of the ethical rather than as answerable to and measurable by the ethical taken on its own and as such. Consequently, in a brief concluding chapter, I intend to make clear that there is no way to demonstrate finally and absolutely that Barth’s theological assumptions are ethically justifiable on any grounds—including postmodern philosophical grounds courtesy of Derrida and Levinas—external to those assumptions themselves, or more accurately, external to the free activity of the living divine reality to which they attempt to bear witness. This is necessary because the counter-intuitive logic of Barth’s theological assumptions themselves demand that it should be so. And again, it is (counter-intuitively) this very limit in relation to the ethical, considered in itself and as such, that constitutes the ethical possibility of those theological assumptions.
The theological logic of faith seeking the ethical: It is only in risking the proclamation of faith that the Church finds the ethical possibility of respecting the difference of the Jewish neighbor, and of the neighbors of the Jewish neighbor. If, that is, we happen to be dealing with a God who, in Jesus, has in fact involved Herself quite inappropriately and problematically in the particularity of the flesh of Abraham for the sake of all the nations—the Jew first, and also the Greek. The ethical limit that is simultaneously the ethical possibility of an evangelical Christian faith: only God can answer this “if,” for both the Church and its neighbors, by speaking (again) for Herself. An evangelical Church can only witness to (in word and deed) and wait upon such an event of free divine address, with the Jewish neighbor and the neighbors of the Jewish neighbor. This is all it can do. But, borrowing from Barth, this is what it can do.
1. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 48. The long history of Jewish suffering within Christendom is well documented; likewise the moral failure of the Church during the Holocaust, a failure characterized not only by a lack
