Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference. Chris Boesel

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Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference - Chris Boesel

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extreme, justifies, if it does not incite to, the murder of Jews”?1 Does not the evidence of history suggest that a seed of violence toward Jews is planted so deeply within the soil of Christian theology and faith that they inherently entail a breach of ethical responsibility to Jews?

      Not surprisingly, theologians like Metz and Ruether have led the way in taking the history of Jewish suffering within Christendom seriously as a problem for Christian faith and theology. They have served and continue to serve the Church by calling it to self-examination, confession, and reformation. This book, and the labor of thought it represents, is a response to their prophetic voice and to these tasks to which they call the Church with such urgency. While convicted by these theologians’ call to self-examination and confession, I have been less compelled by some of their proposals for reformation; that is, by their attempts to make Christian faith safe for the Jewish neighbor, and indeed, for the world at large. The task of this book, then, is to follow the lead of these Christian theologians in taking up their—and Rubenstein’s—question as my own. Again, is the Christian Gospel of Jesus Christ as Good News for the world necessarily bad news for the Jewish neighbor? In working toward my own answer, I demonstrate how certain responses to this question, due to certain assumptions upon which they implicitly rely, often re-inscribe the very problem they are trying to overcome. As an alternative, I suggest that the problematic resources of what I will be calling an evangelical Christian faith might themselves provide unexpected ethical possibilities for the Church’s relation to the Jewish neighbor, as well as to the neighbor of the Jewish neighbor.

      The Problem and Its Context

      In struggling toward an answer to the central question of the book, it soon became clear that the possible toxic dangers of Christian faith for the Jewish neighbor could not be fully analyzed without considering the wider context of contemporary analysis and critique of Christian faith in relation to the neighbor more generally, and how this wider context and the relation to it was situated vis-à-vis the even wider—or deeper—context of the modern West. To fail to consider these complex connections was inevitably to encounter a certain contradictory logic that seemed to undermine the very ethical intentions for analyzing and remedying the dangers of Christian faith for the Jewish neighbor in the first place. This is, in fact, what I believe to be the case with many Christian theologians leading the way on this difficult issue. In what follows I will briefly demonstrate what I mean and, in so doing, introduce the major categories employed in the argument of the book.

      In my reading of theological work on this issue, I discern three dimensions entailed in the danger of Christian faith for the Jewish neighbor that strike me as organically related to the wider (contemporary) and deeper (modern) context of analysis and critique of Christian faith. They are: the nature of imperialistic discourse, the relation of faith to the ethical, and the relation of the particular to the universal.

      Imperialistic Discourse and the Interpretive Imperialism of Christian Faith

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