place?
This latter question constitutes an irresolvable conundrum that I believe plagues contemporary theological analyses of and remedies for Christian faith for the sake of the Jewish neighbor. The failure to fully account for this irresolvable complexity results in good ethical intentions and efforts being undermined by unexamined assumptions. But I am getting ahead of myself.
For now, I simply want to note how it is impossible today to deal with the question of the endangering of Jews by Christian faith without considering the way in which that question is related to the wider discussion today of imperialistic discourse as such; and additionally, to suggest that this wider discussion is often grounded in certain assumptions, fundamental to the context of the modern West, that take Abraham (and the Abrahamic tradition carried forward by his descendents) to be the source of religio-cultural imperialistic discourse and its material violences rather than simply just another of its many victims. The consequence being that contemporary remedies applied to the imperialism of Christian faith for the sake of the children of Abraham—that is, for the sake of the Jewish neighbor—often seem to entail the assumption (for contemporary remedies, usually unstated) that Christian faith is imperialistic in the first place precisely to the extent that it is too Abrahamic.
The Universal and the Particular
The theological discourse of Christian faith is assumed to be imperialistic precisely to the extent that Christian faith, as one particular religious faith among others, assumes itself to be universally true—that is, to know and speak the truth about divine reality and activity for all people at all times and in all places. It is the claim that the Gospel of Jesus Christ, known and proclaimed uniquely by the Church, is universally true—for everyone, for all neighbors—that enables the Church to interpret the very reality of the neighbor, Jewish or otherwise, “through the lens of Christian faith,” based strictly on Christian categories and resources to the exclusion of the neighbor’s own self-understanding. Such a claim is seen to overreach the proper boundaries of a religious faith’s historical particularity, imposing its own particular reality upon others, and thereby impinging upon—doing violence to—the integrity of those others’ own particular reality. In Ruether’s words, “the transcendent universality of God . . . cannot be said to be incarnate in one people and their historical revelation, giving them the right to conquer and absorb all the others.”17 And in claiming universal significance for God’s action in Jesus Christ, this is precisely what the Church does, according to Ruether. “Christianity imported th[is] universalism . . . into history as its own historical foundation,” thereby creating a “Christian version of imperial universalism.”18
The implied remedy? Rather than the claiming of universality in and by the particular, the particular must be understood—and must understand itself—in distinction from and from the perspective of the universal and the general. That is, the particular must understand itself as particular, as distinct from and so as limited in relation to the universal. It is this self-understanding that allows particulars, e.g., Christian faith, in Ruether’s words, to “accept their own distinctiveness and so leave room for the distinctiveness of others”;19 to inhabit their own particularity without impinging upon the integrity of their particular neighbors.
It requires only a passing knowledge of the intellectual history of the West to recognize the extent to which this interpretation of the nature and challenge of traditional Christian faith simply sings forth a fundamental refrain of philosophy characteristic of the modern West. Much of the best contemporary theological analyses of the interpretive imperialism of Christian faith, then, would appear to be working with modern assumptions with regard to the relation of the particular to the universal. And here again we encounter a paradoxical, and ethically troubling, consequence of working thus in the name and for the sake of the Jewish neighbor. For the consensus of the philosophical discourse of the modern West, with regard to things religious, is that it is precisely by inappropriately relating the particular to the universal—by interpreting the (assumed) natural, universal bond of ethical relations (even that of father to son) through the lens of his own particular God-relation of faith—that Abraham is the father, not of faith as such, but of imperialistic faith.
And as imperialistic, this Abrahamic faith constitutes a breach of the ethical.
Faith and the Ethical
Rubenstein makes a connection with the deeper context of modernity by citing Søren Kierkegaard in his framing of the problem of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. “Like Kierkegaard, I have had to choose between a world without the biblical God and the leap of faith.” 20 Unlike Kierkegaard, however, Rubenstein chooses the former; he rejects biblical faith (or radically re-interprets it) on ethical grounds. This is brought into clear relief elsewhere when he states that his commitment to “human solidarity” is greater “than the Prophetic-Deuteronomic view of God and history can possibly allow.”21 For Rubenstein, again unlike Kierkegaard, affirming traditional faith in the face of radical Jewish suffering is not comparable to the courage of a knight, but is more akin to cowardice; biblical faith is a cowardly betrayal of the ethical obligation to human solidarity.
Similarly, one need not be a Kierkegaard scholar to recognize the profile of his polemical embrace with arch foil, G. W. F. Hegel, in the way Christian theologians responding to Rubenstein articulate their own critical analyses of the Christian Good News and its relation to the bad news of Jewish suffering: the interpretive imperialism of Christian faith constitutes a breach of ethical responsibility—with material consequences—in relation to the Jewish neighbor. And similar to Rubenstein, their own positions have been decidedly contra Kierkegaard. Consequently, the extent to which these positions are significantly pro Hegel presses for recognition. We will spend a significant amount of time on this, both in the following chapter and further on in the book.
What needs to be noted here is the extent to which, again, current work on the particular problem of Christian imperialism in relation to the Jewish neighbor seems to be played out within, and therefore, at least to some extent, determined by, the terms of a paradigmatic modern debate. Consequently, in both their asking and answering of the question, Ruether and others appear to be working with essentially modern assumptions about the relationship between the God-relation of faith and the ethical obligation to the neighbor. And it is not clear to me that they are fully aware of all the troubling complexities that this involves for the ethical intentions of their remedies of Christian faith for the sake of the Jewish neighbor. For as the reader is most likely aware, the iconic Kierkegaardian figure exemplifying a faith that constitutes a breach of the ethical taken as such and in its own right is none other than Abraham. And this iconic status of Abraham is not limited to the distinctive contest between Kierkegaard and Hegel as staged in Fear and Trembling, for example. It is taken as a given across various discourses that emerged from the crucible of early modernity and, thereby, defined the contours of the modern West. Again, then, it would seem that, in as much as contemporary remedies for Christian faith’s breach of the ethical in relation to the Jewish neighbor are funded by certain modern assumptions, they cannot but implicitly re-inscribe the characterization of the progenitor of the Jewish people as the father of this ethically offending faith.
The Irresolvable Complexity
In all three dimensions of the problem of Christian faith for the Jewish neighbor we have encountered this ironic “rub” of paradoxical logic breaking the surface and troubling the waters of best intentions. The leading theological attempts to make Christian faith safe for Jews would seem to entail their own ominous shadow of bad news for the descendents of Abraham. I want to briefly note two discernible shades of this shadow; two shades that mirror the very consequences of Christian interpretive imperialism specific to the Jewish neighbor that
