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ethical, in terms of specifically concrete, historical wholes, such as a society or nation.37

      For Hegel, the ethical possibilities of the particular individual, in relation to both God and neighbor, can only be fully accounted for in terms of the universal, that is, in terms of the individual’s proper and rational relation to, and place within the communal whole. Consequently, it is in placing oneself outside or above the communal whole, as Abraham does through his relation to God, that the particular individual transgresses the ethical. The imperialistic violence of Abraham’s religious genius lies in the extent to which the God-relation of faith distorts the proper relation of the particular to the universal whole according to which the former is assumed to be relative to and subsumed within the latter.

      Having here noted the distinctive concept of the universal—as the concrete communal whole—within the context of Fear and Trembling, my analysis in later chapters of the modern assumptions funding Ruether’s theological remedy of Christian faith will look more broadly at various conceptions of the universal. We will find that the assumptions expressed here by Hegel with regard to the proper ordering of the particular to the whole, especially in relation to faith and the ethical, pertain to a variety of conceptions of the universal across the modern period, from Kant and Lessing to Hegel and Schleiermacher. As long as the particular is relative to the universal, any universal will do.

      Conclusion: What if Hegel Is Wrong about the Ethical?

The pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling has a nagging problem. While he initially admits assuming that Hegel is right about the ethical, the closer he looks at Abraham the more he finds himself driven to the conclusion that Hegel, or at least Hegelian Christianity, “is wrong in speaking about faith.”38 The question raised for the reader, then, but not rigorously pursued in Fear and Trembling itself: if Hegel is wrong about faith, perhaps the assumption that he is right about the ethical needs to be revisited. In a wider reading of his works, it is clear that Kierkegaard assumes that this is indeed the case. Specifically, it is the subsuming of the particular within the context of the whole that constitutes a substantial ethical problem rather than being the very possibility of the ethical, as Hegel assumes. And this, on two levels.

First, if the particular individual only understands themselves and the world from the comprehending perspective of the historical whole, then one is delivered from the ordeal of decision that besets one in “the confinement of a temporally situated angle of vision” when embedded within history. And it is this embeddedness—this rootedness in particularlity and its predicament of radical finitude—that Kierkegaard assumes to be constitutive of both the human person and the ethical predicament. Crites puts it nicely. From the Hegelian standpoint of the universal whole, one “comprehends the abundance of human possibilities as a many-sided unity rather than as a field of mutually exclusive alternatives.”39 The Absolute Knowledge of the Hegelian system, then, avoids, or stops short of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the ethical altogether, given that he understands the ethical—and the authentically human—precisely in terms of the inescapability of decision.

Second, Kierkegaard critiques Hegel’s subsuming of the particular individual within the universal whole as itself an unethical, imperialistic logic in relation to the particularity of the human person. He reverses the ordered relation of the particular to the universal. As Hannay observes, the truth of the particular individual for Kierkegaard can only be glimpsed as “independent of any specification one may give of what . . . is properly human in general.” The consequence being that, for Kierkegaard, “the universal becomes an expression . . . of a humanity pre-established, as it were, at the level of the particular and no longer the category in which humanity is established.”40 The particular determines the universal, rather than vice versa. It is just this kind of commitment to particularity in resistance to what is seen as the imperialistic maw of the abstract, the general, and the universal (in Hegelian philosophy, for example), that is interpreted as a fundamentally ethical movement in much contemporary, postmodern, and post-colonial discourse. And, as it happens, this commitment to the particular is also a central thematic refrain of Barth’s theology. Consequently, the possibility of this reversal of fortunes between Hegel’s universal and Kierkegaard’s Abraham with regard to the ethical and the nature of imperialistic discourse foreshadows the possibility of a similar reversal—or at least complication—between contemporary attempts to purge Christian faith of its imperialistic dynamic in relation to the Jewish neighbor and a certain evangelical inhabiting of that faith as exemplified by Barth’s theological assumptions.

      •

      As I demonstrated briefly in the previous chapter, I am following the lead of Rubenstein, Ruether, and others in referencing Kierkegaard to frame what is at stake in the problem of Christian faith and the Church’s ethical obligation to the Jewish neighbor. Where I take the road less traveled is in recognizing the extent to which the characterization of Christian faith as constituting a breach of ethical obligation is a characterization necessitated by certain modern—and in the context of a Kierkegaardian frame—Hegelian assumptions. And given that in our so-called postmodern context, Hegelian assumptions about anything have again been called into question, it seems reasonable to suspect that one of the first and most rigorous questioners of Hegel and modernity might provide some needed purchase on an alternative asking and answering of the question before us.

      The openness and complexity of the context of modernity wherein the contest between Kierkegaard and Hegel with regard to faith, the ethical and Abraham appears to remain unsettled and in play constitutes the space in which the rest of this book unfolds. It is an openness and complexity that, to my mind, slips under the radar of leading theological work on this issue. My reading of this openness and complexity allows an account of the imperialistic bad news (according to Hegel . . . and Said) entailed in the Christian proclamation of faith in Jesus Christ as Messiah and Lord, while also accounting for the imperialistic bad news (according to Kierkegaard . . . and Derrida) entailed in the modern West’s remedy of that Christian faith. We are able to see that what is at issue in the diagnosis and remedy of Christian faith for the sake of the Jewish neighbor is an either/or between two kinds of imperialistic discourse (as in, two understandings of faith in relation to the ethical). There would seem to be no avoiding some risk of complicity in the bad news of interpretive and material violence to Jews within the histories of Christendom and the West more generally. The openness and complexity of the modern context, then, confronts us with a predicament in which—from the perspective of the ethical—it seems we can do no other than to choose our poison, for the sake of a possible remedy; we are confronted with alternative risks to be run, risks to be borne.

1. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 83.

2. Ibid., 95.

3. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 87. This critique has three main targets, Hegel’s concept of History, the role of the subject in Husserl’s phenomenology, and Heidegger’s concept of Being. Levinas sees each of these as resulting, each in its own way, in an “imperialism of the same” (85) in relation to the other.

4. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 96, 84.

5. Ibid., 89.

6. Hannay, “Introduction,” 29.

7. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 86.

8.

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