Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference - Chris Boesel

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heritage. It would seem to require a purging of Jewish religious and theological identity itself of its own violent inheritance, an inheritance that it has bequeathed to the world to catastrophic effect. And this requirement appears to be legislated from . . . where, exactly? From the high ground (from “on High”?) of the ethical; from a free-standing ground beyond the proprietary claims of each and every particular religious or theological lineage; from an impartial, unobstructed, commanding vantage point from whence one (whom, exactly? The Philosopher? The Ethicist? The Professor of Religious Studies? A compelling abstraction, e.g., Rubenstein’s “human solidarity”?) watches pastorally, and when necessary, chastisingly over all particular, concrete, historical religious identities, ensuring that they behave themselves and do not impinge dangerously upon their neighbors, which is to say, shepherding them into proper self-understanding.22 In other words, contemporary remedies for making Christian faith safe for Jews may prove not to be grounded in the self-understanding and self-legislation of Jewish identity in its un-subsumable particularity, as advertised by Littell. Rather, the universal ground of the ethical supersedes the particularity of Jewish religious self-understanding (as well as Christian self-understanding, and Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu . . .) in its administration as the final authority and judge of Jewish religious identity, meaning, value. Again, the conclusion is difficult to avoid. Ceasing to see Jewish neighbors through the lens of Christian faith by seeing them, instead, through the lens of ethical responsibility may nevertheless be to continue to see them through a supersessionistic lens of interpretive imperialism.

      The Context as Consequence of the Problem

      In taking up Rubenstein’s and Ruether’s question, then—the question of an essential breach of ethical responsibility to the Jewish neighbor embedded deep in the fabric of Christian faith—I am wagering on the possibility of a different answer. I am wagering on an alternative possibility for reformation in response to self-examination and confession. I am wagering on the possibility that avoiding the risk of offending the Jewish neighbor may be to foreclose on the possibility of responsibility to the Jewish neighbor. In more biblical language, I am wagering on the possibility that the nature of Christian proclamation as offense to both Jew and Greek might be the key to its most rigorous ethical possibility in relation to Jews (and Greeks).

      I ground this wager in two arenas of complexity not fully accounted for by my contemporary interlocutors. The first arena of complexity is that of the (deeper) modern and (wider) postmodern and postcolonial contexts within which this question is asked, a complexity the main features of which I have just sketched out. The central problem of the book, then, is not simply the question of the interpretive imperialism of Christian faith in relation to the Jewish neighbor, but how this question is related to the interpretive imperialism of Christian faith generally speaking, and the categories with which it is analyzed. But note the counter-intuitive logic of my argument. I relate the particular problem of Christian faith for the Jewish neighbor to the deeper and wider contexts of modern and postmodern discourse (about interpretive imperialism, for example), not in order to simply set it within a broader context whose categories then allow the problem to be properly understood, as if it were a particular instance of a general phenomenon. This is what I understand to be the critical error of contemporary remedies. It is an error due to an inadequate understanding of contextual complexity. That is, it is due to a lack of explicit awareness of the extent to which contemporary analyses and remedies of this particular problem are funded by deeper and wider assumptions that ultimately undermine their good ethical intentions. The necessary alternative is to make clear the extent to which the contexts for our analyses of and remedies for the particular problem of Christian faith in relation to the Jewish neighbor are actually a consequence of—are produced by—that particular problem. For example, the context of the modern West cannot properly be understood apart from the problematic particularity of Abraham. And what is the understanding made possible when this problematic particularity is taken into account? There is always an interpretive imperialism in relation to the Jewish neighbor.

      The second arena of complexity is that of a traditional understanding of Christian faith itself (or, “orthodox” understanding—meaning fidelity to the early ecumenical creeds—or “creedal,” then; or “confessional,” or “kerygmatic”; I will eventually settle on “evangelical,” with very specific qualifications), as it is determined by the problematic particularity of Abraham, and so as constituting an interpretive imperialism deemed to be the very cause of all the trouble in the first place. The complexity I am wagering on here is not one that, under appropriately sophisticated and rigorous analysis, gives way to a heretofore undiscovered possibility of overcoming the interpretive imperialism of Christian faith in relation to the Jewish neighbor, or the neighbor more generally. Rather, as hinted above, it is a complexity that, given there is always an interpretive imperialism, opens the possibility of a distinction between an interpretive imperialism of offence and an interpretive imperialism leveling material damage; a distinction that, ethically, may be no small thing.

      Different Kinds of Interpretive Imperialism

      Through the course of the argument I will be defining, and attempting to distinguish between, three basic forms of interpretive imperialism. And, given the organic relation between the logic of imperialistic discourse and the categories of particularity and universality, I use the language of the particular and the universal to identify and distinguish these forms.

      The Sectarian-Particular

      Sectarian, because it refers to that which is assumed to lie at the heart of what we often call “sectarian conflict” or “sectarian violence”; “tribalism” is another oft-used pejorative. Particular, because these pejoratives are understood to describe the way in which a particular community relates to its neighbors, and to the world as a whole, by claiming some form of universal significance for its own particular identity, experience, tradition, history, language and concepts, etc., over against those of its neighbors. It relates to, identifies with, the universal, the whole, through its own indigenous particularity, through that which is uniquely and distinctively its own in its difference from its neighbors. This imperialistic interpretive violence—imposing one’s own reality upon the neighbor—is inevitably accompanied by material damages; the neighbor’s material reality, including their material resources, is relative to and thereby either anathema to or an extension of—i.e., the rightful

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