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The Problem: Christian Faith and the “Murder of Jews”

In this book I take up the central question of theological work struggling to come to terms with the history of Jewish suffering within Christendom and the West more generally. Is the Christian proclamation of Jesus Christ as Good News for the world essentially bad news for Jews? In his groundbreaking confrontation with the theological significance of the Holocaust, Jewish theologian Richard Rubenstein directs a pointed question to the Church. When the overwhelming moral failure and, to a significant extent, culpability of the Church with respect to the Holocaust is honestly confronted and placed within the context of the long history of Jewish suffering within Christendom, are we not driven to ask if there is “something in the logic of Christian theology that, when pushed to a metaphysical 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?

Hard sayings. And they have not gone unheeded. A growing number of Christian theologians have taken Rubenstein’s words to heart and, in varying ways, have made his question their own. In his effort to come to terms with the significance of Auschwitz for the Church and its theology, Johann Baptist Metz asks if Jewish suffering at the hands of the Church is an “unavoidable consequence” of traditional Christian theology.2 In a similar effort to fathom the sources of Christian “fratricide” of the Jewish “elder brother,” Rosemary Radford Ruether puts forward her own form of the question: “Is it possible to say ‘Jesus is Messiah’ without, implicitly or explicitly, saying at the same time ‘and the Jews be damned?’”3

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

The ethically dangerous features of the Christian theological tradition in its specific relation to the Jewish neighbor are most often identified as anti-Judaism and supersessionism. Anti-Judaism generally refers to the singling out of Judaism for polemical judgment throughout the history of Christian theology, as what is seen to be a unique form of humanity’s sinful rejection of God’s gracious work of salvation, a rejection uniquely perverse given the status of the Jews as God’s chosen people and first receivers of the promise of that gracious work. When this unique rejection of God’s grace in Jesus Christ, expressed religiously in Judaism (again, according to traditional Christian categories), is seen to be rooted in the unique and essential character of the Jewish people qua Jewish (rather than as determined, for example, from “outside,” as a result of their unique election by the free and unaccountable decision of the God of Abraham), then Christian theological anti-Judaism slides into Christian cultural antisemitism.4 Supersessionism, in the strictest sense—what I will refer to as a “hard” supersessionism—refers to the theological proposition that the children of Israel are replaced by the Church as God’s chosen people, due both to what is understood to be their unbelieving rejection of their own promised Messiah, Jesus Christ, and to God’s sovereign plan of salvation for the nations of which this rejection is an integral and providential part. Supersession is often more broadly understood to be entailed in the exegetical and theological structure of promise and fulfillment, expectation and advent, provisionality and finality, pre-figurement and real completion, Law and Gospel, etc., by which the unique journey of God with Israel is related to and relativized by its fulfillment in the advent of Jesus Christ and the gathering of the Church in faith. Even if Israel is not here understood as replaced by the Church, and God’s covenant promises to Israel are affirmed as unabrogated and eternal, the truth and reality of historical Jewish existence and of Judaism is still understood to find its full meaning in a reality outside of itself, and to which it points—Jesus Christ and the Church’s confession of faith. I refer to this as a “soft” supersessionism, a supersessionism of displacement rather than replacement.

While anti-Judaism and supersessionism are, without doubt, fundamental elements of the ethically problematic relation of Christian faith to Jews and Judaism, if one reads contemporary theological analyses closely, they can both be seen to emerge from a deeper, single source—what I will call interpretive imperialism.5 This refers to the logic wherein Christian theological interpretation and representation of Jews and Judaism is based strictly on Christian categories and resources, to the exclusion of Jewish self-understanding. As Steven Haynes has put it, in his own engagement with Rubenstein’s question, the real source of the trouble occurs when Christians are incapable of regarding the Jewish people otherwise than “through the lens of Christian faith.”6 The true meaning and value—indeed, the very identity and reality—of Jews and of Judaism are assumed to be grounded in the categories of Christian faith and theology. This occurs when the meaning, value, identity, and reality of Jews and Judaism are imposed upon Jews from a region outside of and foreign to Jewish self-understanding. Jews are thereby reduced to a silenced object within the discourse of Christian faith. And the native resources of Jewish identity and reality are pressed into the service of a foreign interest; they help to inform and clarify a Christian understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as Good News to and for the world.

This analysis of the Christian theological tradition in relation to the Jewish neighbor is a featured refrain in the work of several leading theologians who have engaged the issues of Jewish suffering and the Holocaust. Note Metz’ suggestion of a remedy in response to his own question regarding the link between Christian faith and the Holocaust: “Yet how are we Christians to come to terms with Auschwitz? We will in any case forego the temptation to interpret the suffering of the Jewish people from our standpoint, in terms of saving history.”7 Similarly, Haynes observes that Roy Eckardt “effectively bans Christian speculation on the mystery of Israel.” Eckardt understands this ban as a measure essential in “protecting the Jewish people from Christian imperialism.”8 Franklin Littell identifies the problem of Christian interpretive imperialism in the first line of his book, The Crucifixion of the Jews, a title (along with Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide) that powerfully expresses the problem before us. “For centuries Christians have presumed to define the old Israel, the Hebrews, the Jews, Judaism . . . in ways generally patronizing, contemptuous, or demeaning.”9 He then goes on to make the rejection of this tradition of interpretive imperialism essential to his attempt to remedy Christian faith in its relation to the Jewish neighbor.

A basic affirmation [that the Church needs to make] is the right of the Jewish people to self-identity and self-definition. No sound dialogue, let alone friendship or brotherhood-love, can develop if one partner is constantly endeavoring to categorize, to define, to box-in the other party.10

The consensus is clear. It is the interpretive imperialism inherent in traditional Christian faith that opens the door to the Church’s historical and material participation in all manner of complicities in and perpetrations of Jewish suffering—to the “crucifixion” of the Jews. And there is consensus with regard to the remedy, as well. The language of this consensus, as seen in the quote from Littell, is to make room for the self-definition and self-understanding of the Jewish neighbor. For, as Katherine Sonderegger agrees in her critique of Karl Barth’s theological imperialism in relation to rabbinic Judaism, “there is no hearing of the ecumenical partner, no full dignity and autonomy, without self-definition and self-recognition in its [rabbinic Judaism’s] own idiom, institution and practice.”11

And if, while one is reading these Christian theologians’ analyses of the interpretive logic of Christian faith, one happens also to have one’s ear to the ground with regard to contemporary currents both in and outside of academic discourse such that one might be inclined to pick up Edward Said’s seminal work, Orientalism, one would be struck by the shared categories of analysis and critique. Said defines Orientalism as the cultural discourse of the West in which the East, the Orient and the oriental, are reduced to objects by the West for its own knowledge and interests. Within this discourse, the Orient does not represent itself; the oriental does not represent herself. They are silent, and silenced, represented objects rather than speaking subjects.12 The identity, subjectivity—the very self—of the oriental is colonized by and made to serve the interests of an external, outside, alien discourse; a discourse that, in Said’s words, constitutes a “nexus of knowledge and power” in which the oriental is, “in a sense, obliterate[d] . . . as a human being.”13

Said goes on to argue that this cultural discourse of domination not only provides justification for the Western imperialist project—the real, material, economic, geographical, political occupations, dominations, and oppressions of other peoples, their lands, and resources. It is more far-reaching than that. It renders Western imperialism’s vastness, endurance, and strength possible in the first place. I will eventually question the extent to which this link between imperialistic discourse and the material realities and damages of imperialism holds for all forms of Christian interpretive imperialism. But for now, it is important to note that the nature of the connection Said makes between cultural discourse and material realities is assumed also by the consensus of analyses shared by the Christian theologians cited above. These analyses critique the traditional discourse of Christian faith precisely as an imperialistic discourse of cultural domination with a complex relation to a very long history of very real, material, economic, geographical and political occupations, dominations and oppressions of Jewish people in Christian Europe and beyond. This relation of theological discourse to material damages will require careful analysis, and may ultimately demand critical distinctions. But for the moment, there is good reason to suggest that the theological consensus before us concerning Christian faith and the Jewish neighbor understands traditional Christian theological discourse to be very much like a cultural “nexus of knowledge and power” in which the Jew has come very close to being “obliterated . . . as a human being,” and not only “in a sense,” but in fact. The Christian Good News for the world, then, would appear to render the world a very dangerous place for Jews precisely as the kind of imperialistic discourse that Said describes.

It is interesting to note that in the course of his own research, Said recognized this connection between Orientalism and the imperialistic discourse of the West in relation to the Jewish neighbor. He concludes his introduction by relating the discovery wherein, “by an almost inescapable logic,” he found himself “writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western antisemitism.”14 This recognition has a couple of implications. On the one hand, it opens up the fact that antisemitism is not only Christian, but Western and modern—given that the ecclesial discourse of Christian faith is not absolutely reducible to the cultural discourse of the modern West. (This is a contested assumption, I realize. It is an assumption made by the argument of this book, but one the argument also attempts to demonstrate.) On the other hand, given that the discourse of Christian faith has, historically, indeed been a featured player within the discourse of the West, the consequence of this connection between the relation of the Church to the Jewish neighbor and the Church’s relation to other neighbors, e.g., to various Arab and Asian neighbors (the “objects” of Orientalism), would appear to be that Jews are not the only ones endangered by the traditional discourse of Christian faith.

So again, it seems clear that we cannot adequately address, analyze or attempt to remedy the problem of the imperialistic dangers of Christian faith for the Jewish neighbor apart from a consideration of how those dangers are seen to threaten other neighbors as well. And, of course, in Said’s analysis of the discourse of the modern West, the Arab is the particular other neighbor that is endangered by Christian discourse in as much as the latter is historically an integral part of the discourse of the West in Said’s analysis of Orientalism. And this raises an interesting, albeit tragic, complication. As is all too clear in the newspapers today, neither Christian discourse nor the discourse of the West more generally constitute the only danger to Jews and Arabs; for their own discourses have become eminently dangerous to one another. And, regardless of the degree to which it is reducible to the discourse of the modern West, what is the discourse of Christian faith to do in relation to these two neighbors who appear locked in mortal combat and who seem unwilling to relent until the other is “in a sense, obliterated”?15 To anticipate our engagement with Emmanuel Levinas: which neighbor passes before the other? Whose claim upon us as neighbor has priority? We encounter this particular political issue again at the end of the book, but it is important to note that it is already with us here at the beginning.

And further complicating matters, the claim (made either by Jews themselves or by the Church and its transformational theologians, and/or by the West more generally) that the Jewish neighbor is especially victimized by Christian faith and the West and, so, is due a unique ethical obligation of priority, is seen by many neighbors of the Jewish neighbor as part and parcel of what is assumed to be the Jews’ own ancient imperialistic dynamic of self-understanding and self-definition. This is, of course, the age-old ethical conundrum—though experienced with a heightened intensity in the modern West—of Abrahamic election.16 And here we start to run into the real crux of the troubling complexity of the Church’s relation to the Jewish neighbor in relation to the neighbor more generally that lies at the heart of the argument: which imperialistic discourse comes first? The imperialistic discourse of Christian faith in relation to the Jewish neighbor, or that in relation to the neighbors of the Jewish neighbor—that is, anti-Judaism and antisemitism, or Orientalism? Or, is it the imperialistic dynamic entailed in the Jewish claim to election—their distinctive religious and/or cultural “genius”—that lies at the source of both? But then, how to remedy Christian imperialism in relation to the self-understanding and self-definition of the Jewish neighbor, if it is the imperialism of Jewish self-understanding and self-definition that lies at its root in the first 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 these theological efforts are attempting to remedy—anti-Judaism and supersessionism.

First, anti-Judaism. As we will see, the modern West’s attempt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to render Christianity both rationally and ethically viable for modernity made no bones about the fact that the source of the problem, in their view, was Abraham, as the patriarchal font of Jewish religious “genius.” It would appear difficult for our contemporary remedies of Christian faith to avoid the same conclusion: what is dangerous (to Jews!) about a traditional Christian faith and theology is that it is too Jewish. Indeed, much contemporary theological discourse today on the imperialistic dangers of religious faith in general appears not to feel this is a conclusion that needs avoiding. One often hears “Abrahamic faith” described as inherently violent toward the neighbor. Remedying Christian faith of its violence toward the Jewish neighbor would then seem to require—as Hegel, Kant, and company believed to be the case—purging it of this violent, foreign, and imposed Abrahamic element. Ironically, then, contemporary remedies of the violent logic of Christian faith in relation to Jews and Judaism may entail a kind of anti-Judaism—a “teaching of contempt”—of their own, a targeting of Jewish religious instinct as a threat to true faith, and to the faithful of all religions.

The second shade of shadow: supersessionism. It would seem that, given the above, the Jews have received, from the hands of the Church, the brunt of a violence born into the world from their own Abrahamic heritage. Consequently, the attempt to make Christian faith safe for Jews would seem to be unable to avoid, on some fundamental level, being an attempt to save Jews from themselves, from their own malevolent (according to these assumptions) 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.

Or so I shall endeavor to demonstrate. And in so demonstrating, I hope to provide a warrant for giving alternative, albeit alternatively problematic, theological assumptions a second look—the very theological assumptions that entangle Christian faith in the logic of interpretive imperialism in relation to the Jewish neighbor in the first place. Thus, the critical question that gives rise to these alternative and alternatively problematic theological assumptions, and that perhaps requires the conversation to remain open as to their viability: What is to be done if God chooses, unaccountably—in excess of the activity of creating and sustaining the cosmos—to involve Herself23 inappropriately in the particular; and not just the particular in general, e.g., “the flesh of history,”24 but the particular particularity of the Jewish flesh of Abraham? What assumptions would be required doctrinally (in relation to revelation, election, and Christology, for example), in response to such problematic divine decision and activity? While considering this question and its requisite theological assumptions does not allow in any way a disentangling of Christian faith from interpretive imperialism as such (either in relation to the Jewish neighbor or the neighbor in general), it may allow a distinguishing between and disentangling of one form of Christian interpretive imperialism from another. And if certain postmodern analyses of the logic of imperialistic discourse have anything to tell us, than distinguishing between different kinds of interpretive imperialism may be—ethically—the best we can do. What is and is not possible theologically—or, more accurately, possible for God—may be another question. As is no doubt evident at this point, the relation between the theological (having to do with the God-relation of faith) and the ethical (having to do with the neighbor-relation between fellow creatures)—the necessity of distinguishing them and the impossibility of separating them—lies at the heart of the argument.

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 possession of—one’s own. As briefly mentioned above, and as I will demonstrate more fully in what is to come, the discourse of modernity has been forged upon the assumption that Abraham—and Abrahamic faith—is the religio-cultural paradigm of what is taken to be interpretive imperialism as such, but what I am calling the interpretive imperialism of the sectarian-particular in order to distinguish it from what I hope to show are other extant forms. The Abrahamic paradigm: God’s relation to all the nations (the universal) is understood in and through the unique election of the particular person, tribe, and tradition of Abraham.

The Universal-Elsewhere

I use this term to characterize certain contemporary attempts to remedy the interpretive imperialism of traditional Christian faith (perceived as the sectarian-particular). With a little help from certain postmodern philosophical analyses of modern discourse, I argue that these remedies can themselves be shown to constitute a form of interpretive imperialism. Universal, because of how they attempt to correct what is understood to be the sectarian-particular’s mistaken, over-reaching identification of the particular with the universal. The corrective move reverses, so to speak, the relation between the particular and the universal; the particular is approached from and properly understood through and within the context of the universal. In other words, the distinctive reality and identity of a particular community is properly understood—that is, it properly understands itself, as well as its neighbors—from and through the perspective of the universal and/or the whole. Elsewhere, because, as universal, the proper ground of a particular community’s understanding of itself, and its neighbors, in their particularity, is located elsewhere than that particularity itself; it is rooted in soil distinguishable from, and so elsewhere in relation to, those indigenous resources constituting the distinctive reality and identity of a community’s particularity in its difference from the distinctive particularity of other communities. The remedies of the sectarian-particular’s violent confusion of the particular with the universal are understood to be remedies precisely to the extent that they are rooted in the universal rather than (and so elsewhere than) the particular. And, I will argue, it is precisely as located elsewhere than the particular that, ironically, this remedy constitutes an interpretive-imperialism of its own. It ultimately constitutes a relation to the particularity of the neighbor “through a lens” that is external to the indigenous resources of the neighbor’s own concrete reality and identity. What is more, the interpretive imperialism of the universal-elsewhere can be shown to be a higher, more subtle and rarified form of the sectarian-particular that it attempts to remedy: the perspective of the universal always turns out to belong to someone in particular.

The Particular-Elsewhere

One of the chief burdens of my overall argument is simply to mark out the possibility of this form of interpretive imperialism, especially in distinction from the sectarian-particular. For, as indicated by the employment of the specific word, “particular,” it is in many ways similar to, and is often mistaken for, the interpretive imperialism of the sectarian-particular. Particular, because, with regard to structure, it also relates to the universal through the particular. And with regard to content, the particular is understood to refer to the particular Jewish flesh of Abraham. As regards Christian faith, the particular-elsewhere refers to the interpretive imperialism whereby the Church understands and relates to the reality and identity of the Jewish neighbor, and all its neighbors, in and through the lens of its confession of faith in Jesus Christ as fulfillment of the divine promise to bless all nations through the flesh of Abraham. The interpretive imperialism of the particular-elsewhere, then, is simply the gospel news, believed and proclaimed by the Church: God has redeemed all the nations, indeed, the whole of the cosmos, in and through the particular, and particularly Jewish, reality and event that is Jesus Christ.

But how is this at all distinct from the sectarian-particular? The distinction rests upon the “elsewhere.” Elsewhere, because—or perhaps we should say, if, given the context of argument—elsewhere, if the particular reality to which this Gospel points is neither the Church and its indigenous religio-cultural (e.g., symbolic) resources as a particular human community, nor the indigenous resources of Jewish flesh as such, but the eternal, personal Word and decision of the free and living God. As the eternal, personal Word and decision of the free and living God, Jesus Christ belongs neither to the Church nor to Jewish flesh, but they to he. As the living Word of God, Jesus Christ stands freely over against both, as the source and ground of their true meaning and reality, as he does in relation to all creaturely reality, that is, in relation to all the creaturely neighbors of both the Church and the children of Abraham. The interpretive imperialism of the particular-elsewhere (i.e., the Gospel of Jesus Christ) is distinguishable from that of the sectarian-particular, then, in as much as the Church’s understanding of and relation to the Jewish neighbor—and all neighbors, in and through its faith in and proclamation of Jesus Christ—can never be reducible to an imposition of the Church’s own indigenous reality upon another. For, its faith and proclamation, when properly understood and inhabited, can only point away from itself to a free and living reality of divine Word and decision. Under the judgment of this Word and decision, the Church can only stand alongside the Jewish neighbor, and all neighbors, in radical dependence upon divine grace and mercy, that is, in the hope of the promise made to Abraham; again, if that promise was made and fulfilled; if that divine Word was spoken and lives as free, personal Reality. The particular-elsewhere of the gospel news is indeed a form of interpretive imperialism—i.e., the particular reality of Jesus Christ is proclaimed to be the ground and source of all creaturely, that is, the Church’s and its neighbors’ (Jewish and Greek, human and non-human), reality and meaning. However, as strictly determined by the particular-elsewhere to which it points, it is a form of interpretive imperialism bearing concrete characteristics clearly distinguishable from the kind of nexus of knowledge and power that virtually (and often materially) obliterates the neighbor.

The Bottom Line

Theologically (and, finally), what distinguishes the particular-elsewhere from the sectarian-particular is the if, or perhaps in this phrasing, the whether—whether God has in Jesus Christ freely involved Herself (and does and will involve Herself) in the particularity of the flesh of Abraham for the redemption of all the nations. If She has, the distinction is possible; if not, it is not. And this “whether,” of course, as an issue of free divine activity, cannot be demonstrated, proved or produced by the thoroughly human activity (with regard to its own possibility) of the Church’s knowing and speaking. And this (ultimately theological) radical limit of utter dependence upon free divine activity is precisely what constitutes the ethical distinction of the particular-elsewhere from the sectarian-particular. Because of this utter dependence, the Church, if faithful (admittedly, a huge qualification), can never understand itself to possess so as to impose that reality to which it can only bear witness in its life and confession amidst its neighbors; it can only inhabit an interpretive imperialism “without weapons.”25 This is the theological logic of an ad hoc apologetic: faith seeking the ethical; or better, perhaps, faith seeking the neighbor.26

Barth and Ruether: Problem as Remedy, Remedy as Problem

My critical analysis of the problem of Christian faith’s endangerment of the Jewish neighbor proceeds by way of two theological exemplars. I read Karl Barth as a contemporary representative of the problem—a theological understanding of Christian faith constituting an interpretive imperialism in relation to the Jewish neighbor resonant with traditional supersessionism and anti-Judaism. I read Ruether as a representative of contemporary remedies of the problem—attempting to make Christian faith safe for the Jewish neighbor by leaving room for Jewish self-understanding and self-definition.

I use Barth for several reasons. First, he does indeed represent the problem.27 His robust affirmation of the Good News of Jesus Christ for all the world inescapably and unapologetically constitutes interpretive imperialism in relation to the Jewish neighbor. As such, Barth is a likely candidate for what contemporary remedies of Christian faith take to be the interpretive (and material) violence of the sectarian-particular. Second, his theological acuity allows a clear assessment of the precise theological grounds and stakes of this interpretive imperialism and the doctrinal positions and relations they entail. Third, as representative of the problem of traditional Christian faith, he represents that problem in a distinctive way, such that the bad news of interpretive imperialism entailed in his fundamental theological assumptions may be distinguishable from the bad news of the sectarian-particular. The distinctive, yet traditional, way Barth inhabits the problem of Christian faith lies in the way he believes the Good News of Jesus Christ to be good precisely as news (which, as we will see, means precisely as a form of interpretive imperialism). That is, Barth’s fundamental theological assumption is that Christian faith and theology are determined by God’s free and unaccountable decision to get inappropriately (from a philosophical perspective) involved in the particular. God has shown up within history as a part of history, entangling Herself in all the problematic particularity of an historical event—the event that is Jesus Christ. There is, then, news—to be reported and heard. Furthermore, God has done this strange, particular thing for the blessing of all the nations. The news, then, is not only good, but is to be published abroad—proclaimed, born witness.

The distinctive way that Barth theologically inhabits the problem of traditional Christian faith, then, can be aptly characterized as evangelical—evangelical, that is, in the broad, ecumenical sense of the word: because God has acted in a particular, historical way on the world’s behalf, there is good news to be told and so witness to be given. And it is this distinctively (albeit broadly) evangelical character of Barth’s fundamental theological assumptions regarding the nature of Christian faith (and the character of its speech) that I believe constitutes the possibility, theological and ethical, of distinguishing the interpretive imperialism of the particular-elsewhere from the sectarian-particular.

Consequently, given Barth’s representational function in my argument, as both problem and possible remedy, I will be using the descriptive, “evangelical,” rather than the more general and ambiguous, “traditional,” in referring to the problem of Christian faith for the Jewish neighbor, and for all neighbors. This will allow greater clarity as to the precise theological issues and ethical risks at stake. And given that I take the evangelical character of Barth’s theology to constitute its possibility of representing not only the problem of Christian faith, but the problem as remedy, my employment of the term also affords the more general opportunity to contribute in a small way to the recovery and rehabilitation of its rich, albeit always risky, theological and ethical resources. In the context of the United States, at any rate, the term has fallen on hard times, having been severely restricted and reified in meaning. And in current public discourse it is identified with a particular conservative, nationalist political activism that, as we shall see, can only be descried as idolatry by a truly evangelical faith as resourced and employed by a theologian like Barth.

There are also several reasons for using Ruether. I believe she represents the most compelling contemporary efforts to radically remedy the interpretive imperialism of traditional—that is, evangelical—Christian faith represented by Barth. Her historical analysis of the roots of Christian antisemitism and supersessionism is powerful and thoroughgoing, and rightly traces those roots to the heart of the biblical witness itself. As with Barth, the theological and ethical issues at stake are cast in stark relief. But also as with Barth, her analysis and remedy exemplifies certain fundamental assumptions that open the possibility of a complication.

I read Ruether, against the grain of her own statements, as seeking to remedy the interpretive imperialism of Christian faith by reference to a perspective above (or below, e.g., Tillich’s “depth dimension”) the difference between traditional Christian confessions and Jewish religious self-understanding, indeed, above all particular religious self-understanding. Her theological remedy thereby assumes the governance of particular religious discourse by an ethical-philosophical determination of what is appropriately universal and comprehensive, a determination made and legislated from outside any and every particular religious tradition—i.e., from the universal-elsewhere. As such, it may constitute an interpretive imperialism of its own in relation to the Jewish neighbor.

This problematic complication is made explicit in the title of the book central to my reading: Faith and Fratricide. If it can be shown that Ruether’s analysis of and remedy for Christian faith is funded by certain modern assumptions that take Abraham to be the source of its imperialistic violence, then the unintended implication of Ruether’s title would seem to be that the imperialism of Christian faith is fratricidal (a brother-killer) because the father of Christian faith is filicidal (a child- or offspring-killer); the brother and the child are one and the same: Isaac, the seed of Abraham and the “elder brother” of Christianity. Again, it appears difficult for Ruether’s remedy to avoid the assumption that Christian faith is dangerous for the Jewish neighbor to the extent that it is formed in the likeness of the Jewish patriarch.

Layout of Chapters

Chapter 2 fills out the introductory background to the argument. Its gives concrete content to the contours of the modern context that I am arguing determines much of the contemporary analyses of and remedies for the interpretive imperialism of Christian faith in relation to the Jewish neighbor. I give a reading of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling as evidence of the extent to which the three inter-related dimensions constitutive of these analyses and remedies—the nature of imperialistic discourse, the relation of faith to the ethical, and the relation of particularity to universality—are rooted in fundamental assumptions with regard to Christian faith and to “religion” more generally that are constitutive of the context of modernity. I hope to show how this modern context determines (and undermines) contemporary analyses of the particular problem of Christian faith and the Jewish neighbor precisely to the extent to which the context itself emerges as a consequence of—and so as determined by—this very problem in its irreducible particularity.

In Parts II and III, my presentation of Barth and Ruether as theological exemplars follows the most common contours of the contemporary discourse about the apparent violent logic of Christian faith toward the Jewish neighbor. Barth represents the traditional problem, and Ruether the diagnosis and remedy.

Chapters 3 and 4 give a reading of the particular ways in which Barth’s pivotal theological assumptions constitute an understanding of Christian faith that, borrowing a phrase from Merold Westphal, takes Abraham as a model.28 Chapter 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 of resistance and rescue in response to Nazi policies regarding the Jews, but, in far too many cases, firm support of and participation in those policies. It has also been shown that the history of Christian persecution of the Jews was an essential element in creating an environment in which the Holocaust itself could occur within the belly of a so-called Christian, but perhaps more accurately, post-Christian Europe. Furthermore, it has been convincingly argued that this history of moral failure of the Church in relation to the Jews is intimately linked to the history of Christian theology, its discourse about who God is and how God relates to creation—most specifically, its Gospel about Jesus Christ as Good News for the world. All this is assumed here as facts entered into evidence. The complicity of Christian theology in the history of Jewish suffering, therefore, is not in question. What is in question within these pages is the precise nature of this complicity, what the consequences of this complicity are for the integrity of Christian proclamation and faith, and what response is required by unflinching and honest self-examination.

The question is immediately complicated. What is the difference between theological anti-Judaism (and supersessionism) on the one hand and antisemitism on the other? The distinction is critical, but tricky. Anti-Judaism refers to the rejection and/or denigration of Jewish faith and religion—Judaism. Antisemitism refers to the denigration of the Jew qua Jew. A related complication: what is the relation between theological anti-Judaism and the material, historical suffering of Jews; more generally, what is the relation between imperialistic discourse and material imperialism, and even more comprehensively, between theology and the ethical? These are critical questions for our task at hand, and it will take the length of the book (which is, in view of the seriousness of these questions, nowhere near long enough) before we are in a position to really venture a responsible response to these questions.

2. Metz, Emergent Church, 24. Other Christian theologians engaging the problem of Christian faith in light of Jewish suffering, and specifically the Holocaust, that are not explicitly mentioned in my text include: John Pawlikowsky, Paul Van Buren, Gregory Baum, Monika Hellwig, Robert Everett, James Moore, Harry James Cargas, Michael McGarry, David Rausch, John Roth, Clark M. Williamson, and Henry F. Knight. This list, of course, is not exhaustive.

3. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, 246.

4. I use the rendering, antisemitism, rather than the more common, anti-Semitism, in view of the argument that the latter is based on and re-enforces the errant assumption of previous thinking that Jewish identity is fundamentally a racial category, that of the Semite. The inadequacy of this thinking is demonstrated by the trouble the Nazis had in identifying Jewish identity with any precision in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.

5. I take my cue here from Roy Eckardt. In Christian-Jewish Dialogue he states his suspicion that even “a positive Christian theologizing of Jews cannot escape imperialism.” Christian-Jewish Dialogue, 162

6. Haynes, Reluctant Witnesses, 184, 125.

7. Metz, Emergent Church, 19. My emphasis.

8. Haynes, Reluctant Witnesses, 184. Haynes cites Eckardt in this context. See, Eckardt, Jews and Christians, 143, 146.

9. Littell, Crucifixion of the Jews, 1.

10. Ibid., 3–4.

11. Sonderegger, “Response,” 86.

12. To the issue of the ubiquitous nature of the fundamental themes articulated by Said, this is a key point of contact with feminist theory and theology; patriarchy erases women as speaking subjects. In resistance to that violation, feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray and feminist theologians like Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza ask: “what if she should speak?”

13. Said, Orientalism, 27.

14. Ibid. Said’s thesis was that “oriental,” as seen through the lens of western categories, was always in fact a particular neighbor not subsumable within those general categories, whence the violence of the West’s interpretive relation to that neighbor in their concrete particularity. Nevertheless, Said is clear that quite a number of particular neighbors and neighbor-relations fall under the umbrella of Orientalism, whereas antisemitism, as likewise an imperialistic cultural discourse complexly complicit in material damages, pertains to one particular neighbor, the Jew.

15. Said, again: “That antisemitism and, as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch, Orientalism, resemble each other very closely is a historical, cultural, and political truth that needs only to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood.” (Orientalism, 27–28.) What Said fails to suggest is that an Israeli Jew might feel they have reason to grasp the irony here as well.

16. Arguments for the uniqueness of the Holocaust are, of course, implied here. Interestingly, there are some Jewish thinkers and theologians, such as Rubenstein and Irving Greenberg, as well as Christian theologians like Roy Eckardt, who make a double move here. They assert the uniqueness of Jewish suffering throughout the history of the Church and the West more generally. But on the basis of this uniqueness they argue for both the moral justification of the state of Israel and the revocation, or at least radical transformation, of the theological tenant of the divine election of the Jews. They see the latter as precisely that which endangers the continued survival of the Jewish people, because of the way it kindles a special antagonization for the Jewish neighbor in the heart of Christendom and the modern West.

17. Ruether, Fratricide, 239.

18. Ibid., 238.

19. Ibid., 237.

20. Rubenstein, “Some Perspectives,” 262.

21. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 68.

22. This point of the argument reveals how closely my project as a whole is anticipated by and resonates with that of Scott Bader-Saye in his fine work, Church and Israel after Christendom.

23. My reason for using feminine pronouns for God throughout the text is simply that I find feminist critiques of the idolatrous captivity of the Church’s theological imagination to male gendered images of God—despite the Church’s explicit theological doctrine of God, as Spirit, being neither male nor female—to be true (e.g., in the work of Ruether and Elizabeth Johnson, both of whom I engage critically in this book on other issues). It is true first and foremost of my own theological imagination; I also believe it to be true of much of the wider Church, to the extent that my experience and observation (which is by no means exhaustive) allows such a conclusion. I find the argument that said idolatrous captivity emerges and holds sway, in large part, through the Church’s long history of exclusive use of male images and pronouns for God equally convincing. It seems obvious to me, then, given that idolatry is to be avoided if we can at all help it, that the employment of alternative language and images for God constitutes a form of faithful Christian practice and theological method. Because I believe the biblical witness testifies to a God who is fundamentally personal, I choose to work within the problematically limited options of personal pronouns. I use female pronouns for God exclusively in this book, rather than alternating between male and female pronouns, because the hold of centuries of exclusive use of the male pronoun suggests to me that there are some contexts in which more radical, though always ad hoc and provisional, measures are not inappropriate. Likewise, while I believe arguments contra this usage based on, for example, the authority of biblical language for the Church (e.g., Jesus taught us to pray, saying “Father”) should not simply be dismissed, I find the urgency of idolatrous captivity the more compelling claim at this time. Finally, it is, as I have said, the critique of patri- and kyri-archy by feminist theologians like Ruether and Elizabeth Johnson that leads me to employ feminine language for God in ways they suggest. I do not, however, necessarily do so on the grounds of their constructive theological proposals. For example, Johnson argues that we need to be more responsibly aware of the limits of theological language as always no more than symbol, metaphor, analogy, etc. Yet she goes on to assert that female images for God can and should be employed theologically because they share the same natural capacity as male gendered language to function symbolically in relation to the divine. I, on the other hand—sharing Johnson’s concern to respect the radical limits of the human predicament in relation to divinity—believe that female language can and should be employed because, while the female/feminine is equally as bereft as the male/masculine with regard to any such natural capacity, God is equally as free and able to use either according to Her good pleasure.

24. This is, of course, Hegel’s interpretation of the meaning of the traditional Christian doctrine of Incarnation. It can also be found in today’s theological discourse, often without mention of Hegel. See for example, these exact words in Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is, 191, my emphasis. This demonstrates an implication of my argument, that modern assumptions—especially what I call the modern ethical desire—determine much of today’s theology (even that claiming itself to be postmodern; and even my own, of course) in ways neither theologian nor reader appear to be explicitly aware.

25. I borrow this phrase from the title of Gary Dorrien’s book, Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology: Theology Without Weapons.

26. I am indebted to Dhawn Martin for this phrasing, as well as for the insight that the argument of the book can indeed be positioned in this way vis-à-vis Anselm and the task of Christian apologetics.

27. There is a strong consensus here, from Jewish theologians like Emil Fackenheim to Christian theologians who are relatively generous readers of Barth, like Kendall Soulen and Katherine Sonderegger.

28. Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique.