March 19, 2010

"The foundation of Jewish or Christian identity cannot derive from the enterprise of thought but must derive from the encounter with the alterity of God who speaks to believing Jews and Christian in Scripture."

"The most difficult oustanding issues between Judaism and Christianity are the dinivity of Jesus, the Incarnation, the Trinity, three terms which are not quite synonymous but all of which assert that Jesus was not only a human being but also God. ... A human being who is also God loses all Jewish legitimacy from the outset. No sharper break with Jewish theological sensibility can be imagined."

"My claim is the Christian teaching of the incarnation of God in Jesus is the intensification of the teaching of the indwelling of God in Israel by concentrating that dwelling in one Jew rather than leaving it diffused in the people of Jesus as a whole."

Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham's Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations
Edited by R. Kendall Soulen, Eerdmans, pp. 165, 166, 178

Wyschogrod argues that the Incarnation, and its different interpretations in Judaism and Christianity, is the sticking point for Jewish-Christian dialogue, and, one might extrapolate, for a Christian theology of Judaism. So a theology of Judaism that takes seriously the concerns of Judaism regarding Christianity must address incarnation theology (Christology for the Christians.) Nevertheless, it must do this without wantonly sacrificing its own history, tradition, or history. Too low of a Christology, in which there is no divinity present in Jesus (or in which the divinity present is identical to that present in every other human), such as van Buren proposes, may logically fit with a Jewish understanding of incarnation, but isn't really idenitifiable (or acceptable by most Christian denominations) as Christology at all. Part of the difficulty with a Christian theology of Judaism is recognizing that there is no one Christianity - the Christian denominations exist in ecumenical relationships, and jeopardizing those relationships for the sake of "the Jewish-Christian relationship" is problematic. It is still my suspicion that previous approaches to the Incarnation are dead ends, and that investigations into Christology will ultimately prove that there is no talking point there for Christians and Jews. Nevertheless, it must be thoroughly examined. So, then, the first exam will have to do with the doctrine of Incarnation. And although I had earlier suggested that this exam should focus on methodology and not content, that doesn't quite work. The content should be examined, along with Jewish theologies of incarnation (Wyschogrod is helpful in this regard), while the third exam should contain the methodology point.

So, the third exam, then would be the development of a methodology that allows for differences in incarnation theology (and differences as radically different as those contained within Christianity and between Christianity and Judaism). Although identity politics is not the goal of this exam, the ways in which theology uses the methods of identity formation, through hybridity, interstiality, the language of mestizaje, etc. offer a structure for understanding how it is that several different (or even opposing) ideas can be held together. It is true that this can also be seen in the doctrinal developments on the two natures of Christ, but those developments deal with only two differences: divine and human, and tend to be restricted to only binary considerations. Although current hybridity theology still tends to be limited to a hybrid of only two, it is not my impression that this is a methodological imposition. Although theologies of difference tend to rely a lot on the theologies of the Other, which results in a binary juxtaposition of Self/Other, I think they could be expanded. (Of course, the theology of the Trinity is an attempt to break beyond binarism, and Peter Hodgson and Kendall Soulen seem to be exploring this avenue, but at the heart of the Trinity is a doctrine of Incarnation, so working with the Trinity would be joining the race after it had already started. Plus, noooooooooo!!!!!!!!!)

So who is to be the major figure in the second part of the exam? One option is to pick someone who is working on the questions in the first exam but is from the 20th century. Unfortunately, none of those people, van Buren, Pawlikowski, Soulen (to a degree, although he doesn't deal with Christology), don't have a large enough body of work to study, and even fewer secondary resources on their material. The second option is to pick someone from the third exam, or someone who could be used as a lens for the third exam. However, the same problem exists. A third option is to pick someone who doesn't fall into either of those two areas, but who has a large body of work from the 20th century that would ultimately fit into a dissertation - someone who could be critiqued and whose work it would be good to know in detail. But who? Who?