March 23, 2010

A model of Christian-Jewish relationship that has sometimes been put forward is that of a child-parent relationship, where Christianity has emerged from Judaism as its child. This has come to be rejected as first being historically inaccurate - Judaism today is not what Judaism post-Temple was, nor did Christianity emerge from it. Rather, there was parallel development of two religions that are now contemporary Christianity and contemporary Judaism, from a common proto-Judaism (ie. Second Temple Judaism). This model has also been criticized as leading to supersessionism, where the grown child now replaces the adult who has died, Christianity taking up the crown that Judaism has let fall.
However, this understanding of the child-adult relationship seems laden with partriarchal interpretation; it seems to resemble most a son-father relationship, where the son is meant to replace the father in his dotage. But if the relationship of child-adult is construed in a more feminist light, as one of daughter-mother, maybe this image can be retrieved. Daughters have never been construed as replacing their mothers, rather they live in a mutually beneficial relationship. Additionally, the daughter-mother relationship allows for a dynamism and growth, both in the relationship, which changes over time, but also in their individuality. Daughter changs as she grows from child to adult to mother herself, and Mother changes as she grows from young mother to mother of an adult child to grandmother. (Okay, so grandmother might not work in this analogy). But regardless, it implies that each person in the relationship continues to grow. Finally, when you consider Anne Joh's model of Christology and maternality, where there is a jeong stickiness in the relationship, such that the Self and the Other are intimately connected but not overrunning or replacing one another, perhaps this model might work for Christianity and Judaism.
Would it be too radical to suggest that Christianity has emerged out of Judaism, albeit in such a way that both Christianity and Judaism continue(d) to develop over time? That Christianity owes its birth (but not its current existence) to Judaism, and as such is forever in debt not only to what Judaism once was but to what it has also become? Can we see the relationship as one where both Judaism and Christianity continue to maintain a relationship without sacrificing what makes each unique? The relationship is one of mutuality, and more than voluntary mutuality, but less than necessary mutuality. That is, they could (and do) exist apart from one another, just as mothers and daughters live separate lives, sometimes estranged ones at that, but never completely separate, because simply the fact of the daughter's birth from the mother means that they will always be somehow connected.
I don't think that this model would necessarily contradict the historical testimony that Christianity and contemporary Judaism developed in parallel rather than in sequence. Mothers continue to develop even after the birth of their children, and even think of themselves as different people from who they were when they gave birth. Certainly it would allow for the historical continuity of Judaism from Second Temple (and prior) to today, a continuity that still poses theological problems for Christian theologies of Judaism.
(But I'm not entirely sure what this has to do with my special comps, unless it can somehow be incorporated into a theology of difference.)