March 26, 2010

Some questions that are on my mind as I try and create a more cohesive third exam:

• If we take seriously the claims by the more orthodox religious groups (both Jewish and Christian), how can the same God have mutually exclusive relationships with both the people of Israel and the followers of Christ?
• How can we understand the unity of the Christian Church when there are so many theological differences within it? The same question also applies to the one people of Israel?
• How can Christianity relate to Judaism when we can't even necessarily claim one Christianity or one Judaism?
• How can a Christian theology of Judaism account for the differences within each religion?
• How can it account for the differences between the two religions?
• If there is nothing but difference between Christianity and Judaism, how can there be any conversation? (Presuming, of course, that conversation is based on some shared set of values. The desire to converse, for one.)
• If every single person and every group is different, how can we talk about one humankind (about whom God is presumably concerned)?
• How do we talk about differences and similarities between groups without falling into essentialisms? How can we do it without imposing our own characteristics as the dominant ones, against which the other must be compared? Can we? Should we? (Okay, that last one was more rhetorical.)

I am very intrigued by the conversations about hybridity and interstitiality coming out of particularly Asian/American feminist theology, but also Latina theology, partly for personal reasons (Japanese-German, Canadian-American, Jewish-Lutheran) but also because I appreciate the way they challenge the dominance of purity. There really is no such thing as "pure" in isolation; it is often only used in order to set something against "impure" or "mixed." One of the things that bothers me about the phrase, a "Christian theology of Judaism," is that it seems as if purity is being dragged into the issue, as if Christianity and Judaism are two completely separate, isolated religions. This certainly isn't true when they were formed, and I question how true it is today. The phrase implies that Christianity is in one place, looking over at Judaism in another place. It doesn't seem to give consideration to any overlap between the two or any transformative presence that they might have to each other. While it accounts for the differences between the two, it doesn't account for any similarites. (Oddly enough, the opposite happened in the older models of interreligious dialogue, where similarities were compared at the expense of differences.) So, how can a middle road be discerned between too much emphasis on similiarity and too much emphasis on difference? And how can it be done without subscribing to the now-problematic "Judeo-Christian" model, which obliterates differences under one pseudo-unity?
Here are some of the authors whose work is very interesting to me:

• Daniel Boyarin
• Rita Nakashima Brock
• Jeannine Hill Fletcher
• Wonhee Anne Joh
• Margaret Kamitsuka
• Michelle Gonzalez
• Namsoon Kang
• Nami Kim
• Kwok Pui-lan
• Mayra Rivera
• Ruben Rosario Rodriguez

So what do they have to do with a Christian theology of Judaism? Or with how the God of both the Jews and the Christians can be the same and have different relationships? (Of course, yes, God can do whatever God wants, but if God is a model for our behaviour, we need to know how God does it, so we can do it, too, without having different selves in different relationships, but being the same integral, whole person in all of our multiple relationships.) Or with how Christianity can understand its theological relationship to Judaism?