Proposal - First Draft

Introduction
Beginning in the second half of the 20th century, Christians have become more aware of the unique and intimate relationship Christianity has had and continues to have with Judaism. The two religions share much of the same history and some of the same sacred texts in ways that are not common to other religions. Theologies about covenant, creation, justice and community, to name only a few, that inform the writings of the New Testament and that shape the formation of the early church have their roots in Second Temple Judaism (and beyond1), and Christianity’s raison d’être, Christ Jesus, was incarnated in that milieu. For that reason, any aspect of contemporary Christian theology that does not take into consideration Christianity’s bond with Judaism sacrifices its own history, as well as its theological integrity.

This realization has not, however, led to any significant reformulation of Christian doctrines, which were dogmatized during centuries when Christianity’s relationship with Judaism was supersessionist at best and murderous at worst. That is not to say that efforts have not been made. The task of rewriting Christian theology has been attempted by several post-Holocaust theologians, yet with only minimal success. Most famously, Rosemary Radford Ruether has argued that Christology is irredeemably tainted with anti-Judaism and that there is no way forward.2 Abandoning Christology is not, however, an option for most Christians. Most theologians invested in Jewish-Christian relations thus seek to redevelop Christology: Paul van Buren, Clark Williamson, Kendall Soulen and John Pawlikowski have all attempted new Christologies that incorporate non-supersessionist understandings of Jesus’ Jewishness. Yet, for various reasons, none of these reformulations are entirely satisfactory.3

Nevertheless, a Christian theology that takes seriously its relationship with Judaism, what we might call a Christian theology of Judaism, cannot set aside Christology: "The most difficult outstanding issues between Judaism and Christianity are the divinity 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.”4 Michael Wyschogrod argues that the Incarnation, and its different interpretations in Judaism and Christianity, is the sticking point for Jewish-Christian relations, 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 Christianity’s theology of incarnation. Nevertheless, it must do this without 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 identifiable (or acceptable by most Christian denominations) as falling within the boundaries of Christian doctrine.5

My set of Special Comprehensive Exams will thus include an examination of the history of Christology, specifically in its understanding of the incarnation of Christ Jesus. This exam will review developments in the early Church and will go on to explore how, in the 19th century, incarnation was framed as a debate between the universality and the particularity of Christ, sometimes understood as the difference between the kerygmatic Christ and the historical Jesus. While not explicitly stated as an issue of incarnation, the question of the degree to which Christ was a historical figure is a restatement of the old argument of the degree to which he was human. In emphasizing the ahistoricity of Christ as the contemporary Christ of proclamation, the divinity and universality of Christ is elevated. The correlative sacrifice is the historical Jesus, as a particularly embedded Jew of Palestine. Thus, the connections here to the development of an anti-Jewish theology will be examined: the more universal /divine Jesus Christ becomes, the less human/particular/Jewish he becomes.

Oddly, the turn to the subject in the 20th century, and the emphases on a Christology from below and on the historical existence of Christ did not focus on Jesus’ Jewish context until the horrors of the Holocaust were fully felt (and even then not completely). However, moving into the 21st century, Christological exploration that seeks to recontextualize Jesus sometimes acknowledges his Jewishness, while simultaneously replacing that Jewishness with something else: Jesus as Asian, Jesus as Black, Jesus as Oppressed Minority.6 While all of these Christologies rightfully challenge the previous twenty centuries' worth of images of Jesus as a reflection of the dominant, majority Christian (ie. male, and usually white), their relocation of Jesus dehistoricizes him and risks dispensing with his Jewishness once again.7

So how can a Christology hold onto a contextual Jesus, who is universal and divine in his relation to all human situations, while at the same time recognizing his particular uniqueness as a human Jew? This is where my third exam will turn to ideas of interstitiality, multiplicity, hybridity (although not a dualistic hybridity that sets itself up in opposition to "purity"), and diversity, where unity is not cast aside, but neither does it uphold uniformity. In these new attempts to deconstruct and reconstruct the incarnation (although they do not describe themselves as such), it might be possible to understand how Jesus can be both/and: divine/human, universal /particular, Jewish/Asian/African/Indigenous, male/female/transexual, etc.

The third exam, then, will be the development of a methodology that allows for difference and differences in incarnation theology (and differences as radically variant 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, interstitiality, 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, I do not believe that this is a methodological necessity. While theologies of difference tend to rely a lot on the theologies of the Other, which results in a binary juxtaposition of Self/Other, one of the goals of this third exam would be to demonstrate how that dualism can be overcome and brought together (although not in the sense of a Hegelian aufhebung).8 For example, the relationship of Christianity to Judaism is similar to that which Rita Nakashima Brock describes in her article on Interstitial Integrity regarding the relationship between Asian Pacific Americans to both America and Asia.9 Following her model, I might describe Christianity as similar to the immigrant trying to find a home, realizing that it has left the land of Judaism, but now trying to find a way to honor its roots. It is no longer Jewish, but it can never leave Judaism behind. Nevertheless, when it tries to return to Judaism to start a conversation, it discovers that the community it finds now is not the same as the community it left. Immigrants who leave their "home country" and return later discover that it, and they, have changed, and not in the same ways. They have problems integrating into their left-behind culture, sometimes in painful ways. But the interstitial nature of their relationship with their home community accounts for both the past incarnation (as it were) of the community that they left, along with its current incarnation. This kind of understanding can allow Christianity to take account of previous, historical formations of Judaism, as well as contemporary Judaism.10 The attempt to develop a methodology based on hybridity and interstitiality returns me to the exam on Christology. The ways in which the Church has negotiated the boundaries between divine and human in the one person of Christ can serve as a model for the ways in which the Church can negotiate the boundaries between the universal / particular tensions in the peoples of God.

Developing a new approach to Christology that takes seriously the critiques of post-Holocaust theologians requires bringing fresh perspectives to the conversation. Thus, the major figure whose work will comprise the content for the second exam will be David Tracy. There are several reasons that his work offers promise for a new way of looking at a Christian theology of Judaism. To begin with, Tracy has worked on theologies of religious pluralism (of which a theology of Judaism is an important but often overlooked component). Further, his acknowledgments that language is problematic, divisive rather than unifying because of the plurality of meanings within words, and that history is ambiguous, always interpreted (with bias) by those in the present, offer a way to question the doctrinal certainties of the earlier Christological controversies. Once we break apart the hegemony of orthodox descriptions of the Incarnation, we can reconstruct a proposal from the pieces that is, hopefully, still recognizable and yet separated from anti-Jewish tendencies. His emphasis on the hermeneutical task of all theologians, and their subservience to the religious classic is appropriate for framing the dialogue between Jews and Christians who do, indeed, share a classic, with wildly differing hermeneutical procedures and goals. And lastly, his idea of similarity-in-difference, where things may be similar but are never identical, may offer a tool for a theology of difference that still attempts to hold things together. His use of analogy relies on difference, as well as the possibility of what may be possible, and may offer insight.

1 See Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Also Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds, The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007.
2 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: the Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, New York: Seabury Press, 1974.
3 See Paul van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, Volumes 1-3, San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980, 1987. Clark M. Williamson, A Guest in the House of Israel: Post-Holocaust Church Theology, Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1996. John T. Pawlikowski, Christ in the Light of the Christian-Jewish Dialogue, New York: Paulist Press, 1982.
4 Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham's Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations, edited by R. Kendall Soulen, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004. P166.
5 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.
6 See Asian Faces of Jesus, edited by R. S. Sugirtharajah, Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1993. James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Kwok Pui-lan, “Engendering Christ” in Postcolonial Imagination & Feminist Theology, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005.
7 Kwok’s conclusion to the aforementioned chapter briefly raises concerns about anti-Judaism in such reconstructions, but from the perspective of Jesus pitted against Judaism rather than of his dehistoricization.
8 The theology of the Trinity is an attempt to break out of binarism, and Peter Hodgson and Kendall Soulen have begun 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. See Peter C. Hodgson, “The Spirit and Religious Pluralism” in Horizons, 31(1), Spring 2004, 22-39 and Kendall Soulen, “YHWH: The Triune God” in Modern Theology, 15(1), January 1999, 25-54.
9 Rita Nakashima Brock, “Interstitial Integrity: Reflections Toward an Asian American Woman’s Theology” in Introduction to Christian Theology: Contemporary North American Perspectives, edited by Roger A. Badham, Louisville: Westminister/John Knox Press, 1998. Pp 183-196.
10 The danger is that this type of immigrant understanding of Christianity's roots can too easily support a "ways that parted" model. But this isn't a necessity - it doesn't have to look that way.


Bibliographies

Exam 1: 8-hr Open book Exam - Christology-Incarnation
Early Church
Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation, translated by anonymous. Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1998.
Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, translated by John Anthony McGuckin. Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1995.
Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, Book III
Origen, De Principiis
Maximus the Confessor, Difficulty 10

Medieval
Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus Homo? (Why God Became Man)
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part III
Bernard of Clairvaux ?

Reformation
Martin Luther, Disputation On The Divinity and Humanity of Christ (1540). “Disputation On the Divinity and Humanity of Christ” Project Wittenberg. http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/luther-divinity.txt Last accessed May 07 2010.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II (12-14)

18th-19th Century
Martin Buber, Der Jude und sein Judentum, (205) and
, Two Types of Faith
Gotthold Lessing, The Jews,
Nathan the Wise,
On the Proof of Spirit and of Power
Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Edited by Peter C. Hodgson. Translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. The Christian Faith. Edited by H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart. 1999. Reprint, New York: T&T Clark, 2008.
. Christmas Eve: Dialogue on Incarnation. Richmond: John Knox Press, 1967.


Secondary Sources
Grillmeier, A. Christ in Christian Tradition. Vol I-II. Atlanta: John Knox, 1987.
Haight, Roger. Jesus, the Symbol of God. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1999.
Kereszty, Roch, ed. Jesus Christ: Fundamentals of Christology. Staten Island, N.Y.: St. Paul’s, 2002. Part II.
Meyendorff, J. Christ in Eastern Christian Thought. Washington: Corpus Publications, 1969.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Volumes 1-5 .
Neusner, Jacob. The Incarnation of God: The Character of Divinity in Formative Judaism. Binghamton University: Global Publications, 2001.
Davis, Stephen T., Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins, ed. The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Parts 1 and 2 (“Biblical Witness” and “Patristic and Medieval Witness”)

Exam 2: 25-40 page paper - David Tracy
Primary Sources
Blessed Rage for Order: the New Pluralism in Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. (With Preface from 1996).
The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism. New York: Crossroad, 1981.
Talking About God: Doing Theology in the Context of Modern Pluralism with John B. Cobb. New York: Seabury Press, 1983. Also at: http://www.religion-online.org/showbook.asp?title=1626
Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Dialogue with the Other: the Inter-Religious Dialogue. Michigan: Eerdmans, 1991.
On Naming the Present: Reflections on God, Hermeneutics, and Church. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1994.
“The Hidden God: the Divine Other of Liberation.” Cross Currents, 46 (1), Spring96, 5-17.
“Theological Method” in Christian Theology: An Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks. Edited by Peter C. Hodgson and Robert H. King. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994.

Secondary Sources
Downey, John K. Beginning at the Beginning: Wittgenstein and Theological Conversation. Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1986.
Jeanrond, Werner G. And Jennifer L. Rike. Radical Pluralism and truth: David Tracy and the Hermeneutics of Religion. New York: Crossroad, 1991.
Gadamer, Truth and Method.
. Dialogue and Dialectic.
Ray, Alan S. The Modern Soul: Michel Foucault and the Theological Discourse of Gordon Kaufman and David Tracy. Harvard Dissertations in Religion, no. 21. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987.

Exam 3: 25-40 page paper - Interstitiality, Hybridity and Multiplicity: A Theology of Difference
Aviv, Caryn and David Shneer, ed. New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
Boyarin, Daniel. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Brock, Rita Nakashima. “Interstitial Integrity: Reflections toward an Asian American Woman’s Theology” in Introduction to Christian Theology: Contemporary North American Perspectives. Edited by Roger A. Badham. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998. 183-196.
Fletcher, Jeannine Hill. Monopoly On Salvation: A Feminist Approach to Religious Pluralism. New York: Continuum, 2005.
Heschel, Susannah. “Jesus as Theological Transvestite.” In
Joh, Wonhee Anne. Heart of the Cross: A Postcolonial Christology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006.
Kamitsuka, Margaret D. Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Keller, Catherine, Michael Nausner and Mayra Rivera, editors. Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire. St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 2004. Especially “Who is Americana/o?” Michelle A. Gonzalez and “Who /What is Asian?” Namsoon Kang.
Kim, Nami. “The ‘Indigestible’ Asian: The Unifying Term ‘Asian’ in Theological Discourse” in Off the Menu: Asian and North American Asian Women’s Religion and Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007. 23-43.
Kwok, Pui-lan. Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005.
. “Fishing the Asia Pacific: Transnationalism and Feminist Theology” in Off the Menu: Asian and North American Asian Women’s Religion and Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007. 3-21.
Lowe, Walter. Theology and Difference: The Wound of Reason. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Rivera, Mayra. The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.
Rodriguez, Ruben Rosario. Racism and God-Talk: A Latino /a Perspective. New York: New York University Press, 2008.
Schneider, Laurel C. Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Slabodsky, Santiago E. “De-colonial Jewish Thought and the Americas.” In Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion, edited by Purushottama Bilimoria and Andrew B. Irvine. Springer, 2009.